With a mixture of pride and puzzlement, the mayor looked down at the daughter he had raised. “How do you know so much about men all of a sudden?”
Another speaker started in. “We oughta clean up the jail, maybe get us a new sheriff.” Sage recognized the voice as Seth Duquette’s. Like his father, Joshua, Seth enjoyed the idea of bullying people.
“Who we gonna put in the jail, Seth?” someone called. “Ain’t got much wrongdoing hereabouts ‘cept for apple snitchin’.”
“Oh, we got some, all right. Kids runnin’ wild after school. Bank robbed over to Dixon Falls last week. I even heard an outlaw was spotted right here in Russell’s Landing.”
Sage spun away from the table and caught her father’s eye. Had Antonio Suarez returned?
“Time!” the mayor yelled.
“But I ain’t finished yet!” Seth yelped.
“Yes, y’are, son.”
A spatter of applause rippled over the crowd.
“Next, we’ll hear from Letitia Halstead. She’s gonna share the recipe for her lemon peel cake.”
More applause. Women rummaged in pockets and reticules for paper and pencil.
“Don’t want the recipe, Letitia, just give us the cake!”
Everyone laughed until the tiny woman in blue-checked gingham rose and walked forward. “You hush up, Parker Ramsey. Get your wife to bake you one! Now, listen up. Take two handfuls of sugar and a half teacup of butter, and when it crumbles nice, you take and skin four lemons and…”
Sage memorized the recipe as Letitia recited it, but she knew it would not taste the same; Mrs. Halstead always purposely left out one ingredient in her most sought-after dishes.
Sage had to laugh at the foibles of human beings. The townsfolk, and the farm families, too, now that she was paying medical calls and getting to know them, were dear to her heart. Not perfect, just human. Flawed and wonderful. Exasperating and lovable at the same time.
She stepped away from the throng of people now arranging cloths and blankets for their picnics on the lush meadow grass. Moving up a little hillock, she turned to survey the doings.
She loved this place, even if she didn’t feel a part of it in some ways. Women her age had grown up and married while Sage was away at medical college. By now, her schoolgirl acquaintances had two or three babies.
Her mother’s friends, and Aunt Cissy’s, were the hardworking, aproned women who ran the Ladies Aid Society and sat on church committees, the ones who helped raise their grandchildren. Sage supposed she would end up doing the same. Except, she thought with an odd tightening in her throat, she wouldn’t have any grandchildren.
She gazed down on the families grouped together, the knots of women chattering over a baby’s bonneted head, and for an instant her heart split right down the center. Ella Pokell’s baby, Arvo’s bruised hip, the three new cases of measles in the county—these were the things that mattered to her.
And a blue-eyed baby in a ruffled yellow bonnet?
She couldn’t answer that question, any more than she could stop the tears blurring her vision into a kaleidoscope of changing colors and textures.
A speaker’s raucous voice cut into her thoughts. “I t’ink we need a hospital!”
“Like hell we do. We need a jail.” Seth Duquette’s voice.
“We all need some of Miz Letitia’s lemon cake!” her father interjected.
“And some ice cream!” four-year-old Rosanna Ramsey piped. “Banilla!”
Four years ago Rosanna was just a dream of Parker Ramsey and his new bride, Natasha Petrov, the mercantile owner’s daughter from Dixon Falls. Sage’s cousin, Matt, had taken one look at the exquisite woman with her dark hair braided into a crown, and fallen in love on the spot. Unfortunately, Matt’s glimpse of her had occurred at her wedding to Parker. After that day, Matt rarely looked at a woman.
Until now, Sage could never understand why her cousin was so disinterested in the opposite sex. Now she understood completely. She had no more desire to cast her eyes on a male—even a strong, healthy one—unless he wore a familiar plaid shirt rolled up to his elbows and unbuttoned to the waist to catch the breeze, and torso-hugging jeans with nothing underneath.
Merciful heavens, what a shameless thought!
Yes, indeed, Dr. West, a voice within whispered. Lately you seem to be feeling as human as the next woman.
She found herself scanning the crowd for a tall, lean man who moved like a graceful cat stalking its prey. Not one man even remotely resembled Cord Lawson.
She shifted her gaze to the buildings along the main road through town, watching for a telltale puff of dust until her eyes burned.
He would never return. At the bottom of her heart she knew a man like Cordell Lawson preferred to wander. And besides, he’d always said he didn’t like towns.
Sage shook the thought out of her head, lifted her skirt and started down the hill toward Aunt Cissy and Uncle John.
Aunt Cissy looked like a willowy stalk of green corn lily in her new emerald muslin. Uncle John, in a faded blue army shirt and crisp trousers, was still the handsomest man within a hundred miles, but he had eyes for no one but Aunt Cissy. When she looked up into her husband’s face, Sage’s heart caught. They were beautiful together, even after all these years.
And, Sage noted with a smile, even her mother was acting a little silly this fine July day. Every time Billy spoke, a worshipful look and a blush came over Nettie West’s still creamy complexion.
How Sage loved seeing them together.
Oh, damn that Cord Lawson, anyway! She didn’t want to miss this mysterious, splendid thing that bound a man and a woman together with such long-lasting but invisible threads. It made her heart ache just to think about it.
The next morning, she met Mrs. Benbow outside Duquette’s Mercantile. “Oh, my dear, have you heard?”
Sage took a step back. “Heard what?” She held her breath as Mrs. Benbow slapped her palm against her heaving bosom.
“About the wedding!”
Sage blinked. “What wedding? Who is getting married?”
“Why, the Pokell girl, of course. Sarah’s been sweet on Eli Ramsey since she was in pinafores, and now—my stars, isn’t it exciting? He proposed last night. Got down on one knee right on her back porch…” The buxom woman paused for breath. “And then she kissed him, and he kissed her, and she started to cry and—”
“Just how do you know all this?” Sage interrupted.
The woman’s eyes rounded. “Why, I watched them, of course! The Pokells’ porch is just across my back garden.”
“Forgive me, Mrs. Benbow, but doesn’t that strike you as being a bit…nosy, spying on a courting couple?”
“Why, no, Sage. I’ve known Sarah for years. Her mother and I are practically sisters, you know. We grew up together, right here in Russell’s Landing.”
“You are not sisters,” Sage corrected. “You and Minerva are first cousins, the same as Matt Montgomery and me. Even so, that doesn’t give you the right to—”
“Why, Sage West, I do believe you are jealous.”
“Jealous?” Sage snapped her jaw shut. Jealous of Sarah Pokell? The last time Sage had seen Sarah the girl had just won the three-legged race at a summer social, wearing jeans with red patches on the knees.
“That’s what I said—jealous. Look at yourself, Sage. You’re practically an old—”
“Don’t you dare say that!” Sage blurted. “Sarah Pokell cannot be a day over seventeen. What could she possibly know about life? About love?”
“I don’t in the least see what age has to do with it. Now, you take Parker Ramsey, why, he was practically an old man when he fell in love with that Russian scamp from Dixon Falls.”
“Natasha Petrov was never a scamp!” At the back of her mind, Sage wondered why she was arguing over this. It wasn’t as if she and Natasha were friends; she barely knew the woman.
“Gypsy, then. Anyway, she’s foreign.”
At that, Sage exploded. “Forei
gn! We are all foreign on this soil—that is, unless we’re Indian.”
Mrs. Benbow’s generous bosom swelled with indignation.
“Anyway, the wedding is to be this Sunday,” she huffed. “At the church. The Ladies Auxiliary is already baking for the reception, and…oh my, that reminds me, I’m out of cinnamon.” She veered toward the mercantile entrance. “I’m making two dozen of my apple tarts.”
“Apple tarts,” Sage echoed. “That’s nice.” She turned away. Her anger had evaporated. In its place a hollow yawned beneath her heart. Sarah Pokell and Eli Ramsey, to be married on Sunday. Little Sarah with the scrawny knees would bind her life to a man, would promise to love and honor and obey, for better or worse. Why, why did this hurt so?
Clear as a rumble of thunder, she heard her father’s low, raspy voice in her head. Might want to give it some thought, Sage honey. Setting bones and bringing babies doesn’t keep a woman warm at night.
Mrs. Benbow disappeared to the silvery sound of the bell over the mercantile door.
“Oh, yes it will,” Sage murmured. “I’m not going to risk my heart for a warm…”
She gulped in air. “I didn’t spend all those years learning how to stitch wounds and deliver babies just to throw it all away on…a male of the species.”
So there.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The Senorita Saloon in Nogales looked as if a dust storm had dumped half the Mexican desert on the floor. Sand crunched under Cord’s boots, but his throat was so dry he didn’t care.
“Double whiskey,” he rasped to the barkeep.
The splash of the amber liquid made his mouth water. Two weeks without rest or a drink, a month without a woman…even his soul felt dry. He slapped his last silver dollar on the scratchy counter.
“Dollar a shot,” the chunky bartender said. He scooped up the single coin and thrust out a meaty hand. “You owe me one more, cowboy.”
“That’s my last one. How ‘bout I drink just half?” Cord offered with a smile.
“How ‘bout you wipe that grin off yer face and pay up? You don’t look like a feller down to his last dollar.”
“Can’t pay you until tomorrow,” Cord said slowly, sizing the man up. He didn’t want a fight. He was so tired he wasn’t sure he could stand up long enough to land a punch, but he was damn desperate for a drink. “How about it?”
“What’s so special about tomorrow? It’s Sunday. You a Bible beater?”
“Tomorrow I see the federal marshal.”
“So?” The barkeep pushed the grit on the counter around with his rag. “What’s the marshal got to do with it?”
“He’s holding my money,” Cord said in a tired voice.
“Yeah? What for?”
“Bounty.” He watched the man’s rheumy eyes widen.
“Yeah? What for?” the barkeep said again.
“Antonio Suarez. I brought him in an hour ago.”
“Jesus! Dead or…?”
“Dead,” Cord snapped. “Look, mister, I’m plumb out of good humor. I’m going to drink my whiskey and then I’m going to order another one, a double, so tomorrow my bar bill will be three dollars. Now, take your hand off that glass.”
“You got a name, cowboy?”
“Cordell Lawson.”
The fat fingers spread and lifted away from the shot glass. In the next instant a square quart bottle of Tanner’s Red Eye appeared on the counter. “Drink up, Mr. Lawson.” The silver dollar slid back across the counter. “On the house.”
It took four fingers of whiskey to settle Cord’s gut and drive the past twenty-five days into the back of his consciousness. He hadn’t wanted to kill Suarez. All he’d wanted was to keep him away from Oregon and Sage. Putting him behind bars would have done it, but Suarez had made a mistake staking out that ambush.
Cord had packed his body into Nogales tied onto the back of the gray mare Suarez had taken. His gray mare.
He downed another swallow and felt the knot inside him begin to loosen. It was over. The only thing he had to decide now was what he’d do with the money.
More whiskey, for starters. He tipped the bottle forward and refilled his glass.
For the next two hours he tried very hard not to think about Sage or anything that reminded him of her. Sage making biscuits with whiskey. Her white muslin drawers fluttering off the backside of her horse. That day in Pudding Flat when the earth stopped turning as they’d come together.
He drank more than he should have, kept drinking until the sharp hunger in his soul faded to a kind of acceptance.
She wasn’t for him. She wasn’t available to any man, if he thought about it. She wanted to be a doctor, to diagnose and treat a man, not travel with him.
He remembered that first time, how she’d looked hard at his manhood, even brushed her fingers across the tip and tasted his seed. One hundred percent scientific curiosity.
With a groan, he poured his glass full, leaned his head into his hand and closed his eyes.
He would never forget that day. He’d almost wept, he’d been so moved.
The day Sarah Pokell married Eli Ramsey was a day Sage would remember for the rest of her life. It started like any other Sunday in July, the cloudless sky arching overhead like a sapphire bowl, the morning air sweet with the scent of honeysuckle and Mrs. Benbow’s front rose garden.
The church bell tolled at eleven o’clock, just as a wagon rumbled down the street, mother and father toting black, leather-bound Bibles, the children riding in the back, scrubbed and subdued, dressed in their Sunday best.
The small white-painted church would be crammed to the rafters this morning, and most families would stay on for the wedding ceremony later that afternoon.
Sage spent the morning sterilizing instruments and repacking her medical satchel. Only when the hall clock chimed two did she climb the stairs to her bedroom and don the peach muslin, tidy her hair and settle the wide-brimmed straw hat in place.
The afternoon sun heated the back of her neck where the hat didn’t shield. By the time she reached the board walkway along Main Street, the hot rays scorched her spine right through the fabric of her dress.
It felt good in a way. Comforting. At the same time, the pleasure of the sensation sent her mind skittering from the steaming scalpels and forceps she’d left on the stove to air dry to picking an armload of Mrs. Benbow’s Belle of Portugal blooms to scent the drawers of her chiffarobe. Her patients teased her when the sheet draping her examination table smelled of roses, but she didn’t care. It made her feel good.
A thunderstorm threatened. The sultry heat pressed down, driving her into the church an hour ahead of the ceremony, where she slid into an oak pew at the back and tried to settle her thoughts.
What did it mean to marry a man, as Sarah Pokell would do this afternoon? What would a woman have to give up to become someone’s wife?
Sarah sewed beautifully and churned butter and raised chickens, but she had always done those things. She would go on doing them after she married Eli.
But what about sterilizing scalpels and setting broken bones?
Townspeople began to drift in, moving slowly down the aisle, choosing seats, shushing children. Sage found herself watching everything, as if there were something to learn from this gathering of people. The light slanting through the windows cast a warm amber glaze over the church interior, illuminating dust motes caught in a shaft of sunshine. The air smelled warm and damp, and suddenly Sage saw everything in a different way.
She saw the looks on people’s faces, in their eyes—fathers concerned about their children, husbands reaching to their wives in silent communion, bent old men and their wrinkled partners clasping work-worn hands. There was something so…so elemental held within the four plain walls of this sanctuary. Something good. Something true.
What a gift life is. And love, as unexplainable as the origin of the universe, was what tied it all together and made sense of the mix of joy and heartache that life brought. It was…sacred, s
omehow.
Her father settled himself next to her, her mother swishing into the seat beside him, and then Aunt Cissy and Uncle John took places next to them. The rest of the pews filled, and then birdlike Letitia Halstead took her place at the harmonium.
At the first notes, Sage’s eyes filled, blurring the scene into a wash of shapes and colors.
Eli Ramsey, in a new suit, his Adam’s apple bobbing above his starched white shirt collar, waited beside Reverend Landon. When Sarah, in ivory lace, started down the aisle on her father’s arm, Eli’s face changed. His large brown eyes softened with a kind of reverence, as if he had seen an angel.
Sarah drifted forward, gripping a floppy bouquet of yellow roses and black-eyed Susans as if they would float away if she loosened her grasp. Her face looked…she looked…
Why am I crying? Sage wondered. This is all so beautiful!
Eli stepped forward, and after some words spoken low, Sarah was his. Sage wrapped her arms across her waist, laughed and cried along with the congregation as the minister made his closing remarks, raising his voice to be heard over the rain now drumming on the roof.
Her throat closed. A hollow ache bloomed under the buttons of her dress.
Scarcely aware of what she was doing, she edged past her parents and Aunt Cissy to the end of the pew, her eye on the open church door.
“Where are you going?” her aunt whispered. “It’s raining outside.”
“Swimming,” Sage murmured in a choked voice. “I’m going swimming in the river.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Cord stepped out of the federal marshal’s office and headed down the main street of Nogales toward the Senorita Saloon. His head still ached from last night’s fandango with the bottle of whiskey, but he wasn’t so pokered he couldn’t think straight.
Or count. The thick envelope he’d stuffed inside his vest contained fifty one-hundred-dollar bills. His bounty money. Five thousand dollars, and this morning his body felt like he’d earned every one of them.
High Country Hero Page 15