Rekindled (22 page)

Then late one evening, weary from work and losing heart, he headed back to the ranch. A bell jangled on the opposite side of the street and, following the noise, Larson looked over. And froze.

It was dark, but he recognized her instantly. A mixture of longing and bitterness streaked through him. He pressed back into the shadows of the empty boardwalk.

Kathryn closed the door to the eatery, checked the lock, then crossed the street. His pulse raced as she walked toward him. And in that instant, he realized he wasn’t ready for this yet. He wasn’t ready for her to see him like this.
Oh, God, no . . .
He held his breath as she climbed the stairs and turned, never looking in his direction. He waited, then followed at a distance.

She quickened her steps along the darkened boardwalk, a bag of some sort clutched in her hand. Larson worked to maintain her pace, not using the staff in his hand for fear she might hear him and turn. She passed the well-lit boardinghouse where he’d first thought she might be staying, then continued past the mercantile and livery. Where was she going? They were nearing the edge of town. Finally, she disappeared into an alleyway between two run-down buildings on a side street, and for an instant, Larson felt concern for her safety.

Then he rounded the corner and saw her enter a simple two-story clapboard building through the back door. Staring at the building, he took a step back.

Instinctively, he knew what the place was.

The furrowed skin on his back tingled in sickening recognition even as his concern for Kathryn cooled.

He counted ten narrow windows on the second floor and couldn’t help but think of each room in terms of time and money. Absently, he wondered which one was Kathryn’s. But his heart rejected the thought even as the harsh truth glared back at him. No, it wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be. . . . Not
his
Kathryn.

Glad for the building at his back, Larson leaned against it and slid to the ground, reliving the last five months of his life. He thought he’d come to understand what God had been doing all that time—making him into the man He wanted him to be. The man he needed, and wanted, to be for Kathryn.

The smell of liquor assaulted him and his stomach churned. Raucous noises and sounds from another life, long dead to him, resurrected themselves and cloaked him like a heavy shroud. He knelt in the dirt.

All the nights he’d dreamed of her, living only to be with her again. He hadn’t thought he could tolerate more pain than his physical wounds had inflicted, but this pain cut deeper to a tender place he hadn’t even been aware existed. And still one breath followed another and his heart continued to beat. The weeks and months he’d endured excruciating pain, then the slow healing of his body and spirit, for what? Why had God allowed him to survive all that only to return and face a different kind of death? One proving even more painful.

He cursed Kathryn for her unfaithfulness. And while the words still tainted his lips, a swift stab of conviction penetrated his chest.

Bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh
.

Larson went completely still. Prickles rose on his neck and back at the gentle thunder inside him. Was this the still, small voice Isaiah and Abby had taught him to listen for? His breath came heavy. His heart raced. He closed his eyes, frightened of the response invading the anger in his heart. His lips moved but nothing came out at first. “But, Lord, Adam said that about a wife who was faithful.” Eve hadn’t given herself to another man. Or men.

The vivid images filling his mind twisted his gut—the things he’d seen as a boy, that he’d tried to block out and forget.
Lord, she scorned me. Kathryn sold herself and traded my love for a pittance
.

For an instant, Larson considered blaming God for his circumstance. After all, God was the one who had allowed him to live. But having blamed Him before, Larson knew it wouldn’t change anything. He covered his face with his hands.

After all these years, the Lord had finally begun to soften his stubborn heart. What did it matter now if Kathryn didn’t want it?

Larson awakened from a restless sleep. He barely remembered walking back to the farm last night and hadn’t slept in the bunkhouse with the other hands. Not in the mood for company and needing time to take in what he’d witnessed, he’d chosen the barn loft instead. He sat slowly and stretched, and the weight of last night’s discovery hit him all over again.

Elbows resting on his knees, he rubbed his hands over his face and slowly let out his breath, feeling his last bit of hope being siphoned away by Kathryn’s deceitfulness. If he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, he never would’ve believed it. And it struck him then that, even with the layer of distrust that had shadowed their years together, nothing had prepared him for this.

Muscles in his right thigh resisted the chill morning air and movement, and he massaged them until the tightness eased. Wincing, he flexed the waxy ribboned flesh of his hands until they too bent to his command.

As the pewter sky gradually lightened to a pale blue, he rushed through his chores, not knowing what he was going to do when he saw Kathryn again but knowing that he had to see her, even at a distance. Even after all he knew.

It was almost noon by the time he made it into town. He waited down the street and watched the brothel, unable to make himself walk up to the door. The setting looked oddly tranquil, so different from last night, which was no surprise for this time of day. After a while, on a hunch, he shadowed his path from the previous evening back to Myrtle’s Cookery, the homey-looking eating establishment where he’d first seen Kathryn.

From a bench across the street, he kept vigil on the people walking up and down the boardwalk, and it wasn’t long before the object of his search appeared.

Kathryn was still a good distance off, on the other side of the street, but seeing the black dress she wore, the respectable shroud of a mourning widow, Larson felt a flush of anger. She carried herself with such quiet dignity. His unexpected anger frightened him. Never would he have thought himself capable of wishing his wife harm. Seeing her again, though, discovering where she was living and what she was doing, wreaked havoc with his emotions.

Even draped in black, she stole his breath. Men turned as she passed, some tipping their hats, but she seemed oblivious to them. Memories of his mother drifted toward him, her head held high as she’d walked through town holding his hand. Men he’d seen visiting her room, some who returned with frequency, looked at her in open disgust and called her names as she passed. Yet her ivory complexion, as though chiseled from marble, had revealed nothing. Only the slight tightening of her hand around his gave any indication that the taunts had struck their mark.

Larson’s vision blurred. He hadn’t thought of that in years. He looked down at his clasped hands. Two things struck him in that moment, reliving that thinnest of reactions from his mother—the tightening of her hand around his, and the fact that she’d been holding his hand in the first place.

Kathryn crossed the busy street and disappeared into the mercantile. Larson rested his arms on his thighs, bent his head, and waited. Now that he’d found her again, he didn’t know what to do. The thought of following her, watching firsthand as she built a new life without him certainly wasn’t a desirable option. Especially with the life she’d chosen.

Everything within him wanted to confront her. But how could he approach her? What would he say? Imagining the look in her eyes at seeing him now, how he looked, was enough to stay that course of action for the time being.

From cautious inquiry at the feedlot earlier that week, Larson had learned about the loss of his entire herd and that his land was scheduled to go to auction in the fall. “Shame about all that cattle though.” The worker had punctuated his statement with a stream of well-aimed tobacco juice. “I hear disease got ’em, but I’m thinkin’ it was tick fever come up from Texas. Don’t know much about that Jennings woman, other than that she done moved to town and took up with her husband’s foreman. Least that’s what folks is sayin’. Good piece’a land up there though—right on Fountain Creek. I’d make a claim for it if I had the means.”

But even if Larson came forward to claim the land,
his
land, he had no money to pay the debt. He’d lose it anyway. Plus, he’d face the devastating humiliation of Kathryn’s rejection all over again.

He looked down the block occasionally, keeping an eye on the mercantile. His thoughts were jumbled and he didn’t know where to turn. Isaiah would tell him to talk to God. Larson tried remembering one of Isaiah’s prayers, but couldn’t.

“Talk to Him like you’re talking to me,”
Isaiah had said countless times with that smile of his.
“Be honest. Tell Him exactly what’s inside you. Only remember that He’s the Alpha and Omega, the First and the Last. And you’re not.”

At that moment, an attractive young woman passed by, her gaze connecting with Larson’s. She stared at him for an instant, then grimaced and turned, hurrying her steps. Dropping his attention to the boardwalk, Larson pulled his knit cap farther down and turned up his collar. He rubbed a hand over his unkempt beard. Before all this, women had looked at him differently.
Much
differently. Realizing just how much he’d enjoyed their attention, their second glances, bothered him now. Especially when he recalled how he’d hated catching men looking at Kathryn.

He closed his eyes and hunched over further. Isaiah sometimes started his prayers with
Father God
but, never having known his father and imagining what kind of man he must’ve been, that particular phrase turned to sand in Larson’s throat.
God, I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t know what to do, where to go
. He paused. Isaiah had said to be honest.
You’re the one who brought me back here, so I guess I’d appreciate you tellin’ me what you’re thinking and what you’d suggest I do next
.

Larson waited for an answer. For the silent whisper he’d heard all too clearly the night before. Nothing came. Emptiness, thick and suffocating, rushed in to fill the void.

He spotted Kathryn leaving the mercantile. She had something tucked beneath her arm—a newspaper, maybe. His eyes narrowed. She was no longer alone. Matthew Taylor casually slipped her hand into the crook of his arm as they walked down the boardwalk, conversing. He’d never seen Kathryn interact with another man that way, and something twisted inside him. He could hear their laughter even over the pounding in his ears.

Taylor walked her across the street and as far as the door of the restaurant, and then Kathryn smiled and nodded at whatever he had said to her. Larson couldn’t miss how his once-trusted foreman hesitated, then watched his wife walk inside and close the door.

Instinctively, Larson reached for his cane but then realized he hadn’t brought it. He mentally counted the steps it would take for him to reach that door, and Matthew Taylor. Thirty at best, even with his irregular stride. Then a wave of hopelessness suddenly crested inside him. For every reason he could think of to confront Taylor and Kathryn at that moment, there were a hundred more that kept him anchored to the bench where he sat. The most compelling being the illegitimate child now growing in his wife’s once-barren womb.

A swift knife of truth bladed through him at that thought and brought his inadequacies into the harsh light of reality. His throat suddenly felt parched. Indeed, through all these years, the burden of sterility had rested upon him after all.

The afternoon faded into evening and the distance to that door—to the life he remembered and had cheated death to reclaim—might as well have been a chasm forty miles wide, with no bridge in sight.

As it neared closing time, Larson watched her through the large glass window of the restaurant, skepticism warring with the courage he’d tried gathering all afternoon. He knew he needed to talk to her, but all the words just tripped over themselves in his head. He’d already lost everything, hadn’t he? So why this tightness in his chest and the impending need to escape? The single prayer he’d held onto as he’d walked up to their cabin upon his return whispered back to him.

God, let her still want me
.

Heaviness settled over him. What a fool he’d been, helplessly hoping. But even as he punished himself for having trusted her, a sense of uncertainty still haunted him. Something kept eating at him, something that didn’t make sense. How could Kathryn work all day
and
all night? And be with child?

A disturbing image came to mind and he winced. He’d been about seven or eight years old when his mother had sent him upstairs to get one of the women. He remembered knocking on Elisa’s partially opened door, and when she didn’t answer, he gave it a gentle push. One look at the bed, and the room started spinning. He’d never seen so much blood. Turned out Elisa had come to be with child and had tried to perform her own abortion, with tragic results. The other women had railed at her for not using the normal aloes or cathartic powders to end the unwanted pregnancy. Larson still remembered the regret on his mother’s face, the detached look in her eyes that night when she’d explained to him that sometimes the powders failed to work.

It hadn’t made sense to him then, but a few years later he’d come to understand what his mother had been saying. The truth of her actions had clearly told him what she’d never possessed the courage to say aloud. That she wished he’d never been born.

The squeak of hinges brought his eyes up. He blinked to clear his vision.

Kathryn exited the restaurant, locking the door behind her. She paused and peered up and down the boardwalk as though looking for something or someone. Then she turned in the direction of the brothel.

He followed her, looking down occasionally for uneven planks in the boardwalk that might hinder his altered stride. He turned over in his mind what he was going to say, wondering if she would even recognize him before he revealed himself. The pounding of a slightly off-key piano carried on the night air and helped to mask the occasional stutter of his step. He worked to catch up with her as she rounded the corner.