by John Boyd
Ian was brought to his feet by the appearance of Gabriella. Framed in the doorway, she wore a pink gown which flowed to her ankles from a sash of white ribbon around her waist and a hat, wide-brimmed and yellow. Almost gasping at the vision, Ian managed to stammer, “Good morning, Miss Stewart.”
Not unaware of his reaction, she blushed slightly.
“I tried on a new hat for you. It’s glazed straw, and I thought it might be best for rainy weather. Do you like it?”
“Ma’am I ain’t seen no hat half so pretty in all my life. If one drop of rain touches that hat, I’ll gun the raindrop down.”
She smiled at his witticism, lifting the hat to fluff her curls, and said, “Now, wouldn’t you just know it would rain.”
“It’s just misting a little, ma’am. Not enough to get your shoe tops wet if your ankles stick out from under the buggy top.”
Somewhat shyly they both stood and talked for several minutes about the weather, of its danger to the health of her mother’s chickens and the possibility that the dry gulch behind the house might overflow and flood the hen houses. Between them they tugged and stretched the subject of the rain in a pleasant, conversational taffy pull until the widow reentered the parlor.
“My, what a handsome matched pair you two make,” she said, breaking the spell. “But breakfast is ready.”
G-7 caught dissonances in the older woman’s voice as she complimented the two, a subtle conflict of interests which Ian must have detected.
“Mrs. Stewart, I just got to stand here, flatfooted, and tell you, you got a daughter no woman in Wyoming can compare with but her mother.”
“Oh, bother!” Mrs. Stewart stammered. “You flatter me, but I can’t say I don’t like it. Now, come and get it. I’ve fixed a man-sized breakfast for a real man: scrambled eggs, flapjacks, smoked bacon, sausage, souse meat, red-eye gravy, grits, hot buttered biscuits with jelly and jam, and all the coffee you can drink. It ought to hold us till after we get back from church. Then I’m going to fix you the best fried chicken dinner you ever tasted.”
He had forgotten that respectable girls were chaperoned, but, strangely, her reminder did not disturb him. He stood back to let the contrast in feminine pulchritude precede him into the kitchen-dining room, comparing the sway of Miss Stewart to the bounce of Mrs. Stewart.
Only one flaw marred the grandeur of the colossal breakfast. In the formal atmosphere of a courtship, Ian found the terms of address, “Miss Stewart” and “Mrs. Stewart,” somewhat tongue twisting.
Mrs. Stewart righted the matter. “Heck, Ian. Just call her Gabe and me Liza. I feel like I’ve known you for twenty years, or maybe I feel like I’d have felt meeting you twenty years ago.
“But, mother,” Gabriella protested, “it wouldn’t be proper for Brother Winchester’s congregation to hear me called Gabe. I can’t let those people get too familiar, since I have to birch their children, sometimes twice a day.”
In the hour of breakfast, Ian found that Brother Winchester, the Methodist preacher, was also the mayor of Shoshone Flats during the weekdays and that people had been looking forward all week to his sermon, “What Heaven Is Like,” because Brother Winchester was so good at giving his congregation hell. Ian also learned that Brother Will Trotter’s body was being kept on ice and his funeral delayed until Wednesday because of a church picnic on Tuesday which all the non-Mormons in the valley would attend.
Liza had heard of Ian’s gunfight with Billy Peyton and offered him the protection of her chicken ranch. “I got a long bore shotgun, and if the Mormons come, I’d be a lot more help than Sheriff Faust. If you want to put up here with us and go to the picnic Tuesday, I guarantee you’ll be safe with me.”
Although Ian planned to leave Monday, he reflected on Liza’s invitation that he stay here with “us” and be protected by “me.” Maybe Liza figured if he stayed here over Monday, while Gabriella was in town running the restaurant, she might beat her daughter’s time with Ian. Strangely, the idea intrigued him, though not enough to divert him from his purposes.
“Thank you, Liza, but I ain’t scared of Mormons. Anyhow, I ain’t educated enough to hide out with a schoolteacher and her mama.”
“Ignorance, that’s for me,” the widow said. “I never read a book in my life, excepting one Gabe made me read about a woman with a house full of girls, a book writ by somebody named Louisa Allcock…”
“Alcott, mother.”
“… who didn’t know mountain oysters about raising girls… Gabe’s father was a great reader, and Gabe inherited the family curse. Reading’s what got her pa killed.”
“Mother! You know daddy died in a fall from a horse.”
Horrified reproach in the daughter’s voice stopped the pellmell speech of her mother abruptly, and Ian filled the embarrassed silence with a comment. “I ain’t never read much, myself, excepting McGuffey’s books.”
He hoped the remark would put an end to book talk because literary discussions embarrassed him, but Gabriella would not let his modesty go unchallenged.
“You were doing all right with Bacon’s essays.”
“Yes’m but I thought he was a cookbook.”
The widow had been weighing a course of action which she took. “Gabe don’t want me to talk about her pa, but I feel I got to warn you anyhow—reading can kill you.”
Feeling he was forced to take sides, Ian tried to balance himself between the two women. “Yes’m, I reckon, though I ain’t heard of anybody getting gunned down by a book.”
“You almost saw it done to Billy Peyton,” Liza corrected him. “He drawed on you because he wanted to be like them dead-eye Dicks in the dime novels he reads to impress Gabe… Her curse is catching, Ian. Reading most nigh got her beau killed. John Milton killed her pa.”
“Mother!” Gabe’s exclamation was an order the widow obeyed.
It was plain to him that there was a skeleton in this family’s closet, but he accepted the knowledge with equanimity. There was a skeleton in the McCloud family’s closet, and he was it. At the moment he was more curious about this John Milton, a gunfighter he had never heard of, and he was even more intrigued by the thought processes of the widow. She might well be right about Billy Peyton, whom Ian had already suspected of being jealous of his own reading ability. For an ignorant, uneducated woman, the widow had a good head on her shoulders.
“Leastways,” Liza continued, “the Alcott woman didn’t know doodly squat about the tribulations of a widow raising an orphaned daughter.”
Ian listened sympathetically as Liza outlined the problems of bringing up a daughter without a man around to help, but inwardly he didn’t feel too sympathetic. Her husband had been dead for less than a year, had died after Gabriella had started to teach school, and Liza seemed to be doing well with a four-room house, a chicken ranch, and the family restaurant.
Still, to commiserate, he suggested that she might sell boxed chicken lunches to the stage passengers to eat on the road. “Give Mr. Birnie two cents’ commission on each twenty-five cent box, and he’ll sell the boxes for you, maybe put them on the cost of a stage ticket.”
“One cent would do it, Ian. By golly, that just shows you what the guidance of a man can do for a poor widow woman. I’ll corner the old skinflint in church this morning. If you decide to settle in Shoshone Flats , I’ll cut you in for a nickel a box just for the idea.”
He thanked her for her generosity and told her if it wasn’t that he had to get back to El Paso and his cattle-buying office, he would take her up on the offer.
Liza, with her appreciation for men and her quick head for making money, would make some cowpoke a good mother-in-law, Ian thought. As a matter of fact, Liza, with her common sense and enthusiasm, and Gabriella, with her book learning and modesty, would make some Mormon a well-balanced pair of wives.
No. It would never do for the Gentile mother and daughter to wed the same Mormon. Gabe was too sensitive to be married to her stepfather. Any son of hers by the man would be her stepbr
other, which would make Gabriella, as the stepsister of her own son, her own stepmother, and Gabe was too young to have an eighteen-year-old stepdaughter. Ian realized the idea was whimsical, but the speed at which he made the interfamilial connections amazed him. The tumble in the stagecoach had reshuffled his brain and stacked the deck.
He relished the breakfast, down to the last grit and last dab of red-eye gravy. Afterward, seated between the two women on the drive to church, he found them equally enjoyable. Lithe Gabriella sat modestly apart, telling of the need for a better school house for Shoshone Flats, while Liza, with her greater spread, talked man-and-woman talk with thigh pressure. Yes, he thought, they were a well-matched span of females.
It was still drizzling when they reached the church, and Ian was disappointed to see only one riding horse hitched to the church rack. Most of the families had come in covered buggies pulled by driving horses, and the one saddle horse present seemed to have been chosen to spare some nobler beast the rigors of bad weather.
Because of the rain, arriving members of the congregation were being greeted in the vestibule by Brother Winchester, the preacher-mayor, rifle straight and ramrod thin, whose gunmetal eyes glinted with pleasure when he met Ian.
“Welcome, Brother McCloud. I’ve heard about your good deeds already, and I hope this visit to our town won’t be your last. If the Lord sees fit to give you the courage to stay over till Tuesday, we’d be grateful to have you at our church picnic. It’s being held down close to the Mormon’s stake boundary. If any of the saints ride over to join us in Christian fellowship, some of the brothers will be bringing their rifles to welcome them, but we could use your pistol. Sister Liza’s furnishing the chicken hampers for our picnic.”
Sister Liza reached over and gave Ian a maternal hug.
“I’m giving him a sample for dinner. If that won’t persuade him to stay over for our picnic, he’s beyond salvation.”
“With your permission, Brother McCloud,” the preacher said, “I’d like to introduce you to the congregation before the sermon and ask you to say a few words.”
“He’d better, Reverend,” Gabriella enjoined, vying with her mother to give Ian a conversational hug, “because I want to show him off.”
“Well, preacher,” Ian said, “I don’t see how I can refuse, but I’m a mite shy around crowds and might not say much.”
“Just tell us a little something about yourself, son, and say a few complimentary words about our town.”
Entering the pew, Liza politely motioned him ahead of her so she wouldn’t come between him and Gabriella, and she whispered, “Brother Winchester’s running for mayor again next June. That’s why he’d like for you to say something nice about the town.”
“You say what you think, Ian,” Gabriella said. “After all, you have to live with your conscience. You don’t have to lie, even for a preacher.”
“I’ll tell the truth,” Ian said.
So he came to be seated between two of the loveliest Gentiles in the Shoshone Flats Methodist Church, and, in his opinion, the three of them made a good singing trio as he held the hymnal for the opening hymn. Mother and daughter had to lean toward him to read the words as they sang, and he found Gabriella’s perfume helped him on the high notes, whereas he favored Liza’s when reaching for the low notes.
After the plate was passed and Ian was divested of another of Brother Trotter’s silver dollars, Brother Winchester introduced Ian with the words, “It’s not yet time to eulogize our late Brother William Trotter. I’ll be doing that, Wednesday, at two p.m., but I would like to introduce and compliment the man who brought Brother Trotter in—Mr. Ian McCloud.”
Ian arose to polite applause. Looking out over the congregation, he spoke in a strong but modest voice. “Pm happy to be here, folks. I didn’t come under the best conditions, but I’ve been well treated by the merchants of Shoshone Hats, with one exception. One of the best things about your town is the chicken served in Miss Stewart’s Restaurant, furnished by the Widow Stewart. One of the worse things is the aim of your Mormon gunfighters. Howsomever, I think Dead Man’s Curve could use a little straightening.”
“You tell ’em, Ian McCloud!” A female voice screamed from the rear, and Ian knew it came from beneath a sunbonnet.
“Amen, or second the motion,” a masculine voice responded.
“I been traveling that road for twenty years,” the banshee wail continued, “and the only thing that’s gonna straighten it out is a new mayor for Shoshone Flats.”
“Sister Betsy, control yourself,” the preacher said. “There’s an administrative problem here, which the average citizen can’t be expected to understand; namely, who’s going to pay the labor?”
“Preacher,” Ian said helpfully, “why not use the jail prisoners in a road gang.”
“There ain’t no prisoners, Brother McCloud. Our good sheriff, Brother Faust, is as strong a believer in brotherly love, even when it’s against the town’s policy. But I thank you and welcome you to Shoshone Flats. My sermon for today is ‘Heaven as It Really Is.’ ”
Ian sat down as the preacher jumped quickly into his sermon. After fifteen minutes, Ian figured it might be time to excuse himself and go steal the horse, but a flurry of rain on the roof made him reconsider. Hiding out in weather like this, all night, waiting for the bank to open, could give a man lung congestion, and the lone saddle horse at the hitching rack didn’t look like much of a mudder. If he waited for the evening services, the weather might clear, and clearing weather would also give him a better selection of horses.
Also, Ian was beginning to pay attention to the sermon, and, for reasons he could not understand, was even growing interested.
Brother Winchester was describing the sights and sounds of heaven, beginning with the first sweet notes of Gabriel’s trumpet.
“Ah, sweet music to the ears of the saved, brothers and sisters, but a dirge unto the damned.”
He got past the golden gate in fine style, describing it with a jeweler’s attention to the details, but when he came to describing the throne of God, either his vision failed him or his voice faltered. “Pure radiance, brothers and sisters, shimmering, ineffable, surrounded by luminous flights of angels enwrapped in righteous robes of peace.”
Inside Ian, G-7 listened tensely. This earthman was giving a literal description of a launching pad with waiting pilots on a stand-by detail.
And Winchester’s human audience was straining to catch every dip and quaver of his voice when the preacher made a political error. “I tell you, brothers and sisters, I half-envy the soul of our late Brother Trotter, which, at this very minute, is walking up to that throne of radiance and all enveloping peace. Brother Trotter is done forever with life’s toil. For him, no more the ordeal of facing winter’s rages atop a coach seat, no more the fear of stage robbers, no more the toiling on the long upgrades, the breaking on the downgrades…”
“And no more Dead Man’s Curve,” Betsy Troop shrilled from the rear. “Ian McCloud for mayor.”
“No more the taunts of men, the bile of females, nor the scorn that civic merit from the nonvoter takes,” Winchester continued. His righteous wrath closed the breech, and a few of the women began to sob audibly as he swung back to the safer fields of heaven.
Whatever his faults as a mayor, Ian decided, Winchester was a spellbinding preacher, and he proved it at the close of the sermon. Repentance of sin was the key to paradise, he said, and he invited his audience forward to the alter to kneel and pray for forgiveness of their sins. He built his plea up to a final adjuration, “Now the time has come, brothers and sisters, to come forward and confess to Jesus and be saved. Come to Jesus, now, you sinners.”
On the word “now” the organist began the old hymn, “Come to Jesus Now,” but a quick-step march would have been more appropriate for the congregation. Almost as a body, it rose and went forward, with Liza Stewart leading the procession, and it was good that Liza should lead, Ian thought, because anyone in front of he
r would have been trampled in her rush to get to the altar. Gabriella sat pat.
“Are you going forward?” Ian asked the girl.
“Schoolteachers don’t sin,” she said. “But you go ahead, if you’re a mind to.”
“I’m a little shy about such things,” he admitted, “but Liza don’t seem backwards. She was pounding leather to get up there, and she don’t seem sinful to me.”
“A woman can think sinful thoughts,” Gabriella said, “and if my mother’s asking forgiveness for what I think she’s been thinking, well, I never!”
Ian could almost hear Gabriella’s jaws snap shut with indignation, and he hastened to comfort her. “Gabriella, she can’t even think sinful thoughts out there on the ranch with nothing but them chickens.”
“You don’t know mama!”
Brother Winchester was moving among his kneeling flock, bending to whisper words of inspiration and faith to each sinner.
Ian noticed that his ministrations over Liza were somewhat prolonged, and, in the middle of the church, Ian had a sinful thought regarding the preacher’s motives, but Winchester’s show of forgiveness seemed to soften Gabriella.
“You can help Sister Liza, Brother Ian,” she said, “by not looking at her as if you were studying her and by not saying complimentary things to her. Help her be strong, Brother Ian, for mama is weak.”
“Yes’m,” Ian promised, slightly addled.
“Now, if you wish to go up and join the others, Brother Ian, I’ll understand, but don’t kneel next to mama.”
It wasn’t shyness that restrained Ian but his schedule. If he went forward and confessed his sins, he might be here until Tuesday and he was leaving Monday morning.
“No, Gabriella, I come with you and I’m staying with you.”
Suddenly she reached over and patted the back of his hand, saying, “You are strong, Ian.”
Even as he thrilled to her touch, he thrilled more to the knowledge that there was something of her mother in Gabriella Stewart.
After the sermon, there was a brief fellowship period over coffee in the kitchen at the rear of the church. As the ladies gathered in one room to plan picnic hampers and as Liza corraled Mr. Birnie in an isolated corner, the men gathered around Brother Winchester to thank him for his soul-saving effort and for setting their feet on the path of salvation.