Heartbreak Creek (15 page)

E
dwina’s talk with Lucas promised to be much harder because by the time she returned to the house her anger had faded into weary disgust, which definitely took the edge off her determination to exact retribution for the hurt the boys had so carelessly dealt her.

Punishing them wouldn’t bring her father’s watch back.

But how could she
not
punish them? What would that teach them?

Her mother’s voice shrieked through her mind, each word punctuated by the crack of the cane across her back. “I. Am. Doing. This. For. Your. Own. Good.” Edwina felt her gorge rise and forcefully blocked the sounds and images from her mind. This wasn’t the same. She wasn’t enjoying it, no matter what Declan thought.

Opening the kitchen door, she stepped inside to find Pru’s dark head bent beside Lucas’s light brown one, as they carefully gathered the watch parts and put them in a small tin. Lucas’s quick glance told Edwina he might have been crying.

She hoped not. She knew the boy had no meanness in him. He was just a curious and troubled boy who kept his mind occupied by figuring out how things worked so he had no space left in his head for the bad things.

She had done the same, but had used music instead of puzzles. Not because she liked the sound of it, but because if she pounded the piano keys long enough and hard enough she could shut out the terror, and the despair, and the sound of her mother’s voice.

Music and Pru had saved her.

Now she had a chance to save this little boy. From what, she didn’t know. She just sensed he was hurting and needed someone to make it stop.

“Lucas,” she said.

He looked up, his eyes puffy and worried. Before she could say anything more, he blurted out in a rush, “I just wanted to see how the gears worked. That’s all. I didn’t mean to break it.” Moisture gathered in his soft brown eyes, eyes a shade lighter than his father’s but just as expressive.

Edwina eased down into the chair beside him, turning slightly so she could face him. She wanted to reach out and comfort him but doubted he would welcome her touch. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

“I know you didn’t, Lucas.”

He swiped a sleeve over his runny nose. “Did Pa take Joe Bill to the woodshed?”

“No.”

“Is he gonna take me?”

“No.” Edwina felt the burn of righteous anger in her throat. “Has he ever taken either of you to the woodshed?”

Lucas shook his head, sending a flop of sun-tipped hair sliding down his forehead. Another similarity to his father. “He took R.D. once when he caught him fooling with matches in the barn. R.D. said it was the scariest thing ever. Not the whipping, but that Pa was so mad.”

Edwina let out a breath she wasn’t aware she’d been holding. She couldn’t have stayed with a man who was brutal to his children. But a whipping over something as dangerous as playing with matches in a barn filled with straw and hay? That she could understand, and excuse.

Unsure how to handle this, Edwina looked over Lucas’s bent head at Pru, hoping for answers.

But her sister shrugged and shook her head, then rose from the table. “Think I’ll see if we’ve got a ham hanging in the cool room downstairs.”

After she left, Edwina sat for a moment, drumming her fingers on the table. Then she rose, went into the parlor, dug out a piece of writing paper and a stub of pencil from a bookcase drawer she had cleaned out the day before, and returned to the kitchen. Placing them on the table, she took her seat again. “Joe Bill’s punishment is to clean out the stalls, fill the troughs, and tend the chickens and his father’s horse for two weeks. What do you think yours should be?”

“I don’t know. I could help him, I guess.”

“He also said he was sorry and he would never do it again.”

“I can say that if you want.”

“Go ahead.”

He did.

She nodded her acceptance of the apology, then pushed the paper and pencil toward him. “Now write it. Twenty-five times.”

She sat quietly until he finished the task. Then she looked over his childish scrawl, nodded, and set the paper aside. “Now tell me why you’re sorry.”

“I broke your watch.”

“Perhaps. We’ll see once you have it back together. What else?”

When his face showed confusion, she helped him. “You let someone else talk you into doing what you knew was wrong. Isn’t that so?”

He looked away, a flush turning the ears that showed beneath the uneven cut of his light brown hair a bright strawberry red. “I guess.”

“You’re smart, Lucas. Smart enough to decide for yourself what’s right and wrong. So from now on, I expect you to do that. If you’re ever in doubt about what that is, ask me or Miss Lincoln or your father. Understand?”

He nodded.

“Good.” And wanting this to be over before she burst into tears of sympathy, Edwina quickly meted out his punishment: for the next two weeks he was to weed and water the garden, feed the barn cats, set and clear the table, and sweep the kitchen every night.

He accepted it with a quavery “Yes, ma’am.”

Edwina felt a bit quavery herself. And like a veritable tyrant. At the rate she was passing out chores, if either of the other two children required punishment, she and Pru would have nothing left to do but lounge on the porch all day, tatting doilies and sipping mint tea.

Lucas took to his chores without complaint. Joe Bill didn’t. But Edwina graciously ignored the rude looks he directed her way, and other than a lingering wariness between her and Declan, the incident passed and the house soon settled into a pleasant, although busy routine.

April ended with a hailstorm that left a new dusting of snow on the valley and four chickens dead. Edwina cooked them that night all by herself, including gutting and plucking them—which was absolutely the most disgusting thing she had ever done—rounding out the meal with mashed potatoes, turnip greens, and the last of the carrots in the bin under the house. No one except Pru seemed to appreciate her efforts, but Edwina thought it was delicious.

As the days stretched into May, dawn came earlier and dusk came later. By the end of the first week, roundup was in full swing, and with the two older boys helping their father and Amos gather cattle, the house seemed quieter and emptier. Taking advantage of their absence, Edwina and Pru did a thorough cleaning of both structures. The removal from the children’s quarters of several years’ accumulation of grime and clutter took longer than it should have, since Brin carried half of every load they took to the burn pile back into the house, insisting each item was too valuable to throw away.

Late each morning of that busy roundup week, Edwina would ask Chick McElroy to saddle a horse for her, and with her saddlebags loaded with foodstuffs, she rode out toward the swirling cloud of dust that marked the entrance to the box canyon where the men held the cattle.

It was one of Edwina’s favorite chores. She loved riding, and hadn’t had a chance to do so since she’d sold their ancient mare and buggy to meet the tax bill on Rose Hill the previous year.

But that was then. Today, she had a fine horse beneath her, and astounding vistas all around, and air so cool and crisp and thin it sometimes left her breathless. Happily she rode along, enjoying the solitude and marveling at this wild and lonely country that was so different from the place where she’d spent all of her life.

Back home, wisteria, and forsythia, and spindly snowball bushes would be in full bloom. Orange day lilies would be crowding the fence of the resting place, and wide-faced caladiums would be peeking around the raised stone vaults beneath the drooping limbs of ancient oaks and stately cypress.

How she missed it. Not the South as it was now but before the war. The tea parties, and country dances, and sweaty-faced boys. Frogs and crickets adding their voices to the music drifting up from the slave cabins down by the bayou. Hot, sultry, magnoliascented nights when she sat on the floor next to her window, her arms folded on the sill, listening to the Negroes sing and wishing she could escape her fine plantation home and be down there in those clapboard cabins with Pru, laughing and catching lightning bugs in ajar.

Gone forever.

Breathing deep to dispel those sad thoughts, Edwina looked around at this valley that might be her home for the rest of her life. It was a savage place. The very boldness and scope of it shouted a constant reminder that frail humans would never be more than visitors here, easily defeated by a harsh climate, hungry predators, and the inflexibility of rocky peaks and stone-walled canyons that even rushing water couldn’t wear away.

Savage, yet beautiful in a way that made her heart race and her spirit soar. Challenging. Untainted. A world apart from what she’d left behind.

Instead of azaleas and camellias, she saw bright yellow sunflowers, tall pines and pinyons, and blue-tinted junipers. Rolling, open hills, wooded canyons filled with birdsong, high ridges where only a few stunted trees curled in the wind beneath a sky so crisp and blue it hurt her eyes.

It might not have the gentle allure of the bayou country back home, but it was seductive, nonetheless. She might find a place for herself here.

She heard the cattle long before she reached them. A huge, bawling, milling throng of restless animals that kicked up so much dust it soon coated Edwina’s throat and left grit in her eyes. Cutting a wide berth, she angled upwind toward the wagon parked beneath a triangular canvas canopy tied to three scraggly pine trees.

As she approached, two smaller figures ran ahead of two others toward the wagon. By the time she reined in, R.D. and Joe Bill were waiting to help unload the saddlebags, while Declan and Amos washed in a metal bowl perched on a stump beside the wagon. Branding and castrating was stinky, dirty, noisy work, and the water in the bowl was a reddish black when they finished, yet neither man looked particularly clean.

Declan nodded in greeting, then hunkered on his heels in the shade while Edwina unwrapped the food. She was just starting to fill the plates when Joe Bill called his father’s attention to a rider coming in from the west.

“Tell who it is?” he asked his oldest son.

Lifting a hand to shade his eyes, R.D. squinted at the figure for a moment, then dropped his arm and grinned at his father. “Thomas.” His grin was wide and toothy, like his father’s. And even though he still had to grow into his nose and fill out through the jaw, he would be a handsome man someday. Also, like his father.

Declan went to meet Thomas Redstone. The Cheyenne dismounted and they spoke for a moment, then still deep in conversation, they walked slowly back to the wagon.

This was only the second time Edwina had seen Thomas, so she didn’t know what to read in his stern, sharply angled face when they walked up. But Declan looked worried. Edwina smiled in welcome.

“Haaahe,”
Thomas said with a nod, taking a seat on the ground beside the front wagon wheel. He was dressed as he’d been before—a topknot with a feather attached and the rest of his long black hair hanging loose except for two small braids at his temples—a blue army jacket worn as a sleeveless vest over a faded pullover shirt with long sleeves and an open front placket—open-hipped leggings, rather than trousers, covering his legs down to knee-high, fringed leather moccasins—and a long rectangular length of soft leather hanging past his knees, front and back, held in place by a thick belt with a bone or antler buckle.

She had read about Cheyenne Dog Soldiers and how they proved their fierceness in battle by staking themselves to the ground with a lance or knife driven through that length of leather, then defending to the death the patch of ground on which they stood. Thomas Redstone looked the part.

He had swarthy skin, a broad forehead and high cheekbones, and eyes as dark and hard as chips of coal. And although he moved with measured deliberation and wasn’t as physically imposing as Declan, he radiated such restrained energy it seemed to hum in the air around him.

Uneasy under his stare, Edwina filled a plate and held it out.

He didn’t take it, but continued to study her, his gaze unwavering.

Edwina stared back, sensing he was testing her somehow, and if she looked away first she would lose. A gust of wind swept through, peppering them with grit and snapping the canvas overhead until the ropes binding it to the trees groaned. Her wrist began to wobble with the strain of holding out the filled plate, but she didn’t look away.

“Nia’ish.”
With a barely perceptible nod, he took the plate from her hand and settled back against the wheel. The encounter had lasted mere seconds but had left Edwina feeling light-headed and shivery. It was an effort to keep her hand from shaking when she filled another plate and passed it to Declan.

He took it with a nod of thanks and sank onto his heels near Thomas, his hat pushed back on his head. “Come to eat? Or help.”

Thomas shrugged. “One follows the other.”

They ate in silence, as they did every day when Edwina brought lunch. Which always surprised her. Put three women and two girls together and the chatter would have been constant. But these five seemed to have nothing to say, despite the fact that they hadn’t seen Thomas Redstone for over two weeks.

Men.
They were hopeless.

“Lucas spoke today,” she announced, both to break the lengthy silence and to show Thomas Redstone she wasn’t intimidated by his presence.

Declan looked up, cheeks bunching as he chewed. “Did he?”

She watched his Adam’s apple bob up and down as he swallowed, and saw that he needed a shave, and the black stubble of his beard shadowed his thick neck almost down to the shaded hollow at the base of his—

“’Bout what?” Declan prodded.

To cover her lapse, Edwina dabbed at her mouth with her napkin. She had brought a half dozen with her, but it seemed hers was the only one in use. “Worms. The ones that leave tiny holes in the radishes.”