When Ruth did not answer right away, Kady turned to stare at her and saw that she was so distressed that she appeared to have aged about ten years in just a few minutes. Unless Kady missed her guess, Ruth Jordan was hiding some big secrets, and when Ruth didn’t answer the question directly, Kady was sure she was right.
“I didn’t know that Cole knew his family had died,” Ruth said softly. “On that horrible day we tried to keep the truth from him. His sister and his friend Tarik were killed outright, but Cole lingered for three days. We told him that they were fine but couldn’t visit him because they had to go to school. It was a lame excuse, but in the midst of everything it seemed perfectly feasible, and Lily and I thought Cole accepted it. During those three days I stayed with Cole every minute. His mother tended to her daughter’s body, then later to . . .”
Hesitating, she looked at Kady. “Lily took care of her daughter, and later she laid out the bodies of her husband and mine when they were brought in, killed by the men who had robbed the bank.” Ruth’s handsome face suddenly turned bitter, her mouth twisting. “It wasn’t the outlaws who killed the children but the ‘good’”—she sneered the word—“people of Legend who murdered them.”
For a while Ruth kept her face from Kady’s as she stared into the dark night. When she looked back, she had recovered herself enough to smile at Kady. “I lost everyone that night. Three days after the shooting the only person left alive was Lily, Cole’s mother, and I could see in her eyes that she was retreating. She couldn’t face what had happened to all the people she loved.”
Again Ruth was silent, but Kady could tell there was more to the story, maybe a lot more, but it was obviously difficult for her to get the words out. Kady sat in silence and waited, the only sound around them the wind in the trees and a coyote in the distance.
“I can’t describe those days of horror,” Ruth began slowly and so softly Kady could barely hear her. “Now I hardly seem able to remember them. My husband, my only child, both grandchildren, all of them were dead. After Cole’s death, Lily became catatonic. She just sat there in a rocking chair, refusing to eat or even to cry. She stared out the window in a way that made me know she might as well have died, too.”
Ruth took a breath. “The only person left alive was young Tarik’s father, who worked for us,” she said, then her face softened. “Oh! but he was a good-looking man. As dark as my family was blond. It was rumored he’d seduced half the women of Legend, but if he had, he was very discreet about it. He was a silent man, devoted to my husband, and always polite, always courteous.
“But that week-in-hell, after everyone was dead, Gamal—that was his name—was still alive. When the first shots were fired, he’d made a leap to put himself in front of the children, but he received half a dozen bullets in his left leg that halted him. Days later the leg was removed, and for a while we thought he’d live, but then his eyes started burning with fever, and I knew that he, too, was going to die.”
Ruth looked at Kady, her eyes as hot as though she, too, had a fever. “He was my last link with my family. All I had to do was look at Lily to know that it was only a matter of time before she would will herself to die.”
Ruth was looking at Kady as though she were pleading for understanding, but Kady still couldn’t comprehend what she was trying to tell her. Reaching across the short distance that separated them, Kady clutched Ruth’s hand.
When Ruth spoke, her voice was almost defiant. “When Gamal opened his arms to me, I went to him, and we spent the night making love. The next morning he was burning up with fever, and he never regained lucidity. Two days later he was dead.”
Ruth kept her profile to Kady as though she was waiting for some censorship, but Kady only squeezed her hand tighter, encouraging her to continue.
“We made a child that night.”
Ruth kept very still, as though waiting for Kady to pronounce judgment on her, but a twentieth-century woman looked at things differently than a nineteenth-century female did.
“A boy or girl?” Kady asked.
Only the tiniest of smiles showed that Ruth was grateful for Kady’s not passing judgment, and there was a loosening of tension in her shoulders, as though she had been relieved of a heavy burden. “At the time I never thought of pregnancy. I was forty-eight years old and had already skipped a monthly or two. After the funerals I moved Lily to Denver to see if I could find a doctor who could help bring her back to life. But part of me envied her; I, too, wanted to retreat from the world. How could I think of life after all the death I’d seen?
“As for the symptoms of pregnancy, I felt so bad they seemed normal. And since it had been thirty-two years since my last pregnancy, I didn’t remember the symptoms very well. And as I was nursing Lily all day, I rarely got out of my wrapper.”
Finally, Ruth turned to look at Kady, who was staring at her with wide eyes, fascinated by the story. Where was she leading?
When Ruth saw Kady’s face, she relaxed more. “I finally went to the doctor when I felt the baby kick.”
Dreamily, Ruth looked off into the distance. “That was the strangest day of my life. I went to the doctor, knowing something was wrong inside my belly, and I know it is a sin, but I was praying that whatever it was was terminal, as I so wanted to join my family in heaven.”
She turned back to Kady. “But I left the doctor’s office with thoughts of life. I had forgotten that God gives as well as takes.”
Kady still didn’t speak because she could tell that this was not the end of the story. If Ruth had given birth to a baby and everyone had lived happily ever after, Kady would not have been pulled through time smack into the midst of this situation.
“I have made many mistakes in my life,” Ruth said softly, “but none I regret as much as what I did when I learned that I was going to have a baby.”
She grabbed Kady’s hand so hard that Kady nearly cried out in pain. “After my family was murdered, I was numb. I didn’t care if I lived or died. There was nothing inside me, not hatred, not love, and certainly not thoughts of revenge.”
Abruptly releasing Kady’s hand, Ruth looked back into the night. The moon was rising, and it was growing late, but Kady had never felt less sleepy in her life.
Ruth continued. “When I found out that I had a life growing inside me, all I could think of was protecting that child. No matter what it cost in money, blood, or tears, I was going to protect this child from all harm.”
Ruth’s lips tightened. “First of all I made my house in Denver into a fortress. No prison was ever as secure as my house and garden. Armed guards with dogs patrolled the grounds night and day. Not even delivery men were allowed onto my property, and servants entering and leaving were searched thoroughly.”
For a moment Ruth paused as she thought back over the past, and when she spoke, her voice was quiet, deep with emotion. “It is many years later now, so it’s difficult to describe why my hatred took the direction it did. Maybe I should have hated the outlaws who robbed the bank, but I didn’t hate them. They never fired a shot in the town. No, it was the overzealous citizens of Legend who did the shooting. All of them owned firearms, half of them had never used them, but that day they saw their silver riding away, so they opened fire. They killed three children that day. And three adults in the days that followed. All in an attempt to keep their bloody silver.”
When Ruth turned to Kady, her eyes were burning hotly. “Can you understand the hatred I felt? I was carrying a child, and there was no doubt in the world that this child would be the only family I’d have for the rest of my life. I had to protect him from those people in Legend.”
“But you were in Denver,” Kady said softly.
“Yes, I was.” Turning away, Ruth looked into the night. “Don’t try to make sense of it, because there is none to be made. I was a crazed woman, not in my right mind.”
Kady hoped she never learned this from experience, but it was easy to guess that profound grief could make a person do irrational things
. “What did you do?”
“I shut down Legend. I owned the whole town, as my husband and son had held on to every inch of land in the hopes of creating a Utopia. I had the mines blown up, so they couldn’t be worked, then I hired guards and dogs to patrol the empty town. I didn’t allow so much as a vagrant to live there.”
It took Kady a moment to digest this information. “And what happened to the people who lived in Legend?”
For a while Ruth looked at the moon, taking her time before answering. “They left, of course, and they came to hate me as much as I hated them. Oh, not the saloon owners and the girls or even the miners, they could get a job anywhere; but my husband and son had worked hard at bringing decent families into Legend, and there were several of them living there then. They had planted gardens and repaired houses; they had made homes for themselves and their families.”
Kady sat in the still darkness for a while, trying to imagine the rage that Ruth’s evictions must have caused. Something like a smaller version of the Cherokee’s Trail of Tears.
When Ruth spoke, her voice was very quiet. “There was a cholera epidemic that winter, and many of the former residents of Legend died, including some of Cole’s young friends. The parents sent me photos of their dead children. They—”
Pausing, Ruth took a deep breath. “They cursed me. One old woman spit on me on the street and said she hoped my dead grandson haunted me forever. And she hoped my new baby would come to hate me.”
As goose bumps rose on Kady’s arms, she rubbed them. She wasn’t Catholic, but she felt that she should cross herself against such an evil wish.
“It has all come true,” Ruth said. “Cole haunts this town, wanting desperately to grow up, to love, to have children of his own. And my living son—”
Kady listened while Ruth told of how she’d imprisoned her youngest son, how he was never allowed off the grounds. When he was three, Ruth had received a kidnap threat from a person who had once lived in Legend, so Ruth redoubled her attempts to keep him safe.
When Ruth paused and seemed as though she was going to say no more, Kady said, “What happened to your youngest son?” then tried to prepare herself to hear of yet another tragedy.
“When he was sixteen, he climbed over the fence and ran away.” Ruth took her time before she spoke again. “He left behind a letter that said my hatred of Legend was stronger than my love for him. He said I had allowed my grief for the dead to override my love for the living.”
Ruth looked at Kady. “I was furious at first, and as always, I blamed Legend for taking yet another loved one from me, but as the months, then the years passed, I came to realize that my son was right. I was the one who had lost my only remaining child. I could blame this tragedy on no one else.”
“Have you heard from him?” Kady asked.
“Yes. I heard nothing for years, then six months ago he wrote me a letter. He’s in New York trying to make a life for himself. He wants no help from me; actually, he wants no contact from me. He is . . .”
“Angry,” Kady said, trying to imagine a child who had grown up imprisoned by a woman obsessed with hatred.
“Yes,” Ruth said softly, “my son is very, very angry.”
When Ruth turned to look at her, Kady instinctively knew what was going to be said. And more than anything in the world, Kady didn’t want to hear it. Ruth Jordan was going to ask Kady for help. She was going to ask her to help with the people of Legend and to help with her angry young son.
But before Ruth could speak, Kady put up her hand. “I think I should tell you about myself. I think there are things you should know about me. I didn’t want to come here, I don’t want to be here, and I plan to go back to my own world and to the man I love immediately.”
There, she thought, that was out in the open. Tossing back the lap robe, she stood and began to walk about the porch. It was very late now, and it would be daylight before long. As Kady began to talk, she tried to conjure the image of Gregory and of Onions. She wanted to remember a world full of cars and jets and computers. Right now atomic warfare seemed safe compared to blood feuds involving curses and ghosts.
Through all of what had happened, Kady had never been able to understand why she had been chosen to go back in time, and now she knew she’d come to know a man who had never lived to be a man. Right now she did not want to think of Cole, for if she did she’d remember too many things about him that she’d come to love. No! No! she corrected herself, she had not come to love him. She was in love with nice, safe Gregory, a man who had lived all of his thirty-one years as a human, not as a ghost, a man whose mother had been cursed by no one (except maybe a few restaurant supply delivery men).
“Do you have lots of money?” Kady asked as she paused in pacing the porch.
“Masses.”
“Then why don’t you rebuild Legend? You could make it into the place that Cole dreamed of. Maybe that’s why I was sent back to this place, to see what Cole wanted and to tell you about it.”
Ruth arched an eyebrow. “Who would want to live high in the Colorado mountains?”
At that Kady smiled. “Maybe I should tell you about downhill skiing.”
“I see, and you think that if I make the town of Legend into a pretty little resort, that will right all the wrongs?”
“I don’t know if you can right the wrongs,” Kady said quickly, while silently begging Ruth not to ask her to stay. Right now the only thing in the world she wanted was to go back to her own time and place, and to be with people who were familiar to her.
While Kady had been pacing nervously, Ruth had been watching her. “Dear, do please sit down. Joseph can’t sleep if you are moving about so restlessly.”
Kady had not noticed the older man stretched out on a couple of blankets at the far end of the porch, now raised on one elbow and watching the two women sleepily. Kady sat back on the chair.
Ruth took her hand and squeezed it. “I’m not going to ask you to stay. What would be the use? What could you do now that you have not already done? You gave my grandson a chance to live for a while. You gave him the chance for revenge.”
“Revenge?” Kady asked, startled.
“When your letter arrived telling me you were now my granddaughter-in-law and that my hardheaded grandson was holding you prisoner, I threw the missive in the trash. Over the years I have become used to such hateful pranks, and I always ignore them. But the next day Joseph brought me a newspaper clipping.”
From inside a cleverly concealed pocket in the sleeve of her dress, Ruth pulled out a piece of newspaper and handed it to Kady, but when she held it nearer the lantern light to read, Ruth spoke.
“It says that an old wrong had been righted. The men who robbed the bank in Legend so many years ago were never caught. My son and husband were both killed while pursuing the three men, but the robbers seemed to vanish into the mountain. No trackers ever found a trace of them.
“Years later a man showed up in Denver with a great deal of silver—there was a lot taken from the bank in Legend—and it was rumored that he was one of the robbers and he’d murdered his partners. No one could prove anything and he had a talent for buying the silence of any investigators.”
Ruth looked at Kady. “Three days ago the man was found dead in his study, a knife through his heart. The person who killed him never fired a shot. He silently slipped over a high wall, fought several guards, and entered the man’s study. On the man’s desk was a signed confession of his participation in the holdup in Legend so many years ago.”
Ruth’s eyes bored into Kady’s. “The knife found in the man’s heart had a medal in the top of it, a medal given for one year’s attendance at Sunday school.” She took a breath. “I asked the sheriff to show me the knife. It was Cole’s medal, and I . . . I had made sure he had been buried with it.”
Turning away from the sight of Ruth’s pain, Kady remembered how Cole had looked when he’d returned from his ten days away from her: his shoulder bleeding from a deep cut and
many bruises on his face and neck. Thinking of it now made her feel sick at the senselessness of revenge. Killing that man had brought no one back.
Ruth continued. “Along with the confession was a will, witnessed and legal, and it left the man’s millions to build orphanages all over Colorado.”
Suddenly, it was all too much for Kady, and she put her head in her hands and began to cry. Cole, she thought, had to be the best, most pure-hearted person she had ever met. Maybe killing out of revenge was wrong, but he’d been able to use the money that had cost so much blood for a good purpose.
Ruth sat in silence for a long while, letting Kady cry softly into her hands, leaving her alone, interrupting only to offer her a handkerchief. When Kady seemed to have herself under control again, Ruth spoke. “You will be wanting to go back to your own time now.”
“Yes,” Kady said softly. “I want to go home. I think I’ve done what I was supposed to do here. Cole had his chance at . . . at life.” But not at love, she thought. She’d cheated him out of that. But how could she love him when her heart already belonged to Gregory?
Abruptly, Ruth said, “Who put the wedding dress in the old flour tin?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I was thinking of your story that you found a wedding dress and my son’s watch inside an old flour tin. Who put it there?”
“I have no idea. I assumed it was Cole’s mother’s dress, but . . .” Remembering, Kady gave a soft smile. “But Cole said he hadn’t been at the wedding, so he didn’t know what she’d worn.” At the memory of Cole’s joke Kady almost started crying again.
“Describe the dress to me.”
Kady thought that now was not the time to have a fashion recounting, but this seemed to be important to Ruth, so she began to sketch the lovely gown with her hands.
Kady had not said three sentences when Ruth said, “Wrong skirt. The skirt is wrong. My daughter-in-law was married in eighteen sixty-three and the skirts were very full then, with hoops, but your dress had a bustle. Your wedding dress was the style of eighteen seventy-three.”
LEGEND Page 20