Dorothy Garlock - [Wabash River] (9 page)

“Wait!”

John turned back. Color had drained from Addie’s cheeks. Her eyes were wide with distress, but she looked steadily at him. Oh, God, but she was pretty. He realized that suddenly he was feeling things he had never felt before, had never dreamed of feeling. His heartbeat surged as a fierce wave of longing, an enormous desire, washed over him.

“You want to say something more?” he said gruffly, because he felt that reality was slipping away.

“I’m sorry—” The words came in a tormented whisper from her tight throat. “It’s just that I’ve not had time to sort things out.”

“I’m thinking you don’t have much time.”

“I . . . know.”

“I’ll speak to the magistrate. I can tell him better than you can what kind of man Renshaw is.”

“Thank you.”

*  6  *

J
ohn rode away from the farm cursing himself for a fool for allowing the warm feeling of joy to come over him when he held Addie Hyde’s hand as they said goodbye. She had awakened something in him that had not even been stirred before—something that left him restless and excited. John had been intimate with a few women. He had never felt the urge to go back to any of them.

He remembered the clear, honest way Addie had looked at him when she thanked him, the graceful movements of her body when she had moved back from the horse and taken her son’s hand. There was quality to Addie Hyde; she was like a sleek handsome Thoroughbred.

Hell, he thought. He couldn’t afford to be interested in a woman a thousand miles from home. Her roots were here on that farm where she had lived all her life. Why couldn’t he have met such a woman in Santa Fe?

He kicked his horse into a canter. He would forget her once he was on his way home. He would do what he could to help her keep the orphans, then he would ride on.

My obligation will be over.

At the livery, John unsaddled his horse and put him in a stall.

“Give him a little grain,” he said to the old man sitting outside the door with his feet on a stump. He flipped a coin, which the old man failed to catch but bent to pick up out of the dirt.

A rider came from the corral side of the livery.

“You leavin’?” the old man asked.

“Nope.” The rider’s eyes were on John. “You John Tallman?”

“Yeah.”

“Thought so. Met ya once over at Fort Gibson in the Nations.”

John studied the man. He wore a brown and white cowhide vest even though the day was hot. His hat was wide-brimmed and turned up in front. He was big, thick-chested, and had legs like tree trunks. He was so tall that his stirrups hung below his horse’s belly.

“Don’t recall,” John said.

“Been five or six year.” The man leaned over to spit on the other side of the horse. “Didn’t have all this face hair then. Name’s Jerr Simmons. Ya might of knowed me as Buffer Simmons.”

“Hunter?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, good day to you.” John stepped around the horse and headed for the main part of town.

“Strange feller,” the liveryman said. “Ain’t much of a talker.”

“But a hell of a fighter.”

“What’s he doin’ here?”

“Damned if I
know,
but I got me a idee.”

The big man put his heels to the horse and rode away leaving the curious liveryman disappointed that he wasn’t going to have news to pass along that night at the tavern.

*  *  *

Usually in the afternoon Colin took the sheep out to the meadow behind the farm where there was no nightshade weed to poison them. Today, however, Addie went with him, leaving Trisha at the house with the younger children. The ram, Mr. Jefferson, and the ewes, Dolly and Bucket, were family pets. They knew the sound of Addie’s voice when she called them and knew that she usually had a little tidbit in her pocket to feed them. The ewes were especially docile. Mr. Jefferson got stubborn at times but obeyed the long stick Addie carried.

Bucket had been born during a late spring storm. Her mother had died, and Addie had brought the small lamb to the house to feed. Dillon was allowed to name her as Jane Ann had named the other lamb. As he was being pressed to come up with a name, he looked around the kitchen for inspiration. When his eyes had come to rest on the water bucket, he had smiled.

“I’m gonna call her Bucket,” he had announced.

“Is that your final choice?” Addie had asked seriously, while the rest of the family had snickered behind their hands.

“I’m gonna name her Bucket.”

The meadow was a long, narrow strip that ran between two steep hills covered with a heavy growth of pine trees and scrub. The grass grew deep and lush. Today Colin and Addie would fill bags of cut or pulled grass to take back to use on days they couldn’t bring the animals out to graze.

Addie loved to come here. It was peaceful and quiet. The air was still, the sky impossibly clear. She sat now on a large rock that had been her special spot since childhood. She could remember when she had to climb to get up onto it. Now she just sat down. The sun felt warm on her back.

While Addie rested, questions dogged her mind. Why had John Tallman followed the men out to the farm? Curiosity, maybe. After that was satisfied, why had he stayed the night? He might truly have wanted to guard against the men’s returning, Addie reasoned. But why had he done all that work this morning? And why the offer to help Colin? Addie mulled it over and the only conclusion she could come to was that he was from a close-knit family and Colin’s plight had somehow touched a soft spot in him.

“Do ya think Mr. Tallman’ll come back, Miss Addie?” Colin asked, as if he had been reading Addie’s mind.

“He said he’d speak to the magistrate. I think he’ll come and tell us what was said.”

“I want to be like him when I grow up.”

“What makes you say that? You don’t know him. He could be just putting on a show.”

“He ain’t puttin’ on a show. He got real mad while I was tellin’ him ’bout . . . old Renshaw.”

“You have to be with someone longer than just a few hours before you
know
him. Sometimes it takes months to find the real person under a nice facade; and when you do, you realize he didn’t really care about you at all.” There was a wistful tone in her voice.

“I don’t think Mr. Tallman is like that.”

Colin, honey, you are more trusting than I. He could be a
rascal for all we know.

Addie sat on the rock and looked out over the valley. She needed this quiet time. It seemed to her lately that her life was passing too fast, that soon she would be old and would not have done the many things she had dreamed of doing nor seen the things she had dreamed of seeing.

Besides giving her Dillon, Kirby had opened doors to her imagination with his stories of places and things. Poor Kirby. She would always wonder if he had been heading back to her when he was killed, or if he had dismissed her and Dillon from his mind to seek his own dreams.

Several hours slipped by. Colin went out to drive the sheep back when they strayed too far down the valley and then returned to stand beside Addie.

“Miss Addie, don’t turn your head now, but over yonder where lightnin’ split that big cedar, there’s a man on horseback. I think he’s lookin’ at us through a spyglass.”

“Oh, Colin—” Addie’s fear sprang to life.

“Let’s go back to the house.”

“Why don’t we just start filling the bags with grass and work our way back toward the house. I’ll look as soon as I can.”

Colin began to swing the short hand scythe. While she waited to scoop up the grass and stuff it in the sacks, Addie looked around as if watching the sheep. She lifted her eyes and saw the man. He and his horse blended into the shadows so well that she would never have noticed him. Colin was right: he was watching them through a spyglass.

“We’ll fill this one sack, Colin. Move slowly. We don’t want him to think we’re leaving because of him. If he thought we were running, he could be over here before we got halfway to the house.”

“Who is he?”

“He’s not one of the preacher’s flock. If they come, they’ll ride up to the house bold as brass. It’s someone from town trying to get a look at Trisha.”

“I wish Trisha wasn’t a nigger.”

“Colin, that word just sets my teeth on edge. Please don’t use it. Trisha has some colored blood. Goodness! A hundred years from now, the way these southern
gentlemen
are begetting children, there won’t be a white person in the South who doesn’t have a little colored blood.”

“But she’s . . . white as me.” Colin held up his suntanned arm.

“I know. But it seems that if she has even a little Negro blood, she’s considered a Negro and treated like . . . property.”

“Men don’t grab at white girls.”

“No.” Addie slyly watched the watcher while they worked.

“Mr. Tallman didn’t care if Trisha was a Negro.”

“Mr. Tallman was raised among Indians, or rather his father was. In some places Indians are treated worse than Negroes.”

“Why do white people do that, Miss Addie?”

“Not all whites do it. Colin, he’s moving away. Now he’s stopped and . . . he’s looking at the house. He can see it from there. Get the sheep.” Hurriedly, Addie began to fill the sack with the grass Colin had cut.

As soon as they rounded the knoll and headed down the lane to the farm buildings, Addie searched the hillside again and located the outline of the horse and rider.

“He’s still there, watching the house. Trisha is in the garden. Dillon and Jane Ann are on the porch.”

“What we gonna do?”

“Stay close to the house.”

Trisha came to meet them as they were putting the sheep in the pen.

“Ya didn’t stay long.”

“There’s a man on horseback watching the house with a spyglass.”

“What’s he doin’ that for?”

“Don’t look. Act like we don’t know he’s there.”

“Horse hockey is what he is. I wish I had me one a them glasses so I could look at
him.
”

“I wish I was growed up, is what I wish.” Colin kicked the dirt with his bare feet.

As soon as supper was over, the younger children were washed and put to bed. After Addie doused the lamp, they sat in the dark and talked.

“We need a dog,” Addie said. “Then we’d know when someone was nearby.”

“Geese is good watchers too. A lady I knowed in Orleans had two geese. Anybody come on the place, they’d squawk.”

“We’d have better luck finding a dog than we would geese.”

“Ya reckon Mr. Tallman will come back?” Colin’s voice came out of the darkness. It was the second time in the past hour that he had asked that question.

“I think he will,” Addie said. “But we can’t count on it. If the preacher insists on your going to Mr. Renshaw, I’ll visit all the church members and tell them what kind of man Ellis Renshaw is.”

“They’d not believe ya,” Trisha scoffed. “ ’Sides, ya can’t talk nasty, Miss Addie, and ya know it.”

“There’s another thing we can do. Pack up and leave in the night. We could go to another town, maybe Fort Smith, and start us up an eating place. We could do that, but we won’t have any money until I sell the farm.”

“Sell the farm?” Colin’s voice croaked with disbelief. “It’s yore home, Miss Addie.”

“It’s just a place. We could be at home in a wagon, or anywhere, as long as we’re together.”

“Ya’d give up this to . . . keep me and Jane Anne with you?”

“I’d do a lot more than that, honey.”

“But you said you loved the farm.”

“I said that. But the truth is . . . I love you more.”

*    *    *

John left the magistrate’s office with his face set in lines of anger and frustration. He had gone there the afternoon before only to be told that the magistrate was away for the day. He had returned this morning and waited for the man to show up. When he finally did, he was bleary eyed from a night of heavy drinking.

“Worthless piece of trash,” John muttered to himself as his long legs ate up the distance to the livery.

The South was in a hell of a mess, he thought, if they had to put the dregs of society in positions of authority. As soon as he had mentioned the reason for his visit to the magistrate, he had been informed that Renshaw had filed for legal custody of the orphan Colin Harris. No, Renshaw had not asked for the boy’s sister, the magistrate had said, because he did not have a woman living in his house.

After that announcement, everything John tried to tell the man about Renshaw had fallen on deaf ears. The magistrate had scoffed at the suggestion that Renshaw was a sexual deviate. He hadn’t even understood the meaning of the word until John had bluntly explained that there were some men, a very small number, who got their pleasure from young boys.

The magistrate had declared that Ellis Renshaw was an upstanding citizen of the county and had countered the charge against him with one against Addie Hyde. He’d said that when Mr. Hyde went off to war, she had not only harbored a runaway slave but had turned the farm into a place of prostitution. A house of ill-repute was not a fit place for children. He had even hinted that now that Mr. Hyde had been reported killed and so would not be coming home to take charge of the boy Dillon, Preacher Sikes was going to petition for guardianship of Mrs. Hyde’s son.

It was then that John was no longer able to contain his rage.

“You let that happen,” he had said softly, as with fists clenched he towered over the man, “and I’ll nail your mangy hide to a tree and your bones’ll not be in it.”

The cowering magistrate had looked into eyes blazing with anger and realized that this stranger dressed in the clothes of a frontier scout could kill him in an instant with the bowie knife stuck in his belt.

“I got the law behind me.”

“The
law
?” John had answered with a wintry sneer. “The law around here is about as useless as tits on a boar. You’re a hell of a lawman. You’re nothing but a drunken sot!”

“I can arrest you for threatening me.”

“Try it, and you’ll get more than threats. When a snake needs killing, I kill it, and it makes no never mind to me how it’s done. I lived three years with the Shawnee, and sneaking up on a man and putting a knife in his back is one of the things I do best. Remember that!”