Bittersweet Bliss (Saskatchewan Saga Book #5): A Novel
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Authors: Ruth Glover
Tags: #Frontier and pioneer life—Fiction, #Scots—Canada—Fiction, #Saskatchewan—Fiction
© 2003 by Ruth Glover
Published by Revell
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.revellbooks.com
Ebook edition created 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
eISBN 978-1-4412-3936-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Scripture quotations are taken from the King James Version of the Bible.
To Alvin Deetho
(fond childhood name)
beloved brother
Contents
C
all it a dream; call it a nightmare; it always began the same way...
First was the crackling, then the glow. Next was the smoke, making it hard to breathe. And finally came the gasping, the struggling with the bedclothes, the helplessness. The fear.
She knew it was imperative that she raise her head, spring to her feet, flee the room, but her limbs wouldn’t move. She needed desperately to call for help, but her mouth opened in a silent scream, and her throat ached with the useless effort.
The sound grew to a roar as the first flickers of flame lit the room, engulfing it in orange sheets, leaping and twisting. The curtains sparked, caught, and blazed, shooting up the rough wall, reaching fiery fingers toward the bed.
Immobile, her screams lost in her throat or in the inferno, she felt the heat of the blast on her cheek, smelled the crisping of her hair, felt the shriveling of her flesh.
When at last a cry was wrung from her and she wrenched herself awake, it was to lie shivering and sweating, trembling and crying. Praying.
O God! Let it stop! Make it stop! Let me forget
...
“Ellie!” It was the anxious voice of her father.
Ellie tried, but only a croak issued from her taut throat.
“Ellie! Are you all right?”
Ellie could hear, from the adjoining room, the creaking of the bed and the fumbling of her father as he struggled to his feet.
With an effort she answered, “I’m fine, Dad.”
But he was at the door to her room, leaning on the doorjamb, peering through the dark. “Is it the nightmare again? Are you all right? Shall I get a light?”
“Yes... no. Just give me a moment—”
Brandon Bonney was accustomed to these bad times in the night, though he didn’t understand them, never had understood them. If Ellie understood them, she had never said.
The nightmares had begun years ago, about the time Ellie was eleven or twelve. Serena, Ellie’s mother, had been alive then and had been the first to hurry to her daughter’s bedside, summoned by her cries in the night. Bran, instantly awake and filled with alarm, had followed, padding into his daughter’s room in his bare feet, to lean over the bed and note the terror in Ellie’s eyes in the light of the lamp held high by her mother.
“Ellie! Ellie!” Serena had said, setting down the lamp and taking the child in her arms. “What’s wrong?”
With Ellie crumpled against her, her thin little shoulders shaking with fright and the heavy beating of her heart, Serena asked again, “What’s wrong? Was it a dream, love? A bad dream?”
Ellie hadn’t cried. But like a frightened mouse she huddled in the tangled bedding, obviously terrified. It was the first of many such times.
That night and for many nights thereafter, Serena slept with her daughter. In the daytime Ellie, once again her lively, seemingly normal self, insisted it was nothing—“just a bad dream”—and that there was no need for her mother to sleep with her. But
at night, as the shadows crept from the corners of the house, Ellie grew silent and tense and gave no resistance when, once again, Serena slipped into bed with her.
“What is it, love?” her mother and father often asked, puzzled and alarmed. But Ellie, if she knew, wasn’t telling.
“It’s nothing,” she insisted, or, “I can’t remember.”
“It has to be
something
,” they said, persisting. “Surely you can remember what it is you see... or hear.”
But if Ellie was to be believed, lamplight or daylight erased the memory, and her parents eventually came to the conclusion that, consciously or unconsciously, she was afraid to face the demons of her dreams. No matter how much her mother and father pressed, coaxed, or persuaded, she shook her dark head and, though her eyes were haunted, gave no explanation.
“It seems strange to me that a child wouldn’t just burst out with the reason for such dreadful fear; children are not usually so secretive,” Serena often mused. “Well,” with a sigh, “perhaps she’ll outgrow them.”
And so it proved, to a large extent. The nightmares grew less frequent (or Ellie grew adept at hiding them), though they never seemed to lighten in their intensity.
And never, in the twelve or so years since, had she become accustomed to them or learned to accept them with any degree of casualness. Always, always, she was left shaken, creeping through the next day, a shadow of her true self.
With Serena gone to her grave these three years, Bran Bonney took on himself the concern for his daughter during these frightening times. She was the only chick he had; three brothers, not living past babyhood, lay in the Bliss cemetery, where the woman who birthed them had eventually joined them.
Ellie—Elizabeth Grace—coming along rather late in the lives of Brandon and Serena Bonney, was their pride and joy with her bright ways, her creativity, her enjoyment of life. Spontaneous and imaginative, she was the natural leader of the group of four girls who played together, stayed together, grew up together, terming themselves the “gang.” Venturesome, she was responsible for many
an act of derring-do, many a scrape, many an adventure during their school years.
It hurt Bran to see Ellie’s bright winsomeness dimmed even a little. And surely it was the nightmares that were responsible for what seemed a blighting of her life and prospects.
With the moon through the window his only light, once again the concerned father approached his daughter’s shuddering form, doing the only thing he knew to do. Placing his hand on the dear head disheveled from sleep and from wrestling with the vivid pictures of the night, he prayed earnestly, fervently, “Lord, give my girl peace. Deliver her from this torment.”
Ellie drew a quivering breath, turned her cheek against the palm of her father’s hand, finding comfort in the calluses made on her behalf, and murmured, “I’m all right now, Papa. Go back to bed.”
Though Ellie never said, her father, judging by her demeanor and countenance the following mornings, always supposed the nightmares kept Ellie awake the remainder of the night. And so he suspicioned again.
Bran was up at the usual time; Ellie was late in rousing but was washed and dressed when he came in from the barn, an apron cinched neatly around her waist, obviously determined to make the day a normal one; it was, after all, the busy time of the year.
Lugging two brimming pails of milk, Bran stepped into the house—a house he had built with his own hands, with trees from his own homestead—to find the table set, coffee ready, toast in the warming oven, and porridge simmering on the stove. Ellie, busily stirring the oatmeal, seemed pale, quiet. Her face, ordinarily animated with lively eyes and a quick smile, was still. Weary. Tense. Her hazel-green eyes were shadowed.