But Sayer barely heard the question. Her attention was taken by the sound of someone on horseback riding away from the cabin.
“I swan,” Rorie said in exasperation. “There he goes again.”
* * *
It was too soon to have heard anything from the Jefferson lawyer. Jack had given his sworn deposition that Thomas Henry Garth was dead, including all the facts of the battle itself, as he knew them. He hadn’t realized that he would have to name his own regiment in the process, but the lawyer’s clerk didn’t seem to notice that Jack had been in the wrong army. A letter would have to be drafted to whoever was maintaining the military and enlistment records for the Highland Guards, the young man said. Supposedly, everything possible was being done to account for missing soldiers, and once the information Jack gave was verified to someone’s satisfaction, then the will could be probated and given to Sayer.
But that could take weeks or more likely, months. Even so, Jack went to find out why Benton wanted to see him. He turned the possible reasons over in his mind on the ride down to the crossroads, mostly so he wouldn’t think about Sayer. It was incredible to him that he’d actually told her about Fred and his constant longing for apple pie, much less his only memory of his vague and shadowy mother. He’d never told anyone about her. Not the other orphans, who were certain they knew everything there was to know about Jack Murphy, and not Father Bartholomew, whom he trusted with his life. He’d told Sayer, almost without hesitation, simply because he thought—knew—he could and that she wouldn’t judge whatever he said. He had looked into her eyes and he had believed beyond all doubt that his secrets, the good and the bad, would be safe with her.
A good woman is more precious than rubies...
A man will know when he finds her...
Yes, he thought. Thomas Henry Garth had certainly known—or Jack wouldn’t be here.
Despite the rain, there were a number of people about when he reached the crossroads, but their interest in his arrival was brief this time, he supposed because both he and his business here had been identified and categorized to everyone’s satisfaction.
The benches and chairs on the general store porch were empty because the wind was driving the rain hard against the front windows of the building. Jack stopped long enough to beat the water off his hat before he went inside. Benton was busy with a customer, a woman Jack didn’t recognize, one who apparently intended to wait out the rain in a rocking chair by the unlit potbelly stove. Benton, ever the wily storekeeper, offered her a sip of some newly opened blackberry wine while she waited—which she sharply declined.
“I’m temperance, Benton,” she said stiffly. “You know that.”
“I heard you wanted to see me,” Jack said in the middle of Benton’s immediate backtracking.
“I do,” Benton said, clearly grateful for the interruption. “I was wanting to know if I need to be looking for...anything from Jefferson.” He glanced at the woman who was now earnestly rocking in the rocking chair—and listening to their conversation.
“Yes,” Jack said. “But I don’t know how long it will take—” He stopped because two men on horseback had arrived and were coming through the door with a good deal more noise than was necessary. Jack could smell the O Be Joyful on them before they reached the counter and so could the woman in the rocking chair.
“Can I help you gentlemen?” Benton asked calmly. Apparently half-drunk travelers were nothing new.
“You got tobacco?” one of the men asked.
“You got money?” Benton countered.
The men exchanged a look.
“We can pay,” one of them said, and Benton raised his eyebrows.
“It’s not Confederate,” the man said, glancing in Jack’s direction.
“Then I got tobacco,” Benton said. “And most anything else you might want as long as your money holds out.”
“How’s about some information?” the taller of the two men asked.
“What kind of information?”
“You seen any strangers hereabouts?”
“I’ve seen you two.”
“Besides us,” the taller man said with a flash of annoyance.
“We’re a stopping place for the Jefferson stage,” Benton said. “I see a lot of strangers—more than I care to, if I was to tell the truth about it. The traveling public these days don’t buy much. And some of them you have to watch like a hawk so they don’t walk off with half the shelf stock,” he added pointedly just in case the two of them had thievery in mind.
“This here one is a ex-soldier.”
“Union or Confederate?”
“Union.”
“See a lot of them coming through, too. You know his name?”
“Murphy. Jack Murphy.”
“What do you want him for?”
“Bounty—” the shorter man tried to say, but the other one interrupted.
“We just need to find him for somebody. You seen him or not?”
“Well, I don’t know,” Benton said, glancing at Jack. “Handing out your name ain’t one of the requirements for doing business in my store. And I ain’t one to ask questions that ain’t none of my business. How much tobacco you want?”
The man bought his tobacco, looking hard at Jack as he made the transaction.
“You’re that friend of Thomas Henry’s what was in the army when he was, ain’t you?” the woman in the rocking chair suddenly called to Jack.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, because the statement was close to the truth. He turned away slightly so the man couldn’t get a good look at his face.
“I would have been at the memorial service, but my old man’s poorly. I come down here to get him some stomach medicine. Did the weather hold? Up there on the ridge?”
“Yes, ma’am. Didn’t rain until it was long over.”
“Was his service nice? I hope it was nice.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jack said again. “Some beautiful singing.” He could feel the sweat running down the back of his neck.
“Oh, my, yes,” the woman said as if she’d been there. “Thomas Henry would have liked that. I know he would. I sent all the flowers I had on the wagon with Preacher Tomlin. The late roses? The gladiolas and the strawflowers—and the dahlias. Did you see the dahlias? When I was a little girl, I used to walk by this old widder woman’s house on the way to church every Sunday—Josephine, her name was. Everybody called her ‘Finney,’ though. She grew the prettiest dahlias—all kinds of colors—and every time she seen me, she’d give me one. I do love my dahlias.”
“They were beautiful, ma’am. I believe they meant a lot to Sayer and the girls.”
“Will you tell them Mariah Grace asked after them? And say I’m sorry for their loss? Say I’ll remember them all in my prayers.”
“I will, ma’am,” Jack said. When he chanced looking around, the two men had gone. He took a quiet breath in relief.
But Benton was still there, and he was looking at him with far more interest than he’d shown previously.
“I’ll send you word by one of these wild young-uns what’s always hanging around here if I get something from Jefferson,” he said. “That way you won’t have to come all the way down here...for nothing.”
“Thanks,” Jack said. “I appreciate it.”
“Just trying to save you some time. You...tell Sayer you went to Jefferson?” he asked, lowering his voice so that the woman in the rocking chair couldn’t hear him.
“No. There’s nothing to tell yet. She’s got enough to worry about.”
“I hear tell it’s going to take a lot of work to make that farm of hers right again. Might be some of the men around here can help you out when they get their own place caught up. The bachelors and the widowers around here, they’ll be wanting to help, now that Sayer’s free to marry
again. You going to wait out the rain?”
“No, I’ll be getting on back. Like you said—lot of work to do.”
“You best mind how you go from now on,” Benton said. It might have passed as a mildly obscure statement any other time, but not today. Today, it was fraught with something else.
Jack looked at him, and he could have jumped right in with both feet and asked what he meant, but he didn’t. He turned and left, his mind more occupied by the notion of bachelors and widowers hanging around Sayer than how long it would take the two men who had just left to find out she had a protector. He couldn’t think that Benton would be the only local they would ask in their quest to find a stranger.
Benton.
He seemed a good man but one who put his full concentration on making money, and he, like Jack, had heard the word bounty.
Chapter Eight
“I never let on to Sayer that I knowed about it,” Rorie said.
Jack stopped midstroke in his search for a tender spot on the horse’s knee. His first thought was that she had somehow acquired another message from Benton down at the general store, and for some reason she was hiding that fact from Sayer. He might have had a better idea of what the remark meant if he had actually been listening to her conversation, but he hadn’t. Instead, he’d been savoring the cool morning breeze coming down off the mountain and trying to hear the song Sayer was singing as she did her household chores. He thought it was a hymn, but he wasn’t sure. If it was, it wasn’t like any he’d ever heard. He didn’t let his mind dwell on the fact that he couldn’t understand most of the words from this far away, even with the cabin windows and doors open, or that it was the singer herself—in a pink calico dress with many small flowers on it—who made him want to listen so intently.
Your company has been delightful
You who doth leave my mind distressed...
Pink calico. It was nothing like the dark green silk Elrissa wore.
I go away, behind to leave you
Perhaps never to meet again
But if we never have the pleasure
I hope...
Sayer abruptly stopped singing, and Rorie was staring at him in that way she had. At that moment, she likely knew exactly what he was feeling, but whether or not she planned to discuss her observations remained to be seen.
He went back to examining the horse’s knee, forcing most of his attention to other, more pressing concerns. He was still going over and over the fact that two men had come into the general store looking for him. In the days that had passed since that nerve-racking encounter, he had come to the conclusion that Elrissa’s husband must have bounty hunters following the stage routes on both sides of the Tennessee border and asking about him at every community and crossroads they came to. Even he would have to admit it was a good—if expensive—plan.
Rorie was still waiting. He gave a quiet sigh. Whatever was on her mind, she had thrown the door to it wide-open, but as usual, she was going to make him come in after it. He’d have no peace otherwise.
“Know about what?” he asked.
“About that there place up yonder on the high ridge—Mr. Garth Senior’s place,” Rorie said. “I used to go up there a lot after my first baby died. First time I went, it was on his Burying Day. I knowed it was Garth land and I knowed Mr. Garth Senior didn’t take kindly to trespassers. But I went anyway. I didn’t want to ask if I could, neither—I reckon he would have said it was all right, but I just couldn’t bear that, asking somebody if I could go on their land to grieve. I reckon that’s why I didn’t tell Sayer about it, too. Didn’t want to seem...weak. Oh, I know women is supposed to be weak, but I always figured the fewer people what caught on when you was all wobbly, the better.”
He looked up at her, still not understanding.
“I been thinking maybe you ought to go up there again,” she said, clearly getting to the heart of the matter.
“Why?”
“You need to get a better hold on whatever’s troubling you.”
“Nothing is troubling me.”
“It’s a good place,” she said anyway. “A prayerful place, like Preacher Tomlin said. Well, you been up there. You know what it’s like.”
“I’m not much for praying.”
“I didn’t say nothing about praying, now, did I? You don’t always have to be talking God’s ear off, Jeremiah. Prayer ain’t just words and trying to sound all lofty like you ain’t you. You think the Lord don’t know when we got trouble and heartache? You just go up there where it’s all quietlike, and you wait. You stand there in the pure beauty of what’s all around you—maybe appreciate what a fine job He done. That’s all. You don’t talk if you don’t want to. You’re just there and ready—in case He wants to tell you something. It ain’t that hard, even for you.”
“Nothing is troubling me,” he said again.
“Now, you know as good as anybody how much I hate a lie. You know I might have shot you dead if I thought you weren’t telling me the truth that day you come to my cabin looking for Sayer.”
“Might? I was sure you would—then. Don’t think you’d shoot me now, though.”
“Well, I ain’t got my musket or my revolver handy now. I couldn’t shoot you if I wanted to—but I can tell you the only thing what’s keeping me from giving you a good hit upside your head is I know you believe what you just said about not being troubled—even when you catch your hands shaking like they do, even if you don’t sleep, even if you got to work yourself to death so’s you don’t think on it. But I don’t believe it, and you can put that in your pipe and smoke it.”
“Don’t smoke,” he said, and in lieu of a hit upside his head, he got a good punch in the arm for it. He couldn’t keep from laughing. “Don’t you have somebody else to bedevil?”
“No, I don’t,” she assured him. “Might directly, though. Might need to go give Sayer a good talking-to here before long.”
“About what?” he asked, no longer interested in the horse.
“Well, look at you,” Rorie said. “You’re listening to me now, ain’t you?”
“No. Yes.”
He waited, and when she still didn’t say anything, he raised both his eyebrows, the way he might have at Ike when he was slow about getting to the point.
“You done a lot of work around here,” she said when she was good and ready. “You’re ever bit as good at working this here farm as Thomas Henry was—him and his daddy. But you and me both know you should have been long gone from here by now, on account of that other trouble you got.”
“I don’t think I ever said I had trouble.”
“No, you said ‘not exactly’ and such as that—like I ain’t been around men all my life and I can’t figure out what that kind of dancing around something means. So why ain’t you gone from here?”
“Halbert,” he said without hesitation.
“You seen any sign of him?”
“Not since he and his men were up here looking for bushwhackers. The thing is, though, this horse knows when somebody is around.”
“That there horse thinks the war is still going on, does he?”
“He does.”
“Reminds me of somebody else I know,” she said pointedly. “Go spend some time up yonder on the ridge like I told you. You’re going to need help to figure out how to take Sayer and them girls with you when you leave out from here.” And with that she walked away—without telling him why she had Sayer in her sights, too.
“Is she all right?” he called after her.
“Not exactly,” she said without stopping, throwing what she apparently considered his favorite phrase right back at him.
“Rorie!” he called, and this time she turned to look at him.
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
She frowned and seemed a
bout to say something, but then she didn’t. She nodded instead and continued on her way. He could hear her singing her own version of what must be a song as she went into the house.
My love lives at the head of the holler
She won’t come and I won’t foller...
* * *
“Is he all right?” Sayer asked as soon as Rorie stepped inside the cabin. She had been determined not to, but clearly she hadn’t the ability to stand by her own decisions. She had been singing to keep her thoughts where they should be, and when that no longer worked, she had concentrated on listening to Beatrice and Amity chattering away until they went to fetch a fresh bucket of water. Then, she had taken Thomas Henry’s letters out of her keepsake box and had been sitting at the table reading them—when she still had chores to do.
But no matter what she did, the only thing on her mind was Jeremiah. He was working sunup to sundown, trying to get the fields plowed and ready for the fall planting, putting the steps in the path to the spring, getting a winter’s supply of wood cut—and she took every opportunity to talk to him if she could without seeming too bold. They had no serious conversations like the one they’d had down at the spring after Thomas Henry’s memorial service. They only spoke of mundane things, crops, weather, the need to replace her missing livestock. They had finally done the haying—a happy event for his horse and Rorie’s cow and mule. It had taken days to do it, even with her and the girls helping. Sayer knew that he watched her as she raked the hay he cut into windrows, and shameless or not, she hadn’t minded.
Of late she had been sending the girls out to the field to take him a hot midday meal, and it was all she could do not to go with them. Amity and Beatrice reported that he said thank-you, but he didn’t stop to eat it while they were there. She had taken to packing as much food as she could into the pail because in the past week he hadn’t joined them for the evening meal. If she happened to see him during the day, he didn’t stop long enough to talk, but only nodded to her on his way to or from the barn. He wasn’t sleeping. She could tell by looking at him. She didn’t think he was eating much, despite the fact that every morning when she got up, the empty lunch pail was sitting on the corner of the porch.
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