Fight for Glory (My Wounded Soldier #1) (6 page)

It wasn’t love. It
was admiration, but I couldn’t voice such a private thing. And part of me
wanted to pound him all over again for putting me in this trench of shame.

I took a deep
breath. I didn’t want to push my luck, but if God could see fit to give me some
more words, I could use them right now.

But she appeared
in the doorway, and stepped out, even though she kept her hand on the frame for
support. “Tom is a fine man,” she said. “If not for him, I wouldn’t have made
it. He saved my life. It’s made a bond between us, and I know it is hard for
him the way we’ve barged into his life. He’s just trying to protect us. I…I’ve
never known such. I…,” she was looking at me, her eyes all shiny, something
like a halo’s light on her beautiful face. “Please forgive him, Sheriff. You
know what a fine man he is.” She nodded her head, and went in the house.

And I knew then. Jimmy
had called it. I loved Addie Varn.

Tom
Tanner

Chapter
Eight

One week after
the great beating of Sheriff Leidner:

“Go on then,” I
said to the oxen pulling this machine. I was, “Hy-up,” and, “Gee haw,” but they
weren’t listening, well Bully was, but that young one had a hornet in his ass
or something.

The threshers
were here, and Ma and the girls were cooking big. My baby sister had given me a
tongue-whop after Jimmy limped to his horse and rode out the day I took him
down in the yard. “I needed to consider myself and change my ways and hoorah,
gobble, gobble, squawk,” for all I heard after she got going. I wondered how
womenfolk learned all those words and got riled that way. Did it come natural?

I didn’t like the
notion Allie was so taken with Jimmy. How had that happened? He’d been at war,
and now with sheriffing, when had she even had time to pine for such a one?

I would speak to
Pa about it. Would do no good to tell the boys for Gaylin would marry Jimmy
himself and Seth would say some nonsense about forgiveness and Jimmy’s virtue. And
I had no more hope that Pa would pay attention bleeding heart that he was.

What a helpless
bunch they were. That evening, when the moon was high up, I was hanging tack
and walking the barn to see if all was in readiness for the next day. The
threshing machine was far afield, sitting there like the bones of a great
beast. What a marvel, and to see it in my day. I was in these thoughts when he
came out of the shadows, and only one I knew moved like that.

I said nothing to
William. I’d let him speak. He would not be here if he didn’t have something to
say.
For we did not seek one another’s company these days.

He stood other
side of the doorway, looking out past the manure piles to the fields yonder. I
knew many of his thoughts, even though he did not express them in words, but I
knew them, read him easy, the way he read earth, and maybe me.

Like right now I
was thinking, well if it isn’t Jimmy’s little lamb come from following its
mama’s teat. Years of planning through the war, how we’d go, the world we’d
see. Then he takes a job with Jimmy, a job where he’d have to ride behind like
a good wife, not a proud free Chimakum man.

He spits, William
does. “Need your help.”

I do look at him
now, my arms folded. His hair is long, but he ties it in back, respectable. He
is as tall as me almost. His shoulders are thick, but he’s wiry too.

“I ain’t talking
to Mose,” I said,
cause
it’s a girl, with him, and the
pa ain’t having it.
“Didn’t live through the war to die at
the end of Mose’s old turkey gun.”

“I done talked to
him,” William said and he lifted his chin all proud.

“Then what?”

“It ain’t Mose. Lenora
says I got to read. She says a man don’t read…he ain’t free.” His pipe burns
away forgotten, and he’s looking off, and he’s mad.

“You ain’t free. But
reading won’t change that.” We both know what I mean.
Him
following Jimmy when he should be going west with me.
And then this
little girl thinking he needs to improve himself.

Now I’m mad, and
we are both looking off, smelling that manure a little more all the time.

“Cap says Missus
was a teacher.”

I stand straight
now. “Get it out of your mind. She ain’t got time to be trying to teach you
your primer.”

“I already asked.
She says yes.”

I’m so mad I
can’t believe it. “You didn’t ask me first,” I said.

“Cause you says
no.”

“You know you got
to go through me.”

“Why?”

I clenched and
unclenched my fists. I nearly shouted, ‘cause she’s mine,’ but that wouldn’t
do.

“Respect,” I
said.

We didn’t say
anything for a while. I quit seeing the fields, or the machine yonder. I quit
seeing anything but my own misery.

After a long time
of such standing, after it was black outside lit by moon and stars, and my
hands had loosened, and were at my side easy again, he said one more thing,
“What Cap said ‘bout you and the missus…I ain’t never seen you run.”

It was a good
thing he didn’t speak much. I didn’t like most of what he said. “While you two
old ladies are gossiping about me, I’ll be having a high-old-time going west. Go
on,
learn your letters so you can fill out those
reports for Jimmy. Someone’s cow crosses a line, you can write it all down
colorful and read it come Sunday for Mose before dinner. As for me, I’ll be
free.”
 
 

I didn’t know
when he slipped away.

I went to the
house. The family looked surprised as I kept to myself most nights. They were
on the porch. I smelled the corn Allie loved to pop. Seth was playing his harp
and they’d been singing.

Johnny ran to me.
It made me feel something so strong I didn’t go to the porch, but to the
fence-row that ran alongside the barn. I stood there looking up at the stars. So
what if she taught him to read. He’d be with her, and I’d be gone. I couldn’t
stay. He could. Who was free and who wasn’t?

“Hey Mr. Tom,”
Johnny said, hopping to the lower rung beside me.

“Hey boy.”

“Wish I could
fly,” he said. “You wish you could fly, Mr. Tom?”

His hands smelled
of popped corn and butter.

I heard the baby
cry softly from the porch behind us where Addie sat with the family.

“That stallion
Sheriff Jimmy rides been known to fly a few times,” I said.

“You reckon he’d
let me ride behind sometimes?”

Isn’t that what
I’d just gotten William for? Riding behind Jimmy? Seems they were lining up. “Have
to ask him,” I said.

I looked up. The
stars were so big and bright. Seth started to sing and my pa joined in. Their
voices were similar round the words.

“Granma says you
sing best,” Johnny said. He called my ma Granma now.

Garret was the
one could sing. No songs in me now. I was alone, and I wanted it so.
No one to hold me, no tie so strong.
Love was a fire burned
out if you didn’t act on it. And I had no intent…none, but I saw her then, in
my mind’s eye. She smelled so sweet. I felt her, behind me, the yard separating
us.
And a million miles.
These thoughts came from
nowhere, but it’s these I’d take with me.
Another ghost.
Love boiled down to the burn in the bottom of the pot. What
was.
What never
was.
On the trail, everyday I’d put
distance, breathe new air,
see
the sun like it was
some other sun, in some fresh sky.

I made it to bed
with no trouble. It was easy if I kept my back to them and made my leave quiet,
the way William would. I drank a little, but not like before. Ever since the
boy saw
me
and a shame did come. So I’d fallen asleep,
sitting across my cot, back to the wall. And I dreamed of her, her long hair
blowing, saying my name, just that, oh balm of Gilead, her voice.

And then I was
wakening, trying to understand. And there she was bent over me, her face small
and white in the ribbons of dark hair.

She’d come in the
dark, but I’d left a light, foolish in the barn, but I’d been careless. And I
saw her now, and I wondered was this real?

When she touched
me I gasped.

“It’s me,” she
was saying.

“Addie,” I
called.

She shushed me,
speaking soothingly, but it did not calm me much as my confusion lifted.

“Don’t you know
not to sneak on me that way? What if I’d hurt you?” I asked, having my hands on
her now, having her pulled onto me. Since the war, it didn’t go well when folks
snuck up on me.

“You wouldn’t
hurt me, Tom. I’m not afraid of you.”

So close she was,
and I felt her lightness, her sweetness, and I was angry still, but something
more. “You compromise yourself,” I spoke harsh.

“Who would
condemn me, Tom?
Ma?”

“It wouldn’t look
right they saw you here. Did someone see you?”

“The only one who
might give me away is Janey. I hope she’ll stay asleep a while.”

“Why would you
take such a chance?”

“I am at your
mercy, sir,” she said, and her hands came to my face, holding me like that.

“I know it is
your plan to leave us. Three short weeks, they say. But if you go…you take my
heart.”

Her beautiful
eyes were on me. I gulped like a boy at the schoolhouse, and I know she heard
my mortification.

“Why do you say
this to me? I can’t do anything for you.”

She was on my
knee. I was trying not to think about what I was feeling, but my reaction grew.
I had been in undertow before, once when we crossed the Ohio. It was no less troubling than this.

“Tom…if you go…I
shall be greatly sorrowful. With you…I feel safe.”

“I appreciate all
your kind words, Missus….”

“Addie,” she
said, her in a gown, modest as the robe she wore over this was, still there was
no hard corset, but things were soft under there, I could tell, though I tried
to think of her husband lying bloody.

“Miss Addie, you
need to sit aside,” I helped her readjust herself, and I put my pillow on my
lap as she was planted beside me, with space between. I tried to take a much
needed breath, but still my chest stayed tighter than a stretched hide.

“I have dreams,”
she said, “and in them…the old soldier, Tom.”

“Yes’m. That will
abate in time.”
Years
maybe, but I did not say this. I
also could not recommend my personal cure--drinking oneself into a stupor until
consciousness was lost. We each had to find our own remedies it seemed. “And
dreams…they ain’t real,” I said. Then I cringed at how ridiculous that sounded.
But true.

She laughed. This
room never knew such a sound. “That’s so,” she said. “I would tell Johnny that.
But can’t remember it myself.”

“See there.” I
caught my hand from touching her leg. What in tarnal? I’d not been known to
grab at women before now.

“But…I’m getting
so…I’m afraid to sleep. And a terrible darkness comes on me sometimes. It’s as
though hope leaves me. It’s a dark feeling, Tom. And when I think of you
leaving…it comforts me to see you, Tom. I know I’ve no right to say this, to
share this.” I can see the tears close.

“There Missus,” I
say with caution. My hands, I hardly know what to do with them. I watch her for
direction. But I am in sympathy.
Strongly so.

“I’m so sorry,
but I could bring this to not another living soul. I think you are the only one
strong enough to hear it.” She uses the tie of her robe to dry her pretty eyes,
but they will not dry so easy.

In the dark barn
a songbird takes off singing. Folks don’t know how the birds sing at night less
they live like me sometimes, out here with the animals. This barn gets to
going
some nights and it’s all I can do not to lose my
composure. The missus talking, that got the birds reconnoitering. The horses
will be next. They’ll hit their buckets looking for a midnight feast.

“I know what
makes you melancholy Missus. Addie. Will you listen to me?”

She takes my hand
in both of her small ones. Oh Lord, here goes. “I reckon there are at least
three big things converging.”

“You’ve thought
of this already?”

“No Ma’am. Just
now it’s occurring.”

“Oh.”

“First off the shooting.
Takes a while to
get over such.
When you go through something like that, it doesn’t just
drop down right away and fit in. It kind of sits on the top and looks for a
place. See?”

She nodded.
“Makes sense.”

That fired me up
a bit. “Second you are widowed now. You’re mourning.”

“Yes.
Of course.
You’re right.”

“Third.
You lost lot of blood. You’re weak.”

“You’re right.”

“And maybe you’re
scared.”

“I’ve never been
very scared, Tom. Not like this. I have
Johnny,
and
the baby now. There’s the farm.”

“But all those
things are your blessings, Addie. You don’t need to be afraid of your
blessings.”

But I was. I saw
William’s face coming before me. I was afraid.

She lifted my
hand and kissed it. I tried not to let my eyes pop. I tried to breathe regular,
the way I’d learned to do when we sniped. We’d wait all day, all night, next
day,
lying
in the brush, waiting for the prey, the
gray, some just boys, me and William, me and Jimmy. It was deer hunting.

Her little lips
on me, the way they curved, her teeth and tongue when she said her words. She’d
been a teacher, William said. Oh she was ripe for some sodbuster to come
through. They were hot on her trail, and it was only a matter of weeks before
she’d give in and say “I do.” And it brought an ill humor to me, like nothing
else. If I cared for her at all, and I’d already settled in my mind that I did,
I could at least try to help her out, make sure she got one close to worthy of
her and the children. Course no one could be, but I could try to help her get
close. There was more to it than just keeping Jimmy away. I needed to help this
poor woman find a decent man, if there was such a beast.

It upset me
terrible to think like this. But love…true love was selfless. I heard that
enough, and saw it in the way my pa was with Ma. I had this to go on. I needed
to put my selfish pigheaded wanting aside, my jealousy and petty hatred of many
things. Maybe that’s why God left me here when so many better men didn’t come
home.
For Addie and the children.
I thought my work
was done, but I could now see my mission. Then I could go west without the
misery I felt now.