Thing With Feathers (9781616634704) (10 page)

“Speaking of Mrs. Tjaden, is there to be another Mrs. Tjaden added to your clan soon, Angus?” Bowman noticed, and he was certain Sean Marshall had too, that Elrod, the eldest of the Tjaden boys kept buzzing around Rebecca.

A broad smile broke out across Angus’s face as he followed Bowman’s stare. “Oh, I would not be surprised a bit, not one little bit. Rebecca is a treasure, I tell you. And you, preacher—” Angus stopped himself from asking about Blair’s pregnancy. Emotions were oddly strained between the preacher and his daughter. Angus cleared his throat and resumed, “All’s well with you?”

Preacher Bowman grunted his reply, but studied Angus Tjaden’s goodly and substantial face in a most unsettling way.

Chapter 22

May 14, 1928

Cloverdale, Oregon

T
he afternoon was a beauty; the sky was blue as a jay, a smattering of clouds waltzed with the delicate currents, and the kind-hearted sun kept its rays steady but moderate. Blair jumped up to fetch Wyatt a scoop of tea when she saw him approach.

“Fine day, Father.” She smiled, one forearm resting upon her slightly bulging waist as she proffered the ladle.

“Certainly is, daughter. You rest yourself now. We can help ourselves.”

Smiling, she sat back down on the pile of shake and squinted up at the men at work. It was a high pitch, that roof, and on top of a two-story barn. Wyatt rested with one hand laid on the back of his daughter-in-law’s neck. His son had been correct. She was a might tougher than one would guess. Something dark in her past had made her so. Wyatt reflected on it now and then, certain that it had something to do with her father, the preacher, but not understanding why the two never talked to each other. He knew that Blair still struggled with some auspicious issue, a private matter, but he often saw the young woman’s face change in a flicker at the mere mention of her father. Sometimes the girl’s sudden changes unnerved him. They could come about so quickly and completely. But his son was happy, and she seemed to be happy in his company. There wasn’t much more that Wyatt could have hoped for.

Preacher Bowman could only watch as his daughter, his wife, swelling with his son, conversed with her father-in-law. If there was one man in the whole valley who could ruin Bowman, it was Wyatt Marshall. No one had more money or inspired more respect than he. Whatever Wyatt said would be believed. Preacher Bowman had reason to fear the man.

Bowman watched as Marshall made his way back to the rooftop. The rafters had been covered with cross boards, and the shake was three quarters to the peak. The preacher had been resting for a spell. It would have looked inappropriate if he rested any longer. He climbed up after Wyatt.

“Can ya hand me another stack?”

Wyatt reached with the hand he was using to steady himself and slipped. His feet grappled for the cross boards even before his hands came down to catch him, but to no avail. Wyatt Marshall slipped off the roof. In a desperate grab, he caught a cross board and was holding on to his life with the strength of the last three fingers of his right hand. The hand was turned painfully while the rest of him dangled vertically over the peak of the barn.

Preacher Bowman had been shadowing Wyatt. He was the only man near when the accident happened. He scurried to the edge of the roof to help the man, grabbing for the outstretched left hand. That secured, the preacher grabbed hold of Wyatt’s right wrist and clenched tightly.

“What has she told you about me?” he asked Wyatt through clenched teeth.

“What? Preacher, help me. I…I can’t hang on.”

“What did the little demon tell you about me? Answer me or so help me I’ll let you drop.”

Wyatt felt his grip loosening and he struggled to hang on. “Demon? Preacher, I don’t—there’s nothing—ah! Please help me!”

The preacher searched Wyatt Marshall’s eyes and saw confusion suddenly change to understanding.

And Wyatt did understand. He had suspected all along that there was some dark secret that only those in the preacher’s house knew of, and probably his son. His imagination would not have allowed him to guess just what that darkness was, until then. But in the flash of an instant, with his life literally hanging in the balance, everything became startlingly clear for Wyatt.

“‘For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do…’” The preacher let go of Wyatt’s wrist.

Blair screamed.

The body of Wyatt Marshall hit the ground with a
whump
. His legs were twisted in a most gruesome way. It all seemed to happen in slow motion. The men came running from all directions, and everyone was shouting. Blair’s mouth was still open, but she screamed silently. Her head rose up mechanically to look at the perch from which her kindly father-in-law had fallen. Her eyes met a look in her father’s. It was a satisfied look. He’d killed Wyatt Marshall, and he looked satisfied, no, justified. She knew that look so very well. The day turned suddenly cold. Blair fainted.

Chapter 23

T
he body of Wyatt Marshall was laid in the back of a wagon and led to the homestead where Mavis waited. One of the Tjaden boys ran the entire distance to tell her there had been an accident and then cranked up Wyatt’s Model-T in order to fetch a doctor. The nearest one was at least an hour’s ride away, in Tillamook.

The lumber wagon pulled up in front of the house. Will and Sean had to restrain their mother by her shoulders from going to see her husband, whose fatal head injury became immediately apparent to those in attendance, the instant he was lifted by his oldest boy. The race to Tillamook would be a futile one. Wyatt Marshall had died instantly. Tiny, bony Mavis Marshall put up a hell of a fight against her two strong sons, but it soon became clear that she had derived most, if not all of her strength, from her husband. When she was told he was already gone, that strength ebbed from her like an outgoing tide, only for Mavis, the tide would never completely roll in again.

October, 1928

Cloverdale, Oregon

Wyatt’s death occurred months earlier, but Mavis seemed to still suffer some sense of shock or other mental defect. She wandered around the house with all the jerkiness of a Chaplin movie and always with the wonder of someone who can’t be made to accept. In her own mind, she didn’t believe it. Every part of her world seemed suspended in a state of unreality. She went through the motions of being a functioning person, but she was numb and without motive. She kept waiting to wake up from a bad dream, but it surely was the longest nightmare she’d ever had. To Sean’s dismay, his mother could not remember Wyatt’s funeral. She did not remember the service or, later, the wake. She could not remember hearing the words over Wyatt’s grave as the first shovelful of dirt was thrown atop the mahogany box, words that Sean could not forget.

“The good always die young,” Angus Tjaden had said in the emotional eulogy he gave for his best friend, “because God wants the good ones for Himself.”

To Sean, the words had not granted the peace of mind intended by their kind neighbor. Instead, they sounded hauntingly prophetic.

Blair had to remind Mavis to eat, and recently had begun sitting in a chair beside Mavis’ bed to ensure that the emaciated woman
would
eat. Blair had scarce time for watching over Mavis, but she made time for the woman who had shown so much kindness to her. It simply meant that Blair’s days would be a bit longer, a little more froward. She would rise earlier and, when necessary, would continue her chores on into the night hours. It was October. Winter was coming. There was much work to be done on the farm and one less man to see to it. Everyone took on a greater work load. Sean took his orders from his older brother, Will, who rightfully became the family’s patriarch by default.

In Mavis’s confused and sometimes trancelike state, she could not notice the changes in Blair. Her daughter-in-law would sit by her bedside and watch her eat, and oftentimes, Blair would read to her. Mavis was grateful to have Blair’s companionship, even though she never really listened to the words Blair was reading. Mavis also failed to notice that the girl held no book in her hands. It seemed to Mavis that the larger Blair’s pregnancy grew, the more often the girl would read for her.

Mavis went to sleep early on that day, perhaps coming down with a touch of flu. Blair accepted it as a chance to soak in a warm tub. She loved that tub. She dried herself and applied scented powder before slipping on the roomy nightdress. She was braiding her long, dark hair when her husband entered the bedroom. Sean was tuckered and bone-weary, but the sight of his lovely wife’s reflection in the gilded mirror, nimbly tying her thick and glossy hair with pretty ribbons, brought a smile to his lips. Catching his gaze, she finished and walked over to him.

Sean kissed her head and sat down on the bed to remove his boots. Blair pushed his hands away and began untying the laces and pulling the boots free for him. That done, she rose up and playfully pushed him back onto the bed and unbuttoned his shirt. When her fingers reached his dungarees, he stopped her.

“Don’t, Blair. It’ll make me…”

“So?” Her eyes arched up seductively.

“I…we can’t. Can we? I mean, I don’t want to hurt the baby.”

“I’ll make it so we don’t harm the little man. Just lay back and leave it to me.”

She pulled his jeans off and spread his shirt open. She could not resist running her hands over his glistening torso, still tan from the outdoor work performed shirtless in the heat of September. She ran playful fingers through his soft swirls of chest hair before gathering up her nightdress.

She lay still on her back, twisting her braid with her fingers and staring out the window at the darkening late afternoon. Sean was awake too, she could tell, but he was lost in his own thoughts. Blair was trying to talk to herself, and she was angry. The inner-voice, the one Blair had learned to depend upon more and more for bolster, if not protection, was only supposed to be there for the hard parts. She was supposed to give Blair the strength she lacked to handle the hard things.

Well, he was hard, wasn’t he?
The voice giggled inside of Blair’s mind.

Blair was actually jealous of herself. It was always the other Blair who made love to Sean. In the beginning, Blair might have needed her only because she’d been nervous. She didn’t need her anymore. But no matter how hard she tried to rid of her other self during intimate moments with Sean, she always appeared and took over.

“Blair,” he interrupted her argument with herself, “why don’t you want me to use your name when we make love?” He turned on his side to see her in the half light of their bedroom.

“Wh—what?” Blair repeated, truly surprised.

“That’s what you said. You know. When we were…”

“I said that?”

“You don’t remember?” A troubled expression darkened her husband’s face. “I must have called out your name. You bent down and whispered in my ear. You said, ‘I don’t want you to call me by
her
name when we make love.’ What did you mean by that? Why wouldn’t you want me to call you ‘Blair’?”

Blair felt lost, frightened. If she could not control that other voice, would she eventually lose herself completely? “Well…I… ” She shrugged. “Sometimes I like to pretend I’m someone else. Someone who is not…so…weak. When I was young there was a…doll. She wasn’t mine—I never owned a doll. But a girl brought hers to our class one day and I remember thinking how beautiful she was. But she also looked smart and important. She was dressed up like a girl who might work and live in a big city. Anyway, I know it’s silly, but I used to imagine that if I were that doll, I would be much stronger. So sometimes, whenever I felt—like I needed—help…”

“You mean, as long as you pretended you were that doll, or that doll was you, you felt stronger and more beautiful?”

“I guess so.”

“But, Blair,”—he raised himself on his elbow and caressed her cheek—“you’re so beautiful. And you’re the strongest woman I have ever known.”

“That’s just the doll.”

“No. That doll only exists inside of you. It can’t survive without you. You’re the strong one, Blair. And smart. Lord! Look what your mind did for you to help you survive. You endured all that pain and suffering and humiliation your father caused you. You’re carrying his child inside you while you harbor the darkest of secrets. I don’t know of another woman who could withstand all that. But you did. So, if pretending to have the strength of something else has helped you to do it, I guess I can understand that. You found strength somewhere inside yourself when most people would give up and die. I think you’re an amazing woman, Blair, and…I love you. I’m bursting with love for you.” He paused. “You don’t need to be someone else when you’re with me, do you?”