by Emily Woods
“I’m scared that I’m imagining the feelings between us. I’m scared that you might like me and that my father will prevent us from being together. I’m scared of the future and the past. I’m scared that God is mad at me for ignoring Him and doubting Him for these past four months.”
It was too much. She turned and fled in the opposite direction of the river, but Tom was right on her heels. The moment she stopped running, he reached out and took her hands in his.
“Thank you, Lord,” he mumbled, drawing her close to him. Then, to her, he spoke clearly, gazing so deeply into her eyes that she thought she might faint. “I thought you lost interest in me, or that I had imagined it all. Lily, I do care for you, more than I can say. Enough to consider giving up running the wagon train so I can settle in Oregon. And as for your father, well, he came to me to kind of give me his blessing before I even asked for it.”
The words refused to register in her brain. “You…you care for me? My father…approves?”
“Yes and yes, but more than that. Lily, I want to say that I love you, but honestly, I don’t really know what love is. I get excited whenever I see you, I want to be near you and listen to you. I think you’re sweet and amazing and every time I imagine my future, you’re in it. Is that love?”
Another tear trickled down her cheek. “It might be,” she whispered. “I don’t really know.”
“And as for the rest, well, we can figure it out. God’s not mad at you, though. The preacher explained that He loves us no matter what and can forgive anything. Lily, if you want to have God back in your life, all you have to do is ask.”
It was hard not to burst into tears. The man who had been occupying a great deal of her thoughts and a rather large portion of her heart was declaring his feelings for her and telling her that he wanted a future with her.
And that God still loved her.
“I want it to be true so badly,” she told him, looking down at their joined hands. “But after the accident, I felt I’m too bitter and ugly to have a good life. I feel so angry still.”
He released her hand and touched her face, running a finger along the scar. “You know what’s strange? Because the scar is part of you, that makes it beautiful. But it’s even more so because of what it represents. If your father hadn’t shot off his gun, he would never have been taken to Fort Boise, and we never would have had a chance to get to know one another. Worse, he would have remained bitter and all of you would have suffered. Oh, I’m sorry you and your ma and the rest were hurt, but no one was killed and people are mostly recovered now. The body can heal, you know, but the soul is harder.”
When he put it like that, she could see how her suffering and indeed the suffering of her whole family had led up to this moment.
“And you think God will forgive me?” she nearly whimpered.
Tom smiled softly and cupped her cheek.
“Yes, sweet Lily, I’m sure of it. If He can forgive all my sins, He can forgive you for ignoring Him and being mad at Him for however long.”
“I don’t even know how long,” she mumbled, but it was hard to focus on speaking when he was caressing her face so tenderly. “You really don’t find me repulsive?”
The laugh that tumbled out of him nearly scared her. “Repulsive? No, Lily, not repulsive. Beautiful, wonderful, lovely, sweet, kind, and so much more.”
Her eyes fastened on his, and she raised a hand to cover his. “And you don’t want to be a wagon master anymore?”
Shaking his head, he leaned towards her a little and she thought he was going to kiss her.
“Not here,” she managed to whisper. “And not yet. I need time to sort things out.”
The look of disappointment in his eyes nearly made her change her mind. She longed to kiss him, but to do so in plain sight of the group, her family especially, was not how she wanted to receive her first kiss. Adding to that, she needed to get her heart right with God first.
“But I want to,” she murmured. “When the time is right.”
This made him smile again and he nodded.
“When the time is right.”
Lily went straight to her mother and confessed all the anger she’d been carrying in her heart towards her father and towards God. She fell at her feet and buried her head in her mother’s lap. Constance stopped her dinner preparations and stroked her daughter’s hair.
A kind smile graced her mother’s face. “It’s no surprise to me, my dear. But I’ve been praying for God to soften your heart.”
“He has,” she mumbled in reply. “But I don’t know what to do from here. What will the future look like?”
Her mother shook her head and turned Lily’s face upward. “No one knows that except God alone, but we don’t have to be afraid of it, not when we know that He is in control.”
It didn’t all make sense to her in that moment, but Lily felt that perhaps she could trust God to take care of her. Despite all that had happened, He had worked all things out for their good, even if they had to suffer for it. She knew now that her scar, her mother’s sickness and injury, her father’s incarceration, and everything else had all worked together to lead up to this time of hope and healing.
“It’s hard to let go of control,” she murmured.
“Yes, dear. That’s very true, and you won’t be able to do it on your own.”
Together they prayed for Lily’s heart, that it would mend, that she would forgive her father completely, and that God would show her how to trust Him. After just a few minutes, she felt considerably lighter and kissed her mother’s cheek.
“I’m so glad that you’re my mother,” she whispered. “And I’m so sorry for giving you such a hard time. Please forgive me.”
“Of course I will, dear. I understand your feelings.”
That night, after the preacher’s meeting, she and Tom went for a walk around the perimeter of the circle of wagons.
“If we keep moving like this, we should be in Willamette Valley in just a few days,” Tom informed her casually. She sensed that he was trying to keep the conversation light, but she wanted to talk about deeper things.
“I’m glad to hear that,” she replied calmly. “But I’m even happier to tell you something.”
He stopped walking and waited for her to continue.
“I have forgiven my father and asked God to forgive my stubbornness. I can see that God had His hand on things all along. Sometimes hard things have to happen to change an impossible situation. I still don’t understand everything, but if I did, I guess I would be on the same level as God.”
He chuckled a little and reached for her hand. “Well, you might be the next best thing to an angel, but that’s probably as far as it goes.”
She laughed and squeezed his hand. It felt good to be so free.
“And I think I actually might be ready now,” she added vaguely, hoping that her heart didn’t leap out of her chest. She was being very bold, but she didn’t want to wait for her first kiss any longer. She could receive it with a clear conscience and without any distractions.
“Ready? For Oregon?”
At first, she thought he was serious, but then he turned and pulled her into his arms. Since they were well away from the campsite, she wrapped her arms around him as well.
“I don’t know if I’m ready for everything that the future holds, Miss Lily, but I’m sure ready to do this.”
With a soft grin on his face, he lowered his head and placed the gentlest of kisses on her lips. She felt the ground underneath her give way and when they parted, the biggest smile of all was on her face.
Epilogue
As the weary group of travelers crested the hill, a settlement came into view. A collective cheer went up from them all and they picked up the pace. The land was dotted with buildings and all around, it had been cultivated. Tears were in the eyes of nearly everyone.
“I can’t believe it,” came the repeated cry.
“We’re here. We’re finally here!”
Families and sweethearts smiled and sighed. The land appeared to be all that had been promised and more. From here, they would start again. It would be hard, but it was what they had dreamed of. After traveling the two thousand plus miles across the country, they felt there wasn’t anything they couldn’t handle now.
They had grown close over the trip and hoped to find land near one another. The people who had started out as strangers had become a family, and they were finally home.
Thank You
Thanks for reading why stories. I hope you liked reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them. If you could take a minute and leave a review for me on Amazon and/or Goodreads, that would be really awesome.
The last series in this collection was about a group of men and women who risked everything on the Oregon Trail. Their stories continue in the Oregon Brides series, and there are many more inspiring stories. I know you don’t want to miss any of them.
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Bonus Content: Story Preview
Preview:
Claire Finds True Love
Early October, 1853, Willamette Valley, Oregon
The sight of the lush valley below infused excitement into the hearts of the exhausted travelers who were finally nearing the destination of their twenty-two-hundred-mile journey. They’d lost wagons, equipment, and nearly all hope after traveling over two thousand miles over the Oregon Trail, but now the Willamette Valley, their promised land, lay before them. The ragtag band of twenty-three people, five wagons, and only thirteen heads of livestock was half of the wagon train that had started out from Missouri more than five months before. The people whose eyes feasted on the sight of the settlement below had been separated from the rest of the wagon train between Fort Hall and Fort Boise due to an unexpected incident from which they were mostly recovered.
“Okay, folks,” Captain Tom Rutger called out from the front of the train. “Let’s move down the hill slow and easy. It’s be a downright shame to arrive in a heap after having made it this far.”
A ripple of exhausted laughter flowed over the group. Following their young captain, they made their way down the hill, their eyes fastened on the scene before them.
Nearly a hundred buildings were nestled into the valley near the Willamette River. Businesses and homes alike comprised the settlement that the travelers had been longing to see over the hard months that were now behind them.
As they approached the place that had been on the tongues of each one of them, smiles blossomed on their faces. They were home.
Noah Jackson looked up from his work as yet another group of travelers descended the hill. He’d been waiting for more than two weeks for the second half of his wagon train to arrive, the hope of winning the love of a shy young girl still buried deep in his heart.
There had been over a dozen wagon trains that had arrived, but none of them carried the slight form of Lily Howard, the most beautiful girl on earth. The scar that now ran down her face as a result of the rockslide they’d endured in the valley three weeks before had done nothing to mar her beauty. It was her spirit that had attracted him, but he’d never had a chance to approach her because her overbearing father had never let anyone near his daughter.
However, the man had been incarcerated in Fort Boise, and Noah couldn’t imagine that the authorities would release a man who had nearly caused death of several people in the wagon train. Many had sustained serious injuries because Eugene Howard had shot off his gun at a band of friendly natives who happened to be passing by. The resulting rockslide had injured more than ten of the seventy people who had started out together in Independence, Missouri. The whole group had stayed together for one week before the decision was made that the healthier among them had to push on so as not to deplete their supplies and thus cause the whole wagon train to starve to death.
When he’d arrived with his uncle in Oregon City, he’d told the man that he wouldn’t be following him to the land that the family claimed just north of the city. His uncle had been disappointed, but at the age of twenty-one, Noah was his own man.
“I want a piece of land of my own,” he’d said. “But first, I need to make some money.”
The land was free thanks to the Donation Act, but he had no funds or equipment for startup. Adding to that, he wanted a chance to win the heart of Lily and hopefully persuade her to marry him before he sought his claim. The government would double the acres given to a man who was married.
That wasn’t the reason he wanted to marry her, but it certainly added to the list. Now, working at the shipyard for the past two weeks had helped him to earn a small amount of money that he hoped would grow before next spring. He still saw his uncle in town from time to time, since no one was able to move to their land yet. There was no point going to a piece of land that had no crops and no house. Each adult member of the wagon train had to find work in the growing town for the winter, after which they would eagerly make their way to their claims.
“Is that them?” asked his friend Samuel Banks. The two of them had met on the first day when Captain Holt had led the wagon train into the city. Sam told him that the ironworks factory was always looking for young men, and after just a few minutes talking with the supervisor, Noah was hired. The man had joked with him about his name.
“If anyone knows how to build a ship, it should be you!”
It wasn’t the first time someone had teased him about being named after the biblical hero, but Noah didn’t mind. His parents had been devout Methodists who loved the story of the ark.
“I’ll do my best, sir,” he replied respectfully, immediately making a good impression on the older man.
Now he’d been working for two weeks alongside his new friend doing the back-breaking work of building the Belle of Oregon City, the first iron steamboat built on the West Coast.
“It looks like the right number of people,” Noah replied, his heart beginning to hammer in his chest as he paused to wipe the sweat from his forehead.
The small group descending into the valley had about twenty people or so, the number that Captain Holt had left behind in Idaho. It hadn’t been an easy decision, but there weren’t enough supplies for the whole train to stop and wait while the wounded recovered. Noah had hoped they would wait for the others at Fort Boise, but the consensus was to move onward. He’d nearly stayed behind, but he didn’t have any means of supporting himself. He’d worked for his uncle back in Missouri, and the man loved him like a son, but he barely had enough for his own family.
As the travelers neared the city, Noah stopped working and stared. It was them. Even from this distance, he could see Lily and her family. Her five brothers were jumping and leaping down the hill like a band of pirates.
He laughed at the sight. “Tell Mister Campbell I’m taking an early lunch,” he said to Sam, ripping the gloves from his hand and throwing them on the ground. “I’ll make up any lost time later.”
Sam nodded and grinned. “Best of luck,” he called after him, but Noah barely registered his friend’s good wishes. He was
too intent on seeing Lily again. He knew that there was a chance she would spurn him, but he strongly believed that she wouldn’t. Every night, he knelt beside his narrow cot and fervently prayed that Lily would be his. He didn’t have a lot or prospects yet, but he thought she would see his potential. Surely God had put this desire in his heart.
However, as he neared the group, his heart nearly stopped.
Lily was walking alongside Tom Rutger, the assistant to Captain Holt and the man who’d become captain of the separated wagon train. If she’d only been walking with him, there wouldn’t have been any cause for concern, or not much anyway, but she was looking up at him as though he’d hung the moon. The smile on her face nearly broke his heart. He’d longed to see it aimed at him, but it was clear to see that she was enamored with the man. The captain was holding onto his horse’s reins and grinning back at her.
All the air rushed out of his lungs. How could this have happened? But the answer came to him in a flash. Without her father around, Lily had become an easy target for any of the single men left in the train. Most of them had been spoken for, all except Tom Rutger.
Righteous anger overwhelmed him, and he was about to run at them and make demands, but catching sight of the man walking shortly behind them prevented his outburst.
Eugene Howard was not in Fort Boise after all. He was walking a few strides behind his daughter and looking fondly at the couple. Clearly, he approved of them. When Noah looked at him more carefully, he nearly gasped. The man hardly looked like himself. Jail must have changed him.
Defeat overwhelmed Noah, and he turned to scurry back to the ironworks when he heard his name. Reluctantly, he turned back and tried to smile.