Titans (4 page)

O
pportunity?”

“The one Trevor Waverling is offerin',” Leon said. “I'd like you to take it since there's no future here for you. You've got to realize that, too.” As if on cue, Daisy let out a deep, melancholic bellow, and the two plow horses pricked their ears and turned their heads toward them over their stall doors. “Today you've had to take some mighty strong doses of the truth, son—too many for a boy to have to swallow on his twentieth birthday, but the facts are what they are.”

Nathan sat down again, feeling drained. “How long have you known Mother didn't intend for me to have the farm?”

“I didn't know until I found a copy of her will a few weeks ago. Up until then, since the farm had been in her family for several generations, I assumed she meant to leave it to the three of you. You'd run it and share the profits with your brother and sister.”

“My
half
brother and sister,” Nathan corrected him, for the first time realizing he and his siblings did not share full family blood. Was it any wonder, then, that he had never felt entirely kin to them?

“I confronted Millicent about the will,” Leon continued. “We had a terrible argument. She had the decency to look red-faced about it but said that originally she'd intended that nothing would change until her death unless a financial need arose. That's when I learned she planned to sell the farm.”

“Did you ask her where that would leave me?”

Leon stroked his knee as he always did when considering how to go about imparting unpleasant news, misery sunk deep into the age lines of his weathered face. “I did. She said that if the sale had to come before her death, with your reputation, you could find work on a farm anywhere. They'd be glad to have you, probably make you manager.”

Nathan felt compelled to move around to digest this information without choking on it. He went over to pat Daisy. Nearly every truth he knew, most of the knowledge and wisdom he'd gained, had come by paying attention to nature. At the moment, he remembered the clear blue stream he'd loved as a child. Butterflies and hummingbirds had played there. Eventually, the stream had dried up and left a depression in the sand. He recalled standing on its dry lip sad to his toes wondering how the most beautiful and essential things on earth could simply disappear. Like now. Only this morning, he'd gone off to the south pasture thinking what a lucky fellow he was to be doing what he loved to do on the land he loved and to have such a fine family and home waiting for him at the end of the day. In less than twelve hours, it had all vanished quick as morning mist before the rising sun.

He returned to the bucket and sat down again. “When were you going to tell me?” he asked.

“Soon's I could figure out how to go about it and to make other arrangements. I wadn't about to keep another secret from you.”

“What other secret?” Nathan's ears perked for another shoe about to fall.

Leon reddened to the part in his sandy, thinning hair. “Aw, forget I said that. It don't pertain to you, so don't pester me about it.”

Nathan didn't believe him. If the secret didn't pertain to him, why say he'd kept it from him? “What other arrangements?” he asked, convinced that whatever his father had almost let slip did relate to him, but he could worm it out of him another time.

“I've laid some money by, money your mother don't know about, money I saved for you. Old Man Sawyer plans to sell his spread one of these years, and I was thinkin' I'd have a word with him to say I'd be interested in puttin' a down payment on the place when the time came. I got good standin' at the bank, and I could borrow the rest. You and I could go on like we always had, only we'd have our own place. Your mother could come with us if she liked. Otherwise…” Leon shrugged. “That'd be up to her. It was the best I could do, son.”

Nathan shook his head, the image of the dried-up stream reappearing. “So why don't we just go on with those plans?” he asked. “I've saved some money from my wages as well.”

Leon leaned toward him. “ 'Cause you've got a bird in hand right now, Nathan. We don't know what tomorrow will bring. You've just learned that you can be sure of nothin'. For two weeks, hopin' for a miracle, I've sat on your mother's intention to sell the place. I thought it might be she'd listen to her conscience and change her mind. I had no idea that the miracle would appear in the form of Trevor Waverling.”

“I don't like him,” Nathan said.

“That's no reason not to hear him out, son, to go see what he's offerin'. He's right, you know. You've never known any place but here.”

“All I've ever wanted to know.”

“Then, by God”—Leon whooped and slapped his knee—“go make sure this is the only place you ever want to know. Prove to yourself that you're not cut out for any other business but farmin'. Learn firsthand that you want nothin' to do with Trevor Waverling, but take it from me, son, if you don't find out now, a time will come when you'll regret not knowin' what else is out there.”

Nathan nodded. “Like Mother,” he said.

“She thinks about it ever' day.”

Nathan looked again at the card. “If I go and hear him out and don't like what I hear, will you still be willing to put a down payment on Mr. Sawyer's land?”

“It's a promise, son.”

Nathan stuck out his hand. “You'll always be my father, Dad. I could have asked for no finer or better.”

Leon clasped it. “Or me a finer or better son.”

In their bedroom as he undressed, Leon said, “I told Nathan about your will, Millicent. He had a right to know.”

At her dressing table, his wife glanced at him sharply in the mirror. “You felt the need to do that, did you? I suppose now he hates me sure enough.”

“He don't hate you, Millie girl. The boy don't have that in him, but I wouldn't expect him to feel the same for you again. The best you can hope for is that he don't realize he owes you nothin'.”

Millicent's mouth twisted. “I suppose you'll make sure he does.”

“No,” Leon said, removing his boots. “You know me better than that, but I sure as hell won't block his vision like I've always done. I wouldn't worry about Nathan tellin' anybody what he's learned today, not even Lily and Randolph. He's as ashamed as you are. I assume you're not goin' to let them know Nathan is their half brother?”

“Certainly not. What good would come of it?”

Leon smirked. “Right. Now that it's open, you goin' to let the final cat out of the bag to Nathan?”

Millicent whirled from the mirror. She was wearing her night chemise, a long white garment with lace at the throat and ends of the sleeves. Her hair had been brushed from its daytime bun and hung in a lustrous mass about her shoulders. Not a thread of gray dulled its strawberry-blond sheen. At forty-one, Millicent Barrows was still the most beautiful woman Leon had ever seen, and her beauty could still grab him by the throat.

“Absolutely not, and don't you even
think
of telling him, Leon Holloway. You promised me. It's bad enough Nathan now knows you are not his father. He would have no reason to keep his silence if he learned we'd given away his twin sister. You've got to think what the scandal would do to Lily's chances of marrying well and Randolph's future as a lawyer if that secret got out.”

“Well, you can certainly speak from experience on both those subjects, can't you?” Leon said, baring his teeth. “But to be clear.
You
gave the boy's sister away, Millicent. I can't let you shade the truth about that.”

Millicent waved away the distinction, but she looked worried. “You
promised
me you would always keep our secret, Leon. I'm going to hold you to that promise to my dying day. You've never gone back on your word, and my feelings for you would alter completely if you ever did. I'm assuming my feelings for you still matter?”

Leon sighed. “Yes, they do, Millie girl, more's the pity.” He came to stand behind her and began to massage her shoulders. “But don't you ever wonder about her? Where she is—if she's safe, well, happy—what she looks like?”

In the mirror, Millicent's gaze faltered. She closed her eyes and relaxed under the knead of Leon's hands. “I try not to. What good would come of it?”

“Yes, what good would come of it?” Suddenly feeling an impulse to inflict cruelty, Leon slipped his hands under his wife's arms and squeezed her breasts. “About those feelin's that somehow keep me crazy about you despite your black heart,” he said. “Let's go do somethin' about them.”

Fort Worth, Texas, March 23, 1900

S
amantha Gordon looked down the long candlelit table at the guests invited to celebrate her twentieth birthday. The gathering consisted of her former classmates and the sons and daughters of fellow ranchers and their parents, all longtime friends of the Gordons. Samantha would have preferred the dinner party be held at Las Tres Lomas de la Trinidad to include the ranch hands, but her mother had insisted that the rustic great room of the main house was too informal for a milestone birthday. “For goodness' sakes, Neal,” Estelle had argued to her husband, who'd made an appeal on Samantha's behalf, “knowing our daughter, she'd choose the bunkhouse for the party and have the guests served out of the chuck wagon.”

Samantha had chuckled at the exaggeration when she learned of her mother's response, but it was close enough to the truth. Still, seeing the familiar faces, listening to the laughter and chatter of amusing childhood memories, Samantha granted that it was appropriate to be surrounded on her twentieth birthday by people who had known her all her life. Cowhands came and went. Only Grizzly, the ranch cook, and Wayne Harris, the foreman, had been around since she was placed in her parents' arms at four days old.

There were twenty squeezed in around the long-strung table. Each year Estelle Gordon added a guest to total the years of her daughter's life, pushing tables together and moving furniture about to accommodate the number in her town house. Her mother would be disappointed to hear it, but Samantha had determined that this would be the last of her birthdays celebrated in such a fashion. Twenty-one was the beginning of spinsterhood for a single woman, a state that Samantha saw looming and no need to honor since the only man she would have married sat across from this year's extra guest, a stunning beauty who was sure to become his wife.

But at the moment, Anne Rutherford was winning no points with Sloan Singleton, the Gordons' neighboring rancher and Samantha's one-time childhood playmate. Sloan's handsome face wore a trace of the scowl that Samantha's father was directing at her from his end of the table. Anne was holding forth on her theory—“from observation”—that certain human mannerisms, character traits, color of hair and eyes, and “proclivities” (a simper at the erudite word) can be credited to or blamed on one's bloodline. “I suppose that explains my penchant for public service,” she concluded with a dazzling smile at the guest whose compliment of her charity work had initiated the discussion. “My grandmother always had an eye out for the unfortunate.”

And you, an eye toward the gallery to see who was watching, Samantha thought, feeling a little thrill at Sloan's displeasure with Anne for discussing heredity in the presence of her and her parents. No blame or credit could be attributed to Samantha's bloodline, since she was adopted, a fact of which Anne was fully and artfully aware.

Adopted.
The term had never bothered her. In her early years, her parents and their relatives had shielded her from the stigma. White children were “adopted” by the Indian tribes that had abducted them. Orphans were “taken in” by relatives. The terms suggested
captive
and
waif
, the implication being that the children were charity cases, never quite one of the family who'd accepted them.

But from the beginning, Samantha had been not only one of the family, she was the axis around which her adoptive parents' lives revolved. She had not known she was adopted until she was six years old, when a cousin of her mother's not seen for a decade came to visit from New York City. Cousin Ella had come presumably to admire the Gordons' recently built town house. By then, in 1886, the cattle industry, over which her father was a reigning force in North Central Texas, was flourishing, and Fort Worth had emerged from the economic severities of the Civil War, Reconstruction, hard winters, and drought to become known as “Queen City of the Prairies.”

Her father's prosperity and the city's relative civility had warranted his wife to insist on the construction of a house in town where their daughter could attend school and “be near the more cultural aspects of life,” as Samantha recalled her mother explaining to Cousin Ella when she stepped from the first-class coach of the Texas and Pacific Railway.

“And who is this?” Cousin Ella had demanded of the shy little girl peeking around her mother's skirts. “Where in the world did she get that strawberry-blond hair?”

Her mother had taken Samantha's hand protectively. “This is Samantha, our daughter.”

“Daughter? I didn't think you could have children, Estelle.”

Holding Samantha's hand tightly, her mother had slipped her arm through Cousin Ella's. “Yes, well, that's true,” she said and lowered her voice. “We'll talk about it when we get home.”

So it was that Samantha gradually came to understand that she'd not actually been born
physically
to her mother and father. She'd been
given
to them as a miracle from heaven, a difference they said made her even more special. Even so, to avoid any unpleasantness that could develop, friends and family never referred to the adoption, so that in time the fact of it was almost forgotten or never known. But Samantha always remembered whose loving hands had rescued her from what could have been a terrible fate.

She became aware that Todd Baker, a recent graduate of the Jackson School of Geology at the University of Texas and former classmate whom she'd known since her cradle days, had begun to regale the group with stories of their school experiences at Simmons Preparatory School in Fort Worth, where Samantha, the only girl in their science courses, had “given the boys a licking.” She had hardly been listening to the conversation that had turned from genetic theory to geological science.

“Exactly what is paleontology, Samantha?” Anne Rutherford was asking. Samantha perceived that her polite query was a ploy to earn back Sloan's favor. It failed. His countenance grew darker. All faces but his and her parents' turned to her inquiringly. Samantha's special interest in the history of the Earth through the study of rocks and fossils and plant life was another subject uncomfortable to the couple who had raised her.

She gave a brief answer from her long-ago textbooks. “It's the study of life-forms existing in prehistoric times,” she said.

“And they can be determined from old rocks and fossils?” Anne asked, smooth brow rising skeptically.

“Surprising as it sounds, yes,” Samantha answered. “For more than a century, geologists have extracted a remarkable timetable from rocks of how Earth has evolved. You might say they are documents and records of the past.” Samantha turned to another guest. “Marcia, tell us about your trip to San Francisco,” she invited, annoyed at Todd for prompting another line of conversation he should know her parents wished to avoid.

Marcia's reply never penetrated her thoughts. Her mind was on Sloan and the understanding wink he'd given her at her adroit turn of the conversation. She'd averted her eyes lest he rightly interpret the flush that warmed her cheeks. It was the only secret she'd ever kept from him, her feelings for the boy-grown-man who had romped with her through childhood. She was doomed for spinsterhood, little doubt about it. How could she ever love another man when her heart belonged to Sloan Singleton?

Dr. Donald Tolman read aloud the letter he'd just written. Hearing his words rather than reading them in silence lent a different perspective. He could better place himself in the position of the man to whom he would be mailing them. How would he feel if he were Neal Gordon reading this letter? Would he tear it up, burn it to ashes with no one the wiser of its contents? Or would he lock it away to be found with his papers after his death? Show it to Mrs. Gordon? To Samantha? No, no, he believed he could say with certainty that Neal Gordon, that tough, rugged, ruthless rancher with a heart gentle as a lamb for his adopted daughter, would never, ever show the letter to Samantha. Neal Gordon was known as a man who jealously guarded what was his, and of no one was he more protective and vigilant than the young woman he'd taken and raised as his own flesh and blood.

Donald Tolman was certain of that fact. He had kept tabs on the Gordons and the baby he'd left with them twenty years ago. He would have called the couple on it straight enough if they hadn't been the people he'd judged them to be—decent, caring, starved for a child. This he'd known from a late sister who lived in Fort Worth, a friend of Estelle Gordon. She'd died ignorant of the little bundle her brother had surprised the Gordons with at midnight one late March. When Mrs. Mahoney, his midwife, had come to him with the rejected twin, an adorable baby girl, he'd known exactly with whom to place her. No papers were drawn up. No rules of adoption followed. Back in 1880, registration of orphaned or abandoned infants on the Oklahoma frontier was slack at best. It had been a clean handoff to the Gordons with no government agency involved.

Now, though, he couldn't die without some record left behind of the child's parentage in case it might be of interest to someone down the line, presumably Samantha. She was aware the Gordons were not her parents. How could they be, they being rangy, dark, big-framed, the direct opposite of their fair, delicately boned daughter with hair the color of an autumn sunset.

Dr. Tolman read the letter again, silently this time, to make sure he'd not left out the few details he knew. He'd stated the names of the parents as Leon and Millicent Holloway, and the place of birth as their farm, but he wasn't sure of its location near the Red River. He listed Bridget Mahoney as the attending midwife. According to Bridget, she'd been visiting her sister in Gainesville, another midwife, but she was out on a call when she was summoned to the farm, so Bridget had gone in her place to assist in the birth. Bridget was a closemouthed sort, so as far as Dr. Tolman knew, he, Mrs. Mahoney, and the Holloways were the only people, besides the Gordons, who knew Samantha had not been wanted. His midwife had come to him in Marietta in the Oklahoma Territory with the child, bearing only the skimpy information that the mother refused to nurse her. Dr. Tolman decided not to include that information in the letter. Perhaps the child's parents had been unable to care for her and depended on his midwife to find their daughter a good home. He'd been so happy to have a normal, healthy child to present to the Gordons that he'd asked few questions of Mrs. Mahoney, and the Gordons had asked even fewer of him. Beggars could not be choosers. In the letter, Dr. Tolman stated that he could give no further information except the little girl had been born with a twin brother.

His conscience satisfied, Dr. Tolman licked the flap of the envelope and sealed the letter. The post office was located not far away. He threw a couple of pills down his throat, gulped a glass of water, took up his cane to assist his weakening frame, and made his way to the door.