Scotty stepped from his office, reading a letter. “Oh, Marcus, would you mind...”
The question died on his lips. His astounded eyes followed the pair, their footsteps reverberating from the magnificent staircase as Marcus tugged Jube along behind him. She glanced over her shoulder at Scotty—helplessly—and blushed to the roots of her hair. Then they disappeared above the turn of stairs and Gandy retreated quietly inside his office, closed the door, and smiled to himself.
Upstairs, Marcus took Jube straight to his room—the one he shared with Jack. He deposited her inside and without ado gripped an enormous armoire that appeared as if it would take Herculean strength to be budged. He slid it in front of the door as if it were a toy. But the screech echoed all through the house.
He turned, panting, and found a teasing smile on her face.
“You’ve scratched the freshly waxed floor,” she said softly. “Leatrice will make us do it again.”
His answer was to undo two shirt buttons, then jerk the tails from his pants before crossing the room to lift her off her feet. He carried her to the spooled bed and fell with her onto the soft coverlets. With his first kiss his hand found her breast, and before it ended he lay pressing her into the deep tick. As his body lay stretched upon hers, Jube learned that nothing had been lost between the barn and this room.
The only love Marcus had ever known had been bought. But this... this by some miracle had been won. With each caress he showed her how he prized her. His Jube, his beautiful, unattainable Jube, attainable, after all. She murmured in his ear, pouring out for both of them the words only one could say. He spoke with his roaming hands, his idolizing mouth, his eloquent eyes. When their clothing lay strewn, he worshipped her duly. Other men had words at their disposal, words that they might employ at will to seduce and tantalize. Because he had none, Marcus used only his body.
But he used it so adroitly that Jube heard his voice in each lingering touch.
Jube, my beautiful Jube. How I love your hair, your skin, your eyes, your dark lashes, darling nose, beautiful lips, soft neck, your breasts, the mole between them, the shadow beneath them, your white, white stomach, and this... this, too, Jube... ahhh, Jube...
Many times in her past she had produced counterfeit ardor, but with Marcus, sham was not necessary. What she felt for him turned this act, for the first time ever, into one of love.
And when he rose above her and linked their bodies with a single smooth stroke, it was as foregone as the mating of the swallows in the rafters, the dragonflies in midair, the horses in the paddock.
When it was over and the tumult had been reached and moved beyond, they rested with their sweating brows touching. Jack tried the door and went away grumbling, and the smell of freshly fried hush puppies drifted up from the dining room below, and Leatrice’s voice thundered out a warning that they were late for supper, and they laughed into each other’s eyes and draped their spent arms over each other. Then Marcus knew they were not like Prince and Cinnamon. They could not separate and trot their individual ways as if this meant little more than the sating of animal drives.
Excited, he scrambled off the bed, leaving Jube so suddenly she shrieked and clutched herself. He had to ask her now, quickly, before they even went down to supper. He rummaged frantically for a pencil and paper—through the armoire, the pockets of his discarded jacket, two drawers, the top of a refectory table between the windows. Finally, impatiently, he thrust the fire screen aside and found a chunk of charcoal, pushed Jube off the far side of the bed, threw back the coverlets, and wrote on the rumpled bottom sheet:
Will you—
“Marcus, what are you doing! Leatrice will behead you!”
marry me?
She stared at the question, so shocked her wide eyes seemed to tilt nearly to her hairline.
“Will I marry you?” she read, amazed.
He nodded, blue eyes bright, certain, blond hair mussed.
“When?”
He wrote on the sheet, underlining emphatically:
NOW!
“But what about a minister and a dress and a wedding feast and a—”
He landed on his knees in the middle of the bed, covering the word marry, grabbing her arms and tugging Jube to her knees before him. His eyes evoked a wondrous thump from her heart before he slammed his mouth down on hers and kissed her with the same authority he’d used when marching her up the stairs forty-five minutes ago.
He drew back, his unrelenting eyes holding her as forcefully as his grip upon her elbows.
“Yes!” she rejoiced, throwing her arms around his neck. “Yes, oh, yes, Marcus, I’ll marry you. But in two weeks. Please, Marcus. I’ve never been courted before and I think I’m going to love it.”
He kissed her again, starting hard, ending soft, wondering if joy this great could be fatal.
They were so late for dinner the hush puppies were all gone. Leatrice waddled around the table, collecting plates and scowling. She came to a halt at the sight of them careening to a breathless halt inside the dining room doorway, their faces shining with joy.
Scott looked up over his coffee cup and met Jube’s eyes. Everyone else turned watermelon-pink and took a sudden interest in the crumbs on the tablecloth.
Where Marcus had towed Jube earlier, she now took the lead. Clutching his hand, she looked squarely at Gandy and announced, “Marcus and I are going to get married.”
Six heads snapped up in surprise. Gandy set down his cup.
“In two weeks,” Jube added quickly.
Every eye turned to Gandy, gauging his reaction.
A slow grin climbed his cheeks. When it reached his eyes and dimpled his face, the tension eased from the room.
“Well, it’s about time,” he drawled.
Jube catapulted into his arms. “Oh, Scotty, I’m so happy.”
“And I’m happy for you.”
He shook hands with Marcus and clapped him on the back, while Jube was passed around for hugs. When the congratulations ended, Scott stood with an arm around Jube’s waist again. “I insist that the nuptials be spoken in the weddin’ alcove,” he told her.
Jube looked Gandy square in the eye and threw him into one of the major emotional upheavals of his life by declaring, “And I insist on inviting Agatha to the wedding.”
CHAPTER
19
Oh, that winter, that endless unmitigated winter while Agatha’s aloneness smote her daily. She had been alone before, but never as mercilessly as this. Before the advent of Scott, Willy, and Gandy’s extended family into her life, her aloneness had been pacific. She had learned to accept the fact that her life would be a string of invariable days whose zeniths and nadirs fluctuated so minimally as to be almost indistinguishable, one from the other. She had learned to accept the blandness, the orderliness, the conformity. And the lovelessness.
Then they had come, bringing music and confusion and nonconformity and laughter. In terms of a lifetime, their presence had lasted but a brief heart flash, a few measly months out of years and years of solitariness. But in terms of living, she’d condensed more emotional vitality into those numbered days than she would experience in the remainder of her life, she was sure. Having lost it—and them—she was doomed to be forever aching.
Oh, the dullness after they were gone. The dullness had teeth and talons. It tore at her. She would never again be reconciled to it.
Sunset was the worst, that time of day between occupation and preoccupation, the time of long shadows and kindling lanterns when merchants drew their shades, women set their tables, and broods gathered in kitchens where warm fires glowed, fathers said grace, children spilled milk, and mothers scolded.
She watched the rest of the world end their days with these homely blessings and repined that they would never be hers. She bade Violet good-bye, went upstairs, lit her own lamp, and sometimes on a good day its shade would need washing. She sat down to read The Temperance Banner and sometimes on a good day one of its articles would in
terest her. She checked the clock after each article and sometimes on a good day she looked at it only five times before it was time to get ready to walk down to Paulie’s. She touched up her already perfect hair and sometimes on a good day found enough strands out of place to justify taking it down and reshaping it. She limped down to Paulie’s to eat her lonely supper and sometimes on a good day a child would sit at a nearby table and make eyes at her over the back of his chair. She drank her final cup of coffee with nobody to converse with and sometimes on a good day a man at a nearby table would light a cigar after his meal. And for a few moments she would gaze into the middle distance and pretend.
Then she went home with scraps for Moose and watched him eat, then wash himself, then curl into a contented ball and go to sleep. At bedtime she donned the nightgown she’d worn the night she slept in Scott’s bed, then brushed her hair down, pulled the weights on the clock and, when she could avoid it no longer, climbed into bed—an old maid, getting older, sleeping with a spotted cat, while a pendulum ticked in the dark.
Most nights she lay awake listening for the tinkle of the piano and the ringing of the banjo, but the revelry was forever gone from below. She closed her eyes and saw long legs kicking toward the ceiling and red ruffles framing black fishnet stockings and a man with a cheroot between his teeth and a low-crowned black Stetson, and a little boy peeking under a swinging door.
One night when her restless recollections refused to desist, she rose from bed and crept downstairs with the key Scott had left her. She entered the back door of the saloon and stood motionless, holding the lantern aloft, watching light play along the short passage to the room where Willy had slept. Inside that room the cot was gone. The cradles that had held the kegs remained, along with the yeasty smell of old beer. But the boy was gone, and so were all reminders of his presence. She remembered the last night when she and Scott had tucked Willy into bed and he had kissed her. But the memory clawed at her heart and she left the storeroom.
In the main room of the saloon the chairs were upturned on the tables and the bar. But the piano was gone, and Dierdre, too, along with her Garden of Delights. The light from the single lantern created eerie shadows that crept along the walls and fell between the tables as Agatha moved among them. Here the scent of whiskey lingered, and perhaps the ineffable reminder of cigar smoke.
Something rustled and Agatha stopped, lifting the lantern high to peer into the murky corners. As if through a long tunnel came the distant tinkle of music, a lively song that wafted through the night with the tiny resonance of a harpsichord. Agatha cocked her head and listened. Now she recognized it—a piano and banjo together, and in the background the faint echo of laughter and feet tapping on a wooden floor.
Buffalo gals, won’t you come out tonight,
Come out tonight, come out tonight...
She smiled and turned toward the spot where the piano was, where Jube and Pearl and Ruby were swishing their taffeta ruffles and lifting their heels in wondrous synchronization.
The sound stilled. The images vanished. It was only Agatha’s imagination, the daft maundering of a melancholy and wishful woman standing alone in an abandoned saloon, shivering in a nightgown upon which a man had once pressed his body and a little boy had laid his head.
Go to bed, Agatha. There’s nothing for you here, only heartache and the road to further unhappiness.
She never went into the saloon again after that, except once during daylight hours when she showed it to a party interested in renting it as a dry goods store. But when the man’s wife lifted her nose and sniffed, she declared they would never get the whiskey smell out of the place. So they left without even checking out the back storeroom.
She wondered if others would come, new renters who’d spark her life with new friendships, new distractions. But who would come to this desolate little cow town anymore? Not even the cowboys now that the saloons were closed to them. Spring would arrive and the liveliness brought by the longhorns and their drivers would be absent. No noise, no commotion, no hubbub. How she would miss it, no matter what she’d said in the past. The cowboys and their disorderliness were as much a part of her life as the millinery shop. But without them and the prosperity they brought, the seasons would change and the town would wither, just as she and her business would, with nobody to care about either.
Christmas was an occasion to be suffered. Agatha’s only delight—and it was a mediocre one at that—was making a stuffed goose for Willy and sending it along with her first letter to him. She filled the missive with idle chitchat about how big Moose was getting and how he had snagged the hem of her garnet dress with his claws, and what she was giving Violet for Christmas, and how beautiful the roof of Christ Presbyterian looked with its mantle of snow. She included no clue of her overwhelming loneliness and was careful to refrain from asking how Scott was or sending him too personal a message.
Whenever she paid the rent, she made out the check and addressed the envelope with more care than she used on anything else these days, forming each flowing letter in intricate copperplate that looked as if it should be embroidered upon a pillowcase. But the enclosed letter stated only that she was sending the month’s rent in the amount of twenty-five dollars, followed by a report on whether any prospective buyers had looked at the building. Except for the month of January, when the sniffing woman and her husband came, that portion of the letter was negligible.
There were outpourings she longed to express. But for fear of sounding like a desperate, love-starved spinster—which was exactly what she was—she bridled the urge.
She made it through the days by wearing a false cheerfulness that vanished the moment Violet’s back was turned. But when she was in the shop alone she often found her hands idle while she stared at Willy’s little stool and wondered if he’d grown tall enough that he wouldn’t need it now; and wondered what it was like at Waverley, where he and Scott lived; and wondered if they missed her, too, sometimes; and wondered if she’d ever see either of them again. Then Moose would come and preen himself against her ankles and say, “Mrrr...”—the only sound in the otherwise silent shop—and Agatha would have to force herself out of a deep lassitude that seemed to pervade her more and more often as winter slogged along.
December, with its unendurable Christmas.
January, with its biting cold that made her hip ache worse.
February, with blizzards that blew down out of Nebraska and coated the snow with topsoil, making it as brown and forlorn as Agatha’s life.
It was Violet who brought the telegram. Violet, with her blue eyes lit like a pair of gas jets and her blue-veined hands fluttering in the air and her blue hair trembling. And her titter was back.
“Agatha! Oh, my! Agatha, where are you? Tt-tt.”
“I’m here. At the desk.”
“Oh, Agatha!” Violet slammed the front door. The shade snapped up and whirled on its roller but she took no notice. “You have a telegram! From him! Tt-tt.”
“A telegram? From whom?” Agatha’s breath seemed to catch in her throat.
“Tt-tt. I was coming to work just as I usually do when somebody called from behind me and I turned around and there was that young man, Mr. Looby, the one from up at the depot, and he—”
“From whom, Violet?”
“—said, ‘Miss Parsons, are you on your way to the millinery shop?’ And I said, ‘Yes, of course. Don’t I go to the millinery shop every morning at eleven o’clock?’ And Mr. Looby said—”
“From whom, Violet!” By this time Agatha’s hands were trembling and her heart was making mincemeat of her chest.
“Well, you don’t have to shout, Agatha. It isn’t every day we get a telegram, you know. From Mr. Gandy, of course.”
“Mist——” Agatha’s voice refused to cooperate. “Mr. Gandy?” she managed on the second try.
“Tt-tt. Isn’t it wonderful?”
Agatha stared at the piece of yellow paper in Violet’s hand. “But how do you know?”
> “Why, it says right here, plain as a barn fire on a dark night—L. Scott Gandy. Tt-tt. That’s his name, isn’t it? And he’s asking if you’ll—”
“Violet!” Agatha leaped to her feet and held out a palm. “Whose telegram is it?” Surprising, how calm that hand was when her body felt as if it contained a fault line that was separating.
Violet had the good grace to look contrite as she handed over the telegram. “Well, it was only folded in two. And, anyway, Mr. Looby told me what it said. Then he grinned and handed me this ticket made out for White Springs, Florida. Tt-tt.”
“A ticket—” Agatha’s eyes dropped to the ticket and excitement made her body wilt into a chair as she began reading.
HAVE PROPOSITION FOR YOU STOP WILL DISCUSS ON NEUTRAL TERRITORY STOP MEET ME TELFORD HOTEL, WHITE SPRINGS, FLORIDA, MARCH 10 STOP TICKET INCLUDED STOP JUBE AND MARCUS ENGAGED STOP REGARDS STOP L SCOTT GANDY STOP
Each time Agatha read the word stop, her heart seemed to do just that. At the word hotel, her fingers covered her lips and she sucked in a quick breath. She was still staring, dumbfounded, when Violet tittered again.
“Tt-tt. That naughty Mr. Gandy. Tt-tt. He’s sent a oneway ticket.”
Agatha could scarcely breathe, much less speak. But she reached up woodenly and Violet placed the ticket into her trembling fingers—a stiff piece of white cardboard with black ink that seemed to dance before Agatha’s confused eyes as she scanned the words Proffitt and White Springs.
“White Springs?” Shaken, she lifted her eyes to Violet. “But why White Springs?”
“Why, you just read it, didn’t you? Neutral territory.”
“But... but I’ve never even heard of White Springs, much less the Telford Hotel. Why would he ask me to go there?”
It was Violet’s turn to cover her lips. Her blue eyes twinkled with illicit speculation. “Why, my stars, tt-tt, he’s said it as clear as the Morse code can make it—to proposition you, my dear.”
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