Chapter Text
Gale paused while hitching up the wagon, briefly enjoying the soft spring breeze blowing across the Nebraska plains. It was days like this that he found it easy to understand why his father moved them all the way out here, far from the coal mines of Pennsylvania, far from the people who called them mongrels for the crime of having an Indian grandmother, far from anything resembling civilization, really. The tiny town with a railway station and handful of stores hardly counted, in Gale’s opinion. Which was fine with him, since he preferred solitude anyway.
But it was that town that was his destination today, so he shook himself from his reverie and climbed into the wagon. He had wild turkeys to drop at the butcher’s, and he’d promised his mother he would pick up some fancy bread from Mellark’s, which meant dealing with that insufferably cheerful man, although it also meant a chance to ask Katniss why she’d missed hunting today. (He had a hunch, not that he particularly wanted it confirmed). He needed to stop by Thom’s blacksmith shop as well, and then on his way home he would stop by the schoolhouse and give Posy a ride home.
Mellark smiled when Gale walked in, his grin only getting bigger when Gale scowled in response. Katniss came downstairs, announcing that she’d seen Gale from the window upstairs but when Gale asked where she’d been this morning, her glare was as dark as a summer storm and Mellark’s ears turned bright pink as he suddenly got very interested in something behind the case. Leaving the bakery feeling considerably better—it’s not that he hated Mellark, it’s that Gale just didn’t think one person should be so damn happy all the time—Gale stopped to see Thom and his ever growing brood of children (three so far, and Delly looked suspiciously tired) before loading up the wagon and heading out to the little schoolhouse.
The schoolhouse wasn’t too far from the Hawthorne homestead, almost halfway between them and town. But on Wednesdays, Gale went to town to pick up necessities and then would stop to pick Posy up. He loved those drives home; he would sit quietly and Posy would chatter about whatever she learned in school that day. Ever since that first terrible winter after Papa died, when Posy and Hazelle had both been so sick and he had spent weeks terrified that he was going to lose them both, Gale had had a special fondness for Posy. Rory was so close in age to Gale that he couldn’t remember Rory being a baby and Vick came only three years after Rory when Gale was only five. But Gale was fourteen when she was born. He was there for Posy’s first steps, her first words—Ma, then kitty, then Gale—and it had been Posy who toddled over to him with a handful of white and pink wild garlic flowers clutched in her fist and said “pretty.” That was the moment, six years ago and two years after Papa died, when Gale finally started to forgive his father for moving them away from everything they knew and then dying. The dying bit, Gale knew, wasn’t really Papa’s fault. But he’d been only fourteen. Fourteen, and suddenly the man of the house, fighting to keep his brothers in line and his sister alive. Ma had helped, but that weight of responsibility had come crashing down on Gale’s shoulders the moment Papa had gotten sick. It was lighter now, since Gale and Hazelle had scrimped and saved and managed to not only pay off their mortgage early, but buy some more land when neighbors gave up and headed back east. Three years ago they’d even built a real house with wooden floors, leaving the old sod house behind forever. But he knew that weight would always be there.
Gale slowed the wagon down in front of the little one-room school house, but Posy was nowhere in sight. Gale sighed to himself, realizing she was probably inside, talking nonstop to her beloved Miss Undersee. Gale had yet to meet this Miss Undersee, who had only taken over the school the week before when the previous teacher left to get married, but Posy adored her and had already started pestering their mother about having her over for dinner.
Ducking his head and taking his hat off, Gale stepped inside the school. He needed a moment for his eyes to adjust from the brightness outside, but there, up near the chalkboard, Posy sat reading beside a woman with wavy blonde hair in a smart navy dress. Posy bounced out of her seat when she saw Gale, running down the aisle to wrap her arms around his waist. Miss Undersee stood up with slightly more dignity than Posy, a soft smile on her distractingly pretty face. She’d moved to town from Chicago with her father, Gale knew, and secretly he suspected they would only last one winter before hightailing it back to the city. Mr. Undersee was a banker (Gale despised bankers on principle, although Undersee was new to his position and as yet untested) and a widower, and Madge kept his house. She was older than he’d thought, probably close to his age, and all softness and curves and gentleness. No, Gale thought, she was not cut out for the prairies.
“…Gale? I said, this is Miss Undersee.”
With a start, Gale realized he’d been staring in silence like a fool. Normally he was a little better with women, having courted a few girls half-heartedly after that morning when Katniss had abruptly announced she was going to marry the baker’s son. He felt the heat rise to his cheeks as he nodded in Miss Undersee’s direction. “Gale Hawthorne, miss. It’s nice to finally meet Posy’s new favorite person.” Miss Undersee chuckled. “Oh, I don’t know about that. I haven’t had Posy two weeks yet and I already feel like I know everything about you.”
At that, Gale looked down and rumpled Posy’s hair, laughing as she attempted to bat his hand away. She hated it when he did that, he knew, but if he was going to put her hair in braids every morning, he could certainly mess them up if he felt like it. And right now, it was suddenly a little difficult to look Miss Undersee in the eye. “Well, Pose, Ma’s going to be waiting on us, and I suspect you’ve already talked Miss Undersee’s ear off. Miss Undersee, it was nice to meet you.” Posy hugged her goodbye and tore out of the schoolhouse to vault into the wagon at an alarming speed. She never did anything slow, his Posy. Gale awkwardly nodded to Miss Undersee, shifting from foot to foot before muttering that it was nice to meet her again and then hustling out of the school before he did something stupid, like ask her how on earth a girl from Chicago managed to have eyes as blue as the prairie sky in June.
****
After that awkward meeting, Gale steadfastly refused to go back into the schoolhouse on his Wednesday drive. Posy could watch for him, he decided, and come out herself. She was old enough to learn a little responsibility, he told himself. It had nothing at all to do with avoiding an unnervingly pretty daughter of a banker. (Although, after Mr. Undersee had helped Thom get a loan for his shop at a good rate, Gale hated this banker a little less than most.)
This worked well, until one afternoon in late June when the prairie sun was blazing down on him like the devil himself was in the sky. Gale was down to his shirtsleeves and suspenders, but he was rapidly sweating through his shirt anyway. He was in a bad mood already, partially due to the infernal heat and partially because he’d cut his palm hitching up the wagon and it was bleeding through the old handkerchief he’d wrapped around it.
He reined up in front of the schoolhouse, but Posy was no where in sight. Grumbling to himself, he swung down from the wagon, took the porch steps two at a time and shoved the door open roughly. “Pose, c’mon. Let’s go. I can’t wait around for you all day.” Posy and Miss Undersee started at the sound of his voice, and a little stab of guilt went through him when he remembered that he was probably a little bit early. Posy scrambled for her things while Miss Undersee looked at him curiously. “What?” he barked. “What’s wrong?”
Miss Undersee blushed a bit, and Gale realized she’d been staring at him. But before he could ponder why she would do that, she asked, “Did you cut your hand, Mr. Hawthorne?”
Gale shrugged. “It’s nothing.”
“It doesn’t look like nothing. That’s a bit more blood than nothing. And that handkerchief is positively filthy, so it’s probably doing more harm than good. Come here, Mr. Hawthorne, and let me patch you up before you go home. Trust me, your mother will thank me.”
Momentarily stunned by how stern the usually soft-spoken Miss Undersee just sounded, Gale silently walked over and sat down in a nearby desk. She rummaged through a drawer in her desk for a moment and then returned to sit next to him. “Posy, go fetch the bucket of water. Now, Mr. Hawthorne, I’m surprised that a man as smart as you would risk infection like this,” she scolded. Gale felt a little chagrined (he did know better, he was just in a rush), but mostly he was surprised that she thought he was smart. But before he could pursue that little detail, she was unwrapping the handkerchief and grimacing as it stuck to the dried blood. She held his hand gently, rinsing it with water from the bucket Posy had brought over, asking Posy questions about skin and muscle and smiling when Posy got the answers right.
This was the closest Gale had ever been to Miss Undersee, and he found himself fixated on the light dusting of freckles over her nose. Were those there before she moved to Nebraska, he wondered, or were they something new? She opened a clean white handkerchief with a small M embroidered in purple on the corner, wrapping it over the wound and tying a knot across the back of his hand. Her hands, he noticed, were tiny and soft, so different from his scarred hands, or his mother’s calluses. He tore his eyes away from their hands, only to find her bright blue eyes looking directly back at him. For one heart-stopping second, he forgot where he was, or what he was doing. But then Posy asked if he was in such a hurry why was he just sitting there, and the moment was over. He stopped at the doorway to the schoolhouse and called his thanks, but she was busy with something in her desk, determinedly not looking in his direction. Gale spent the drive home absent-mindedly fiddling with the embroidered corner of the handkerchief, wondering how he was supposed to return it to her now.