Clarissa opened the front door to find a beaming Maria standing on the porch. “Señorita, I bring gift.” She held up the headless body of a chicken.
Clarissa recoiled. “Oh, I, um, thank you, but I don’t think—”
“Is nice fat hen,” the Mexican woman explained. “Make very good dinner.”
Clarissa gasped. Dinner! Oh, heavens, she’d forgotten her agreement. If she worked as Gray’s cook, then of course she must do just that—cook! And that meant not only breakfast but midday dinner and supper each evening. And not next week or tomorrow, but now. Today.
She stared at the bird clutched in Maria’s brown hand. “Maria, wh-what do I do with it?”
“Is easy.” Maria lifted her hand and folded Clarissa’s slim fingers around the scaly yellow legs. “First chop feet off, then take off feathers. To do this, boil water and give bath, then—”
“Chop off...?”
“Feet,” Maria reiterated. “Then pull out pinfeathers and clean out insides. You know what are pinfeathers?”
“Maria, might I borrow your cookbook?”
“Que? Never have I used a book of cooking, señorita. I have learn everything from my mama—tortillas and frijoles, even flan and pan dulce. The rest—American food—I teach myself.
Clarissa swallowed hard. Could she do that? She must have frowned because the Mexican woman suddenly reached out and patted her hand. “Do not worry, señorita. You will learn.”
“Th-thank you, Maria. I will try.”
Chop off the feet? A shudder went up her spine. She retreated to the kitchen, plopped the bird in the sink, and stared at it. I haven’t the faintest idea how to do this.
On the back porch she found a small hand ax, laid the chicken on the back step, closed her eyes tight and whacked off the legs. Then, recalling Maria’s instructions about the bath, she filled the teakettle and set it on the still-warm stove. Finally she shoved more wood into the firebox. At least from watching Gray she knew how to make a fire and heat water!
When the teakettle sang, she dumped the boiling water over the bird and discovered she could strip off the wet feathers quite easily. But the smell made her gag, and she tried not to breathe. When the naked bird sat looking at her, she thought about Maria’s next direction—clean out the insides.
Oh, God, how did one do that? She paced around and around the kitchen, steeling her nerves. Then she grasped a butcher knife and made a tentative incision at the thickest point of the chest, between the two wings. No entrails. Then she poked the tip of the knife between the drumsticks, and voila! She slashed in under the skin and—oh, Lordy—she couldn’t bear to look. All kinds of awful, ropey-looking things tumbled out. Hurriedly she looked away and gulped in air, then sucked in a deep breath and steeled herself to pull out all the innards and plop them in a bucket.
She would never be able to do this again. Whatever had she been thinking to agree to employment as a cook? Tears rose in her eyes. She had made another impulsive, ill-advised decision, like traveling out West to marry Caleb Arness, and now she was paying the price. She hated the West and everything in it—especially chickens!
She studied the eviscerated chicken on the counter. She’d already done the hard part—hadn’t she?—cutting off the legs and stripping off the smelly feathers. And pulling out the—she shuddered again—guts. How much more difficult could it be to shove it in the oven and bake it?
She rinsed the bird out, sprinkled salt and pepper over the skin, and laid it in a deep-sided pan. After an hour, the kitchen began to smell surprisingly good—so good, in fact, that her stomach rumbled. And by eleven o’clock, Emily was alternately dancing about the kitchen and complaining about being hungry.
“Just a few more minutes, Emily. Why don’t you set plates on the table, and then we’ll have dinner?” In the pantry off the kitchen she found a mason jar of green beans and the remains of a stale loaf of bread in the bread box. Tomorrow she must think about learning how to bake bread, even though she could not imagine herself in the kitchen with floury hands. Still, it could not possibly be worse than cleaning a chicken, could it? She gave an involuntary shudder.
Promptly at noon, Gray tramped through the back kitchen door and sniffed the air. “Mmm, somethin’ sure smells good!”
“It’s a chicken!” Emily shouted. “All baked ’n’ everything. Maria showed me chickens are nice.”
Clarissa set the platter holding the roasted bird on the table next to his elbow and handed him a sharp knife. “Would you please carve it?” she pleaded. “This chicken and I are not exactly friends.”
“Oh, yeah?” It did look kinda odd, the skin over-brown and stiff as parchment. When he stuck in the knife, he heard a crackling sound. Still, roast chicken was roast chicken, and he was plenty hungry. When he slid the knife in to slice off a drumstick, it was so dry it was like sawing through wood.
He set the knife down and shot a look at Clarissa’s tense face. “What happened to it?”
She worried her bottom lip between her teeth in a way that made him uneasy in an unexpected way. “Maria brought it over this morning. I did everything she said, but...” Her voice choked off and she swiped a sheen of tears off her cheek.
Emily stared at her mother with round blue eyes. “Mama, are you crying?”
“Of course not,” she said quickly. “It’s quite warm in here.”
Gray studied her face, then looked down at the platter. “Looks pretty well overdone,” he said. “But heck, it’s only a chicken, Clarissa. Nothin’ to cry about.”
“Oh, y-yes it is. You hired me to be your c-cook, and I can’t!”
“Can’t what?”
“Can’t cook.”
“At all?”
“No,” she sobbed. She looked so heartbroken, he wanted to laugh, but he figured that would just make it worse, so he clamped his jaws together. “Listen, there’s worse things than overcooking one chicken.”
“Oh?” Her lips were still quivery, which made him feel downright funny inside.
“Yeah. You could be overcooking a chicken in Caleb Arness’s kitchen.”
She gave a strangled cry and buried her face in her hands. Emily scrambled out of her chair and smoothed her small hand over Clarissa’s dark hair. “You could learn, Mama. You learned lots of things before we got on the train, remember? How to iron my dresses and pack up all our stuff in one suitcase. Lots of things.”
Gray wanted to hug the little girl. “Listen, I have to ride into town this afternoon. How about I bring you back a cookbook from the mercantile?”
Clarissa’s face lit up like Christmas. “Oh, c-could you? You can deduct it from my earnings.”
Gray studied the woman across the table. “What did you do before you learned to iron?”
“We— My brother had servants. He was gone at sea for months at a time, so his wife and I always had servants and plenty of—”
“Money,” he supplied. “Maria told me about your sister-in-law dying. And then your brother didn’t come home, and you lost it all.”
“Yes, I lost everything—the house, the bank account, even the furniture. The lawyer said we had nothing left and we had to move.”
“Didn’t your brother have a will? Some way to provide for you and Emily?”
“Apparently not. At least they could never find one.”