“You young’uns are the most generous people I’ve ever known. There’s nothing greedy about any of you. It’s not that. It’s just. . . ” Grant looked at all of them. “You’re such fine young people.”
Charlie dropped his chin to rest on his chest and studied the floor as if it held the meaning of life.
“I’m pure lucky to have gotten you. We’ve all lived through hard times. What if there’s not enough? What if we run short of something? Yes, we may have fabric we’ll never use, but if times got hard, we could maybe sell it. There’s always a day coming when there might be a need for us.”
“It makes no sense for you to dress in rags,” Marilyn said. “Using up three or four yards of fabric that came to us as a free gift will not change a thing if hard times come. I want you to let Sadie and me make you some new clothes. If you love us at all, you’ll let us share with you one tiny bit as much as you share with us.”
Grant tightened his jaw. An almost desperate fear twisted around inside him when he thought of wasting anything on himself.
A tug on his hand pulled his attention away from Marilyn’s stubborn eyes. Libby held his hand. She looked at him then lowered her eyes to study a patch in his flannel shirt torn away from the nearly rotten fabric. She reached one tiny finger into the hole in his shirt, stuck her finger on in through the hole behind that in his union suit, and poked him in the belly.
She wiggled her finger back and forth and tickled him. With a little laugh he jerked away, surprised to find out he was ticklish. She smiled up at him and reached her twitching finger toward him again.
Grant jumped back and glanced up to see all of his kids with their eyes focused straight at him.
“You’re ticklish,” Benny said.
“Pa’s ticklish.” Sadie’s dark eyes almost caught fire as she came toward him, her fingers raised in front of her, wriggling around like ten worms.
“You’re gonna get some new clothes, Pa.” Sadie gave him a diabolical smile. “We’re not going to leave you alone until you say yes.”
With a scream, Benny jumped on him, tickling his belly. Libby latched onto one of Grant’s legs, and that tripped him as he tried to get away from Benny while laughing. Marilyn, Sadie, and Charlie stepped back to watch him go down under them, but Grant saw a gleam in Charlie’s eyes like he wished he could be part of the wrestling match. Sadie looked like she’d be willing to attack if need be. Joshua laughed from his spot on the floor.
“Okay, okay, okay!” Grant laughed as he tried to escape his tormenting children. They quit attacking as quickly as they’d begun. Grant dumped them off him, pretending to be rough but very careful not to hurt either of them. Through laughter, he said, “Make the blasted clothes. Just don’t tickle me anymore.”
“New boots, too?” Sadie said with an arch of her eyebrows and a twitch of her fingers.
Grant collapsed flat on the floor. Gasping for breath, he said, “Yes, fine, new boots, too, you little monsters.”
Sadie and Marilyn exchanged satisfied nods that made Grant wonder what they were up to. But he’d never known how ticklish he was, and he didn’t want to go through it again. He stood patiently while the girls measured him.
He tried Joshua’s boots on and when they were too tight, the young’uns wouldn’t be satisfied to let Joshua guess at a fit. Under threat of another attack, he promised he’d go to town the next day and let Zeb at the livery measure him for new boots. With that, his cantankerous household settled down to do their studies.
As he sat with Benny, going over his lessons, Grant wondered what he’d ever do with fancy clothes. Then he wondered if Hannah would like the way he looked in them, and if it weren’t for the tickling, he might have gone back to refusing. It didn’t matter anyway. It was too late to stop ’em. Once the girls had gotten him to go along, they’d been cutting quick as lightning, most likely afraid he’d weasel out of his bargain somehow.
“Pa, you remember when you first brought me and Sadie home?” Joshua drew Grant’s attention, and Grant realized Joshua had been watching the sewing just as he had. “You sewed all six of us a new outfit of clothes.”
Grant laughed. “Yeah, I really made a mess of ’em, didn’t I?”
Joshua shook his head. “We should have saved ’em just as a bad example. Even then Sadie was better at it than you. And she was only five.”
Sadie nodded over her needle and thread. “And you made me a dress.”
Sadie and Marilyn looked up from their fine, neat stitches.
“Pa sewed you a dress?” Marilyn looked at Sadie as if she’d grown another head.
“I’d seen my ma do some sewing. Even threaded a needle for her. I didn’t really know anything. But Pa’s hands were so clumsy.” Sadie started giggling until she had to set her needle aside. “He made Joshua a pair of pants so big, Joshua and Will could’ve both fit inside them.”
All the children snickered. Even silent little Libby giggled behind her fingers.
“They weren’t that bad,” Grant said between his own chuckles. “It beat what you were wearing.”
“We were all in rags, even worse’n what you’ve got on now.” Joshua nodded. “When you made Sadie try on her new dress, it dragged on the floor in back and her knees showed in front. Plus there was no hole for her head, so you just hacked an opening with your knife.”
“And then you cut the back off so it wouldn’t drag, and then it was too short so you cut the front off.” Sadie quit talking so she could laugh full time.
“Good thing it was about four times too big around for Sadie,” Joshua said, leaning his head back against the wall, his shoulders shaking with laughter. “Will ended up wearing it as a shirt as I recall.”
“Sadie got better at it quicker’n I did.” Grant shook his head.
“Sadie taught me most of what I know.” Marilyn grinned at her little sister.
“You picked it up fast enough.” Sadie picked up her needle.
“And Cassie was ten,” Joshua added. “And she knew a few things that helped us along. And you boys pitched right in to help on the ranch.”
Grant remembered that little gang of orphans. Joshua, Sadie, Will, Cassie, Eli, and Sidney. They’d all been starving. It was a cold morning, and they didn’t have a single coat between ’em. Will had tried to pick his pocket. Grant had caught him and known right away he was dealing with a street urchin just like he’d been near all his life.
He’d convinced Will to trust him, and before long he’d been carrying out food from a diner. . . a diner that wouldn’t’a allowed black children inside. He fed six little kids breakfast while he fretted over how to take care of them forever.
Grant could see people in a huge city like New York ignoring hordes of children. The problem was just too huge for a lot of people to deal with. But it made him furious to think of the citizens of a good Texas town like Houston letting those children scurry around in alleys without taking them in.
He’d been riding his horse, planning to sign up for the Confederacy if he could ever hunt up the War. He’d seen those children, banded together, Will acting as the father, ten-year-old Cassie mothering the littler ones, Joshua and Sadie, black, but accepted as members of the family without a question. Grant had been planning to fight for the Confederacy, just because that’s what a good Texan did, but after seeing Joshua and Sadie, and knowing what danger they were in running around loose in the South, he couldn’t have taken part in any fighting that supported slavery.
With no paperwork and no permission, he’d claimed them as his adopted children and taken them home. He’d found his calling in life.
Soon after the War, the first orphan train came through Sour Springs.
“Cassie and I both learned a sight quicker than you, Pa.” Sadie basted a sleeve onto the shirt she was making for him.
“A fractious longhorn would’a learned quicker’n me.”
The family laughed again.
Sadie looked up from her work. “Now Cassie’s sewing fo
r her little ones, just like Megan and all your other grown-up daughters. You would have made everything easier if you’d have rounded yourself up a wife before you started collecting children. That’s the proper way of things.”
“I was too young to get married.” Grant flinched when Sadie and Marilyn exchanged a quick glance. “I’m still too young to get married.”
Marilyn said quietly, “But not too young to have children, right?”
That set the whole bunch of them off in a fit of laughing again, and Grant felt his cheeks warm up even as he laughed along. He’d never explained to his children about the vow he’d made to care for young’uns. He’d told some of them when they’d grown up, after they’d left his home, but the ones who lived with him would never know. He didn’t want them to think he was sacrificing anything for them, because he wasn’t. He got so much more than he ever gave. But talk of marriage led to thoughts of Hannah, and kissing her, and how she’d stood shoulder-to-shoulder with him and offered to sacrifice her job for his children.
And that made him desperate to think of something else. He couldn’t think of a way to talk to Charlie about that knife without embarrassing him in front of the family, so Grant left that for later and settled in beside Benny to help him wrestle with the words in his reading book.
Maybe it was time he polished up his skills for working inside the house. It’d keep him busy and keep his mind off Hannah if he’d do the sewing. He could stab himself a few times with a needle anytime she bloomed inside his head.
The girls could teach him fine stitchery and dressmaking. As Benny droned out the words of a psalm, Grant stared down at his callused hands and wondered if it was hard to crochet lace.
“Pa.” Marilyn came up behind him while he leaned over Benny’s book. “The fabric’s cut now and the basting done, so while Sadie is busy sewing, I think I oughta cut your hair.”
“Cut my hair?” Grant whirled around to face his daughter. The gleam in her eyes near to set him running out of the house.
“I need to practice on a man, since I’m getting married soon and all. Just turn around and sit still.” She opened and closed the scissors with an ominous snip.
Grant glared at the little troublemaker.
She glared right back.
Finally, rolling his eyes, he turned around and ignored her to the best of his ability. . . while she scalped him.
TWENTY-TWO
Grant had put up with the new clothes and a haircut, but now it was eating him alive.
He ran his hands through his stumpy hair, wishing he could sleep. Lying on the kitchen floor, listening to the sound of his children breathing, living, fed and warm and safe, there was no way to explain to them the desperate burden he felt for unwanted children. He’d had Parson Babbitt tell him once that he needed to trust God to care for His sheep. That Grant, try as he might, couldn’t care for them all.
Grant wrestled with the worry. He could feel those children, cold and hungry, out there, begging for a coin, just enough to keep the front of their stomachs from rubbing against the backs. The hard wood of his floor was a reminder of the hard life of a child who had no one to care if he or she lived or died.
He could still remember little Sadie when he first laid eyes on her. Her body shivered so hard in the cold, the skirt of her thin little dress waved back and forth. It haunted him to think of all Sadie had suffered before she’d come to him.
As he lay there, the clothes the girls were making started to bother him more and more. That cloth was wasted being cut and sewn into something for him. Anger burned low in his belly until he was furious thinking of it. But the children were right. It was a kind of foolishness to wear rags, thinking it would feed one hungry child.
“Trust,” the parson had said. “God is in control.”
If God was in control, then why had He given Grant a tiny glimpse of family? If God was in control, why had Grant’s parents died? If God was worthy of trust, then Grant had to accept that He wanted children like Libby to be frightened beyond their ability to speak.
Sadie, cold and shivering. Grant opened his eyes and ruffled his short hair. He stared at the dark ceiling, the nightmarish image of his freezing daughter. Her skinny little bare knees shaking beneath a skirt that she’d grown out of years before. Rolling onto his stomach, he wondered how many nights in his life he’d been left sleepless with this torment.
God, why would You make a world where children lived, hungry and cold, in an alley? How can I believe You’re in control when the innocent suffer like this?
It was a sin to spend money on himself for new clothes. And new boots were a foolish waste while children froze.
He listened to the wind whip around his ramshackle cabin and knew it was so much better in here than out there. There were more children out in the cold. He couldn’t go to New York and get them without abandoning his family, but what if some were close to hand? He’d found Joshua and Sadie in Houston. It was a long trip, but Grant should be looking for them, bringing them home. He had six, but there was room beside him on the floor. He could squeeze in six more if he tried.
He rolled back to stare at the ceiling, and his heart cried out to God for sleep and peace and for a chance to take care of all the cold, hungry children who needed a home.
A creak on the ladder to the loft pulled him out of his worry. He saw Charlie backing down the steps, as silently as possible. “What are you doing?”
Charlie froze and looked down. Even in the barely existent light from the fire, Grant saw Charlie’s guilt. What was going on? Grant was afraid he knew.
Charlie’s rigid muscles relaxed and he climbed on down. “Just. . . uh. . . couldn’t sleep.”
He was running away. Grant had seen the guilt in Charlie’s eyes when he’d realized Grant didn’t have a room. Between the anger the little boy carried around and the desire to leave before he got left, the boy would use this as an excuse to move on. Probably planning to steal a sack of food on his way out the door.
“Pa?”
Grant sat up and leaned forward. He turned so his back leaned against the table leg. “Yeah, what is it?”
“I’m just restless is all. The wind is keeping me up, I suppose. A cold wind makes me think of bad times I had before I came here.”
Pa pushed his bedroll aside. He rolled to his knees and grabbed a couple of logs and threw them onto the fire. Charlie dropped down in front of the licking flames, and the two of them watched as a friendly, reassuring crackle lit up the room.
“Did I wake you?” Charlie asked.
“I wasn’t asleep.”
“Are you sure?
Grant shrugged. “I don’t think so. Maybe I dozed off. The night can trick a man.”
Grant rested his palm on Charlie’s shoulder, and Charlie flinched like a child might who’d been treated harshly by a man’s hand.
“It sure enough can.” The boy sat frozen under the touch.
“It can trick a man into thinking only dark thoughts. It can trick a man into making some small thing into something large without the light of day to shine on his worries.” Grant felt Charlie’s fear and tension and let go of him. Turning around, Grant rested his back on the stones that framed the fire. Charlie visibly relaxed and leaned closer to the warmth of the crackling fire.
Grant decided the boy wasn’t going to say anything more. “I was awake because. . . I don’t. . . need new clothes. I want to be ready in case there are children who come along. I shouldn’t have let Sadie talk me into those duds. I should leave Joshua in charge and go see if there have been any children abandoned nearby.”
“And leave the family alone?”
“No, I can’t do that.”
A silence stretched between them as the smell and warmth of the fire soothed and eased the knots tying up Grant’s thoughts.
“Pa, it’s not the new clothes that are bothering you. It’s not even thinking about children who might need you.”
“Yes, it is.”
�
�It’s the devil.”
“What?” Grant sat forward. He hadn’t expected to hear that from the boy.
Charlie, crossing his ankles, propped his elbows on his knees and rested his chin in both hands. “The devil is who torments good folks in the night. He whispers doubt in your ear. He stirs up anger. He picks at any little mistake you’ve made, or thinks you’ve made, and blows it up big. That’s Satan, stirring and stirring trouble, like a pot he’s trying to boil over, hoping he can spill sin through your soul and slop it all over the people around you.”
Grant’s eyes narrowed as he considered that. “I reckon you’re right, son. When I’m up and about, busy with you kids and life, I know I’m doing God’s work. But if you could have seen Sadie when I found her. . . ” Grant couldn’t go on for a minute. He scrubbed his hands over his face and combed his fingers through his short hair.
When he was sure his voice wouldn’t break, Grant continued. “I remember other little children when I ran the streets of New York. I saw them die, run down by carriages. I saw older children beating on them. I saw them dead from the cold. They beat on me, too.” Grant paused. “I saw the younger ones grow up and turn mean and get in trouble. I was right along with them. I’d spend time in an orphanage, then I’d run off, then the police would catch me doing something and send me back. I felt my own innocence die, replaced with anger and cruelty. As I got older, I saw new little ones show up. I knew what was ahead of them. I couldn’t do anything for them then when I was young. But now I can.”
Grant leaned toward his troubled son. “I want you here, Charlie. If I found others in need, I’d bring in ten more. I’d find the room for ’em. Maybe I should build a great big house and, who knows, maybe find room for a hundred. They could stay here until they’re grown and. . . ”
“You can’t be a real father to a hundred children at once, Pa. You couldn’t even feed them. And you could never give them a father’s love, not enough to change their lives.”
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