Butterfly Garden (24 page)

In it, Sara was like a ... a pagan goddess, God help him, all bright, blinding light, her head thrown back, her soft hair flowing down her naked body. Too beautiful to be real, too incredible to be his. And yet Adam was certain that was how she looked, except that he had never seen her naked. He had touched her, yes, but to envision every perfect curve, the way her proud breasts lifted away from her body, their pouting tips outlined by the fire behind her, became an ecstasy all its own.

And the way she had fit herself over him, like a glove made of the softest leather, tight, supple, milking him—  Adam groaned and changed position, again. How was it that he had wished for so long that she would stay away from him, and now that she did, she drove him madder than the world claimed him.

“Adam?” Sara said, sitting up, as if he’d brought her to life with the depth of his need.

He tried to pull her down against him then, to settle his need where he wanted to be taken inside her—though he would not breach her—but she pushed him away.

“The door,” she said, rising. “Someone is knocking at the door.” She donned her robe, but Adam rose behind her and placed a staying hand on her arm. “This is the middle of the night  Wait. I will see.” He lit the lamp and took it as he left their room.

The man at the door needed a bath; Adam did not need the lamp to know that much. The stench of sweat and liquor hovered about him like a pall. It was a scent he had worn, himself, those months after Abby and before Sara. That kind of pain could cause a man to fall, and far. Perhaps this man had fallen as well, and with good reason. Adam swallowed his judgment and his frustration at the intrusion. “Can I help you?”

The staggering man entered and passed him for Sara standing in the shadow of their bedroom door. Adam closed his eyes, his need sliding away with his hope. Another birthing, at midnight no less….

They were on their way in no time. “Never will you say no; I know that now,” Adam told Sara, perched on the buggy seat beside him. “Because if ever there was a man deserved that answer, Butch Redding is the man.”

“His wife does not deserve such bad treatment, however. The child she has been nurturing in her womb does not deserve to die.”

“Sara,” Adam said, regarding her, sudden concern prickling his nape. “You will not save every one of them. You cannot. If you think to do so, you will fall hard when you fail, harder than I did from the loft, and you will not mend as easily. I understand that much, if little else, about you.”

Sara waved away his caution. “I know what to do. Don’t worry about any of them.”

“About you, I worry,” he said, but she did not hear, or she did not choose to.

After a quiet minute, she flashed him a smile, likely calculated to ease his concern. “Imagine if I had refused to respond to Mad Adam Zuckerman’s call.”

Imagine where his girls would be now, he thought. Where he would be. “Hell,” he said; he would be in hell. His girls too, without Sara.

“Cuss all you want,” she said, misunderstanding him. “Just go faster so you keep up with him.”

Leave it to her to be in a hurry, even now, given the prospect of a midnight delivery with a drunken husband under foot. Sometimes Sara was like the horses his people had taken to buying for their buggies, always eager to go, always ready to run. When Sara could not do what she wanted, she was like a racehorse at the starting gate, forced to a stop, heart racing the way its eager legs wanted to do, unable to move forward until the gate opened.

He wondered what would happen if nobody ever opened the gate. Would racing hearts give out and die?  He feared she might die of it too, his Sara, of not being able to give all of herself to her work, to their children, to anyone who needed her. She would die, as certainly, if she failed, he thought.

It occurred to him, then, that he had been trying to stop her from giving all of herself to him. Was that why she had turned from him? physically, at least. He needed to think more about it, though now was not the time. Butch Redding needed to be caught up with.

“It will not be pleasant, with him,” Adam said. “But I will be beside you, no matter what happens. You will be safe,” he promised.

Sara turned to him then. He did not see or hear movement, but he sensed her eyes on him, and something more. He took the reins in one hand and reached for her.

It was there, her hand, reaching too. She laced their fingers together, raised them to her lips and kissed his knuckles. “
Danke
,” she said.

That was all.

It was enough.

It was everything. Adam blinked to clear his vision. In their bed, he had yearned for … everything. Now he had it. And it wasn’t even what he thought it would be.

It was better.

* * * * *

The man’s house was as bad as him, smelly, unkempt, dirty. Barefooted children in a cold, barely-heated kitchen were dressed in threadbare clothes that needed washing as much as them. Why were they not in bed at this hour?

He saw Sara hesitate when she saw them. Damned if he didn’t see her swell with the need to help them, too, but a woman’s scream brought her to her purpose and she ran.

Adam sat at the table even as the man upended a bottle of whiskey against his lips. Greedy, slovenly. A shaft of pain hit Adam to see the way the children watched their father. His girls might have watched him that way at one time, except that he had waited until Sara had taken them away to drown his worthless self in drink.

Like these children feared their father, Adam had always thought he wanted his children to fear him. He had been stupid to think they should. It might be enough that he reined in his temper with the same force he used on an unruly beast. He was more manageable surely than an animal, though his father had not been.

One of the smaller boys asked to go to the outhouse.

Ignored by his father, he began to cry. Again, he made his need known.

Butch Redding swore and took another drink. “Shut up,” he shouted.

Adam rose and extended his hand. “I’ll take you.”

It took the boy a while to extend his own, and by then it was too late, because he was standing in a puddle on the floor.

The child cowered before his drunk father lunged. “Son of a bitch!” The man’s hand shot out like a snake and sent the boy clear across the kitchen.

Adam saw red. The boy’s bloody face blurred to the blood-smeared face of the little girl Adam once tried to protect. Emma.

The drunk flew through the kitchen as fast as his son had done, but Adam had aimed him in a different direction. He landed in the trash. And with a roar, the bastard was up and charging, but Adam met him half-way, and the brute hit the wall a second time.

More blood. More fury.

Sara screamed as Adam toppled the heartless bastard, smashing his fist into that hideous face, the one he wanted to hit, and hit, and hit, until it broke and breathed no more.

Sara screamed his name; she shouted for him to stop, but he had to keep the man from hurting—

Adam received a sharp blow from behind, despite the fact that his adversary lay before him, a blow that rattled him to his bones. Then the room shifted, tilted, and he fell.

When he opened his eyes and rose, Adam shook his head, and saw that blood covered the man’s face, that he was unconscious but still breathing.

Sara threw a broken chair to the floor.

Adam was pretty sure, by the feel of his head, that she had used it on him. He looked around while she tended the small boy with the bloody face, and realized where he was and what he had nearly done.

Murder.

He went outside to the pump to fill a bucket and came back to throw water over the man. When the bully came to, Adam bent down and grabbed him by his collar, just enough to lift his big ugly face from the floor. “You touch another of your children and I will kill you. You hear me?”

Sara grasped Adam’s shoulder. “It is not our way,” she said, her brow furrowed, her gentle fingers stroking the stubborn head she had just finished cracking with a chair.

“It is the way I was raised,” he said, nodding at the cowering children. “Just like them.”

At Sara’s look of shocked revulsion, he went outside to wash and wait in the buggy.

He was on his knees beside the pump, staring at the blood on his hands, craving delivery from the hell of his memories when Sara came and knelt beside him. She kissed his cheek. “I love you.”

“Do not.”

She stood with a sigh. “I cannot help myself.”

“I do not need you or your lo—” He grasped her skirts as she made to turn away and buried his face in them. She held him there, stroking his hair, giving his unclean self an absolution he did not deserve.

It was all the deliverance he craved. Adam wept.

When he quieted, she smoothed his brow. “You did it because he struck the child.”

“Evil struck,” he said. “In more ways than you know.”

“It could strike again this night. I need help Adam. Your help.”

He washed his face again and followed her inside. The man on the floor was snoring.

“The children?” Adam asked.

“I cleaned them up a bit and put them to bed before I went outside,” Sara said. “They were exhausted.”

He followed her up the rickety stairs and found his fury at the man building again with the squalor about him. But he swallowed his ire when he met the woman. She had been battered, more often than not, it was easy to see.

Adam read kinship in those eyes.

He walked her when she could barely stand. He sat behind her in her bed and held her up when she needed to push. After a long and difficult labor, she delivered a big, strong baby boy.

They had a chance to talk then, while Sara washed the babe. Adam told her right off that he’d beat her husband and left him on the kitchen floor. “You will take your children and leave,” he said, bringing Sara’s quiet protest, but neither he, nor the woman with the bruised face, paid her any mind.

“I would,” the woman said looking at the baby Sara washed. “If I knew where to go.”

“I will come for you in a week and take you away for good. He won’t follow. And he won’t hurt you or the children between now and then, either; I’ll see to it,” Adam said.

“I believe you,” the woman said. “My name is Jenny.”

“I am Adam,” he replied. “You’ve met my wife.”

“Are you two finished?” Sara snapped, uncomfortable with what Adam was taking upon himself and with the bond that had formed before her eyes, however invisible it remained.

Adam looked free of pain for the first time since they arrived, and Jenny looked ... relieved. Sara was actually sorry to spoil the moment for them both, but…. “The afterbirth is not coming,” she said. “You are bleeding more than you should, Jenny.”

Panic, Sara saw flare in Adam’s eyes. “What can I do?” he asked.

“Jenny, I want you to kneel on the bed and Adam I want you to massage her stomach while she does. We need to get the contractions started again.” Sara wished desperately that Jordan were here. “I’ll prepare some raspberry leaf infusion.”

This was the first time Sara had seen her husband red with embarrassment, but he did exactly as she showed him, apologizing to Jenny all the while.

The woman laughed at his embarrassment. “Any man who defends one of my kids against Butch can keep me from bleeding to death.”

Her words silenced him.

Sara took over for Adam after she made Jenny swallow the strong infusion. “The contractions have started again,” Sara said. “I can feel them.”

“Ya, me too,” Jenny said, almost collapsing on the bed when Sara allowed it. The placenta came in two pieces, but it came, nevertheless. Sara fit it together to make certain it was all there and none was left inside, then she elevated Jenny’s legs.

It was late the next night When Sara and Adam finally set off for home, almost twenty-four hours after they’d arrived. The children had been bathed, fed, and the house cleaned. They worked together to accomplish it.

After Jenny and her new son fell asleep, Adam took Jenny’s husband to the barn to have a ‘talk’ with him. Despite the fact that Adam returned a long hour later, Butch Redding had not surfaced again, though Adam assured Sara he had not laid another hand on the man.

Both tired, both silent, they drove toward home.

Disturbed by more than the beating he had given and endured, Adam shuddered. He had seen a child struck down. Picturing it chilled him even now. Worse, it brought on that rage that made him mad—good word for him—mad enough to kill.

He knew now, once and for all, that he was like his father, violent and dangerous to those around him. He should go away and free his family from his clutches, except that he had a responsibility to care for them.

Not that he’d been very good about caring for them. Until recently, it had been a matter of ritual, like putting one foot in front of the other. Now his care of them had become connected to an emotion he could not name, one that frightened him witless. Somehow, he knew Sara was responsible for this change, yet he could not decide if he was sorry about it or not. Disconnected was easier.

Not that he’d done a good job of disconnecting from Abby. He’d killed her anyway. Tonight he’d learned how, and probably why, that happened. If he had called Sara at the beginning of Abby’s labor, Ab might have lived. If he had not gotten her pregnant, she certainly would be alive.

He had a lot to answer for.

“Jenny is grateful that you’re going to take her away from that man,” Sara said, breaking his silent hell. “You are probably saving her life. The children’s too. But Butch will hate you enough to kill you, afterward.”

“Small price,” Adam said. It should be higher; he deserved to suffer. The man should try, he thought. “I’d like to see him try.”

“I would not. What happened, really?”

“He hit the boy. I hit him.”

Sara put her hand on his arm. “It was more than that. You know what I mean.”

“Leave it be.”

“Adam, I—”

“You did a good job tonight. You learned a lot from The
English
.”

“Adam, please—”

“That’s what happened to Abby, isn’t it?  There was no afterbirth that night either.”