Phoebe's Valentine

by Duncan, Alice

  Phoebe hollered, “Kill you? Kill you? I’ll kill you. I’ll kill all three of you! How dare you not tell me this madman was still loose?”

  After a brief and furious struggle, Pete and Antelope managed to wrest the pump handle from Phoebe’s fingers. It was a hard-won battle, and Pete ended up with a lump on his head. He rubbed it and scowled.

  “Dammit, we didn’t want to worry you,” he told her grumpily.

  “What’re you complaining about, anyway,” muttered a disgruntled Antelope.

  “What am I complaining about? What am I complaining about?” She tried to wrench herself away from Jack so she could pummel Antelope and Pete for a while, but her effort failed miserably.

  “Don’t mind her,” Pete advised his cousin. “She’s always been hysterical.”

  “Yeah,” grumbled Antelope. “I know. And now she’s gonna get the damned bounty, too.”

  Panting, exhausted, still struggling in Jack’s powerful arms, Phoebe had energy enough to shriek, “Bounty? I don’t want the wretched bounty! I wouldn’t take money for this creature if you paid me!” She realized her declaration didn’t make any sense and frowned.

  “You wouldn’t?” Antelope brightened.

  “No, I wouldn’t!”

  “Great,” said Antelope. “Mind if we take it?”

  “Take it!” Phoebe screamed. “Take it and take him and go away!”

  “Thanks, Miss Phoebe,” Pete said.

  He grabbed Basteau’s wrists, sparing him the agony of being dragged by his broken fingers, and Antelope took his feet. Together, they began to haul him away, towards the sheriff’s station.

  All at once Phoebe realized Jack Valentine’s arms encircled her. He’d been holding her very gingerly with his hands around her waist. When Pete and Antelope relieved her of her weapon, though, he’d slid his arms around her, and now he held her body snugly to his.

  As if she were a hot-air balloon and somebody’d just stuck in pin in her, Phoebe deflated. Suddenly her energy fell to the earth at her feet and her legs gave out. She sagged in Jack’s arms and barely had spunk enough to turn in his embrace and throw her arms around his neck.

  “I hate you!” she sobbed into Jack’s chest. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!”

  Torn between laughter and tears, relief almost overwhelming him, Jack murmured, “That’s my Phoebe.” Oh, God, she was safe! He’d never been so thankful of anything in his entire life.

  “I hate you!” Although she possessed barely enough strength to lift her arms, Phoebe batted feebly at Jack’s chest with her fists.

  “And I hate you, too, darling.” Jack buried his face in her tumbled hair and took a shuddering breath of relief. “Oh, God, Phoebe, I was so scared.”

  She answered with a flurry of sobs.

  “Will you marry me now, Phoebe? Will you hate me enough to marry me? Will you hate me all the way to San Francisco and be my wife? Will you hate me forever, until death do us part?”

  “I c-c-c-can’t give you children!” Phoebe wailed.

  She’d stopped trying to pummel him with her puny fists, for which Jack was profoundly grateful, but she still had her hands balled up and didn’t seem inclined to listen to reason. Still, he persisted. Damn the woman. Why was she so stubborn?

  “I don’t want any children!” Jack realized he’d begun to yell. He took a deep breath and hissed, “Damn it, Phoebe, I made a promise to myself during the war that I wasn’t going to bring any sons of mine into the world to be blown up in a goddamned war or be orphaned and left like Sarah and Bill!”

  “You-you did?”

  Nodding, Jack added, “Besides that, how the hell many children do you think a person needs, anyway?”

  Jack felt Phoebe’s face squinch up, heard her suck in hard gasps of air, and knew she didn’t understand his question. He tried again.

  “Damn it all, I’d like to know how many children you plan to adopt. If two girls and a boy aren’t enough for a man, they sure as hell ought to be.”

  “Wh-what?”

  Jack sighed when Phoebe lifted her head and stared at him. Her poor face was bruised, and her eyes looked drowned. Dirt smears and blood spatters decorated her cheeks, and she sported more than one angry-looking scratch. He figured she was going to have one hell of a shiner in the morning.

  “You heard me,” he said, feeling grumpy now.

  “Two girls and a . . . you mean Sarah and Sunshine and William?” Her voice sounded breathy, incredulous, corrugated by left-over tears.

  “Well, who the hell else would I mean?” Damn, this woman could be thick as a plank.

  Phoebe blinked several times. “Don’t swear at me, Jack Valentine.” Her voice sounded stronger. “You mean you want to—to adopt them?”

  Since she didn’t seem inclined to run away or try to murder him any longer, Jack dared to release her for a moment. He hauled out a piece of paper from the same breast pocket from which he’d procured the ring earlier in the evening.

  “I have a paper signed by General Philip Sheridan, giving you and me the right and custody to one Sunshine, Mescalero orphan, found on the plains in the New Mexico Territory on this—” He squinted at the paper but couldn’t read it in the dim light. “—Whatever the hell date it was.”

  “Oh, Jack.”

  He glared at her. “Damn it, Phoebe, is that ‘Oh, Jack’ a yes or a no. I’m getting real tired of all this nonsense!”

  “Oh, Jack. It’s a yes. A great, big yes!”

  She caught him off balance when she threw herself into his arms. They ended in a heap of arms, legs, and petticoats on the dirt in front of her uncle’s store.

  “And you’d better not make a fuss, either, Phoebe Antoinette Honeycutt, soon to be Phoebe Antoinette Valentine.”

  “Why would I make a fuss, Jack?”

  “Because you always fuss,” he told her roundly. “But I’ll be damned if I’ll ever let you work again. I’m richer than anybody I know. I’ve got a house on Nob Hill and so much money I can’t even count it all, so don’t you dare even think you have to work.”

  “You—you’re rich?”

  “Rich as Croesus, sweetheart.”

  Before Phoebe could say a thing, another voice intruded. “This better mean what I think it do, Mr. Jack Valentine, or you’re dead meat.”

  Hosea’s booming voice surprised a small scream out of Phoebe. Jack just laughed when he lifted her in his arms and stood up.

  “It does, Hosea. It means we’re getting married. You’re going to be the last Honeycutt, all by yourself, because this one’s becoming my Valentine.”

  Hosea pushed his army hat back on his head and grinned. His white smile cut a brilliant path across his dark face. “Well, that’s just fine, then. That’s just real, real fine.”

  Jack saw Phoebe’s bruised face spout two red flags when a tremendous roar of approval went up from the crowd gathered around to watch the excitement.

  Then he barely had time to open his arms and catch Sarah when she flung herself at him from the top of the porch steps. William’s face held a grin half a mile wide when he, Sunshine in his arms, walked down the stairs in a more dignified manner, as befitted an almost-a -an, to congratulate his aunt and his new uncle on their impending nuptials.

  Epilogue

  San Francisco, California, June, 1890

  Jack pulled Phoebe a little closer to his side, sorry he couldn’t ease her emotional state which he knew to be turbulent. He tried to nuzzle the side of her neck to give her courage, but was thwarted when her big hat poked him in the nose.

  “It will all be just fine, darling,” he murmured.

  After a large snuffle, Phoebe whispered, “I know it, Jack. It’s just that Sunshine is the last of our children, and this is such a big step for her.”

  Even now, twenty years after they’d married, Jack smiled to hear Phoebe call them “their” children.

  “She’ll be fine, sweetheart. We’ve reared her to be fine.” If there was one thing Jack knew for
a rock-solid certainty, it was that.

  “I know.” Phoebe sighed, and rose with Jack and the rest of the parents assembled to watch their daughters graduate from the Northern California Teachers’ College for Young Women. Sunshine Valentine, valedictorian of her graduating class, was going to make a speech right after the hymn ended.

  Jack’s deep baritone still gave Phoebe chills, even after all these years. Although Phoebe felt sad about losing yet another daughter to adulthood, she knew Jack was right. Everything would be all right, as long as she and Jack had one another.

  She cried through the entire ten minutes of Sunshine’s speech, though. Especially during the end of the speech, when Sunshine gave credit for her success to her mother and father. She was grateful to her veil, even though Jack hated it, because she’d never in her life had such a time controlling her emotions in public.

  After the ceremonies, as the crowd began to file out, Phoebe clung to Jack’s arm. “Why does she have to move so far away, Jack?” she asked wistfully.

  “She wants to help her people, sweetheart. You know that. You taught her that, for heaven’s sake.”

  Jack smiled at her tenderly, and Phoebe felt an enormous surge of love for him. Her very own Yankee devil. She didn’t know how on earth she’d ever deserve him. She smiled back, albeit a bit lopsidedly.

  “I guess you’re right, Jack. But Santa Fe! It’s so far away.”

  He twitched her chin. “You were all set to live there yourself. Remember?”

  With a sigh, Phoebe hugged his arm a little tighter and said, “I remember.”

  They suspended their chat when Sarah Finnerty Blaisdell joined them with her new husband Richard in tow, just about the same time William Finnerty strolled up. William’s straw hat was a sporty concession to the weather, and he peered at Phoebe as if hoping for her approval. He seemed to relax when she smiled at him.

  Then they all spotted Sunshine, surrounded by what seemed to Phoebe to be a vast sea of well-wishers.

  “Doesn’t she look beautiful?” Phoebe sighed.

  “She always was beautiful,” said Sarah somewhat wistfully. “I wish I had hair like that.”

  Phoebe gaped at her niece, astounded. Sarah’s ripe-wheat hair glistened beneath her pretty flowered hat, and her peaches-and-cream skin was perfection itself. When Phoebe heard Jack chuckle at her elbow, she frowned at him.

  “She’s a looker, all right,” William observed appreciatively. He seemed to notice when Phoebe transferred her frown to him. “I mean, she’s a very well-looking young lady, Mother dear.”

  Then he grinned and winked at her, and Phoebe couldn’t be fussy with him. She guessed the children were all grown up at that, whether she liked it or not. Another gusty sigh escaped her.

  Just then Sunshine spotted them and turned away from her friends. Phoebe’s grip on Jack’s arm tightened when Sunshine broke into a run and dashed towards them, her graduation gown flapping at her heels, the tassels on her hat bouncing.

  “She is a real beauty,” Jack breathed. Phoebe could hear the pride and love in his voice.

  “Mother! Father!” Sunshine careened into Jack’s embrace and almost immediately twirled away from him to hug her mother. She was as tall as Phoebe, and as slender. Her ebony hair gleamed in the sun, and her red-brown skin glowed with health and vibrant youth.

  William grabbed Sunshine out of Phoebe’s embrace. “You have to give your older brother a hug, Sunny. And don’t forget to tell Antelope and Pete Spotted Pony that I still have the horse they gave me.”

  “Me, too,” Sarah said. Tears bedewed her cheeks when she and Sunshine squeezed one another.

  “Oh, Sarah,” cried Sunshine, who also wept. “How will I ever get along without my big sister?”

  One of Jack’s business associates, standing nearby, watched the enthusiastic little crowd of Valentines and smiled. He turned to his wife and nodded toward the Valentine clan.

  “Nice family,” he whispered.

  “Indeed they are,” agreed his spouse. “They certainly don’t look much like one another, though, do they?”

  Her husband nodded wisely. “The younger girl is Jack’s. You can tell by the coloring. The other two are Mrs. Valentine’s. Lost her husband during the war, I understand. Rumor has it Jack’s girl is part Indian. Guess he decided to raise her white, although I hear she’s planning to teach at the Indian School in the territory.”

  His wife shook her head. “I wish her well, I guess.” She peered at the family for some moments before she added, “I think it must take a special sort of person to rear children who aren’t one’s own. It must be difficult.”

  Her husband appeared to think for a minute. “Well, I guess so. But they seem to have done all right. Good family, the Valentines. Indian or not, I’d be proud if that little gal of theirs was to look at our Johnny one of these days. Good blood there. All of ‘em.”

  His wife nodded. “Yes. You can always tell. Breeding is everything, you know.”

  Historical Note

  The 10th Cavalry was not posted to Fort Stanton until 1877, but they make up such a colorful part of New Mexico’s history, I couldn’t resist nudging their arrival up a few years. They were a hard working, disciplined group, and were used to good purpose during the Indian campaigns in the late 1800s. A unit of the 10th was also used to quash the factional rising in Lincoln County during its Billy-the-Kid days.

  In 1864, under Colonel Christopher Carson, the army drove thousands of Navajo people to the Bosque Redondo Reservation where two years earlier 450 Mescalero Apaches had been imprisoned. Although by 1868 the army had admitted the failure of the Bosque Redondo project, thousands of Native Americans died of drought, cold, disease, and starvation there. The Bosque Redondo Memorial stands as a bleak reminder of the attempted eradication of the Native American people during the Indian Wars.