Wood smoke reached Grady’s nostrils. They were close to the cabin.
He stopped the horse and stepped down. He wanted to look the boy in the face for what he had to say next. “Noah, you probably don’t know where I’m going with this, so I’ll spell it out.”
Noah looked down at him gravely.
“Don’t hold it against your pa that he’s not a man of the territories yet. Most of us out here have spent years learning what we need to know. Give your pa time; he’ll do just fine. Remember, if you haven’t done it before, there’s no shame in making mistakes.”
Grady made sure he gazed square into Noah’s eyes. “Your pa, he’s a brave man. Not many would leave behind something they’re good at to try their hand at something unfamiliar. It’s a lesson I’m going to learn from him. Tomorrow I’m going to propose to Lucy and take a chance on family and following dreams, just like your pa has done. I only hope I’m half the man your pa is.”
Grady let that hang there in the silence, keeping Noah’s gaze.
Finally, the boy nodded.
Then smiled.
Chapter 22
“Near the end,” Jeremiah said, “there was the three of them, each hanging on a cross. Soldiers had nailed them hand and foot.”
Although he hadn’t meant to go on so long, from the beginning of the gospel story, he’d told it through almost to the end. About the lepers and the fathers who begged him to heal their children and the blind man and the pigs that jumped off the cliff. It seemed to Jeremiah that Reb had an innocent desperate hunger for the stories, so it was just natural to keep going, even with Kentucky shifting impatiently at the side of the fire, occasionally getting up to wander to the horses then wandering back again to the fire.
“Nailed to the cross?” Reb said. “Ain’t right. Sure them two, they was robbers; they deserved it. But him, he never did nothing but try to help people. And didn’t say a word to defend himself.”
Jeremiah stirred the fire with a stick. Embers flew into the air.
“That’s why Christmas is so special, Reb,” Jeremiah said. “If that baby hadn’t been born, he would never have gotten to that cross.”
“Just to die?”
“To die for me,” Jeremiah said quietly. “And for you. Right where you’re lying, that man died for you to fill that emptiness you have. Because he loved you like a father loves his son. Believe that Jesus was sent from God and believe in his message and ask him to take you home to him, and you’ll have peace, no matter what happens in your life, good times and bad.”
“I ain’t good enough to have someone die for me,” Reb said. He shivered. “Trust me on that.”
“Let me tell you the end of it,” Jeremiah said. “Then you decide. See, people were yelling at Jesus on the cross, and one of those robbers said just what you did. That it wasn’t right. And Jesus looked at him with all that love and told him that very day he would be in heaven with Jesus. No matter what a person’s done wrong, God loves him, and all it takes is to ask forgiveness.”
Reb hugged himself beneath his blanket, staring thoughtfully at the fire. “And the other fellow on the cross. The other thief?”
“Didn’t feel bad at all,” Jeremiah said. “Not for Jesus. Not for himself. He died with a hardened heart.”
Reb closed his eyes. They stayed closed so long that Jeremiah wondered if Reb’s fever had taken him again.
Kentucky rose from the fire yet one more time and walked toward their horses. The snow was so soft his steps made no noise.
Eyes still closed, Reb spoke as if he were speaking to himself. “I’m so tired. So very tired.” He opened them again. “Sure wish I could have been there,” he said, “hearing all that angel music.”
Reb’s voice got quieter and weaker as the fever began to take him away again. “Knowing all this about what that baby done and become when he growed into a man, I’d have been right up front, singing with the best of them.”
Chapter 23
When Jeremiah had busted his leg and Grace had been nursing him through the first few nights, he’d turned to her and said, just once in those sleepless nights, that if he ever died, he hoped she might look through his drawing pads, which he kept hidden under the mattress, and send his stories to someone who might put them in a book.
Grace hadn’t given that request much thought at the time. She doubted he was going to die. She had the four boys and a household to run. She’d been busy nursemaiding Jeremiah. There had been no opportunities to sit and wonder about what he’d kept secret and why.
Now, with the fire burning, the candle in the window almost a stub, and the boys back asleep, his request came to her mind. Send his stories to someone who might put them in a book.
Grace climbed the loft to their bed. The loft was just a platform in the rafters, and there was little room to stand, but she was always grateful for the relative privacy this gave them.
Under the mattress she found his drawing pad.
The light up in the loft was too dim for her to see what he had written. She took it down near a lantern and lifted the cover of the drawing pad.
The yellow light showed a delightful sketch of an old woman’s face, her cheeks like prunes, her hair wild like a nest of snakes. Underneath in bold lettering was a single phrase: Evil Eye.
So this was his secret dream. Taking stories and putting them on paper.
Thinking that Jeremiah might already be dead, Grace put a hand to her mouth and bit her knuckle. Her poor, sweet husband, spending time on this, too afraid to let her know.
Grace flipped to the next page. As a schoolteacher, Jeremiah had always been a stickler for good handwriting, and she was able to clearly read each word.
“Suzy!” I hissed that hot summer afternoon in our small Virginia town. “You git yourself out from behind that pickle barrel!”
“C’ain’t,” she hissed back. “She’s here! I don’t want the evil eye.”
“How many times do I have to tell you—” I cut myself short and grinned weakly at Granny Morris as she leaned on her cane and wobbled her way toward me down the store aisle. “Fine day, ma’am.”
Granny Morris glared at me. At least I think it was a glare. Hardly any light made it here in back of Guthrie’s General Store. And with enough light, her old face was wrinkled so bad a person couldn’t ever tell if Granny Morris was grinning or spitting mad.
“Josh Callison,” she said, “you get that egg-sucking grin off your face. I despise you as much as the rest of your kin.”
Grace giggled. She could hear Jeremiah telling it this way. What a delight, seeing it in words on paper. She resumed reading and began to get lost in the story.
Granny Morris turned her head and spit a blob of tobacco juice onto the rough wood floor. “Fact is, boy, I might decide to cast a spell on you too.”
Suzy whimpered from her hiding position behind the pickle barrel.
“You don’t scare me none.” She did, but I had to say it loud for Suzy to hear. Suzy was eight and needed a man of twelve like me to look after her. “I don’t believe in your evil eye.”
Granny Morris cackled. “That so, boy? Then you tell me why your gram’s lying on her deathbed. It learned her good, didn’t it, for spreading word that I were an old witch.”
I had nothing to reply to that. Gram was only a couple of days away from dying. She said it, and so did Doc Martin. And too many folks agreed it was Granny Morris and her evil eye that caused it.
“Cat got your tongue, boy?” Granny Morris cackled louder at my nervous silence. “I might go home right now and cast a spell to grow a frog in your stomach too!”
That was too much for Suzy. With a shriek . . .
Barking of the dog interrupted Grace’s reading.
Her heart leapt with sudden joy.
Only to turn to pain when she opened the door to see a stranger
Chapter 24
Grady stood in the doorway. A pretty woman with a tired face and worried smile watched him from inside. Be
hind her, he saw the heads of three boys. She shooed them, and they returned to peek around her. Grady guessed the oldest to be eight years old.
“Hello,” the woman said. Her eyes moved up and down as she looked at the snow that covered his hat and coat. She stepped back from the doorway. “Come in. You must be freezing. We’ve got some soup and you’re welcome to it.”
“Thank you kindly, but no,” he said. “My name’s Grady, and I ride for the Pony Express. Your husband—”
She brought her hands to her face. “He’s not hurt! We’ve been waiting on him, singing Christmas carols to pass time and—”
“He’s fine, ma’am. And your oldest boy came with me.”
“But Noah . . .”
“Tending to your horse. He saw that it was here and wanted to make sure it was fed.”
The woman smiled. “Just like Noah. Always taking care of things.”
Grady explained the rest of it, telling Grace about the accident and that Jeremiah was safe at the wagon.
“That sets me at ease,” she said. Still, her face looked tired and sad.
Grady took off a snowy glove and pulled a brown package from inside his jacket.
“He asked me to deliver this in case he didn’t make it here by tomorrow,” Grady said. She smiled as if he had handed her a bar of gold.
“Merry Christmas,” Grady said, giving her the other three packages. “He had all of these for the boys.”
“Merry Christmas,” she said back to Grady. Her eyes kept going to his coat. But Grady didn’t have anything for her.
“Well,” Grady said, “I’ve got to be moving on. Can’t let the storm get the best of me.”
Chapter 25
Jeremiah sat at the fire. Snow had begun to fall again.
Reb was in a fitful tossing sleep under the blanket on the other side of the fire.
And when Kentucky walked back to the fire from the horses for the final time, he had the mailbags thrown over his left shoulder and his Winchester in his right hand.
“Sorry, pards,” he said to Jeremiah. Kentucky flipped the Winchester so that, waist high, it pointed directly at Jeremiah’s chest as he sat in front of the fire. “Couldn’t help but see these saddlebags right on top of your supplies. What they’ve got inside, I need bad. So I’ll be moving on.”
“But—”
“I’m going to have to shoot you so I can load my brother on his horse and not worry about you making a play to stop me. Can’t leave no witnesses behind, neither. Maybe I’d have done you a bigger favor shooting you from behind so you couldn’t see it coming, but after hearing your sermon tonight, I thought you might want a chance to say your final prayers before you meet your maker.”
Jeremiah sat motionless. He did not beg, merely stared into the rifle barrel.
“Hurry up now,” Kentucky said. “Say them prayers.”
Jeremiah closed his eyes. “Lord, thank you for sending Jesus so that I may now go to the home you have prepared for me. Please give comfort to Grace and the boys. And, Lord, please be with this man’s soul. He needs you. In the name of Jesus I pray. Amen.”
Kentucky spit in anger. “You had no call to throw in that part about me.”
Jeremiah calmly gazed at the big man.
A sharp metallic click broke the short silence between Jeremiah’s prayer and the roar of the Winchester that was to come.
“Shoot him,” Reb croaked from behind them, “and I’ll have to shoot you, Kentucky. And don’t turn neither, or I’ll plug you before you get halfway round to facing me.”
Jeremiah’s eyes shifted to Reb from the big man frozen in surprise above him.
Reb had thrown aside his top blanket. As best he could, he held a wavering revolver with both hands and pointed at Kentucky’s back.
“You can’t shoot me,” Kentucky said. “I’m your brother.”
“You ain’t gonna kill this man. Drop the rifle.”
“All right then,” Kentucky said. He let the rifle fall, then slowly turned to face his brother. “Now that you’re feeling this spry, let’s ride. I’ve got the mailbags and all the Pony Express mail.”
“No,” Reb said. “Drop the mailbags too. I’m through with this life.”
“I ain’t,” Kentucky said after several moments. “Fair enough. I didn’t shoot this man. But I’m leaving with these mailbags, and the only way you’re gonna stop me is by shooting me.”
Kentucky stepped out of the firelight toward his horse. Two more steps into the darkness, he turned around again.
“Brother,” Kentucky said, “come with me. I’m the only family you got. And finally, we got some money.”
“If you’re gonna go,” Reb said, his voice shaky, using all his strength to hold the pistol, “git.”
When Kentucky was well gone, Reb collapsed again into his fever.
Chapter 26
The boys were listening on their bed as Noah recounted all his exciting events.
Grace smiled and let them be. She lit a new candle and placed it in the window.
She sat near the stove with Jeremiah’s drawing pad on her lap. She did not continue to read, however, but sat and stared at the candle and thought.
She admonished herself first for her initial disappointment over the Christmas gifts. She should have been proud of Jeremiah for thinking of the boys.
Her Christmas gift was the fact that the stone shell around her heart had cracked and broken and fallen away. It was that Jeremiah was alive and well. God had given her the chance to tell Jeremiah again how much she loved him. God had given her the chance to make up for the mean words she’d spoken before Jeremiah left for town.
As she stared at the drawing pad in her lap, she realized that this evening had given her another gift. New respect for her husband.
She remembered what she had said to her boys earlier in the evening while telling them the story about Old Granny Morris and the evil eye.
“All a person needs is faith in the good Lord. Trouble is, sometimes when you believe something, you can make it so.”
Grace had been wrong, and she knew it now.
She’d begun to believe Jeremiah was less of a man than others. In so doing, he’d become that in her mind. And she’d started to make him feel that too.
All she had to do was open the drawing pad and see that Jeremiah had his own strengths. This was a man who loved his family and had always tried to do his best for them.
She’d quit pestering him to take them back to the city, and she’d give him the same love and support in return.
Grace bowed her head and prayed gratitude, filled with wonder and awe at the peace inside her.
Chapter 27
The lights of the Weyburn ranch glowed bright as Grady crested the final hill.
He’d have some explaining to do, all right. First of all, there was the fact that he was late some. Then there was the fact that he had all the sealed Pony Express mail pouches but no leather saddlebags to hold the mail.
It gave Grady pleasure thinking about how the greenhorn had fooled the outlaw. As Jeremiah had explained when Grady rode up to find him at the fire with a man too sick to hardly speak, the muddy coat and stolen army horses had said plenty about the visitors. Turned out Noah did have plenty to be proud of about his father. Jeremiah had pretended to look for supplies in the wagon and used that time to take the sealed mail pouches out of the leather saddlebags and replaced the mail pouches with some sacks of coffee beans. Somewhere out in the storm was a desperado riding hard to escape the law, and all the thief carried was coffee. There was humor in that, Grady figured.
Lastly, Grady had some explaining to do to Lucy Weyburn. That is, after Grady proposed. Then he would tell the woman he loved about her Christmas gift, maybe the best one she’d never receive.
He’d tell Lucy all about how he’d left the cabin and those four boys in renewed heavy snowfall, and how for the next five minutes, all he could see in his mind was how the smile had left that woman’s face when she realiz
ed Grady had no more gifts. It near broke Grady’s heart, thinking of how she must be struggling to raise four boys out here. He remembered how Jeremiah had said he wanted to put a sparkle back in her eyes.
With a long sigh, Grady had turned his horse back to the cabin.
He ignored the barking dog. He stepped off his horse. In his hurry, he didn’t shake the new snow off his hat and his shoulders. He was draped in white as he approached the door.
“Ma’am,” Grady said, “I’m a little disappointed in myself. I almost rode off without leaving something. It was so small, I forgot it was there.”
He had reached into his coat a final time. When he got back to the wagon, he intended to tell Jeremiah about this and take an IOU so that the man could keep his pride and at the same time make his woman happy.
Grady pulled out the gift of Lucy’s perfume still wrapped in the fancy silk scarf. Grady set the gift in her hands.
“It’s from your husband,” Grady said.
Whatever the perfume and scarf had cost Grady, it was worth triple to see the joy on her face.
“Ma’am,” Grady said. Lucy was waiting for him at the Weyburn ranch. With or without a gift, he wanted to propose. This was going to be a good Christmas after all. “Merry Christmas and God bless.”
He tipped his snowy hat.
As she slowly closed the door, Grady heard the littlest boy speak. “Ma,” he asked, “was that man in white an angel?”
“Yes, Caleb,” Grady heard her say, “I believe he was.”
Chapter 28
Jeremiah was home now. Warm and safe in the loft of his cabin.
Grace lay asleep beside him, the sound of her breathing like the music of love. And she’d held him tight falling asleep, tight in a way she hadn’t done for months.
Jeremiah wasn’t ready to sleep, though. He had plenty to think about this Christmas.
A day had passed. His neighbor had helped him fix the wagon, and Jeremiah had made it home safe with the supplies. That Pony Express man had taken an IOU for Grace’s Christmas gift, and by the way Grace had laughed and cried opening it, Jeremiah figured it was the best debt he could have assumed.
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