Angel's Embrace

by Charlotte Hubbard

  “Better drink up, son,” Malloy said, handing him a dipper of water from a bucket. “Soon as your mama and Carlton come back, we’ll have our service. Can’t think of a nicer place for it, either, here among these trees and honeysuckle bushes.”

  “Real peaceful,” Asa agreed. He shaded his eyes to look out across the pastureland. “I can just picture them fine thoroughbreds your daddy used to raise, and feel his pride in the home and family he had here.”

  “The house has really deteriorated,” Billy murmured, wincing when a loose shutter banged. “If Mama takes a notion to go inside, it’s gonna be a long time before she gets over her shock.”

  “A home falls into disrepair when the love leaves it—just like a life does.” Malloy walked around the overgrown hedgerow for a better look. “With some time and attention—lots of paint and pruning—this place could do somebody proud again. Have you considered coming back, now that Wes is gone?”

  Billy’s jaw dropped. How should he answer?

  “There was a time I wanted nothin’ more than—” he began, but once again his tongue didn’t feel fully connected to his brain. “I’ve been real happy trainin’ your Morgans! Beholden to you and Mercy for—”

  Malloy shushed him with a firm finger. Those golden eyes softened with a love that made his heart hammer in his chest. “I couldn’t have found a better ranch manager if I’d created you myself, Billy Bristol. But comes a time you want your own place—your own life—that’s what I want for you, too.”

  Billy opened his mouth to protest, but the rise of Michael’s eyebrows beat him to the punch.

  “No arguments, young man! We’ve got serious business to attend, and I wanted to speak my mind, man-to-man. Keeps things simpler.”

  Billy nodded, wiping his sweaty face with his handkerchief. Girlish voices drifted through the honeysuckle hedge, so he parted the leafy limbs to enter the garden where Mama had planted her favorite flowers. They grew in wild abandon now, brown-eyed Susans and day lilies poking through the Queen Ann’s lace and dandelions. But even the weeds made a pretty setting for the three girls as they sat around Eve again, entranced.

  “Back when we were kids,” she was saying, “the front porch of this place was surrounded by bright red poppies that waved like wildfire, and caladiums with pink streaks in the center—”

  “Elephant ears,” Solace clarified for little Grace.

  “—and those maple trees lining the front drive dropped little seed spinners in the spring. We’d toss them up like whirligigs,” she said wistfully, her brush moving as she spoke, “and in the fall, their red and orange leaves would catch the sun, well—almost like the fire in Billy’s hair!”

  He swallowed hard. Had she really noticed all those things about his home—about him—when they were kids? Her reminiscing made him ache for those days long ago, but that was foolish. Time marched on, and so had they. And they would continue until they were in a casket like Wes—

  And what will you have to show for it? How will you spend the rest of your life?

  Once again he swore Judd or Michael was talking to him, guiding him away from morbid thoughts. He kept walking until he was behind Eve, looking down on her picture.

  His heart stopped. He didn’t know much about art, except that she was painting with watercolors, and their muted, translucent hues gave his home a dreamlike quality that surpassed even his fondest memories of it.

  “You . . . you recalled every little detail,” he breathed, drinking in the subtle wash of color in the lilacs and the sweep of green lawn and those poppies that blazed in the afternoon shade. “Why, I could walk up those steps, between those white pillars, and swear the rooms inside would be just like they were back then, too. Just . . . perfect.”

  Eve smiled up at him, her eyes mirroring his nostalgic thoughts. “This was the prettiest place in town,” she replied softly. “So cool and inviting, with all these trees, even on the hottest summer days. I must’ve painted it a dozen times since you went away, Billy. Even now, I see it like it was then.”

  Are you listening?

  He blinked back tears, wishing some sort of miraculous magic could restore the house—and the simplicity of their childhood days.

  But that was a silly thing to wish for. The truth stared him in the face as he looked across the sparse lawn and up the sunken, peeling front steps—and heard the incessant banging of that loose shutter.

  “There’s not a breath of air movin’,” he rasped, “so why is that dang shutter makin’ such a racket?”

  The girls followed his gaze, and Lily giggled. “Could be an angel up there is trying to get your attention, Billy!” she replied. “An angel who won’t let you rest until you do what you were born for.”

  He blinked. Once again the princess in pink spoke of higher realms as though she dwelled in them on an everyday basis, as though she knew his purpose on this earth—on this estate—better than he did.

  “Or maybe it’s Wesley’s ghost, tryin’ to scare you away!” Solace widened her big brown eyes at him as part of a very scary expression, until Temple Gates frowned at her.

  “We should respect the dead, Miss Solace,” she reminded the girl, “just as we should respect Mister Billy’s feelings about his brother. Think how horribly upset you’d be if it were your sister or brother who—”

  “It’s all right, Temple.” Billy smiled down at those bright faces, at that painting, as Eve brushed in the pink of a sunrise across a cloud-dappled sky. “If Solace didn’t tease me, I’d think she didn’t like me anymore.”

  “Can we come and see you after you move back here, Billy?”

  “Good idea! Can we stay the summer and help you fix the place up?”

  Lily and Solace, bless their hearts, were looking at him with questions he hadn’t considered since he’d learned Wes owned the place. But why did everyone assume he’d want to leave Abilene for this run-down house and acres of dried-up pastureland surrounded by broken fences? What was there in Richmond for him, except heartache and hard work?

  You’ll have those at the Triple M, too, you know.

  He was working himself into a real quandary, over a situation that might not even be possible—and then Eve signed the painting with her fountain pen and handed it to him.

  “It’s not dry yet. Be careful how you hold it,” she warned him. Her smile beamed up at him, open and warm. “I wanted you to have this, since you never got the one I mailed you last spring. And who knows how long it might be until . . . until I see you again?”

  Her lips parted and that little furrow between her eyebrows made funny things wiggle in his stomach. Billy held the picture gingerly, around its edges, again at a loss for words.

  “Thank you, Eve,” he whispered. “I—I can’t tell you how much I’ll enjoy lookin’ at this. And I truly hope things’ll go well for you at your mother’s.”

  As she hesitated over her reply, the clatter of wagon wheels and horses’ hooves came down the long lane.

  Billy glanced around, hoping everything looked all right—hoping Mama had found a dress that suited her—dreading the farewell that would take place in a matter of minutes. That was his twin in the casket beside the grave he’d dug, and no matter how surly Wes had become, Billy felt a deep sadness about losing him before they could have a proper reunion.

  And maybe that never would have happened. He had to start facing a lot of facts head-on, didn’t he?

  “Better wash up and change my clothes,” he murmured as the wagon pulled to a stop in in front of them. Mama was draped in black from her veiled hat to her gloves, to the dress that flared to reveal black petticoats as Carlton helped her to the ground. He was wearing a new black frock coat and trousers, no doubt to keep peace with Mama. Mercy, too, had found a simple, dark dress. Her expression told him the mood in the carriage had been bleak indeed.

  But it was time for that. Billy fetched his better clothes, and then took Eve’s painting through the back kitchen door with him. He brushed the debris from t
he table where Beulah Mae had made her pies, and laid his treasure there. Because he did treasure this picture.

  And as he put on his dark pants and a clean white shirt, Billy let his mind wander . . . gazing at those red-orange poppies and shining white pillars . . . wondering about the way things were happening today. If he was hearing voices, and being summoned by angels—or Wesley’s ghost—and getting questions he didn’t have answers for, there surely had to be a reason.

  “As we gather here to remember Wesley Bristol, we should remember that he was—and is—a child of God.”

  Michael Malloy’s voice rang clear and calm in the shaded cemetery out behind the gardens. They stood inside the spiked iron fence that marked his daddy’s resting place—a simple stone overlooking the pastureland Owen Bristol had loved so much.

  Billy stood with his hands clasped, staring at the gaping grave and the casket on the ground beside it. Beside him, Mama was crying into her handkerchief as Carlton held her. The others were arranged around the grave with somber faces, the little girls in front of their mother, while Mercy—Mercy seemed to mourn the disappearance of Mama’s son as if he were her own.

  “It’s perhaps the greatest comfort of our faith that God loves us even when we ignore him,” Malloy went on. He spoke with his head slightly bowed, holding the Bible he’d brought from the sideboard at home. “It was for sinners like us he sent Jesus, who taught us that judgment is the Lord’s task and not ours. While we feel sadness and disappointment over Wesley’s life and the choices he made, and while we’ve wished things could’ve happened differently, we must remember that all things are in God’s hands.”

  He looked up then, smiling sadly at Billy and his mother. “And even when we defy Him and behave in ways that God could never condone, He uses our lives to work out His purpose. It’s a miraculous thing, to think the Lord can love us in our brokenness, and create order and wholeness from the messes we’ve made while we lived on His earth.”

  “Amen to that,” Temple murmured.

  “It pleases me that Lily helped me choose today’s Scripture, and asked if she could read it.” Michael opened the ponderous volume to a page marked with faded red ribbons. As Lily stepped to the head of the grave beside him, he held the Bible for her.

  “I’m reading from the third chapter of Ecclesiastes,” she announced, looking at each of them with solemn confidence. “Daddy and I thought it was a fitting passage, considering all the things that have happened this past week with Billy’s brother, and before that, when Eve came to us. It makes me feel better about Joel’s running away, too.”

  Billy’s heart throbbed with pride. Not quite nine, Lily was a wonder—and as they often had, he speculated about whether she was older than her father’s note had told them. She stood beside Michael in a spot where the sun shone through a gap in the trees, so much a part of that heavenly light that she resembled an angel herself.

  “‘To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven,’” she read. “‘A time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted. A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down and a time to build up.’”

  Beside him, Mama shifted, but she was listening, as spellbound as everyone else in this circle their two families had become. Billy hoped she was finding comfort in these ancient words. With her, it was hard to tell.

  “‘A time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance,’” Lily read on. Her finger traced the words as she read. As he held the heavy Bible for her, Michael was crying.

  “‘A time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing—’”

  Billy’s mind drifted with the rhythm of these familiar phrases—mostly so the finality of this funeral didn’t make him burst into tears—tears Wesley had always made fun of when they were kids.

  “‘—a time to keep silence and a time to speak; a time to love and a time to hate—’”

  He glanced up to find Eve gazing straight at him, as though trying to read his mind and figure out what came next. As though he knew! Her green eyes and pretty face stood out in sharp relief against her black bonnet, and it occurred to him that he could be gazing at that face for years to come, if he’d only say something—

  But it was too soon. He’d felt that way about Emma once, too. Although he’d been wrong to go along with her proposal just because she was lost and lonely. As this passage said, there was a time for love and hate—a time to keep and a time to throw away—

  “‘—a time of war, and a time of peace.’”

  Lily stepped aside so Michael could straighten to his full height. With the Bible in one arm and his other around Lily, the man with the sandy hair and heart of gold looked around the faces in their circle.

  “We would do well to remember that life and death remain a mystery to us mortals—that we’re not meant to understand why Wesley lived the way he did, or died like he did,” he remarked quietly. “But I hope that as time heals us, we’ll recall the better qualities this young man possessed. And we’ll remember him as he was before the Border Ruffians turned him to their own way.”

  He opened the Bible again, to the New Testament this time, and then looked at the dark casket and the grave it would fill. “As we commit Wesley’s body to the ground and his spirit back to God, I’ll close with verses from Romans that have always reminded me that in life and in death, we belong to God.”

  He glanced down at the page, breathing deeply. “’Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” he asked—as though he expected each of them to have an answer. “‘Shall tribulation or distress? Or persecution or famine, or nakedness or peril—or sword?’”

  Michael looked up, to close with words he’d committed to memory long ago. “‘For I am persuaded that neither death nor life . . . nor angels nor principalities nor powers . . . nor things present nor things to come . . . nor height nor depth nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’

  “And Lord, we ask You to enfold us in Your love and hold us in Your hand as we mourn the passing of Your child Wesley,” he prayed. “Give us light that we may see the way You would have us live now, so that his life was not in vain.”

  “Amen,” Asa murmured in a shuddery voice.

  “Amen,” filled the little grove in a variety of subdued voices.

  Numbly, Billy joined Michael and Carlton and Asa as they raised Wesley’s casket by wide bands of leather the undertaker had provided, steadying the box over the grave and then lowering it. Mama and Eve and Mercy were crying openly now. Just as well, since he didn’t want to hear that awful thump when Wesley hit bottom.

  “You and Carlton should be with your mother now,” Malloy whispered to him. “Asa and I will finish up here.”

  Billy nodded blindly, aware that each of the ladies was dropping a rose from the spindly bushes out front onto the casket before leaving the fenced enclosure. Mama lingered, quivering as she gazed into the grave. When Temple guided the girls out ahead of him, Billy threw himself into Michael’s embrace. “Thank you, for—”

  “It was the least I could do, son. I’m so sorry.” Malloy’s arms tightened, expressing a deep devotion that had grown like a wild prairie rose bush over the years: not always picture-perfect, but strong and beautiful all the same.

  Had Wesley seen him hugging another man this way—

  Despite the crude names that came to mind, spoken in his brother’s coarse adult voice, Billy buried his head against his guardian angel’s strong, warm shoulder. He sobbed like a kid who’d lost his—well, his twin brother; the boy he’d been so much like, yet so very different from since before he could first remember. He didn’t understand the man Wesley had become, but he would always wish things had turned out differently.

  As he stumbled past his daddy’s tombstone and between the iron gate posts, Billy realized that from he
re on out, the way things turned out was largely up to him.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  The next day, Mama and Carlton arrived at Lexington’s Union Pacific train station shortly after Billy and the Malloys did. Before his mother could see it, he took down a wanted poster of his brother, plastered alongside reward notices for the Younger brothers and Frank and Jesse James. He folded it and stuffed it into his back pocket before going over to greet them.

  The detective looked drawn and tired. Billy had heard his low voice soothing Mama often during the night, through the wall between their hotel rooms. But Harte’s eyes expressed an anticipation he wouldn’t put into words.

  “Your mother and I are staying in Richmond for a few days, to look into a couple of business opportunities. We’re thinking of buying one of the hotels in town,” he announced. “For her, it’s a chance to live closer to Olivia, of course.”

  Billy had a hunch Carlton was also setting up a cover for his Pinkerton activities. “She’ll like that,” he agreed. “It’ll help the days pass faster.”

  “She’s never been terribly happy in Kansas,” Harte admitted. “But here, she can tend Wesley’s grave when she wants to. That’s important to her.”

  Billy nodded, noting how subdued Mama looked this morning. Recalling her weeping, wailing hysteria for months after Daddy died, he was relieved that she’d taken more control of herself since she’d married Carlton. Maybe those years of carrying out the illegal schemes of a con artist had taught Mama to appreciate a simpler life with a man who lived to please her.

  Whatever allowed her to stand at the platform blotting tears instead of wailing in self-pity, Billy was glad for it. He took her in his arms, amazed at how small and delicate she felt. Mama laid her head on his shoulder and sighed like a lost little girl.