by Joyce Wright
After the service, the men set up the tables and benches while the women brought out the food. Violet had decided to bring a cinnamon peach pie, using the peaches that the ladies had sold to Lucas. She was confident that her crust would be equal to anyone’s; Violet had been making pie crust since she was a child in her mother’s kitchen and her mother had been exacting in her standards.
Lucas was sitting beside her, his plate heaped with the delicious samplings from the dishes that had been brought. Violet, anxious over the success of her pie, found that she wasn’t very hungry. The twins had already eaten and were now eagerly engulfed by the crowd of children playing, their antics all watched by the eagle-eyed mothers.
When the meats, cabbage salad, beans, sourdough biscuits, baked apples and cornbread were finished, it was time for the desserts. Violet chose to sample a slice of short cake but Lucas, as much out of anticipation as loyalty, put a wedge of her peach cinnamon pie on his plate. He was tucking in to his pie while listening to the conversation around him.
Preacher Logan’s voice boomed out, “Who made the peach pie?” he demanded.
“My wife, Violet,” Lucas answered.
The preacher’ gaze circled around the circumference of people at the tables until his eyes fell on Violet, who was seated next to the young mother who had pacified her son with raisins.
“Mrs. Jackson!” he called. “Your pie is a welcome addition to our congregational repast.”
His remark was met with a round of applause by the others, including those who could agree with his verdict because they were sampling it, and those who simply wanted to welcome the new member in their midst.
“More than that,” replied Deacon Calleigh’s wife, Loretta. “Mrs. Jackson, you will be entering the pie contest next month.” Like her husband, Loretta Calleigh was an emphatic member of the faithful. But she felt that the ongoing shame of losing to the Methodists year after year brought disrepute to the Baptist women, whose pies, their menfolk assured them, were superior to anything that anyone else baked.
Violet, hearing the name which was still somewhat new to her hearing, looked up.
“The Pie Committee meets on Tuesday afternoon,” Mrs. Calleigh announced. “We welcome you to join us.”
“That’s very kind of you, but with the twins—“
“You’ll bring them of course,” Mrs. Calleigh said.
That night, as they lay in bed, Violet asked Lucas about the women in the congregation. He didn’t know them as well as he knew their husbands, he admitted, but he knew that the pie contest losses were seen as a disgrace in the minds of the ladies.
“They take their pie-baking very seriously,” he said, laughing. Bedtime was his favorite time of the day, holding Violet close to him as they shared their thoughts in the darkness of the night.
“Why do the Methodists always win if the judges are impartial?” she asked. “Lyle said they bake better cakes. Is that true?”
Lucas stroked his wife’s smooth shoulder. He was endlessly fascinated by the texture of a woman’s skin. Her touch revived him; his life before her seemed as if it had been lived in the desert, deprived of water. With her and the twins, he felt connected to the wider world of his community, where such things as the thwarted pride of a pie contest mattered deeply.
“I don’t know. Maybe Lyle is right and their pies are better.”
That wasn’t the conclusion which the women of the Pie Committee had reached on Tuesday when Violet, with some trepidation, took the wagon to Loretta Calleigh’s home. She had adopted the suggestion of Polly Zeiner, the mother who fed her son raisins in church to keep him occupied, and had secured the twins in the back of the wagon with leading strings fastened to the wagon boards. They had toys to play with, and raisins to eat. It was not a long journey, and when she arrived, the twins were in good humor and still in their places.
“There’s thievery somewhere!” Mrs. Calleigh vowed. “Mark my words.”
“I don’t think so,” Polly said calmly, unaware that in disagreeing with the Deacon’s wife, she was insubordinate. “I think we need to mix up the pies. Instead of putting the pies on one table for the Baptists and one for the Methodists, we need to have the pies all together. Someone can register each pie and give it a number when it’s brought in for the competition. It’ll have to be someone who can be trusted,” she added. “Then the pies can be displayed on a table, all together, Baptists and Methodists. The judges will sample each by category so that the flavors don’t dull their tastes.”
Deacon Calleigh’s wife stared at Polly with respect. “You’ve done this before,” she deduced.
Polly smiled modestly. “A time or two. But I’m not a prize-winning pie baker.”
“How do we get the Methodists to agree?” asked another one of the women.
“If they don’t agree, we say we’re holding our own contest and we open it to all the women in town. Which we should do anyway,” Polly said. “A pie contest should represent the best of our town. We’ll talk to the mayor and see what he thinks.”
Mrs. Calleigh was not often flummoxed, but she was clearly impressed by Polly’s clear-headed thinking. “I think you should talk to Mayor Heidrich,” she said firmly.
“First I’ll talk to the leader of the Methodist Pie Committee,” Polly stated. “We’ll go to him together.”
“I know Elsie Harrow and she’ll never agree. If you listen to her, you’d think that God Almighty favors her lemon pie over anything the angels could bake.”
Polly smiled serenely. “I’ll see if I can convince her.”
“And she did!” Violet reported to Lukas a week later when they were eating supper. Lucas was almost too absorbed in the tenderness and taste of the coffee roast that she’d baked to be listening, but as he chewed, he marveled with her and agreed that Miss Polly was a force to be reckoned with. Her husband, Leon Zeiner, a cattle rancher like himself, was a quiet man, well thought of in town. “They went to the mayor and he agreed that the pie contest rules would change and it’s open to all women in town, not just the Baptists and Methodists.”
“I don’t see that it matters,” he replied. “Your pie is going to win.”
“The other ladies bake well,” she argued, pleased by his defense but dubious about her ability to compete with the others.
“Didn’t Miss Lily say that you were a pie contest winner of some repute?” He waved her doubts away with his fork before he speared another bite of meat. “I say you’ll win.”
The day of the contest dawned clear and cool, a pleasant late autumn morning and a perfect temperature for the pie contest. Lucas could detect his wife’s nervousness as they rode into town by the way her hands gripped the pie pan. Polly, who would not be entering a pie in the contest, had volunteered to keep the twins overnight so that Violet could bake late in the evening and then let her peach cinnamon pie cool and set. Violet brought her pie to the registration table where the mayor himself was bestowing the numbers on the pies and finding something complimentary to say about each entry. After she registered, Violet joined Lucas, who had collected the twins from Polly, and together they strolled through the town where the various social organizations were selling items to raise money for the tent revival that would take place in the summer of the next year. The Ladies Art Society had paintings from its members; Mrs. Wiltshire was selling her preserves; members of the Music Appreciation Organization were playing tunes and singing; Lucas joined them in the chorus of “Annie Laurie” as he dropped coins in the hat and vowed that he and Violet would find time to make music before the year was out. The twins were entranced by the toys that old Mr. Klapper had carved; Lucas bought them each a hobby horse to ride through the streets as they travelled past the vendors.
Finally it was time to gather inside the theatre, the only building that was big enough to hold the audience waiting to find out who would be this year’s pie contest winner. Conscious of the importance of their roles in this year’s contest, the judges were particularly sol
emn as they sampled the pies and recorded their scores on paper which they were careful to hide from view. The judges—pigtailed Li Quan, robed Father Benedict, and stoop-shouldered Mr. Cohen—talked quietly among themselves.
“I don’t envy them,” Lucas whispered to Violet. “That’s a lot of pie to have to go through.”
“You like pie.”
Lucas did like fresh baked pie but he didn’t much like competition over it. The ladies set such a store by winning, but he wondered if it was a good thing for them to fuss so much. It was just pie, after all; a tasty dessert to be enjoyed, but it wasn’t the be-all and end-all. A woman was just as good a wife whether she baked a prize-winning pie or not---“
His thoughts were interrupted by the major. “Judges, have you reached your decision?
The judges, who had been conferring for the last ten minutes, nodded portentously and handed the mayor the slip of paper on which the winner’s name and entry were written. Lucas gripped Violet’s hand. He knew her pie was the best and it didn’t matter what the judges said.
“Number 19—“
Violet gasped. Lucas looked at her. “What number are you?” he asked urgently. She looked faint.
“Mrs. Lucas Jackson’s Peach Cinnamon Pie. Congratulations Mrs. Jackson. Well done. Lucas must be a very happy man when it’s baking day in the Jackson household.”
Lucas stood up from his chair. “That I am, Mr. Mayor! That I am!”
Violet tugged at his and. “Sit down, people will stare.”
He did sit down. The twins were staring at him, their eyes round with wonder at his outburst.
Lucas was beaming, his brown eyes brimming with pride. “I have a champion wife,” he said to Violet. “I have everything I’ve ever wanted in you.”
“Mrs. Jackson, please come forward to claim your prize.”
Violet looked flustered. No one had said anything about a prize. Hesitantly, she walked to the stage. She could see Mrs. Calleigh and the Baptist wives clapping furiously as the major announced that for her triumph, she would receive tickets to the opera troupe which would be performing in El Paso the following week.
Violet’s accepted the two tickets and curtseyed her appreciation to the mayor. She knew how much this prize would mean to Lucas, who had once told her how he’d attended an opera when he was a boy and had always wanted to go again someday if a troupe ever came back.
When she returned to her seat, she handed the tickets to Lucas, who placed them reverently in his pocket. Polly leaned over. “You can leave the twins with us when you go,” she said.
Lucas leaned closer to his wife. “Maybe we’ll get that honeymoon after all,” he whispered. “At least one night of it.”
And then, not caring who was watching, Lucas Jackson gave his mail-order bride a long, lingering kiss that left no doubt of his feelings for the woman who was his prize.
**THE END**
CHAPTER ONE
“Men are weak.”
Armeda Winchester made this pronouncement as she gazed down at her youngest son, her only surviving son, who gazed back at her with the one eye that was able to focus, the other eye obscured by a swollen lid and a darkening orbit that would be blue-black by morning.
“I reckon that’s so,” he replied with the drawling, devil-may-care indifference that maddened her and up until now, had beguiled her with the easy charm that would be his undoing. And hers. And the ranch’s undoing, if she allowed that to happen. But she could not allow that to happen. She had endured too much, worked too hard, fought too many enemies to concede defeat to this child of her body, the only heir to the land that she and her husband, also weak, also self-indulgent, had seen grow to manhood.
She fixed him with the stern visage that kept the ranch hands obedient, even those who, when first hired, had thought that a woman would be easy to work for, until they learned that she was a fair employer but a demanding one. She paid well because she expected every dollar to be earned. Hoyle Slocum, the ranch overseer, who had worked for her before her widowhood, always warned the new hands that Armeda Winchester paid better than any of the other ranchers because she was tougher than any of the other ranchers. They didn’t believe him, until they had to face the steel-eyed stare when they missed a morning’s work because of a night spent too late in town the night before. It wasn’t a mistake that was made a second time.
Except for Owen Winchester, who worked as hard as any hand and played even harder. The son who, when he was not in the saddle at the Circle W, was in the saloons, upstairs with one of the girls or downstairs at the poker table. Owen knew his mother’s expectations and seemed intent on defying them. Hoyle could scold the hired men, but he couldn’t do the same with the man who would inherit the ranch when Mrs. Winchester was no longer in charge. She was a strong-willed, straight-backed woman who would be described as handsome, not beautiful, and in the 30 years that he had worked for first her husband and then her, he couldn’t recall a time when she’d been laid low by any malady of mortal man. Pregnancies had momentarily halted her, but not for long; the deaths of three infant sons had not stopped her; neither the marriages of her daughters nor the births of her grandchildren had interrupted her relentless sense of duty.
“They are weak until they find a strong woman who can prop them up,” she continued as if he had not spoken.
Owen Winchester tilted his head as if he were tipping his hat to her. He’d lost his hat in the barroom scuffle that had earned him the black eye, and the reddening bruise on his cheekbone was a receipt from another punch that had landed, but Owen had no hard feelings over the marks. He’d given as good as he’d gotten, and fighting kept a man trim, even if the fight was over a saloon girl he favored for his Saturday night frolicking. There was no emotional obligation to the girl; it was a matter of principle. His opponent understood this now, and if Sallie thought it meant more than that, she would not be the first to misinterpret a young man’s lust for something deeper. Owen did not trouble himself with the way women took on over him, or what they expected from him other than payment. If he chose to squander, in his mother’s oft-repeated words, his pay on whiskey and women, that was his business. He’d worked for the money and it was his to squander.
Her son’s dark eyes gave her polite attention, as if he were attending to her lecture. His eyes were his father’s and once, she’d been pliant to his long-lashed, merry look, before she learned to weather the charm that he liberally bestowed upon anything in skirts. Owen’s gleaming golden hair, a brighter version of the gilt locks, growing so gradually paler that it indicated no signs of ageing at all, was from Armeda. “Medie, gal, we’ve made us a handsome young’un,” Lance Winchester had crowed over his youngest, the only male child to live long enough to sprout curls and walk.
And so they had. The local girls gave him sidelong glances at barbecues and dances, as their mothers watched with hopeful yet worried expressions on their faces. The Circle W was an impressive spread, its cattle a lucrative inheritance. But the Winchester men were not destined for taming.
No, Armeda realized. If her son was going to settle down, she was going to have to wield a whip hand to make it happen.
“Tomorrow morning,” she told him, “you will leave for Jackson. You will go to your Aunt Rebecca’s. I will follow. When you return to the Circle K, you will have a wife. If you do not marry as I direct, you will not return to the Circle K.”
The bland expression vanished. “What are you talking about?” Owen demanded, his open eye blazing. “I don’t need a mother to tell me when to take a wife.”
“Most men do not,” she concurred. “But you are not most men. You are a wastrel. You will ruin this ranch and all that I have built. I will not let you destroy my work. Tomorrow, you go to Jackson. When you return, you will have a wife with you. If you do not, you will not return. I will turn you out with your horse, your saddle, and your Pa’s rifle, and your wages for the week. I trust I make myself clear.”
Hoyle told no one the reason wh
y Owen did not show up for work the next morning. He let them speculate, as they were wont to do, on the follies of the young man who was always ready with a quip, a round of drinks, or a fist as needed. But when he drove Mrs. Winchester into town to catch the stage for Jackson, he took the liberty of speaking his mind.
“There’s no ill will in the boy, ma’am,” he said. “I know he’s got a sporting streak in him, and he runs into a scrap now and then, but I’ll swear he’s as tried and true a man as ever sat in the saddle.”
“Perhaps,” she said, looking straight ahead, the firm line of her jaw visible below the curve of her gray bonnet. “But that sporting streak will lead to wickedness if it’s not brought to a halt, and marriage is the only way to do that. I will find a wife for him.”
“Ma’am,” he began. “A man knows what he wants in a woman and begging your pardon, it’s not likely to be what his ma thinks he should look for.”
“I am aware of that, Hoyle.”
The conversation ended. He’d said his piece. He liked the boy. Owen Winchester was no boy; he was . . . well, past 21. He’d been ten when his Pa was killed in a fight over a bad poker hand, and that was going on twelve years ago, making him 23 or thereabouts. Maybe if Armeda Winchester hadn’t been so strict with him when he was growing up, he’d have turned out differently. But she wasn’t a woman to tolerate deviations from the rules, and Owen Winchester had his Pa’s own knack for getting into mischief. Maybe she was right. Maybe what the boy needed was a strong woman. Maybe marriage and eventually, fatherhood, would settle him down and make the man of him that Armeda Winchester required of her son. But Hoyle felt a bit of pity for the poor girl brought into such an arrangement, with a mother-in-law who would never relinquish control and a husband who would never surrender to decorum. It was not a recipe for a peaceful household.