Smoke River Bride (3 page)

L
eah had never seen a prettier church. The Protestant mission churches in China were drab structures of weathered gray wood or stone, and she gazed in admiration at the lovely interior before her. Four tall windows punctuated the white-painted walls, two on each side. Sunshine poured through the glass into the sanctuary, spilling warm golden light over the wood floor. She smelled furniture polish and something lightly lemon-scented.

Two large bouquets of red camellias banked the altar. Flowers? In November? Mother would say that was a lucky omen.

The minister disappeared through a small doorway, then returned a moment later draped
in his black clerical robe. A smiling young woman followed him to the altar.

“This is Mrs. Halliday,” Reverend Pollock announced. “Mrs. Halliday grows lavender on her farm. She will serve as your witness.”

Leah stole a glance at the slim, dark-haired woman, relieved to find her smiling. She moved forward and lifted Leah’s hands into hers.

“Welcome. You must be Thad’s bride. From San Francisco,
n’est ce pas?”

“I come from China, Mrs. Hal—”

“Oh, please call me Jeanne.”

“My name is Leah Cam—”

“Leah MacAllister,” Thad interjected firmly.

Jeanne laughed. “Mrs. MacAllister, then. Your wedding garments are very beautiful,” she whispered.

“They were my mother’s,” Leah murmured. “I brought them from China.”

The minister cleared his throat. “We’d better get on with it, folks. The church is beginning to fill up for the morning service.” He waited a half second, cleared his throat once more and opened his Bible.

“Dearly beloved…”

Leah sensed people entering the sanctuary
and seating themselves on the pews behind them. She also heard their gasps of surprise and the sudden silence that followed.

The ceremony passed in a blur. “Do you, Thaddeus MacAllister, take this woman…?”

Thad’s low “I do” rumbled close to her ear, and she realized he had bent his head down to her level to speak his vows.

“And do you, Leah Cameron, take this man…?”

While the minister waited for Leah’s response, a woman’s shrill voice cut through the quiet. “God save us, she’s a Celestial!”

Jeanne Halliday reached out and quietly touched Leah’s arm. Reverend Pollock looked up from his Bible with a frown and repeated the question. “Do you, Leah, take Thaddeus for your lawful wedded husband?”

“I—” Her throat clogged. “I do,” Leah choked out.

Reverend Pollock cleared his own throat. “I now pronounce you husband and wife.” In finishing, he raised his voice to cover the whispers from the congregation behind them. “May God bless you both and keep you safe in the shelter of His love. You may kiss the bride,” he added in a lower tone.

Leah waited in an agony of nerves for Thad
to touch her. Instead, he suddenly dug in his vest pocket and produced a wide gold band. “Forgot the ring,” he murmured. He slid it onto her finger. “This was my grandmother MacAllister’s.”

Then he placed his hands on Leah’s shoulders and turned her to face him. She could feel his fingers tremble.

He drew her toward him, and for some reason tears flooded into her eyes. She wasn’t frightened. Or unhappy. She was moved by something deep inside that she could not explain. She blinked hard and then Thad’s mouth settled gently over hers, his lips warm and firm. It lasted but an instant, but Leah’s breath knotted beneath her breastbone. She opened her eyes and smiled into his face.

He looked surprised, but she was too giddy to wonder at it. Jeanne Halliday hugged her, and Reverend Pollock shook Thad’s hand, then Leah’s, then Thad’s again, and turned them around to face the swelling congregation.

It was over. Thad’s still-shaking hand held hers just tight enough to keep her feet anchored to the earth. If she skipped down the aisle, as she felt like doing, she would float away.

Together they started toward the church door, and only then did Leah become aware of the heavy, disapproving silence that greeted them. She kept her head up and tried to smile at the sea of stony faces. Not one person would meet her eyes.

A shard of disquiet knifed into her belly. They disliked her, but why? Because she was Chinese? Because Thad’s son, Teddy, sat outside on the church steps, sulking in obvious displeasure? Because some other woman had wanted to be Thad MacAllister’s wife?

She began to count the steps to the last pew. The women glared at her with animosity, and some of the men ogled her with undisguised interest. Only when she was safely outside the church could she regain her equilibrium. At least she would try.

They emerged into the crisp midmorning sunshine to find Teddy still slumped on the bottom step, a sullen scowl on his face. A dark, cold shadow spread over Leah’s entire being, carrying with it an odd sense of foreboding. She had never expected to feel such disapproval on her wedding day.

Thad kept her hand in his, and with the other he ruffled Teddy’s hair and grasped his shoulder. “Come on, son. Let’s go home.”

Teddy shrugged off his father’s hand and trailed behind them, dragging his feet until they reached the wagon. Thad lifted Leah onto the bench. Teddy clambered up, but scooted his small body as far away from her as he could get without toppling off.

Thad cracked the whip over the mare’s head, then had to wonder at his action. He’d never used the whip before, but he’d explode if he didn’t do something to dispel the tension gripping his belly.

“Why’d you do that, Pa?” Teddy accused.

“Dunno, son.” He glanced at the boy. “Just felt like it.”

“Is it ’cuz you got married?”

“Well, kinda. I guess I’m feeling a little nervous.”

“How come?”

Thad chuckled. “You’ll understand when you’re older.”

“No, I won’t,” Teddy yelled. “I won’t ever, ever understand.”

Leah said nothing. To Thad’s dismay she uttered not one single word the six miles out to the ranch, just studied every tree, every grassy meadow and cultivated field, even the shallow spot in Swine Creek where they forded. Was she homesick for China?

Or maybe she was wondering what she’d gotten herself into? Given the frosty reception of the townspeople at the church, maybe she regretted marrying him.

Thad was surprised in a way that
he
did not regret it. He knew it was the right thing. He had given her his name and his protection, and by God, he would give her a home and all the comforts he could afford in this lean year, starting with the boy’s trousers and shirts and work boots he’d purchased yesterday at the mercantile. She sure couldn’t do housework in that silky red outfit.

Ah, hell, maybe it would work out just fine. He was respected in Smoke River, known as a steady and resourceful man, and she seemed to be good-natured. And—he felt his face grow hot—she sure was pretty.

What could go wrong?

He drew rein at the front porch and watched Leah study the small house he’d built, the barn, and the barely sprouted three-acre field of winter wheat he’d gambled his savings to plant. He’d put his whole life into this farm; he hoped to goodness she liked what she saw.

The minute she walked into the cabin and gazed at what was to be her home, his heart shriveled.

Leah stared at the plank floor, sticky with something that had spilled but never been mopped up. A tower of pots and skillets and egg-encrusted plates teetered in the dry sink. The bare log walls were chinked with brown mud and a grimy, uncurtained window over the sink looked out on the withered remains of what had apparently been a kitchen garden. Another bare window beside the front door suddenly resembled a yawning face, laughing at her.

Were all the houses in Oregon like this, so carelessly kept? Or was it only
this
house?

The room smelled of dust, wood smoke, stale coffee and rotting food, the latter odor drifting from a slop jar that she fervently hoped was intended for a pig. She closed her eyes and tried not to breathe in.

“Guess it could use some cleaning up,” Thad said with a catch in his voice. “Hattie always said…” He left the thought unfinished.

“I am sure she was right,” Leah said evenly. She could not imagine how difficult living here must have been for Thad’s wife. She could also not imagine how she herself could manage to live in this filth and clutter.

Thad lifted her valise. “I’ll just put this in the bedroom.”

Bedroom!
Heaven help her, she had avoided thinking about what marriage would mean at night. “Is…is there—How many bedrooms are there?”

“Just the one,” Thad muttered.

“Where does Teddy sleep?”

“In the loft up there, over the front room. Says it’s warmer at night. I planned to sleep up there, too.”

Thad lifted his head. “Oh, I almost forgot. Yesterday I bought you some work clothes. Should make do until you can get to the dressmaker’s in town.”

“The dressmaker’s?”

“Sure. Don’t you want some dresses like the other women wear?”

No, she did not. Having a Western dressmaker poke at her and criticize her comfortable silk trousers and tunics made her stomach heave. But she was starting a new life in America, and she knew she must fit in.

“Could I not make my clothes myself? Did Hatt—” At the stricken look on his face, Leah couldn’t bring herself to speak her name. “Did your wife own a sewing machine?”

Thad ducked his head and started toward the closed door of what she assumed was the bedroom. “Yeah, she did have a sewing machine,”
he said over his shoulder. “Brought her mother’s fancy Singer with her from Virginia. But she never learned to sew on it.”

“Perhaps I could use it?”

The puzzled look in his eyes almost made her laugh out loud.

“Uh, well, sure, I guess so. It’s probably out in the barn somewhere. I’ll—I’ll have to find it.”

He flung open the bedroom door, plopped her valise in front of a tall chest of drawers and motioned to a square paper package on the bed. “I brought some duds from the mercantile for you.”

“But I brought clothes from—”

Thad cut her off. “That red outfit’s too fine to wash dishes in. Same for that pretty blue shirt thing you wore yesterday. Silk, wasn’t it?”

Leah nodded but did not answer. Instead, she unknotted the string securing the brown paper package on the bed and began to unwrap it. She lifted out a pair of boy’s jeans. Why, they looked just like the ones his young son wore!

She looked up, but Thad was gone. She heard the front door click shut and the thump of his footsteps across the porch. Teddy took
one look at his father’s receding figure and bolted after him.

Leah straightened her spine, shook out the strange-looking American trousers and a long-sleeved red plaid shirt. Since she had stepped off the ship in San Francisco she had not seen one woman wearing clothes like these, not even here in Smoke River. She fingered the boy’s shirt. At least it was red; in China, red was a lucky color.

With shaking fingers she slipped free the frog closures down the front of her beautiful scarlet wedding gown and let it drop to the floor. Her life as Mrs. Thaddeus MacAllister had begun.

“P
a?”

Thad peered into the dusty gloom of the barn, where Teddy was hunched over on a mound of fresh hay. “Yes, son?”

“I don’t like her, Pa. She wears funny clothes and she looks real diff’rent, and she doesn’t talk to me.”

Thad knelt to look into the boy’s stiff face. “More like you’re not talkin’ to her, isn’t it?”

“I don’t got anything to say to a Chinese lady.” His chin sank toward his shirtfront and Thad waited. Teddy usually took his time with more than one sentence.

Thad gazed about the musty smelling barn interior, idly searching for Hattie’s sewing machine. Was that it, there in the far corner?
That burlap-draped lump next to the hay rakes?

“Pa?” Teddy raised his head, then let it droop again.

“Yeah?”

“How come you married her? Do you like her better’n me?”

The boy’s muffled words cut into Thad’s heart like a cleaver. He gathered his son into his arms and held him tight.

“Theodore Timothy MacAllister, there is no one—
no one
in this entire world—I like better than you. And there never will be. You’re my son, and I love you more than…” His voice choked off.

He wanted to do what was best for Teddy. At the same time he wanted to ease Leah’s way into their lives, to fill the hole left by Hattie when she’d died.

After a long silence, he heard Teddy’s voice, the words mumbled against Thad’s Sunday best shirt and fringed deerskin vest.

“Pa, d’you think maybe she’ll cook supper for us?”

Thad chuckled. “I think maybe, yes. Now, how’d you like to help me find something in our barn?”

Teddy’s voice rose an octave. “A horse?”

“Not a horse, son. A sewing machine. Your momma had one, but she never used it, so I stored it out here in the barn somewhere. You’ve got sharp eyes. Where do you think it might be?”

Teddy sat up straight and studied his surroundings, moving his eyes from the array of shovels and axes against one wall to the bridles and harnesses that hung on the opposite wall, to the two saddles draped over a sawhorse in the corner—one man-size, one slightly smaller, for a woman. That one had belonged to his mother.

Purposely he looked away, then pointed to a burlap-draped object in the opposite corner. “I bet that’s it!”

“Might be,” Thad said. He rose and pulled the covering aside. “Well, look at that—you’re right. Come on, son, think we can lift it?”

“Nope.”

“You want to give it a try?”

Teddy’s lower lip jutted out. “Nope.”

Thad shrugged and started to jockey the oblong sewing cabinet away from the wall. He remembered it, and seeing it again brought a funny pain in his chest. Before he could draw another breath, Teddy was puffing beside him. Together they hauled the machine
across the hay-strewn barn floor until they reached the entrance.

Thad swung open the double doors, but when he looked back, Teddy had his head down on top of the once-shiny cabinet and was gasping for breath. Obviously the load was too heavy for the boy. Damned thing was solid oak. Must weigh at least a hundred pounds.

He strode to the back of the barn, grabbed up a large gunnysack and spread it on the floor in front of the sewing machine.

“What do we do now, Pa?”

“Now, we go to work again.”

They rocked it back and forth until all four legs sat squarely on the sturdy hemp sack.

“Think we can pull it, Teddy? Slide it over the ground to the porch?”

The boy eyed the load with a frown. “Nope.”

“Want to try at least?”

“Nope.”

But when Thad stooped to grasp one corner of the sack, Teddy was at his shoulder, reaching for the other.

“Good lad,” Thad murmured. “Let’s go, then. One, two, three, pull!”

The sewing cabinet inched forward. They
had to tilt-walk it over the barn door sill, but after that it bumped over the two-hundred-yard path to the cabin with only three stops along the way to let Teddy catch his breath.

Thad had to wonder at his son’s sudden helpfulness. Had he decided Leah was not so bad after all? Or maybe Teddy just wanted to be close to his father? Thad guessed he’d been so wrapped up in mourning Hattie over the past year he’d pretty much ignored the boy.

His breath caught in a sudden rush of emotion. Had he really done the right thing? Would Teddy ever forgive him for marrying Leah, bringing a stranger, a
foreigner
, into his home? Turning his young son’s life upside down?

“Pa?”

Thad straightened. They had reached the bottom step.

“How’re we gonna get it up to the porch, Pa?”

Thad scratched his newly trimmed beard. “Well, let’s see. I can heft one end, and you…”

Teddy’s head drooped. “It’s too heavy for me, Pa. I can’t lift it.”

“Right. Well, let’s see if something else will work.” Thad hoisted one end of the cabinet up onto the first shallow porch step,
then switched ends and lifted it again. Teddy leaned his back against the oak case to keep it from slipping.

Just as Thad reversed his position again, the cabin door banged open and a small jeanclad figure flew out. She looked so much like a boy Thad had to blink.

“Leah?”

“Yes,” she said calmly. Without another word she positioned herself opposite Thad.

He stared at her slim figure. She’d rolled the sleeves of the red plaid shirt up to her elbows, revealing slender forearms, and the jeans hugged her rounded bottom in a way that made his mouth go dry. Her waist was nipped in with a narrow length of woven scarlet cord of some kind, and the upper part of the shirt swelled gently over her breasts.

He wondered suddenly why more farm women didn’t dress that way. The garments were sturdy and practical. And on Leah—he swallowed—they were downright attractive.

He swallowed again as his brain churned out more images. What sort of undergarments did she have on? Did a Chinese woman wear a corset? A camisole? Bloomers?
What?

He shook his head to clear his mind and focus on the task before him, drew in a deep
breath and heaved the load up another step. Leah put her back against the opposite end and heaved, as well.

Teddy’s mouth dropped open and Thad had to laugh. She’d just shoved a heavy cabinet up a step and she wasn’t even breathing heavily. She must have worked hard in China all her life.

He gestured for his son to join Leah at her end. “Heave,” he muttered. This time six hands gripped the heavy sewing machine and swung it up onto the next step, where it teetered for a moment, then settled with a thunk.

“One more step,” Thad urged. When the cabinet finally rested on the porch, he surveyed his work crew with admiration. Teddy looked winded. Leah didn’t appear the least bit tired. Her cheeks were flushed, but her gray-green eyes sparkled with triumph.

“Here’s your sewing machine, Leah. Where do you want it?”

“Oh!” She dashed inside the small cabin interior, propping the door open with an empty apple crate, and stood studying the room. For the first time Thad noted that her feet were bare.

“Over there.” She pointed to the far corner, where a cat-clawed brocade armchair rested.

Thad retrieved the gunnysack, and he and Teddy used it to slide the cabinet across the stained plank floor. When it stood where Leah had indicated, she stepped back and gazed at it with an assessing eye while the two males caught their breath and massaged their shoulders.

“No,” she said at last. “All wrong. The light is not good.” She pivoted in a slow circle to inspect each cabin wall in turn. “There,” she said finally. “Under the window.” She pointed to the opposite side of the room.

Thad and Teddy groaned in unison, but bent to the opposite corners of the gunnysack. “You’re sure, now?” Thad asked drily.

Leah shot him a look. “Yes, quite sure.”

Again Thad and his son traded glances. This time Thad rolled his eyes toward the ceiling and Teddy suppressed a giggle.

Leah crossed to stand opposite the two cabinet movers, and when Thad and Teddy started to slide their load across the floor, she laid her backside against the opposite end, lowered her head and shoved. The sewing machine scooted smoothly across the floor.

Leah spun around. “Yes,” she breathed. “Perfect.”

Thad’s eyebrows went up. “You sure?”

Teddy clasped both arms over his chest and scowled at her.

Leah faced them both, her hands propped on her hips. “Of course I am sure! Did you think I would change my mind again?”

“Yep,” Thad and Teddy replied in unison.

Leah looked from her new husband to his young son. Their expressions were identical—narrowed eyes, unsmiling lips and a tiny frown between their identical red-brown eyebrows. Teddy resembled his father, right down to his stance, with both hands jammed in his back pockets.

“I do not change my mind,” she said quietly. “Once I decide what to do, I do not change.”

Frowning, Teddy studied the floor. She shifted her gaze to Thad. A variety of emotions showed in his face, a combination of surprise, bemusement and apprehension. His expression puzzled her until she remembered she wore boy’s clothing, her feet were bare and Teddy was not at all pleased that his father had married her.

She was in no position to insist on being accepted. Here in Smoke River she was safe and protected; she could endure a great deal of hardship and disapproval in the bargain.
Still, a hard kernel of doubt niggled its way into her mind.

Thad and his son escaped to the barn, saying they had to care for the horse and do the milking. Tomorrow, Thad said, he would show Leah the chicken house and how to milk their temperamental cow.

As soon as the front door closed, she started to make the cabin habitable. Even the poorest hut in China had been better kept than this—neater and spotlessly clean. America was strange indeed.

She washed the sinkful of dirty dishes and pots in water she pumped and heated on the woodstove, then filled a tin bucket with more water, dumped in the last of her waning supply of powdered jasmine-scented soap and scrubbed the entire cabin floor on her hands and knees. When she rose at last, the floor squeaked under her bare toes.

Next she attacked the window over the sink and the one by the front door with a rag dipped in vinegar water, swept down the cobwebs drooping from the ceiling and dusted every surface she could find, from the oak headboard in the bedroom to the shelf of Teddy’s schoolbooks, even the shiny black Singer sewing machine in its oak cabinet.

Then she climbed the built-in ladder to the loft, where she made up Teddy’s disheveled bed and was straightening his jumbled collection of rocks when she spied a children’s book lodged between the bureau and the wall.
East of the Sun, West of the Moon
. She had read it herself as a child. Suddenly she was glad her father had made her study so hard at his mission school. Thad wanted an educated woman to care for and perhaps set an example for his son.

She dragged the woven rag rug that covered the loft floor outside, tossed it over the clothesline and beat it with the broom until the puffs of dust made her cough.

What next? She felt compelled to keep herself busy; if she allowed herself to stand still for a moment she would think about her marriage and the bed and the coming night and Thad MacAllister, who was now her husband.

What would it be like, lying close to him in the dark, feeling his hands on her skin? Such thoughts made her shiver.

She reswept the kitchen floor, rinsed out a camisole and a pair of white silk drawers in the sink and hung them on the clothesline next to the rug from Teddy’s loft. Now she must think about supper for the three of them.