Sweetwater Springs Scrooge: A Montana Sky Holiday Short Story (The Montana Sky Series) (2 page)

Noah had bought candy with one of the pennies but saved the rest. And he had more money from….

His throat closed, remembering how, the summer before Ma died, Pa had come home laughing, his pockets full of dollar bills and coins. His mother had been sitting at the table, reading her Bible. When she saw Pa, she frowned and turned her back to him.

With a laugh, Pa flung the money on the table.

But instead of looking happy, Ma’s expression grew more pinched, even as she began to gather up the bills.

With a growl of annoyance, Pa swept his hand over the loose coins and scooped them up. He tossed them into Noah’s lap.

Noah had stared down at his riches in amazement. “Thank you, Pa!”

Pa ruffled Noah’s hair. “Good to know
someone
around here appreciates me.”

Back then, his father’s words and sharp glance at Ma had given Noah a squirmy feeling, not unlike the one he had now because of breaking Grandma’s vase.

The idea came to him as clear as if someone had told him what to do.
Buy grandma a new one.

Feeling sudden hope, Noah jumped up from the bed and hopped to a chest of drawers where a cigar box sat on the top. He opened the lid, not stopping to admire the picture of the clipper ship on the front, nor to imagine sailing away like he usually did. The inside still held the faint scent of cigars. He didn’t know why, but sometimes, when he needed to remember his pa, he’d sniff the smell and feel comforted.

Picking up the money pouch, Noah squeezed it. The coins clinked together and moved under his fingers. Opening his bedroom door, he peered down the hall and listened for the sounds of his grandmother. “Grandma?” he called, to be sure she wasn’t around.

Silence met his ears, and Noah remembered her saying she was going to take some pea soup to Mrs. Murphy, who was ailing. He hoped the widow ate the whole pot, for he didn’t like pea soup. He didn’t like oatmeal either. But Grandma made him eat both. Not like Pa….

His throat threatened to close again. Noah quickly donned his coat, hat, and mittens and stepped out of the house, making sure to close the door behind him—something he often failed to do. Once on the street, he began to run, anxious to buy the vase before his grandmother came home.

~ ~ ~

In spite of himself, Elias couldn’t quell a rise of eagerness at walking down the main part of Sweetwater Springs. He hadn’t been to town for at least three months, not since he’d brought his harvest to the Cobbs for barter, and the changes he now saw caught him by surprise. He’d known of the construction of the fancy hotel owned by the banker and that the newspaper owner was putting up an office building, but he couldn’t believe the structures were finished, with shiny pinkish brown quartz facades sparkling in the pale winter sunshine.

He stopped and stared. The four-story elegant hotel seemed out of place in this little frontier town. He looked up and down the street and scratched his chin.
Maybe not so little any more.

A young woman with long brown curls rode past him on a two-wheeled contraption, her legs moving up and down.

Elias gaped after her.
Who could have imagined such a thing?

A few steps further, he noticed the spruced up exterior of what used to be a white two-story building. He squinted to read the sign.
Sugarplum Dreams.
Is that a sweetshop?

Beguiled, Elias took a few steps in the direction of the store. But then he saw some fashionable-looking ladies go inside. Instead, he reversed his course and headed toward the mercantile. The frozen mud of the street changed to rough-hewn blocks of the same quartz as the hotel. The whole road was paved all the way to the train station.
Must have cost a pretty penny.
He didn’t see any need for wasting money laying fancy stone over dirt.

Shaking his head at the changes that had come to Sweetwater Springs, Elias approached the red brick mercantile. He opened the door and stepped into the warmth, inhaling the scent of evergreen from the swags of pine boughs and holly hanging from the counter and window displays and something that smelled of cinnamon. He headed toward the round black stove, nodding at a young German woman with a pale blond braid wrapped around her head, who passed him on her way out. He remembered her as a girl, playing with Marian’s daughter.

One by one, he placed the apples in the large basket in the corner by the door, where the Cobbs expected people to set their barter items.

He selected from the laden shelves with a lavish hand, tucking items in the bag—first staples, and then the coveted jam. Part of him marveled at what had come over him, buying more in one shopping expedition than he had in a whole year put together. But the other part of him couldn’t seem to care.

His arms full, Elias carried his plunder to the counter of the mercantile. Today he’d chosen with reckless abandon—huckleberry, saskatoon, boysenberry, and chokeberry—two of each. The smell of fresh-baked cinnamon cookies on the rack of shelves near the front counter also tempted him.
I’ll take half a dozen.
His gaze slid to the pies next to the cookies, but his habits of thrift finally caught up with him.
Jam will last longer.
Resolutely, he turned his head away.

Plump Mrs. Cobb, wearing a gray wool dress, stood behind the counter waiting on a boy in front of her. She raised an eyebrow in askance at Elias’s full arms.

He stared back at the shopkeeper, his face impassive. In thirty-five years, he hadn’t allowed Hortense Cobb to get his goat, and he wasn’t about to start today.

With a harrumph, she turned her attention back to the boy who was carefully counting out coins on the counter next to a vase he apparently wanted to purchase.

That looks like the one I gave Marian.
His attention caught, Elias edged closer. Yep, similar fluted shape, although this one had pink roses in addition to the purple violets dotting the sides.

He looked away, not wanting to be reminded of the old memory—of how for weeks he’d planned to ask Marian to marry him, plotting and discarding various ways and means. But in the glow of impulsively buying her the vase, seeing the sparkle in her blue eyes, how her happy smile had lit up her face, he’d blurted out a proposal right then and there in the dirt street in front of this same mercantile.

When she accepted, he’d picked her up and twirled her around, scandalizing the busybodies who watched. But, lost in their bliss, neither had cared.

Her mother did.
In fact, Elias suspected Martha Hutchinson of thrusting a stick in the spoke of his courtship wheel every time she had a chance.

He shook his head. The last weeks of lying sick in bed had given him time to reflect on the past.
Truth be told, I had only myself to blame.

The boy glanced over at Elias before bending back to his task, sliding a copper penny across the surface to join the pile in front of the shopkeeper. He had a heart-shaped face with curly black hair, pale skin, a snub nose, and translucent blue eyes.

Seeing the child—the spittin’ image of Marian—made Elias’s stomach tighten.
Surely, the boy must be related.

Mrs. Cobb’s eyebrows pulled together. She sent the boy a disapproving glance from her close-set brown eyes. “Stop dawdling, Noah Turner.”

Turner. Hadn’t Marian’s daughter married a man named Turner?
Then they’d moved to Crenshaw.

“I don’t have all day.” Mrs. Cobb prodded sharply.

Neither did Elias, but for once he wasn’t impatient to finish shopping and retreat home. Instead, unusual curiosity kept him rooted to the boy’s side, staring over his shoulder at the tableau on the counter.

Noah slid over his last coin.

Even without knowing the price of the vase, Elias guessed the boy didn’t have enough money to cover the cost.

Mrs. Cobb scowled and shoved back the stack of money. “The vase costs more that
that
, boy.”

The child’s shoulders slumped, and he picked up the coins and put them in a small sack. He turned to leave, glancing up at Elias as he did so.

Those eyes!
The sadness in the blue depths took Elias back thirty years, to a similar pained expression, the eyes of his beloved brimming with tears.

“Why are you buying that vase, boy?” The question burst out of Elias’s mouth before he could think, shocking him. Not sure what came over him, he began to set his purchases on the counter, attempting to appear nonchalant.

Mrs. Cobb fluttered her hands at hearing Elias voluntarily string seven words together.

He couldn’t help a spurt of amusement at her reaction. He never spoken more than necessary words to her. But today his nature was somehow different.
After all, I did set out intending on a little human interaction, and I just accomplished that.

“No need to look so,” Elias told the stricken boy. He reached into his pocket and pulled out several crumpled bills, sliding them across the counter.

Mrs. Cobb gasped. Her hand shot out to claim the money, as if she thought he’d change his mind.

The boy’s eyes widened.

Bemused by his need to intervene on Noah’s behalf, Elias didn’t bother to bargain with the shopkeeper. “Add that to young Mr. Turner’s account.”
What in tarnation has come over me? I haven’t been so impulsive in thirty years.

The woman’s close-set brown eyes narrowed in speculation.

Elias could almost see the gossip about to spill out of her mouth, probably to the next customer to darken the doors of the mercantile. “And not a word about this transaction, Mrs. Cobb. It’s Christmas time, after all. Presents. Secrets.”

The woman’s lips pressed together. She gave him a nod, stiff with reluctance.

But he knew she’d keep her agreement. As much as the shopkeeper liked to gossip—the more malicious the better—Mrs. Cobb knew if she didn’t exercise discretion, people would stop using her store, instead ordering from catalogues and such.

Hope sparked in the depths of the boy’s eyes. “Really, Mister? You’ll help me buy Grandmother a vase? I broke her other one.”

“It’s a loan, you hear,” Elias said sternly to cover up the pang that went through him at hearing about the broken vase.
As if I hadn’t shattered our relationship so many years ago.
“I expect you to work off the debt. You can start by helping me haul wood.” Not that he needed any more wood. He was set for the rest of the winter. But that task was the best he could come up with on the spur of the moment. “You come over to my house—I’m two lots over from the Adler’s stone house—on Monday after school.”

“Yes, sir! Thank you, sir!”

The boy’s fervent tone sent an unexpected surge of pleasure through him, and Elias couldn’t resist a smile back at Noah, albeit his mouth felt a little rusty at the unexpected movement. He reached over and picked up the vase. “We’ll keep this at my house until you pay me back.”

~ ~ ~

After school the next day, with the weather crisp despite the sun, they worked on the woodpile together. Elias split some logs he’d sawed last summer into stove-length pieces, which Noah gathered and stacked in the woodshed. The sun’s rays sparkled off the snow, making him squint. The air was crisp and frosty, but exertion soon heated him, and Elias took off his outer coat, walked over to the nearby clothesline, and draped it over the rope.

On this side of Sweetwater Springs, close to the forest, the lots were divided into square acre parcels. His land was screened on all sides by trees his parents had planted along the property line when they’d first built here. The row of mature trees, a mixture of evergreens, maples, and silver birch enclosed the yard. The apple orchard further hid his home from his neighbors and the street. But even the tallest trees couldn’t block the sight of gray clouds billowing over the snow-covered mountains, heralding a coming snowstorm.

Elias returned to the woodpile. Normally he detested chopping wood, an arduous but necessary chore. But today with Noah keeping him company, he stopped work every time the boy came near.
For safety
, he told himself, but really because the child fascinated him.

Much like his grandmother, the boy didn’t have a silent bone in his body. He chattered away without needing input from Elias, talking about his friends, his teacher, what he learned in school, each of the townsfolk whose path he’d crossed that day, the cardinal flitting through the trees, and a deer he spotted on the edge of the forest.

And Elias, who’d spent years in solitude, found he didn’t mind a bit. In fact, his ears sharpened each time Noah dropped a tidbit of information about his grandmother.

He learned Marian had baked a peach pie and, according to Noah, the dessert sure was tasty. For the second day in a row, she’d taken soup to Widow Murphy. Noah let on that he suspected his grandmother didn’t even like the woman, not that she’d ever said so. But Mrs. Murphy had been mean to Noah one day, and Grandmother had given her the cold edge of her tongue. The boy said the latter to Elias, squaring his shoulders with obvious satisfaction.

Elias had to grin at that. Marian was as even tempered a woman as you could find until you riled her, usually by crossing someone or something she held dear, and then
look out.
His grin slid away as he remembered their last argument.

As if reading his thoughts, Noah asked, “Why didn’t you marry Grandma?” The boy looked up at him.