Page 110 of Head Room

Maggie stared at the frame that rested in a nest of cloths whose edges dripped from her palm.The outer cloths had been stained with sweat and blood.His sweat.His blood.The innermost cloth, the one that touched the frame, was as soft and clean as the finest of the linens she delivered with pride.

The frame was silver, hardly tarnished.A finely wrought twisting that curved into so delicate an oval, meeting at the bottom in a fine spray of branches and at the top in a more elaborate bouquet of roses, tied with a silver ribbon.

She was a coward.

It wasn’t the frame that mattered.Not even the cloths, though they told what care had gone into protecting this remembrance from the hardships his body had endured.

It was the picture.

Maggie drew in a quick breath.The young woman was beautiful.As delicate, as finely crafted as the frame.A dark-haired beauty with luminous skin and wide eyes.A smile touched her mouth.But even that didn’t mask the air of privilege and certainty in the woman’s face.

Thelady’sface, Maggie corrected herself.For this, most surely was a proper lady.A lady an officer could be proud of.A proper lady from North Carolina.

That’s where Peter said their home was, when he talked and talked to her and she listened, thinking that for all he’d seen of war, he still held a part of boy in him.

She liked when he talked like that.His voice changed, got softer.

He talked about his family, especially his older brother Thomas, who’d died in the war.Now and then, he’d let something slip about Ransom.It had to be a secret that Ransom was his uncle.She didn’t understand why, but no one would ever know it from her.

Always Peter’s talking came back to North Carolina.

The place of their memories.The place they belonged.

Notes: She’s wondering about Ransom’s past as she grows more fond of him and more appreciative of what he’s done for her.Asks Peter in roundabout way...

Asks doctor...Doctor thinks she’s asking about how to have no children, which he interprets as her being afraid of sex.He talks with Ransom.Really awkward...A husband’s right, but with her circumstances, and particularly not knowing what went on with the Indians...Ransom suspects the dead husband might have been at least as difficult for Maggie.He recommits in his own mind to no physical lovemaking, though he’s drawn more and more to her.

Notes: Ransom to boy...making him strengthen his shorter leg...great in saddle...both grunting...sweat...trying to make the boy not think about the pain.

Ransom says something.Boy responds.

“What if I should return to my people, half my people, and raid against your people.Against you.”

“If you go back to your raiding and you kill me after all the work I’ve put into you, I’ll kill you.”

The boy’s eyes narrowed, as if sensing a trap.“But you would be dead.”

Ransom met his look.“Why so I would be, under ordinary circumstances.But I’d make an exception in your case and come back to finish you.”

The boy’s stare continued, unblinking and Ransom returned it, unyielding.

“I will not kill you, then, to save my own life.”

Ransom nodded, accepting that decision.“Seems the wisest path.”

How it started, he never knew — with him or the boy — but there they were grinning at each other, and pretty soon, laughing.Laughing until their sides hurt.

...Maggie comes in.Astonished to find them laughing...

(Notes: Scene fragment from when Maggie asks Ransom about the picture she found.)

“You married me to punish this lady?”

“No.I married you because you needed a husband.It’s the only way— If you hadn’t needed a way forward, I wouldn’t have done that to you, tying you to me.”

“Why?”

“Coming out here, being in this army — I turned my back on my home, on my people.I wasn’t the man I had been.I was nothing.Can you understand that?”