Smoke River Bride (15 page)

S
ummer turned so hot and dusty Leah dispensed with the tight corset Ellie had talked her into wearing. Being laced up into the whalebone garment felt like being imprisoned; she could not bend or reach or even breathe on the hottest days. True, she looked more like the other women in town, more American, but Thad did not even notice.

In fact, Leah reflected, these days she might be dressed in feathers and oilcloth and Thad would not notice. The thought nagged at her, and as the days progressed, she felt more and more rejected.

On this Saturday afternoon she rode into town beside Teddy on his new colt, which he had named Red. The scorching air was so
suffocating that once they reached the main street it took her some minutes to recognize the enticing scent of something floating from the bakery.

Teddy sniffed the air. “Man, somethin’ sure smells good, don’t it?”

“Doesn’t,”
Leah gently corrected.

The boy reined his colt up close to her mare. “Leah?”

“Yes, Teddy? What is it?”

“There’s, uh, somethin’ I wanna ask you, but I don’t rightly know how.”

Leah studied her eight-year-old stepson’s tanned face under the brim of his boy-size Stetson. “Yes? You may ask me anything, Teddy. Except,” she added with a grin, “how to learn to ride a horse.”

“Well, then, here goes. What’s eatin’ at Pa? I never seen him so, well, disgrunted. That’s a new word I learned in school.”

“
Disgruntled
, you mean?”

“Yeah, that. What’s wrong with him? Is he mad at us?”

Leah sighed. If she knew, she would do anything to fix it. Teddy was right; lately Thad had been growing more moody. Just this morning at breakfast he had seemed so distracted he’d left his toast unbuttered on
his plate, and he forgot to drink his second cup of coffee. Then he’d agreed to go fishing with Teddy, but forgotten to dig any worms for bait.

This afternoon she had left him silent and frowning, pacing back and forth on the front porch. Something was definitely wrong.

“I think your father is preoccupied, maybe because of the drought we’re having this summer. He worries about his wheat crop.”

“Gosh, it’s only one little field. He’s got corn and alfalfa and—”

“Teddy, try to understand. To your father, his wheat field is more than just a field. Like Red, here. To you, he’s more than just a horse, is he not?”

“Gosh, yeah. Red’s my bestest friend.”

Teddy’s vigorous nod did not allay her uneasy feelings about Thad. His wheat field
was
more than just a field to him, but
what
more? Thad was as impenetrable as the thick honeysuckle vine that was almost smothering the privy.

Did he regret marrying her? Did he wish he had married someone else—Verena Forester, perhaps? Or one of the other townswomen?

Or was it something else? Something about her?

Each night when he came to bed he briefly touched her shoulder, kissed her cheek and rolled away from her. Night after night her heart shriveled a bit, and she fell asleep aching for him. Now, as she and Teddy walked their horses down Smoke River’s main street to the bakery, she tried not to think about it.

Uncle Charlie, wrapped in his white baker’s apron, stood in the open doorway waving an oversize Chinese fan.

“Uncle, whatever are you doing?”

“Ah, Niece Leah. I send good cookie smell out to customers,” he announced happily. “Also to dressmaking ladies upstairs. Teddy, you sweep floor and I pay you four cookies, okay?”

Teddy scrambled off his colt and Leah tied both horses to the hitching rail. “How is business, Uncle?”

“Some good. Sell big cake to Missus Rose at boardinghouse. Some bad. Mercantile boss make threat.”

Leah’s heart clenched. “What kind of threat?”

“He say ‘Go away from town or something bad happen.’”

“He would not dare! This is a free country.”

A rare frown crossed Uncle Charlie’s round
face. “Country itself not free, Niece Leah. Country is just land. ‘Free’ depend on people
in
country.”

Disheartened, she climbed the stairs to Verena’s apartment, thinking over Uncle Charlie’s words. If it was people that made a country free, was that not true here in Smoke River?

“Leah!” Ellie Johnson rose from her chair and grasped her hands. “You are wearing a new shirtwaist!”

“Yes, I—”

“Saints preserve us,” Verena screeched. “It’s bright red! Ladies never wear red.”

Leah slid onto the chair next to Ellie. “Why not wear red? Red is a very lucky color.”

“Lucky for who?” Verena pressed. “For a Celestial, maybe. Not for an American.”

“But I am an—”

“Don’t be a goose, Leah,” Darla injected. “It’s not just that it’s red. That style is just plain old-fashioned. For one thing, the sleeves are too full.”

Verena smirked. “And the ruffle at the neck is all wrong.”

“I like it,” Noralee Ness whispered, just loud enough for Leah to hear over the clatter
of the tea tray Verena set down. “I think red is pretty.”

“Red,” Darla interjected, “is in very bad taste.”

Heat crawled up Leah’s neck. She opened her mouth to reply, then thought better of it. There were more important issues in Smoke River than the color of her new shirtwaist.

The mouthwatering scent of freshly baked cookies drifted on the warm air. “Mmm,” Darla hummed. “Verena, your cookies smell enticing.”

Verena’s long, narrow face flushed. “I didn’t bake today. I was up late working on Cleora Rose’s wedding dress.”

“Wedding dress! But Cleora is…well, she is twenty-nine!”

“So what if she is?” Ellie challenged. “I was the same age when I married Matt. At twenty-nine a woman can still be young and alive.”

Noralee lifted her nose and sniffed. “What smells so good?”

“Cookies,” Leah announced. “From the bakery downstairs.”

She watched Verena’s expression tighten.

“You mean that Chinaman is baking cookies?”

“Of course.” Leah folded her hands in her lap. “It
is
a bakery, after all.”

Verena grimaced. “Chinese cookies,” she snapped. “What next?”

“Oh, no,” Leah corrected. “Brown sugar cookies, I think. With raisins.”

The dressmaker’s eyes narrowed. “We don’t want any Chinese cookies, or Chinese anything else, in Smoke River. Do we, ladies?”

“No!” Darla declared.

“We won’t stand for it,” Verena said, her lips thinning. Something in the tone of her voice sent a chill up Leah’s spine.

Ellie, Jeanne Halliday and Leah sat frozen, without making a sound.

“I don’t care if they
are
Chinese cookies,” Noralee ventured in a small voice. “They smell good!”

“They are not ‘Chinese’ cookies, Noralee. Chinese cookies are very small and thin. These cookies are big.” Leah held up her thumb and forefinger, rounded into an arc.

“That,” Verena snapped, “is not the point.”

Jeanne abruptly folded up the knitting in her lap. “
Alors
, what
is
your point, Verena?”

“The point, Mrs. Halliday, is that we do not want any foreigners in our town.”

“But,” Jeanne pointed out with a half smile, “I come from France. Does that not make
me
a foreigner?”

Verena swallowed, clamped her teeth together and began splashing tea into the flowered china cups.

Darla rose to carry the tray. “Your skin is as white as mine, Jeanne. But Charlie What’s-his-name at the bakery definitely isn’t white.” Defiantly she stared at Leah.

Leah took a shaky breath. She was not afraid. What she felt was bone-deep fury. She had never known such anger, not even when the village boys in Luzhai had called her names and pelted her with fruit rinds.

It was not fair. Not fair to her Chinese uncle. Not fair to the Negro blacksmith at the livery stable or the Nez Perce hired man at the Hallidays’ ranch. Not fair to anyone who was different.

“Oh, I see,” she said into the sudden quiet. “Being an American means having white skin, is that it?”

“Yes!” Darla exclaimed.

“No,” Leah said, her voice quiet. “I am an American, and my skin is not white.” In fact, after a month of the summer sun, her usual creamy-golden skin had darkened in color.
Now she was so sun-browned she looked more Indian than Chinese.

“Skin color, it makes the difference, does it?” Jeanne inquired, her eyebrows rising.

“That’s not what we learned in school,” Noralee said. “Is it, Miz Johnson?”

While Ellie responded to the girl’s question, Leah slipped out the door, down the stairs and into Uncle Charlie’s bakery.

“I would like some cookies, Uncle. A dozen of the ones you just baked and a dozen of the chewy kind with raisins.”

Upstairs in Verena’s apartment, Ellie was still talking when Leah stepped back inside and edged around to the tea tray. Hurriedly she arranged the cookies on a plate and passed it around the circle with unsteady hands.

She was shaking so hard she did not notice when Teddy barreled through the door.

“Leah.” He yanked hard on her sleeve. “Pa wants you. Hurry.”

Thad lay spread-eagled on the board sidewalk, and Leah bent over him, trying to control her racing heartbeat. Uncle Charlie sprawled beside him.

“Thad, what happened? What have you done?”

“He didn’t do nothin’,” Teddy volunteered. “Mr. Ness and the barber jumped on him and then that big guy, Ike somethin’, he joined in.”

Thad groaned and twisted his pounding head to look up at her. “That’s pretty much it.”

Her face tightened. “What started it?”

Thad drew in an uneven breath. “Ness was jawing at me about the drought, about what a fool I was to plant wheat in Oregon instead of barley or oats.”

There was more, about Leah and Uncle Charlie being “dirty Chinks,” but Thad wasn’t going to repeat it. Carl Ness sure rubbed him the wrong way. All summer long, every single time Thad entered the mercantile to select things on Leah’s shopping list, the mercantile owner gave him some cockamamie excuse for being fresh out of the items.

“The next thing I knew, Ness was trying to wrestle me out the front door, and Poletti, the barber next door, barrels out of his shop to help him. Oh, I almost forgot about Ike Bruhn, big strapping fella with a punch like a—”

“Sledgehammer,” Leah interjected through tight lips. “I can tell from the condition of your face. Oh, Thad…”

He spit a mouthful of blood onto the walkway.
“Uncle Charlie tried to help by leaping onto Ike’s back, but Ike sent a right to his jaw that laid him out flat.”

Uncle Charlie still lay unmoving an arm’s length from Thad. Teddy bent over him, brushing his hand along the Chinese man’s rounded shoulder. “He’s breathin’ okay,” the boy reported.

Leah mopped at the blood pouring from Thad’s scalp with her petticoat hem, then felt him all over. “Does it hurt here?” She pressed on his rib cage. “Here?”

He jerked when she touched his collarbone. “Hell, Leah, stop poking at me. I hurt everywhere.” But it sure felt good when she patted her small hand over his body.

She scooted to Uncle Charlie’s prone figure and spoke near his ear. “Uncle, can you hear me? Are you hurt?”

“Hear fine,” he replied in a trembly tenor voice. “Hurt maybe on head.”

Leah inspected a puffy-looking lump on Charlie’s forehead. “This looks like you ran into the bakery door.”

“He didn’t, neither!” Teddy yelled. “Uncle Charlie jumped on that big man’s back while he was hittin’ Pa. He was real brave!”

Thad forced his bruised body into a sitting
position and focused on Leah. He didn’t like the fiery look that came into her eyes. He half expected her to march into the mercantile and lay Carl Ness out behind his counter.

“Leah,” he croaked. She twisted back to him and he got his right hand up high enough to lay it in her lap. “Can you get me home?”

Charlie sat up, then got to his feet and walked unsteadily back toward his bakery. “Uncle?” Leah called. “Do you need help?”

“I fine, Niece Leah. I eat cookies, then feel better.” The snapping black eyes studied Thad. “You take care of husband. Very brave man.”

“Teddy, can you tie your father’s horse to yours and lead it home? Your father can ride double with me.”

Teddy gave her a tentative smile. “Sure I can, Leah. I’m almost growed up.”

Thad started to chuckle but caught at his chest instead. The question was, he thought with that clarity that always came when he was hurt, could he even mount a horse? Maybe she should bring the farm wagon?

Naw. That would take too long, and heaven help him, he wanted to be home in his own house so he could nurse his hurts in private. He’d mount the damn horse if it killed him.

Somehow Leah jockeyed him into the saddle, then hiked up her skirt, climbed up behind him and clasped her arms around his waist.

“Honey, honey, not so tight.”

“I don’t want you to fall off. Hold on to the reins, Thad.”

Teddy was waiting on the porch by the time Lady and her double load stumbled to a stop next to the bottom step. Thad tipped himself out of the saddle, but his knees buckled and he hit the ground and rolled. Dammit, his ribs hurt! His back muscles were screaming, and his tongue was beginning to feel mushy.

With Teddy’s help, he crawled up the steps. “Son, you remember that liniment I used when Leah hurt her back?”

“Yeah. It’s in the barn.”

“Get it.”

His son raced for the barn. Teddy was a good kid. Guess he should tell him that more often.

And Leah…Hell, he’d tried hard to keep his mind—and his hands—off her. It scared him spitless to even think about losing her.

He closed his eyes with a half-swallowed groan. Sometimes he wondered when she’d become so important to him. It had started
long before they’d made love the first—and last—time. And now…

Dammit to hell, he loved her. Leah was stubborn, courageous, sensible, funny and devoted to him and his son. The joy that had flooded him when he’d made love to her that night was just…frosting.

Half supporting him, Leah maneuvered him into the bedroom. With her free hand she flipped back the quilt on the bed and he settled his bashed-up body on the cool, smooth sheet.