Sarah's Promise by Leisha Kelly Page B

carry them through until the man of the house was home. There’d be no telling, since I had no idea what time he would come. It started really bothering me what could happen to this family if I left them alone and the husband was delayed.
    Mrs. Platten’s cough sounded pretty awful, and the little ones were still uncomfortable too. I fetched in a bucket of water and set a teakettle full by the fire to heat, hoping to find something to put in it for them. “Got any kind a’ tea leaf?”
    “I’m so sorry,” Mrs. Platten answered me. “We haven’t had regular tea in such a long time. I probably can’t offer you anything you’d care for.”
    She’d misunderstood me completely. “I don’t want nothin’ ’cept to get some made for you. Got any herbs? I could look ’em over and see what’s best.”
    “Top cupboard on the left,” she answered me. “We grow or forage our own. It’s so much cheaper.”
    That was nothing new to me. My family and the Worthams had been gathering tea herbs for as long as I could remember. I’d never had much store-bought tea except at outside functions. So none of the contents of Mrs. Platten’s jars were strange to me. Sassafras. Chicory. Chamomile. Red sage, rosemary, comfrey. I could tell most by the look, the rest by the smell. I picked the comfrey because I’d seen Mrs. Wortham use it when someone had a cough. There was a little baking powder in the cupboard with the herbs, and a little sugar. Salt and pepper and a near-empty bag of cornmeal. Not much else.
    “Do you have honey, ma’am?”
    “I don’t need it sweetened.”
    “Maybe not, but honey’s good for what ails you. When Mrs. Wortham makes a cough syrup, she always uses honey. Lemon’s good too, if you have it.”
    She was quiet, maybe not knowing for sure what to think of me, a stranger rustling around in her kitchen. Maybe I shouldn’t have snooped, but I opened the cupboard on the right too and was dismayed to find nothing at all but a single jar of home-canned tomato juice and half a loaf of homemade bread. There was a potato bin close to the back door, but it had only four potatoes in the bottom. Unless they had something stored someplace else, they were almost out of food.
    “Have you all had breakfast?” I asked.
    Bennie nodded and his mother confirmed the answer. “You don’t have to stay,” she told me, her voice suddenly sounding scared. “You’ve done enough.”
    “Truth is, ma’am, I don’t wanna stay,” I admitted. “But I ain’t gonna be able to drive off in good conscience and leave you like this. Three armloads a’ wood ain’t gonna last you long in this cold. And you got too much to deal with on top a’ that, with your sick babies and yourself being sick, plus the ankle sprain. I could go, if you tell me where to stop to send the doctor out to you, or some other help from town. I’d feel all right ’bout that.” I couldn’t even mention the food. Everything else was bad enough.
    But she shook her head. “We . . . we don’t need the doctor. The chicken pox—it’ll pass.”
    “There’s your cough too,” I prompted her. “And your ankle.”
    She looked like she might cry again. “We can’t pay the doctor. And it’s nothing serious. I’ll be all right.”
    “Got kin I can fetch? Somebody else you know?”
    She shook her head. “You’ve done so much already. We’ll be all right till my husband comes home.”
    “When’s he due?”
    “Tonight, I hope.”
    There was too much uncertainty in that for my liking, but I didn’t question her further. I just fixed her cup of tea and went back outside to split some more wood and think about this. That woman looked weaker to me than she let on. Or at least tireder. Maybe she’d been up half the night with a sick child. Or two. Or three. Maybe she’d been sick several days. Plus the fall this morning trying to get firewood. And if she was like Sarah’s mother, she prob’ly hadn’t been eating enough in the hard times,