Home by Nightfall (3 page)

“Lunch!” she called to the men standing around the corral. They paid her no mind. They were too busy watching the new stallion that had come in on the train yesterday. The animal represented a sizeable investment and a promising future for Braddock Horse Farm. “Shaw! Tanner! Cole!”

Still no response.

“Those men,” she muttered. “As if they’ve never seen a horse before.” She was right in the middle of putting up blackberry preserves, and it was sticky, hot work. The smell of boiling fruit and sugar wafted out the back door, attracting bees and yellow jackets. She left the porch and marched across the sun-blasted, dusty yard to the corral. Her brother-in-law, Cole, and her husband, Tanner, sat on the top rail of the corral, watching the chestnut trot nervously around the enclosure. Shaw, too arthritic and old to climb a paddock fence, leaned against it and watched between the rails.

“I wish someone had bothered to tell us that horse ain’t been broke,” Shaw said. “For what he cost, he should be able to serve tea to a ladies’ church social.”

“That’s okay, Pop. I’ll work with him. Besides, the ladies we’ve got won’t care if he can serve tea or take a saddle. They’ll be more interested in his other talents,” Cole said.

“I sure as hell hope so.”

“Do you want to eat, or are you going to stare at that beast all day?” Susannah asked.

Tanner turned first and pushed back his hat when he saw her. “Oh, sorry. I guess we lost track of the time.” He gave her a sheepish grin and a look that reflected his heart.

“Well, he’s a beauty, I’ll give him that,” she said, nodding at the sleek-coated stallion.

“Not as pretty as you.” Tanner jumped down, still smiling at her.

“Oh—well, no, maybe not now—” She glanced down at her apron, splattered with berry juice, and felt herself blush. She put a self-conscious hand to her hair that had gone wildly curly from the humidity in the kitchen. Quiet in his ways, Tanner was not a man given to many public expressions of affection, so this surprised her. He rarely even talked about himself or what he was thinking.

“Yes, even now.”

“Damn,” Shaw carped, “do you expect us to eat if we have to listen to that gooey crap?” He straightened slowly—she could almost hear his old joints screeching.

Cole landed beside his father, his boots hitting the hardpacked soil with a
whomp
. “Aw, Pop, leave them alone. They’ve only been married a couple of months. They’re just newlyweds.”

The old man shook his head. “Newlyweds—first you and the doctor gal—”

“Jessica,” Cole corrected.

Shaw waved him off impatiently. “Yeah, yeah. First you and
Jessica
, and now these two.”

Susannah’s first husband—and Shaw’s eldest son—Riley, had died in the Great War just two years earlier. Tanner had been and still was a hired hand at Braddock Horse Farm. Neither of them had blood ties to the Braddock family. When they wed, Shaw had hardly jumped for joy over the situation. Now he rarely missed an opportunity to plant a well-aimed dig at her or Tanner.

“We all know you call on Mae Rumsteadt sometimes, Pop.”

“You don’t see me marrying her!” Those visits to the old lady hadn’t done much to improve his cantankerous nature, either.

Shaw and Cole headed toward the house, still sparring.

“We’re eating in the dining room again—I’m using the kitchen table for canning,” Susannah called after them. She watched them go, shaking her head. Then she turned to Tanner. “Where are the boys?”

“I’ve got them cleaning out the stables,” he answered, casting a last look at the stallion.

“Haven’t they served their sentence yet? You’ve been working them hard for almost a week.” Susannah had a very soft spot in her heart for Tanner’s nephews. Joshua was eleven and Wade, barely eight.

“I told them they’d get ten days of nothing but chores and schoolwork, so they will.” He pulled off his gloves and took her hands, entwining his fingers with hers. “Maybe it’ll make them think twice before they snitch candy or anything else from Bright’s Grocery again. I promised their ma that I’d raise them right.”

No one knew who their mother was, and Tanner’s protectiveness discouraged any questions about them. Susannah didn’t believe he was their father, though. He had arrived with them and that story when he’d gone to work for the Braddocks. With no children of her own, Susannah had taken them under her wing.

“That means they get to eat, doesn’t it?”

He grinned and released her fingers. “Yeah, I’ll get them.”

As he walked away from her, stuffing his gloves under his belt, she studied his rawboned build. He took off his hat and ran his arm across his damp forehead. The sun lay on his shoulders like the arm of a friend and glinted off his sandy hair. He didn’t have the long-legged, loose-jointed grace of the Braddock brothers. And he wasn’t the love of her life. A woman got just one of those, and then only if she was lucky. But Tanner was a good husband, he worked hard, and she knew he loved her, even if he couldn’t quite get the words out.

She turned and walked back to the house to finish putting lunch on the dining room table. On the porch, she found Cole and Shaw washing up in the hot water she’d put there. When she stepped into the kitchen, the very air was thick and sweet from the graniteware pot of blackberries boiling down on the range. Hot, sterilized glass jars stood lined up on the table, waiting for the preserves.

She looked over her shoulder. “Shaw, did you take your medicine today, the new pills that Jessica gave you?”

The old man pulled open the screen door and scowled on his way to the dining room, making his brown-button eyes look even smaller. “That stuff chews up my belly something fierce. I think that doctor gal—” He glanced at Cole, then continued. “I think Doctor
Jessica
Braddock is trying to poison me.”

“Damn it, Pop, I wish you’d let up on her.” In the dining room, Cole pulled out a chair and swung a leg over it to sit. “Anyway, I’d be willing to bet that rotgut moonshine you’re drinking at Tilly’s is more likely the cause of your problem.”

Shaw tottered in. “It’s not moonshine! It’s good Canadian whiskey the bootleggers bring in over the border, and Virgil sells it straight across. No diluting or mixing with turpentine or Absorbine Liniment or anything else.” He dropped into his chair with his usual
oof
and added, “You drink it yourself.”

“Yeah, but he charges a fortune for it and I know you hate to pay more than you have to. I’ve seen you order that other stuff he cooks up in his back room.”

Shaw dodged the accusation and rubbed his white, wooly head with a gnarled hand. “Those meddling old biddies with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union should have stayed home and tended their knitting. Now the whole country is as dry as the high desert, thanks to them. At least Whit Gannon looks the other way.”

“I know the sheriff tends to overlook some laws he doesn’t agree with, but Jess told you that aspirin and alcohol would give you stomach troubles, didn’t she?” Susannah asked, putting a bowl of potato salad on the table in front of him.

His weathered face reflecting his frustration, Shaw just waved them off. “Bah!”

“And the aspirin helps, doesn’t it?” she continued, unwilling to be derailed. “You’re not quite as stiff as you used to be.” She went back into the kitchen and reached for the Bayer aspirin bottle that sat on a shelf beside the stove.

“Maybe, but I think it’s because of these copper bands I got from Mae. And she says aspirin is poison.” He displayed a copper bracelet on each wrist.

Cole glanced at them. “They look like something a hootchy-kootchy girl would wear.”

“Naw, Mae swears by ’em. Said the Indian medicine men use them and that she never met one with arthritis.”

“Yeah, Indian medicine men roll through Powell Springs all the time,” Cole muttered, reaching for one of the chicken sandwiches stacked on a platter in the center of the table.

Susannah put the aspirin bottle beside Shaw’s dish. “Just the same, I think you should follow your doctor’s advice.”

He fixed her with a look that flashed unexpected resentment. “
I
think you should keep to your jam-making,
Mrs. Grenfell
, and never mind about my doings.”

Susannah felt as if she’d been slapped. She turned away, her cheeks hot, and went back to the kitchen. Her humiliation made her feel as if she were a child instead of twenty-seven. At the stove—a huge six-burner beast with a hot-water reservoir—she stirred the blackberries in the pot with her big cooking spoon.

“Pop, for God’s sake,” she heard Cole say, and the conversation dropped to low-voiced grumbling.

It wasn’t that Susannah hadn’t grieved over Riley. Oh, she had. She’d begun grieving the day he left for training. She’d paced the floor for eighteen months of darkness, worrying, unable to sleep a whole night through. If a shell, or a bullet, or poison gas hadn’t felled him, he might have been struck down by an invisible enemy—the Spanish influenza that was on the march around the globe. It had smothered Powell Springs with a ruthless grip, taking friends and neighbors. Some who had lived were even now invalids, frail representations of the people they’d once been.

Ultimately, word came of his death in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. Her worst fear had come to pass. Susannah had been worn out from the grieving—

Just then the boys tumbled into the kitchen, all coltish exuberance and hay-flecked energy, and headed straight for the dining room table. Tanner followed them.

“Hey, hey, hey! Hold up there, you two. Wash first.” He was firm with them, but never unfair, and Susannah knew they adored him. She also noticed that he’d made them take off their boots and leave them outside.

“Yessir,” Josh said, resigned.

“Aw…” Wade moaned. But they both went back out to the porch and crowded around the basin.

“There are chicken sandwiches and potato salad in there,” she told them, nodding toward the dining room. She stayed at the stove.

“Aren’t you comin’, Aunt Susannah?” Josh asked when he reappeared, his hands and face scrubbed pink from the flour-sack towel.

Her eyes darted to Tanner’s, then returned to the pot. “No, I’ve got a lot of work to do here in the kitchen. I’ll eat after you all go back out.” Her voice sounded falsely bright to her own ears, and she felt Tanner’s gaze on her. She couldn’t bring herself to look at him again. He might be a quiet man, but she’d come to realize that he didn’t miss much.

He passed behind her, letting his hand brush her elbow like the soft puff of a dandelion, then went to the dining room with the boys in tow.

Susannah sighed and wadded up the hem of her apron to carry the fruit-filled pot to the kitchen table. Just as she grasped its edges, a movement beyond the open side window caught her eye. She dropped her hands, leaving the pot on the burner, and stared.

Tanner walked back into the kitchen. “Hey, Susannah, have you got any mustard in the iceb—”

Her fingers tingled and she stood, transfixed, watching the approaching horse and rider.

He came closer. “What?” Then he followed her gaze. “Isn’t that Roy Ellison?”

Yes, it was. Rural free delivery was still not available in this part of the county, and the only time the post office brought mail to the farm was if the letter had been sent special delivery. In Susannah’s experience, special delivery was dreary kin of the telegram—no good news ever arrived with either of them. The last time Roy brought such a letter, it had announced the news of her mother’s death in Corbett. That had been during the influenza epidemic, and now she worried about what trouble might be coming to the Braddocks again in Ellison’s leather pouch.

Without replying, she pushed open the screen door and stepped out to the back porch to meet the gray-haired postman.

He waved at her and dismounted. “Howdy do, ma’am. I’ve got something here for you.” After tying the horse to the weathered gatepost, he rummaged around in his saddlebag and withdrew an envelope. “It just come in and I could see right off it was important, so I thought I’d better bring it.”

Susannah sensed Tanner standing at the door behind her. Roy Ellison held out the envelope to her, and after a moment of hesitation, she crossed the narrow porch and extended her hand to take it.

The postman lingered. “We don’t see much mail from the War Department now that things have settled down in Europe.” Plainly, he was hoping she’d open it while he was still there. But she only stared at the typewritten name—Mrs. Susannah Braddock.

Finally, she tucked the letter in her apron pocket. “Thank you, Mr. Ellison. It was kind of you to make the trip out here.” He dallied
a few more moments, but when he realized he wasn’t going to learn anything, he went back to his horse.

Turning, she saw Tanner in the doorway, but sat down on the bench beside the washbasin instead of going inside. She waited until Mr. Ellison was back in the saddle and headed down the dusty road before she reached into her pocket for the envelope.

Susannah had been expecting this letter for a while. When Riley had been killed, she learned that his grave was a temporary one, and that large, formal cemeteries were being constructed in Europe for the war dead. She was to receive notice of his final resting place, and now here it was. Here was the news that would close, once and for all, a chapter of her life that she’d never expected to end so soon. Glancing across the pastures that surrounded the farm, she looked at the blades of grass flash silvery-green as they bowed in the warm September breeze. He would lie half a world away, so far from this place where he’d grown up, perhaps in a spot that resembled John McCrae’s poetic description.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses row on row

She tore open the flap with hands that trembled slightly and unfolded a single sheet of paper.

Dear Mrs. Braddock…

Susannah felt her eyes grow wider with every word she read. She sat bolt upright and clapped a hand over her mouth. An inarticulate wail pushed its way up her chest and escaped from between her fingers. It was the only sound her pounding heart would let her voice. The blood pulsing in her head dimmed her hearing. She felt but didn’t hear the pounding of boots across the floor in the house and the slamming open of the screen door. She looked up to find herself surrounded by family, Tanner, Cole, Shaw, the boys. She could only stare at them.