Dishonoring Jack

Chapter Two

 "I see you there, Jack Harrison," cried the girl. "You aren't welcome in these parts."

Jack lifted her hands in the air, displaying the letter for the woman to see. She knew better than to mess with Margaret Hunt, whose rumored skill with a shotgun rivaled Jack's. When Fred MacIntosh, from the no-good MacIntoshes of West Irvington, showed up to take her courting, Margaret shot a clean hole through his finest top hat.

"I don't mean any trouble," Jack replied, wishing she'd brought her own shotgun to visit the Hunts. She should have known they wouldn't accept her arrival peacefully, and she wished she'd had the presence of mind to come armed. "I have a letter for Frances Hunt."

"Ma ain't home," Margaret answered. "Leave it on the front porch and then get off our property."

The girl, in her mid twenties with two tangled braids of dark auburn, stood with her feet apart in a pair of holey boots, the gun cocked tight against her shoulder. Her gingham dress with an apron looked like something out of the previous century, stained and torn from years of neglect. As much as Jack wanted to leave the letter and escape, she hesitated.

"Margaret, the letter's about Roy. I'm afraid it's bad news."

Margaret's freckled complexion blanched and the gun wavered in her hands. Jack took a few steps closer, abandoning her bike along the roadside. What was she supposed to do? Comfort the young woman? Jack had no words of consolation to offer, no promises or banalities to soothe the loss. Still, she owed it to Roy to deliver the letter into the hands of his family.

Margaret cried out, "No, no!" and dropped the gun. Jack fell to the ground, covering her head with her hands and herself in mud as she did so. The gun went off, a bullet lost somewhere in the empty marshlands around them. She felt the whiz of air over her head and thanked her lucky stars she'd dropped to the ground at the crack of the gun.

"What in tarnation!" yelled Jack, rising to her feet and straightening her dress where it had gotten caught in her underskirt. "Have you lost your mind, woman? You nearly killed me!"

But Margaret was lost to Jack's ministrations. The girl sunk to her knees on the front porch of the Hunts' house, the shotgun discarded on the uneven boards beside her. Her hands reached to cover her face, tears wearing a clean path down her dirty path. No sound escaped the woman's mouth, but Jack could feel her misery in her own heart.

"I--I'm sorry," Jack murmured, striding up to the girl more confidently with the gun discarded. "For Roy."

Jack outstretched her hand, offering the letter from the war office. Like a starved dog, Margaret snatched the letter from Jack's hands, tearing the envelope open with greedy fingers and devouring the contents with her wide, hungry green eyes.

"No, no, no," the girl chanted beneath her breath like an incantation that would somehow bring Roy back.

Jack cleared her throat and looked down at her hands, picking dirt from beneath her bitten fingernails. "Well, uh, I suppose I'll leave you alone. I am sorry, Margaret."

At Jack's voice, Margaret lifted her eyes from the letter to Jack, the paper crumpling in her angry fists, as if just remembering the postwoman was still there.

"You're sorry?" she hissed between her crooked teeth, lifting the wadded paper into Jack's face and stepping towards her. "That's all you have to say for yourself, Jack Harrison?"

Jack pursed her lips and crossed her arms over her chest. She would not be intimidated by a scrawny mite of a woman, no matter what pain she must be enduring.

"After everything you've done, that's all you can say is that you're sorry? And you wait until our Roy is dead to tell him?"

"I'm not apologizing for breaking our engagement," cried Jack, unable to contain her anger. I have been screamed at, shot at, and now accosted, and I've had quite enough. "I never meant to hurt Roy, and you know that."