by Carla Kelly
ALSO BY CARLA KELLY
FICTION
Daughter of Fortune
Summer Campaign
Miss Chartley’s Guided Tour
Marian’s Christmas Wish
Mrs. McVinnie’s London Season
Libby’s London Merchant
Miss Grimsley’s Oxford Career
Miss Billings Treads the Boards
Mrs. Drew Plays Her Hand
Reforming Lord Ragsdale
Miss Whittier Makes a List
The Lady’s Companion
With This Ring
Miss Milton Speaks Her Mind
One Good Turn
The Wedding Journey
Here’s to the Ladies: Stories of the Frontier Army
Beau Crusoe
Marrying the Captain
The Surgeon’s Lady
Marrying the Royal Marine
The Admiral’s Penniless Bride
Borrowed Light
Coming Home for Christmas: Three Holiday Stories
Enduring Light
Marriage of Mercy
My Loving Vigil Keeping
Her Hesitant Heart
The Double Cross
NONFICTION
On the Upper Missouri: The Journal of Rudolph
Friedrich Kurz
Fort Buford: Sentinel at the Confluence
Stop Me If You’ve Read This One
© 2013 Carla Kelly
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form whatsoever, whether by graphic, visual, electronic, film, microfilm, tape recording, or any other means, without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief passages embodied in critical reviews and articles.
This is a work of fiction. The characters, names, incidents, places, and dialogue are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. The views expressed within this work are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Cedar Fort, Inc., or any other entity.
ISBN 13: 978-1-4621-0550-2
Published by Bonneville Books, an imprint of Cedar Fort, Inc.
2373 W. 700 S., Springville, UT, 84663
Distributed by Cedar Fort, Inc., www.cedarfort.com
Cover design by Angela D. Olsen
Cover design © 2013 by Lyle Mortimer
Edited and typeset by Melissa J. Caldwell
To Vondell Temple, my swimming buddy,
who doesn’t mind listening to story ideas
If you want to go fast, go alone.
If you want to go far, go together.
African Proverb
PROLOGUE
ADDIE HANCOCK STOOD back from the lace curtains so no one could see her. Rain drizzled down the glass, obscuring her favorite view of the Sierra Madres. From habit, she touched the space on her ring finger where her wedding ring used to be, turning an imaginary ring around and around.
It would have been the work of a minute to go downstairs to the dining room, get on her hands and knees, and feel under the claw-foot china cabinet until she found the ring she had flung at her husband two years ago. She never was much good at throwing things and he knew it, so he hadn’t even sidestepped when she yanked the ring off her finger and chucked it at him. He had just stared at her, stunned.
The ring had struck the lower drawer where Grandma Sada kept her tablecloths, bounced once, then rolled under the china cabinet because the floor tilted there. She knew the ring was still there, because they had both been too proud to retrieve it.
To put a finer point on the matter, Ammon couldn’t have easily gone to his knees for the ring he had saved for months to buy in El Paso. She never asked him what it cost, but she knew it was expensive. Papa said it was, and Papa had an eye for money.
Ammon was on crutches then, his leg broken in a logging accident that must have happened about the same time as her miscarriage. It had laid him up, and so he told her, when he finally found her at Grandma Sada’s house in Colonia García. He had clumped into the house calling her name, relief on his face to see her mingled with his obvious pain.
“My leg’s hurting so bad, Addie,” he had said, leaning against the dining room table as she just stared at him, her own face tight and stony. “I went home first, hoping I’d find you there. Hungry too. I need something to eat.”
Stung by that memory, Addie turned away from the window, but that only fixed her glance on the mirror, and she didn’t like to look at herself. She faced the rain again, still twisting the imaginary ring. Why was I so stupid? she asked herself for the thousandth time. He truly hadn’t known.
She closed her eyes, reliving the moment when she raged at him for not coming to her side at once when he learned about the miscarriage. She, ordinarily so quiet and calm—Thomas Finch’s model daughter—had berated her husband for his absence, never once thinking that he hadn’t heard the sad news. She had ripped him up one side and down the other while he stared at her, his mouth open, his tanned face going whiter and whiter. If she had slashed him open, peeled back his skin, and dumped salt under it, he couldn’t have looked any worse.
Why couldn’t she have accepted his astonishment for what it was? He had no idea what had happened to her during his three-week freighting trip to Pearson and the lumber camp. He had no knowledge of her pain.
Their pain. And when he just looked down at the floor, Addie had thought it was shame at his reprehensible behavior. She knew how much that lumber contract meant to him, to them, just starting out. It had never occurred to her until much, much later that he hurt too at the unexpected news flung at him.
“Am, I wish you had said something,” she told the lace curtains. Even as she said it two years after the fact, she knew she had never given him a chance to speak. Her rage had overpowered her, she who never got angry or even raised her voice. She had never dealt with such loss before, and in her agony, she compounded it.
If only she had called him back or followed him out of Grandma’s house. He had stumped away so awkwardly on his crutches, so it wouldn’t have been difficult to stop him or just keep up with him. She had let him walk from her life, his head still down. She had flayed him alive. Barely breathing, she had watched him swing himself onto the wagon seat, scrabbling with his hands to keep his hold even as his crutches slipped out of his grasp.
A paisano hoeing weeds around Brother Thayn’s corn had hurried across the lane to put her husband’s crutches on the wagon seat. Addie still remembered the man’s eyes so big with concern and his own darting, fearful glance at her house. Had she shouted loud enough for a common laborer to hear her?
Addie rubbed her arms and watched the rain fall, looking down that same lane her husband had traveled two years ago. She wanted to skip what happened next, gloss it over, and pretend Ammon Hancock hadn’t really halted his team at the end of the lane, looked at the sky, and wailed.
The sound still rang in her ears. Once, she had heard Mexicans wail like that, when she was a little girl passing a graveyard. Mama called it keening and clapped her hands over Addie’s ears against the awful sound, half-way between a murmur and a low note held too long. The Hancocks had always been closer to their Mexican neighbors than most of the colonists. Ammon said he had heard keening during that spring years ago when so many children died of diphtheria. He had talked about it once, and she had shushed him, saying something idiotic about “Mexicans and their drama.”
When he stared at the sky and keened his own sorrow, she had dropped to her knees in anguish. It had not occurred to her that he would feel as bad as she did about her terrible news. Maybe he really hadn’ t heard, even though Papa said he had sent a telegram to Pearson. Maybe she was wrong.
“If only I had gone to you,”
she whispered to the curtain. “If I had gone to you, you would have returned.” She looked at the empty lane again. “Maybe you would have returned.”
If. If. If I had stayed here in García, maybe we could have patched it up, she thought. If Papa and Mama hadn’t hurried me out of the colony and up to Provo, maybe we could have talked.
With each day, week, and month that passed, reconciliation—always a shy guest at any gathering—had withdrawn, rebuffed. Papa had told her over and over that the Hancocks were a ramshackle bunch, and she had started to believe him. Reconciliation required a heart willing to listen and knees willing to bend and pull a ring out from under a china cabinet. Why was it that pride had no difficulty shouldering into that same gathering? One push and it sent reconciliation sprawling.
Why had she been so heartless to rip up every letter he sent her, stick it in an envelope, and mail it back to Pearson, where he had moved after his leg mended? She did that cruel thing every week for a year. Finally his letters dribbled down to every other week, then one a month, and then nothing.
Funny how even the revolution going on around them had not really penetrated until the letters stopped. Was I that self-centered? she asked herself and knew the answer.
Only last week, when Papa came to visit his ailing mother-in-law and complain about the rebel armies and the federales who looted the colonies with equal impunity, Papa had pounded his hand on the dining room table. His face red, he had declared to her mother, “I regret that we ever came to this horrible country. I’ve lost horses, cattle, hay, and everything except … except my suspenders! We’re leaving.”
And so they left, putting their ranch outside of Colonia Juárez in the hands of caretakers. Maybe life would get better, Papa reasoned, when one faction or the other grew strong enough to hang onto power in Mexico City and leave the Mormons alone.
The only fly in Thomas Finch’s ointment had been his mother-in-law’s sudden turn for the worse (after years of turning for the worse, he had fumed to his wife), and her unwillingness to leave her home in Colonia García with its fine furniture.
The old lady had proved to be unusually insistent, and truth to tell, Papa had lost interest in her plight in his eagerness to get away. He was like that, Addie knew. She didn’t doubt that he was already planning his next venture in a locale far removed from Mexico. She wasn’t surprised when he approached her one night, turned on that charm he typically reserved for possible business partners, and wheedled her into staying with Grandmother Sada Storrs.
She saw through his unctuous sincerity this time, berating herself for not noticing it sooner. She listened to his blandishments, his assurance that she would be safe because the other colonists would watch out for her and Grandma, and wondered why she had ever believed a word he had said.
She agreed to stay behind, not so much because he convinced her that all was certainly well in Zion, but because she was suddenly ashamed of her father. All she wanted him to do was leave.
He did, along with Mama and her two little sisters. Mama had cried, but Papa hadn’t looked back once. As she watched them go, Addie realized that everyone she had ever cared about had disappeared down that lane that she knew led eventually to Colonia Juárez, then to the Mexico North Western Railway in Pearson, and the border two hundred miles away.
The whole affair turned her even more quiet than usual, until Grandma Sada took her hand one night and held it tight, despite her growing frailty. “My dear Adaline, do you regret that you did not leave?” she asked, her voice so plaintive.
Addie shook her head, because she knew that was what Grandma needed. After her grandmother was asleep, she had gone to the window again.
“What I regret, Grandma, is that I did not stop my husband two years ago,” she said softly. “Regret is the worst word I know, unless it’s remorse.”
ONE
THE MORMONS CROSSED the border at Dog Springs, in the brand-new state of New Mexico, the forty-seventh state in the union, which many of Ammon Hancock’s compadres had left behind in 1885, before he was born.
If Pa had been there, he probably would have remarked that Ammon and his fellow priesthood bearers were a sorry lot, growling and snarling about leaving behind homes, crops, land, and cattle because they were good Mormons and listened to their leaders. Good thing Pa wasn’t there, Am decided. He listened to his leaders better than Pa did.
As it was, their mile-long column of horses and wagons had to perform a little dance and wave their two white flags to avoid being shot by Negro troops stationed on the border to watch out for Mexican revolutionaries. There weren’t any flies on the 9th Cavalry, though. As soon as the Buffalo Soldiers realized who they were looking at, their sergeant came out and waved them onto US soil.
Ammon grinned at the collective sigh that seemed to rise from the whole column of dusty, smelly, tired brethren. It had been a long two days, traveling across harsh country and avoiding all roads, because guerillas and federales alike were watching for fresh horses to steal, and the column had five hundred horses. It had been an even longer wait for the men from Colonia Dublán and Colonia Juárez, hiding out and waiting for the men from the mountain colonies to join them. Telephone lines and telegraph poles had been an early casualty of the revolution, working only now and then.
And here they were, back in the land of the brave and the home of the free. Ammon looked around, taking note of the riders like him who were born and raised in Mexico and maybe not even eligible for a welcome at all. He certainly didn’t intend to call anyone’s attention to his Mexican citizenship.
He had a larger concern; his backside ached from two days of sitting on the wagon seat of his freight wagon. The length of time was nothing new—his business was freighting—but he quickly noticed the difference between traveling so-so roads and no roads at all. He glanced behind at Blanco, tied to the back of his wagon and prancing along with lots of spirit left in his gait.
“What do you think, Ammon?” asked the man sitting on the seat beside him. The wagons had been reserved for provisions and men too old to fork a horse for the journey.
“Too hot to think, Brother Masters, but I guess I’m glad.”
Hill Masters chuckled. “There’s a bunch of men not so happy Bishop Bentley and President Romney said to bail out.”
Ammon shrugged. “I follow my leaders. That’s all. We’ll go back when it’s safe.” He tried to straighten up and couldn’t avoid a groan. “Looks like dinner off the mantelpiece for a couple of days.”
“I think we left the mantelpiece behind, Am,” the older man said. Then he turned away, as though the thought was too large to handle.
Ammon tugged his hat lower on his forehead. The mantelpiece and everything else. He couldn’t help but think of Ma’s piano. As they waited in line to file through the border crossing, Ammon remembered the look on his mother’s face as she said good-bye to her piano. She ran her hand across the polished top. It was a real Steinway, freighted in from El Paso five years earlier with great difficulty—and considerable expense, Aunt Loisa delighted in chiding her. (Ammon had resisted the urge to remind his father’s sister that he had freighted it for free.)
Pa was telling his mother to hurry up because they had miles of dangerous driving just to get down to the train at Pearson, if there even was a train that General Salazar’s guerillas hadn’t blown up or appropriated. Aunt Loisa was giving Ma that pinched look that usually moved things along, but darned if Ma didn’t strip off her gloves, sit down, open the lid with a flourish, and play Beethoven’s Sonatina in G. She took all the repeats, while Loisa fumed in the doorway and Ammon leaned against the piano, trying not to smile too big.
She played the last two chords louder than usual, raised her hands high off the keys like a concert pianist, and kept her foot on the pedal until the sound drifted away through the quiet rooms, empty of people now and already starting to look abandoned. He remembered it never took long. He knew that from closing up the little home he had built for Addie.
Ma closed the lid and locked it, wiping away imaginary dust with her handkerchief. She looked up at Ammon, her eyes liquid with unshed tears. “I’ve lived here twenty-seven years, son.” She gave herself a little shake. “Stand up straight! Someone would think you’d never been taught!”
The rest of the Hancock children and cousins were in the wagon, and Pa had just settled his sister beside him on the seat. Loisa smoothed her skirts around her and smiled down at Ammon and his mother.
Ma smiled back and it was genuine. “It appears she left me the wagonbed with the kiddies,” she whispered to him when Loisa looked away. “Good thing I like the kiddies.”
Ammon followed his mother across the porch. He put his hand on her shoulder and felt her tremble. She pressed her lips tight together like she did in testimony meeting to keep from crying.
“You know where everything is. Better share that ham with the other García men before … before it disappears. You have clean socks in the laundry room. And if you have to leave …” She paused, unable to gulp back her tears, and Ammon tightened his grip on her shoulder. “Be sure to sweep out and lock the front door,” she finished in a rush.
She bolted for the wagon, but Ammon grabbed her for a hug, lifting her off the ground. “Don’t worry, Ma,” he told her.
She clung to him. “If the house catches fire, don’t forget to get the piano out.”
It was a family joke, but no one laughed this time. His sisters and cousins in the wagon started to cry, from Junebug all the way up to Elise, who had put her hair up and her skirts down this year.
“Better go. You know how Aunt Loisa hates to wait.”
She gave him another squeeze, straightened her hat, and let her son lift her into the back of the wagon. Ma took Junebug on her lap and whispered in her ear. Junebug waved to Ammon until they were out of sight down the road.
Nine days later, when the bishop got word for them to gather at the Stairs, a formation west of Colonia Juárez, Ammon swept out the rooms, locked the door, and pocketed the key.