Forrest Stephens was one of the kindest men Betsy had ever known. He’d fussed at first when Betsy and her mother arrived in Lavender by irregular means, stepping across the line that separated the little community from the modern world, setting it aside as an oasis in time, but his sympathies went immediately to the lost young girl she was at that time. Since then he’d been a true grandfather to her.
She felt confused about her loyalties. With her whole heart she believed in the right to equal treatment for all and considered the history of slavery and the long decades of second class citizenship a disgrace to the land. And yet she loved Grandpapa Forrest who had fought on the other side of that cause.
And she loved . . .no, she would not think of Caleb. To do so would only invite trouble. And Betsy, who had spent her first few years in the strife caused by a manipulative, uncaring father wanted only the peace that Lavender had brought into her life. She had sworn to stay here forever in this island of calm and certainty.
She smiled a little shakily at her grandfather. Forrest looked troubled, lines set deep in his face. “Don’t like to think of those times, Betsy,” he said. “Lost so many friends, saw the terrible suffering on both sides. So many died or were maimed, so many lost . . .” He sank into contemplation, obviously feeling the need to talk about what must have been the worst period of his life and yet not wanting to inflict awful experience on his granddaughter.
Betsy didn’t ask him if he remembered Caleb Carr. She was afraid to hear the answer.
It was a long summer for Caleb, healing slowly and uncertainly. He heard of battles long after they happened, mostly from the letters Forrest sent, and lived with constant fear for Doc and the rest of the family as the old man continued his emergency services to the black community in spite of increasingly vitriolic gossip about his activities.
By fall, he no longer woke up each day hoping to see Betsy Stephens again and began to look on her visit as something like a dream, wonderful to contemplate, but unlikely to ever happen again.
He memorized the lines of her lovely face, the look in those deep blue eyes and the sound of her voice echoed in his ears so that sometimes he almost thought he heard her speaking from near at hand.
Hetty didn’t come to the house anymore, saying that to do so put both her family and the Stephens in danger. It didn’t help any that her husband and two sons had gone off, reportedly to join the Federal troops and she was left alone with only a pretty little daughter, both of them vulnerable to the irrational sentiment prevalent in the community as the lines intensified between the union sympathizers and those who supported the new Confederate States of America.
He began to doubt that he would ever be well enough to return to the army and tried to be glad, knowing that it was only his presence here in his worn gray uniform and the fact that Forrest was off fighting for the southern cause that kept Doc even remotely safe.
He was way too outspoken, was Doc, and what he had to say was popular only in the wrong quarters. It didn’t much matter, even weeks after reinjuring his leg, he could only walk by leaning heavily on the cane Doc had gotten for him
Lavinia with what help he and Doc could manage was doing the cooking and cleaning now, as well as looking after baby Evan, who was starting to pull up and walk. The bright-eyed indulged young woman who had joined the household complained less about her responsibilities and seemed to live for her child and her husband’s letters from the front.
He was glad Betsy was spared all this and hoped she was someplace where young women could sing and dance and have a good time in the way normal to their age. Texas in late 1862 became less and less such a place.
In October came news of a mass hanging in Gainesville, not too far away in Cooke County. Forty men suspected of being union sympathizers were accused of treason or insurrection by a Citizens Court and dispatched accordingly.
Talk was that a so called Peace Party had been started by those opposed to the war. Caleb didn’t want to hear that Doc was a member and so didn’t ask him right out. He didn’t want to know.
Fall came and then winter. They celebrated Christmas only for the sake of the toddler Evan and Caleb’s leg was infected once again. Doc talked about the necessity of amputation and Caleb flat refused. He’d rather die, he said.
Doc said grimly that it might come to that.
Snow lay on the ground in 1908 Lavender, sifting down to cover the pines and magnolias with a frosting of white. The ice on the ponds wasn’t thick enough for skating, but they had a Christmas dance at the school, the auditorium seats having been temporarily moved to give room for the party.
Betsy and Sylvie had matching dresses made of soft blue wool, though as was befitting to her age, Betsy’s skirt was longer and fuller.
Nearly everybody in the community attended from small children to old married couples, but the younger crowd collected at the far south end and claimants for Betsy’s hand were not scarce.
She’d always planned to marry—eventually. And here she was, an old maid by Lavender standards, having passed her twenty sixth birthday and not any longer given to getting engaged and then unengaged as she had in her girlhood. Eddie and Zan had come back for her birthday a couple of weeks ago. Once a month she stepped along the bend in the creek that marked the set-apart community and stepped out into the 21st century world, just in case a member of her family on the outside wanted to visit inside.
This time her stepsister and brother-in-law had come, bringing with them a huge box of the expensive chocolate candies that weren’t available at any price in Lavender. She’d shared the treat with others in the family and a few friends.
Before Eddie went back to the meaningful life she and her husband lived, Betsy had told her all about her new time traveling experiences that allowed her to cross into the world of the past simply by entering the old cookshack. She’d even told her secretly about Caleb Carr and how he’d made her feel.
Eddie had looked thoughtful, but characteristically offered no advice.
This evening was one to seriously consider her future, Betsy had decided, but as man after man asked her to dance and she analyzed each one as marriage material, none seemed possible.
Darrell was fun and light-hearted. Silas was serious and responsible; they had wonderful conversations and had been friends forever. Averill was so handsome that he made all the girls swoon. But she couldn’t even imagine wanting to kiss any one of them, much less anything more while in her dreams she and Caleb Carr reached out for intimacies she would blush to describe even to her sister.
Something in her recognized him as the lover she had been looking for all her years. Only there were so many complications including the fact that their life views were so at odds. And then there was the fact that she’d most likely never see him again.
She had crossed and re-crossed the threshold into the kitchen more times than were remotely necessary, pausing to admire the rows of canned fruits and vegetables and jams and jellies they’d put up over the summer and stored away on the shelves.
Nothing out of the ordinary had happened over that time and though she searched her mind for what little detail might have been different when she’d walked into the past, she couldn’t figure out anything, not a clue that would take her back again.
Not that she was sure she would go even if she faced that choice.
She waved at Susan and her other friends as they passed by in the lively dance and tried to give herself over to flirting and conversation as the evening required. At supper, they found a table laden with the homemade goodies they all had brought. Betsy had made three of her popular egg custard pies and Susan a rich fruit cake, which was a recipe handed down from her grandmother.
“She was the best cook,” Susan enthused while the young men who had escorted them to the long table talked about possibilities for next summer’s crops.
Betsy, remembering a breakfast she’d only tasted in the old cookshack, almost said she knew, but caught herself in time.
Susan nibbled at her dessert, than asked, “You mean because of her cooking.”
“That, of course, but I meant she must have gone through some hard times back during the war between the states.”
Susan shrugged, her dark eyes shining in the lamp light. She was a strikingly beautiful young woman, only a couple of years younger than Betsy. She didn’t seem eager to marry, but planned to keep on with the pharmaceutical business her mother and grandmother had got going. “Don’t need a man to boss me,” she often said, but that didn’t keep her from being popular with the young men. “She never said much. Mama says she was a slave when she was young, but got an opportunity for an education unusual in those days. She was the granny woman, the one everybody came to when they were sick and in trouble. I suppose she never went through the kind of trials most people did in those days.”
Somehow Betsy was sure that wasn’t true. Maybe Hetty, like Grandpapa Forrest, didn’t want to contaminate the young of her family with the sorrows of yesterday.
Eddie would say that was a shame, that history was lost in the process.
Chapter Eight
When Caleb met Bolter Jackson at the store he nodded and then went past without speaking. Bolter had been Forrest’s friend, not his and he found it hard to hide his disapproval that the planter, responding to the Confederate Conscription Act had only to hire another man to fight in his place, saying he was too needed on the plantation to go himself.
Bitter over his own injury and continued disability, Caleb purchased the beans and rice Lavinia had sent him after and left as quickly as he could, not anxious to linger to hear the war news that would be under discussion by the old men playing checkers in back.
These days word-of-mouth was the only news they got and Lavinia grew pale and thin. None of them had heard from Forrest since the terrible losses at Shiloh in April. Surely, surely someone would have gotten them word if he had fallen or been taken prisoner.
But no word came and Doc went about his work with a grim look on his face while Lavinia did her best to hang on, her eyes reddened with the tears she shed in private.
Caleb went out of his way to the small house on the edge of town where Hetty lived with her little daughter. She received no word from her vanished husband and sons and, unlike them, had little hope of getting information about their fate unless they were in a position to write themselves.
Hetty, secretly educated by association with a plantation owner’s fond daughter in a southern mansion, had seen to it that all her kin could read and write.
She was working the garden that provided foodstuff for her little family and several others as well when he stopped by the tiny, well-kept cabin. She looked up gladly at the sight of him and little Miranda, who was less than a year older than their own Evan, ran into his arms. He managed to anchor himself enough to give her the expected toss in the air, before leaning heavily on his cane again.
“At least you’re alive and still got both legs,” Hetty said tartly, only glancing at the cane. “Thank the good Lord.”
Caleb smiled, not sure how grateful he was for either, not with the way things were going these days. He felt the continual frustration that others were defending his home while he could do so little. But there was no use feeling sorry for himself when Hetty was around. She wouldn’t stand for it.
“I don’t go for Doc anymore,” she said abruptly. “Not since I heard about the hangings in Gainesville. Tell him there’s talk, lots of talk, against him.”
He tried to make a joke of it. “I hear Bolter isn’t all that popular after hiring a replacement for himself.”
“Bolter never was really liked,” she said. “Thinks too highly of himself.”
She didn’t mention the slaves he held, slaves who would be set free if the Federals won. For the first time, he had a glimmering of her viewpoint. Always before he’d thought she with her schooling and her confident attitude was different from those others, but maybe she didn’t see it that way. Maybe she felt like they were locked up in prison, yearning to be free. She’d watched her husband and sons go to fight for that hope of freedom.
He felt itchy all over with a sense of guilt. He and his folks had always been poor, had never owned as much as a single slave. Their lives had been harder because of the slavery system. Who would hire a white man and pay him when they could buy a slave?
“Any word from your menfolk?” he asked. He’d grown up with her older son, considered a buddy until he was old enough to realize his neighbors looked disapprovingly on the friendship.
She shook her head. “Nothing since that letter from the boys after Shiloh. They and their daddy came through without a scratch, though I have no idea what’s happened since and a long time has passed.”
He stared at her tearless face. Whatever weeping Hetty had done in the absence of the men of her family was kept secret. “I know it’s hard,” he said the words, feeling how inadequate they were.
She nodded, her expression grave. “What do you hear from Forrest?”
“Nothing. Not even Lavinia has had a letter in ages.” Not in the long months since Shiloh where he and Hetty’s kin would have fought on opposite sides.
By that spring Caleb was forced to admit that he would never walk well enough again to be of use as a soldier. To his dismay, the war went on and on without him and nothing was heard from Forrest while his son, who was now old enough to run around in the soft warm air outside, had no memory of him other than the stories his mother told him.
Caleb longed to be back in his own little place in the country, but he’d sold off what livestock he had when he went to war, and on occasional visits, he found his fields overgrown with weeds and young trees. The acres he’d so carefully planted were returning to wilderness.
He was needed too much in this home run by an elderly man and his daughter-in-law. He might have to lean on a cane to get around, but he was still strong enough to carry wood and other heavy loads and see to the horses that took Doc on his visits to patients.
Doc was looking old and worn these days when he seemed always to be called out to one emergency after another. Not a single troubled birth or child with a fevered illness, but he was summoned.
The only other doctor in the vicinity had gone to serve in the war. The women helped each other as best they could, but sometimes only his trained skills had a chance at saving a life.
And, as Caleb knew well enough, he still made those secret, silent trips at night to go to the aid of slaves in desperate need. Caleb shook his head at actions that were liable to get them all killed.
Hell, Lavinia and the boy wouldn’t even have to be killed out right. They could never survive here alone.
He did a few heavy lifting chores for Hetty, made sure she and the little girl had enough to eat, then ambled home, remembering Hetty’s warning. He had to sit Doc down for a serious talk.
But as he entered the cookshack, intending to take a short rest on his bed in the lean-to, he stopped abruptly. There, looking at him with her beautiful blue eyes open wide, stood Betsy. She looked just as startled as he felt.
For once she’d raced unthinkingly back to the kitchen, looking for the particular vase Mrs. Myers had requested, dashed in and found herself staring at the old fireplace.
Heart pounding, she glanced around and saw that she was alone in the cookshack. Fearful that Caleb might very well have died during the days she’d been away, she went to the lean-to door, pushed it open. Nobody there, but the little bed looked as though it had been slept in. That gave her a glimmer of hope.
She hadn’t long to linger between hope and fear. The outer door opened and Caleb himself limped in, leaning heavily on a cane. He looked tired and worn, pain lines cut so deeply into his face that he seemed years older, but all she could feel was a rush of gladness that he was still alive.
“Caleb,” she said senselessly. “You’re not dead.”
H
e grinned wryly. “Not so as I can tell.”
She nodded. “I’m glad.”
“No better though,” he said as though admitting a personal failure. “Won’t get any better, Doc says.”
“That’s not true.” She gave a little laugh. “You were flat out on the floor last time I saw you.”
He joined her laughter, than said. “Reckon we don’t always see our own blessings.”
She looked at the raggedy uniform he continued to wear. “You’re still a soldier.”
“It’s only for show.” He shrugged. “They wouldn’t have me these days.”
“I’m glad,” she responded hastily, then knew by the look on his face that she’d said the wrong thing, “but I don’t suppose that’s how you feel.”
He shook his head. “Guess the good Lord has showed me sure enough that he wants me here seeing to things and not off fighting. Trouble enough right here in Lavender.”
“Dr. Tyler?” she asked anxiously. “Hetty, Lavinia and the baby?”
“All alive and well enough. So far.”
She suddenly realized that he, an old-fashioned gentleman, was standing because she remained on her feet. She settled into a chair and watched as he did the same with obvious relief, laying aside the cane that seemed now to be a permanent fixture.
“Surely you’re safe enough here in Texas. It’s so far away from the war.”
“We seemed to be having our own war, especially in the northern counties. There looks to be about as many on one side as the other and they aren’t what you might say real fond of each other.”
“Not actual fighting?” she asked anxiously, “Not with Doc feeling the way he does.”
“And keeping on saying what he feels right out loud and in the wrong company. Men have been hanged for less and he won’t listen to a word of caution.”
She drew a breath of relief that they were all still here.
“There’s worse news.” He looked not at her, but at the wood of the floor. “It’s Forrest. He’s not been heard of since Shiloh.”
Lavender Blue: A Time Travel Romance (Lavender, Texas Series) Page 6