[Troublesome Creek 01] - Troublesome Creek (11 page)

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Authors: Jan Watson

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“Emilee,” Daniel replied, “I swear I’d druther be in hell with my back broke than to interfere with Will that-a-way.”
“If you don’t remedy this situation soon, you won’t have to go to hell to get your back broke. I’m near dry as a lizard on a hot rock now. And this little girl don’t need to suffer because her pa’s gone quare.”
Daniel’s tone turned sharp. “To think you’d say that after what Will’s been—”
“I know. I’m sorry. But he ain’t the only one to suffer a loss,” Emilee said, a trace of anger in her voice. “I miss Julie too, and I love her baby like my own. Will needs to let me have her, Daniel. I want to raise her up with little John.”
 
Granny commenced stirring the bubbling thick oatmeal she was fixing for their breakfast. She could stand in the middle of the week and see both ways to Sunday on this one. Daniel was right to allow Will to heal in the only way he knew how, but Emilee was also right in her desire to protect the baby. Granny had thought Will’s treks would stop of their own accord, that he would come to terms with his loss, but so far there seemed to be no lessening of his pain.
She portioned the cereal into white ironstone bowls, topping them off with a dollop of blackberry jam. She set the bowls on the table beside the platters of fried ham and biscuits.
Food will help,
she reckoned.
A full belly don’t grumble.
 
The baby was newly fed and freshly bathed when Will came for her later that morning. She’d had her first dipping bath, for her navel cord had finally shriveled and come off. Daniel met Will at the door and took him to the barn for a “little talk.”
Granny and Emilee tarried on the porch. Granny picked over pintos, flinging the pebbles and broken beans out into the yard. Emilee busied herself by untangling a morning-glory vine and trailing it up the string she had fastened with a tack to the eave of the cabin.
“Granny, this will be purty when it blossoms,” she said. A fat red hen scratched around her feet. “It’ll make a nice shade where I can set my rocker and feed my babies.” The hen cocked its head and pecked at Emilee’s bare toes. “Shoo, now. Shoo!” Emilee flapped her apron. “There’s corn in the chicken yard. I don’t want you messin’ on my clean porch.”
They watched Daniel put his arm around Will’s shoulders and heard Will say, “Never, Daniel! I’ll never give my baby up!” Will stalked away from Daniel and stood, arms dangling at his sides, shoulders slumped, looking out across the valley for the longest time.
He’s got so thin,
Granny worried.
It’d take two of him to make a shadow.
She could see his resolve from where she sat. First his spine stiffened; then he stood straight as a sourwood sprout and put his hands on his hips. He turned back around and spoke in a voice so soft Emilee cupped her hand to her ear. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate all that you and Emilee have done for us, but my baby keeps me sane. Having her with me stills the anguish in my heart. Sometimes, up in the hills, I just hold her and look at her, and she looks right back with eyes so full of wisdom. . . . It’s like Julie is telling me how to survive through our daughter.”
Having reached some sort of agreement, the men joined Granny and Emilee on the porch.
“You’re right, Daniel,” Will said. “I’ve been thoughtless. I can’t raise Laura Grace inside my shirt. I’ll go back to my house. I’ll make myself go in, and I’ll start taking care of the baby the way I should.” He took Emilee’s hand. “I hope you can forgive me, for I’ll need a heap of learning about babies from you and Granny.”
“It’s all right, Will.” Emilee kissed his cheek. “You know I’d do anything for you and for Julie’s baby.”
 
Over the next few weeks, Will’s odd behavior was on everyone’s minds up and down Troublesome. This or that one would stop by Daniel’s front porch and puzzle over Will’s attachment to his daughter.
Daniel wouldn’t talk about it, but Emilee agreed with the others. It was much more common to see a man turn against a child if his wife died during or soon after childbirth. Why Sam Heller, over in Quicksand, left his twins with his sister not two days after his wife died of childbed fever. Not only that, Emilee told Daniel, but Lucinda Mark had told her that his other three were farmed out to anyone who would take them. Talk was that he had moved a sixteen-year-old in to take poor Anna’s place. Sam, with that sneaking look on his face, like a sheep-killing dog.
Of course, Will couldn’t have taken care of Laura Grace if Granny hadn’t moved in with him; that’s what turned the trick—that and Emilee’s milk. You had to hand it to Will, though. He sure wasn’t like other men.
The first night the baby was gone, Daniel found Emilee sobbing when he came in from the fields with a fat, young rabbit for their supper. He couldn’t bear to see her cry, so he pulled her onto his lap and kissed the tears from her round face. “Sweetheart,” he said, “we’ll have more young’uns.”
Emilee laughed through her tears. “Chances are they’ll all be boys. Matthew, Mark, and Luke to go with little John.”
 
What no one could have predicted was Will’s long-term solution to his dilemma. He rode off that summer, in the year of Julie’s death, and came back with a new mother for the baby he’d dubbed Copper because her hair shone in the sunlight like a newly minted penny. Nobody could have figured that Will would bring a stranger into their midst. But he did. He went all the way to Lexington and fetched Julie’s sister, Grace.
CHAPTER 7
 
Years of memories came and went for Will Brown this stormy August afternoon. Days long gone were still as clear as yesterday in his mind. He struck out blindly with the willow switch he’d cut just hours before and called his dead wife’s name as if he were still on the banks of the flooding Troublesome, not in his barn more than fifteen years later. His heart seized violently, and emotion as raw as the night Julie had been swept away threatened to overwhelm him.
He couldn’t help but blame himself.
What if I had encouraged Granny to stay longer? What if I’d listened to my own intuition and taken the wagon instead of that flimsy buggy? What if I hadn’t forced Samson into that raging creek?
Even his horse had had more sense than he did that awful night.
“Will!” He heard a call from far away.
Grace,
he thought. Another reason to feel guilty. He’d practically forced her to leave the place she loved to come and help him raise Copper. Every time he looked in her eyes he could see that she hadn’t forgiven him for that. It didn’t matter that he had fallen in love with her.
“What are you doing?” Grace asked as she stepped into the barn.
“Nothing,” he said, fighting to keep his voice steady.
“Who are you talking to?”
“No one,” he said, his back a barrier to her worried voice.
“You missed your dinner,” she said as if it mattered.
“Save it for supper.” He was suddenly weary. It was all too much.
“Will . . .” She touched his arm.
“Leave me be, Grace!” He shrugged off her hand and fled. He had to get to the cemetery. Maybe there he could find forgiveness.
 
Grace stood alone in the barn, her hands clenched. The storm was nearly over, but a drip of rain still fell through a hole in the roof. A dirty puddle at her feet received each drop that fell.
Plop. Plop. Plop.
Her heart beat in cadence with the leak, the drops like a broken strand of pearls, reminding her of her inability to comfort her husband.
As much as she had come to love Will, secrets from the past kept their hold on her heart. Things had gone terribly wrong somehow, for even though he showed his love in countless ways, she couldn’t bring herself to freely love him back. She’d hardened her heart, made a shield against him out of cold guilt and hot anger.
Grace had her own memories from days gone by. . . .
 
Will had shown up on her front porch months after Julie’s death, with a proposition for her. He wanted her to come back with him to Troublesome Creek to help him raise her sister’s daughter. He had been honest in his intent; she had to give him that. But she was not. Oh, she certainly was not.
Her life in Lexington was not as she pretended it to be, not at all as she had portrayed it in her letters to Julie. She would sit at the window with her pen and paper and spin fanciful tales of a full and exciting life. The ink flowed with colorful words while the world outside her window was cold and as gray as ash. She wrote of days too short for everything she needed to accomplish while the clock in the parlor ticked out minutes of loneliness, hours of despair.
All of her friends had husbands and children. When she was invited to their homes for luncheons or dinner parties, she was always the odd one out. Even at church she sat alone, the pew marked
Taylor
a sad reminder of happier times. The suitor she had planned to marry before her mother died—before her duty to her father and her sister claimed her life—now had a wife, a son, and a daughter. She knew people felt sorry for her, and she chafed under their pity. She could see her life unfolding as the spinster schoolteacher caring for everyone’s children but her own. Sometimes her arms ached for a child. There seemed no hope, no love anywhere for Grace.
Will had come to her house every day for a week, asking the same thing. He was persistent—none of her arguments against his plan deterred him.
One morning he had come early, much too early. She was in her wrapper, drinking tea and looking at the morning mail. The maid answered his knock at the door, and he strode, unannounced, right past her to where Grace was sitting. Grace hadn’t even dressed her hair yet, and it hung in a long, messy braid halfway down her back. Her hands flew up, arranging pins, twisting the braid into a knot.

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