by A Western Family Christmas Christmas Eve; Season of Bounty; Cowboy Scrooge
Will briefly considered asking Matty for a little time off from work and going to consult in private with the great Charlie himself, then decided against the plan for fear his own face would betray his feelings for the man’s wife, whatever the hell those feelings were.
So, since he wasn’t going to be confronting Charlie Favor right away or purchasing any new lumber, and since Matty wasn’t talking about profits or improvements or anything else, Will busied himself with reinforcing the old sagging shelves. It would be a major miracle if one of them didn’t come crashing down on somebody’s head before the year was out.
He was nailing a crosspiece under a shelf loaded with patent medicines, wondering why people insisted on paying outrageous prices for remedies they could just as easily have obtained in a shot of bar whiskey at their local saloon, when Lottie Crane came into the mercantile accompanied this time by her infamous sons.
The twins were bundled up against the cold, but Will could still make out their carrot-colored curls, the thousands of freckles that splattered both their faces, and the mischievous glint in all four of their eyes. They were ten or eleven, judging from their height, and weighed a combined hundred and sixty pounds of undiluted energy and pure trouble.
“Good morning, Matty,” Lottie said before gazing fondly upward in the direction of the shelves. “Oh, hello, Will. My, don’t you look tall on that ladder?”
Behind her counter, Matty’s sweet mouth flattened in a sour grimace and her forehead crimped with worry. “You’ll keep those two boys on a very short leash, won’t you, Lottie?”
“Well, of course, I will, Matty.” She had each boy by the coat collar as she spoke. “For goodness’ sake, you don’t think for a minute that I…”
Contrary to their mother’s promise, the twins jerked out of her grasp. Samuel went left, beckoned no doubt by the candy jars on the counter, while Hamuel veered right in the general direction of the hammers, saws and other implements of destruction. Or maybe it was the other way around, with Samuel going right and Hamuel left. From his perch on high, Will couldn’t tell the difference.
“You act like the little gentlemen you are, boys,” Lottie called somewhere in between them.
“Oh, Lord,” Matty moaned.
Hearing that dire pronouncement, Will decided the time was right for him to descend the shaky ladder and make himself scarce in the storeroom for the duration.
But he’d barely parted the curtains that led to the back room when there was a resounding, almost sickening crash behind him.
“He’s bleeding!” Lottie shrieked. “My poor child! Lord have mercy. He’s cracked his head wide-open.”
Matty shoved aside the toppled ladder that had narrowly missed cracking open her own head. Her first instinct was to shake her fist and scream / told you so!, but her better, more charitable reaction was to rush to the fallen hellion who lay sprawled and bloody amid dented tins and shards of broken bottles.
The floor was so slick with cough syrups and patent medicines she nearly took a tumble herself.
“There, there, Samuel,” she cooed softly as she pushed her skirts aside and knelt down beside the boy.
“It’s Hamuel,” Lottie wailed. “My poor baby!”
Whichever twin it was, his face was practically unidentifiable for all of the blood that covered it. Matty was afraid that the child might indeed have cracked his skull. She reached out in an attempt to brush the boy’s hair back from his forehead at the same moment that someone nudged her aside.
“Here. Move aside, Matty. Let me take a look,” Will said calmly, squatting down beside her.
Then, while Matty watched, the gambler’s exquisite hands performed a thorough but gentle inspection of Hamuel’s person, pausing occasionally, at an elbow or a rib or a knee, to quietly inquire, “Does that hurt, son?”
“Nothing’s broken,” Will said at last.
“Are you sure?” Matty whispered behind her hand so Hamuel didn’t overhear. “That’s an awful lot of blood.”
“There always is from facial and scalp wounds. The vessels are close to the surface.”
Lottie, who’d been weeping inconsolably while she hovered above them, repeated Matty’s question. “Are you sure, Will? Are you positive his poor little noggin is intact? Are you sure he didn’t crack his head wide-open?”
“You look like you’ve been scalped, Ham,” his brother said. “We ought a take him to the doc, Ma.”
“That’s a good idea,” Will said. “A couple of stitches will close those lacerations, and the boy will be just fine.”
“Doc Sedge is out of town,” Matty said. “He went to Kansas City for some medical convocation. Last week as I recall. He won’t be back till after Thanksgiving.”
“Oh my God!” Lottie wailed and wrung her hands. “Whatever will we do?”
Matty looked at Will in the hope he’d have a suggestion. Up until this moment he’d been calm and competent in the face of this emergency, but now he appeared decidedly uncomfortable, if not downright nervous. A sheen of perspiration glistened on his forehead and above his upper lip. “Is there anything you can do?” she asked him.
“No.” His lips tightened while his gaze slid away.
Hearing that, Lottie’s hysterics increased tenfold. Both twins began to cry, and the blood on poor Hamuel’s face started running pink, diluted by his tears.
Matty sighed. “Well, I’m pretty good with a needle and thread. My last quilt managed to take first prize at the Ellsworth County Fair.” She looked down at the bloody little boy and, none to her surprise, began to feel her courage waver. “Of course, I’ve never stitched anything that was breathing.”
“I’ll do it.”
Will sounded angry and confident all in the same breath, just before he started barking orders.
“Matty, get me a packet of new needles, the finest ones you’ve got, and some white silk thread. I don’t want cotton. Samuel, you run outside and bring me half a dozen hard packed snowballs. Lottie, you go sit someplace and stay out of my way, you hear?”
Will didn’t pay his usual call on Mrs. Runyon and her bevy of soiled doves that night. Not that he hadn’t seriously considered the benefits of a deep and sated sleep in the madam’s big warm bed, but after a few honest hands of poker at the Gilded Steer, he had enough change to buy a bottle of rye, which he carried past the brothel and back to his frigid accommodations at the mercantile.
The cold and the grim dark of the attic suited his mood. He gathered all of Matty’s soft quilts around him, leaned his head against a rafter and lifted the bottle to his lips, again and again.
It was his hope…no, it was his fondest and most deep desire, his heartfelt yearning, to drink and keep drinking until he had obliterated the memory of the events of that morning.
The crash of the boy’s fall. The sickening smell of the spilled medications. The blood. The tears. The hand wringing helplessness of those who couldn’t help, who didn’t know how to stop the bleeding, stitch the cuts or ease the pain. He knew how, but he’d sworn he’d never practice medicine again in any form or fashion, and he’d kept that vow with an almost religious fervor in the past few years.
He’d forced himself to walk away from epidemics that roared through little towns like wildfire. He’d turned his back on the victims of more than a few shootouts and barroom brawls, a burning hotel and even a train wreck or two.
If anybody shouted “Is there a doctor in the house?”, Will had schooled himself to keep his face impassive and his hands folded in his lap. He had tempered those natural instincts of his to render aid and comfort, and had recreated himself as a bystander, a do nothing, the kind of man who turned a blind eye to distress.
His demons had finally banished his better angels, assuming he’d ever had any.
Will tipped the bottle again, trying to drown the vision that haunted him. It was worse today. So much worse. He could see it all too clearly.
He could see his runaway bride, his beautiful Caroline, as she lay o
n a bloodstained bed, abandoned and near death, struggling to give birth to his brother’s child. It had taken Will nearly a year to track her down, and when he finally had, it was too late. It was too late to love her or to hate her, though he tried. Too late to save her or the child, though he had tried to do that, too.
Hadn’t he? He rolled the cold glass of the bottle across his forehead, but it failed to ease the throbbing there.
Hadn’t he brought all of his skill and expertise to bear in those last moments? Hadn’t he done everything in his power to bring both Caroline and the baby through?
Or had he held back somehow? Had he killed her by withholding his skill and expertise?
Sometimes in his dreams, when he was back in that foul, infested room, he made no attempt to turn the baby from its dangerous breeched position. Instead, he would stand by Caroline’s bed, gazing down at her suffering, breathing in and out, silently ticking off the seconds until she was dead.
Sometimes, in the darker dreams, he’d take a scalpel from his black bag but, rather than making a helpful incision, his hand would move to slice her throat.
Sometimes he’d simply sigh and walk away, closing the door on his wife’s weak, depleted moans.
Sometimes—most of the time—he wasn’t sure what it was he’d actually done all those years ago. His dreams and his demons seemed more real to him now than the actual events. All he knew for certain was that he’d buried Caroline along with her child, and that he’d tucked his black medical bag, along with all his goodness and his soul, into a corner of the coffin before he’d left in deadly pursuit of his brother.
This morning brought it all back with a bloodred vengeance, and his attempt to wash the memories away with rye was futile. The liquor was only making his head pound and his stomach churn.
Setting aside the bottle, Will drew the quilts more closely around himself and tried to think about Matty instead, to let her sunset-colored hair and sky-blue eyes drive all other thoughts from his brain. That wasn’t hard to do, but it only succeeded in making him feel worse. He was no better than his brother, Matthew, coveting another man’s wife.
No. That wasn’t true. He wasn’t like Matthew at all. He had no intention of acting upon those feelings. They were dreams. Pure fantasies. Warm thoughts to keep the cold away. Flickering images to light the darkness in his soul.
So it was all right, he told himself, to imagine threading his fingers through all that rich red hair, kissing her delicate eyelids, skimming his knuckles along the pale skin of her neck, feeling the beat of her heart beneath his hands. And since it was pure fantasy, it was permissible to slip the buttons on her woolen dress, one by one by one, and to slide the fabric over her shoulders to expose the soft and fragrant flesh hidden beneath the sturdy gabardine.
His hands would find the sweet and succulent weight of her breasts, and his mouth would follow, savoring every taste and texture. Matty would sigh, an exquisite sound that would come from deep inside her, harmonizing with his own irrepressible groans of pleasure.
She would bow her head and her warm red hair would spill over him, closing like a velvet curtain, making it impossible to hear or to see anything but her. There would be nothing in the world but Matty, and he would enter her—slowly, gently—as if he were going through a door to a better life.
Will almost laughed out loud.
“You’ve had too much to drink,” he muttered into the surrounding dark even as he was reaching for the bottle again. “That’s a hell of a lot to ask from the act of love, don’t you think?”
Somewhere deep in his besotted brain, he silently agreed. Then, at the same moment, he heard the crunch of footsteps in the snow outside and wondered what fool was out at such an hour. A second after that, a key jiggled in the lock downstairs, the front door creaked open, and Matty called softly, “Will?”
Will’s heart surged. He lurched up, but then immediately hunched back down. Why was she here at this hour of the night? What did she want? How could he possibly trust himself to be within arm’s reach of her right now, half-drunk and wholly in her thrall?
“Will?”
He didn’t answer, but lay still with one eye slightly open to watch the yellow lantern light wash across the stairwell as she climbed, and with one ear cocked to listen to the oncoming swish of her skirts, the soft tread of her shoes and the thundering beat of his pulse.
At the top of the stairs she paused and shivered. “Lord, it’s cold up here.”
Not anymore, he thought.
“Will? Are you awake?”
He held so still he was sure he’d stopped breathing. But for the pounding of his heart, he might have imagined himself dead. What the devil did she want? No. He didn’t want to know. It was enough to know what he wanted and what he couldn’t have.
“Will?” she whispered a little more insistently.
She stood there for what seemed an eternity before she sighed and muttered a soft little curse, then turned and started back down the stairs.
The chill air in the attic was still replete with her sweet fragrance. The rafters were still vibrating from her presence.
So was Will.
Chapter Five
Matty awoke the next day still thanking her lucky stars and all the planets that Will Cade was such a solid sleeper. She’d gone back to the mercantile the night before with a plate of oatmeal cookies meant to cheer him and to erase his glum mood, the one he’d been in ever since Hamuel’s accident.
At least that was what she’d told Charlie when she consulted with him at dinnertime about her unhappy assistant at the store. Taking him the cookies was a simple, kindly gesture, she had pointed out. It seemed the considerate thing for an employer to do. She was worried about Will Cade in a neighborly sort of way.
That’s what she’d told Charlie. It wasn’t exactly a lie. But it wasn’t so easy for Matty to convince herself of those purely charitable intentions. She’d told herself that visiting the store so late at night had nothing to do with any feelings she had for the gambler. Yet, once she was there, waiting for Will to awake in that cold attic, listening to him breathe and seeing his handsome face just touched by lamplight, all of her nice and neighborly sentiments gave way to a longing so fierce it nearly brought her to her knees.
If he’d awakened…if he’d spoken her name…if he’d held out his elegant hand in her direction…
She thanked her lucky stars again while she ate breakfast, dipping an oatmeal cookie into her coffee, chewing slowly in order to postpone her walk to the mercantile, so afraid that Will would be able to read the traces of that longing on her face.
It wasn’t right, what she was feeling for him, but she didn’t seem to be able to stifle her emotions or slow down her heartbeat or cool her blood. At least not as long as they kept brushing shoulders in the mercantile day after day.
She couldn’t very well consult with Charlie about this. It was one thing to ask for advice about friendly oatmeal cookies for an employee, but imagine asking her husband what to do about a gambler who’d come to town and set her heart aflame! Matty wondered just what his advice would be if she did ask.
Fire him.
It came to her in a flash. It wasn’t Charlie’s voice this time, but her own, somewhere in the back of her brain.
Get rid of him.
Well, of course. She was a fool for not thinking of it before this. Why keep suffering such temptation and guilt when all she had to do was say goodbye? Why wait for Will to disappoint her or even break her heart by slipping out of town, when she could take control by demanding that he leave immediately?
Fire him.
That was exactly what she intended to do.
“You’ve more than paid your debt to me,” she’d say, even before she took off her cloak this morning. “Thank you for helping out these past two weeks, Will, but I won’t be needing you anymore.”
She’d pull off a glove and then she’d shake his hand in a businesslike way, all firm and final. She’d ignore the smo
oth length of his fingers and the fine shape of his nails and the warmth of his palm against hers. If necessary, she’d remind herself that his were the sly hands of a gambler rather than the competent ones that had stitched up Hamuel’s head or the hands that had given her such pleasure in her unfaithful dreams.
“Best not shake hands,” she muttered. “Don’t touch him. Just tell him to go.”
Matty came through the door of the mercantile like a flame-haired bat out of hell. At least that was what she looked like to Will, who was just finishing up the new shelves in place of the ones that young Hamuel had brought down the day before. It was the least he could do, he figured, before he told her he was leaving town. Leaving before something happened that the two of them would forever regret.
“Good morning, Will,” she said, sounding like a schoolmarm and clutching her cloak around herself as if she were still out in the cold. “After a great deal of thought, I…”
Her words drifted off as she stared at the shelves, a fine example of carpentry if Will did say so himself. Matty, however, seemed more horrified than impressed. By now he was so familiar with, and so in love with, every expression that passed across her lovely face, he didn’t have to be a mind reader to know what his pretty, parsimonious darling would say next. From the look of her, one foot was already on the doorstep of the poorhouse.
“What in blazes do you think you’re doing, Will?” She let go of her cloak to stab a finger toward the shelves. “Take those down right now. This very minute. You know damn well I can’t afford that finished lumber.”
He wanted to wrap his arms around her, hold her close to his heart and tell her that she’d never be poor, not as long as he had breath in his lungs and an ace up his sleeve. Instead, he told her the truth.
“I’m leaving, Matty. Today. Just consider those shelves the final installment on my debt of gratitude.”