by Yvonne Jocks
Rumor held that she and her brother had returned safely from Fort Worth on Tuesday, but he didn't see her. Of course, her self-appointed guardian was probably keeping close watch. By the end of the week, Thaddeas Garrison and his German grandmother had left town, and Jack figured Audra would find some marketing to do. But she still did not appear.
Melissa Smith, returned to the teacherage for the new school term, came by the mercantile on Saturday.
“What can I get for you this fine afternoon?” asked Jack, hoping the blonde at least brought news.
“Walnuts? Beets? Shoe polish?”
But she ignored his teasing, simply requesting tooth powder, and when she left—looking
uncommonly guilty—he found the pen. Melissa had secreted it onto the counter while his back was turned. He recognized the wooden box with a sense of foreboding.
Inside its velvet-lined interior, along with the fountain pen he'd so enjoyed giving Audra for Christmas, nestled a note addressed simply to “Mr. Harwood.” It began with an even less
encouraging “Dear Sir.”
Jack didn't have to read more to know what was up. He slammed the pen, box and all, onto the counter. “Well, damn it to hell!”
“Hey!” protested Ham, looking from Jack to the glass counter and back. Luckily for business, no ladies were shopping at that moment, though Mr. Trigg hardly looked amused.
Jack ignored Ham and everything else, took the note into the back room, and dropped onto his pallet to stare at her careful handwriting. Mr. Harwood. The name looked downright respectable the way she wrote it, but he knew better.
The delicate leaf of stationery smelled faintly of peaches, like she did.
finally, he mustered the grit to actually read the damned thing.
Dear Sir, Audra had written. You were kind to give me this lovely pen. However, I cannot accept it.
Please forgive my having done so even temporarily. You must be aware that our respective positions forbid al but the sparest of interaction. In the future, I believe a stricter adherence to such expectations is best. In hopes that you have as good a heart as you always indicated, I thank you for respecting my wishes in this. Sincerely, Miss Audra Susan Garrison.
Jack read it again, but it said the same thing—every ten-cent word of it. Tarnation. One would think the author of such a letter not only wore a corset, but laced it so tight it squeezed all her spirit right out of her.
Still, he could not pretend Audra hadn't written it. He recognized her handwriting from the dozens of letters she'd mailed to Wyoming. And he recognized her use of whatever rules she could get her sweet little hands around to shield herself from the truth.
Their respective positions, was it?
Jack crumpled the letter in one hand. To hell with Audra Garrison and all other so-called ladies like her. If she truly wanted to sit in judgment, why stop her? She could just become a sour-faced old battle-ax like her aunt!
Then, ruefully, he smoothed the letter back out and looked at it again. Was she sitting in judgment? She called him kind, said he had a good heart, and did not—in writing, at least— blame him for anything from the “improper” gift to the kisses to his inebriation in her presence. Could be the schoolmarm wasn't even taking time to judge. Could be she was just running.
As usual, though, he couldn't figure whether she was running from him or from herself.
The only person who might be able to tell him that would be Audra. In a town as small as Candon, surely she'd return to the store within a week or two. Once the impact of whatever had spooked her eased up, anyhow. He would make his apologies. She, decent gal that she was, would accept them. Surely, despite their “respective positions” and his previous mistakes, she would at the very least start conversing with him again! And then...
He reckoned he'd settle things with Audra first, then worry about what came next. In the meantime, he carefully refolded the letter along its original lines and tucked it in his saddlebags.
Of all she'd given him, this was the first thing Jack could carry with him when he left.
Audra turned seventeen the first week in January, but ever since her visit to the charitable settlement houses in Fort Worth's “Acre,” she felt far older. Maturity felt not a little like guilt. Now that she'd seen how ugly the world could be, she regretted both the innocence that had kept her blind and, selfishly, the loss of that innocence.
Since her return from Fort Worth, she could hardly look at girls like Claudine, or Melissa, or even a reflection of herself, without remembering the residents at the Women's Industrial Home for single and fallen women. She'd seen a silent fourteen-year-old, heavy with a fatherless child, and learned that the age of consent in Texas had recently been raised to twelve. She'd heard the ravings of a haggard, nineteen-year-old “soiled dove” whom the ladies at the home took in after a suicide attempt and learned that most deaths in the Acre were not from shootings or violence but suicides—usual y those of “working women.”
At first Audra resisted faulting gambling or drinking for such tragedy. But even she could not miss the blame of poverty, nor how gambling and drinking complicated that. Feeling helpless, she stepped in to help change soiled sheets and cook a warm meal before Thaddeas could make her leave. He had not approved. He'd only meant her to glimpse the consequences of vice, then return to her upright, untainted life. But Audra could never fully return.
She'd held a puny, wailing infant who'd recently been left on the home's front steps, naked and still bloody from its birth. How easily could her scandal with Peter Connors, in less civilized society, have turned tragic for her? She wondered if any of the women bearing fatherless children had not trusted their men—would they have taken such risks with their lives if they hadn't? And she had felt derelict for never questioning the charmed life she'd thus far led.
Her insistence on helping kept them at the home past nightfall, and the walk out of Hell's Half-Acre, in full celebration for New Year's Eve, became the most frightening experience of Audra's life.
The streets reeked of steaming horse manure, of urine and vomit laced with whiskey. Smoky smells stained the cold air—tobacco, kerosene, coal, and even, once, something sickly sweet from an unpainted business with Oriental men guarding the door. Colored men spilled out of places like the Bucket of Blood and the Black Elephant. Even the white men seemed alien, their noise pouring from the many saloons whose open windows testified to the heat of pressing bodies. Audra had recognized a cacophony of warring sounds as piano music, the clink of glass against glass, drunken laughter, angry shouts, and a strange but steady undercurrent of what turned out to be gambling.
She'd heard the whirring noise of a wheel of fortune, the rattle of wooden game pieces, and the occasional cry of “Keno!” And she saw men who wore the same finery as Jack Harwood's, men who smiled charmingly even as they relieved their companions of money.
Hell's Half-Acre was almost three acres wide—but she couldn't deny its similarity to hell.
True to his word, Thaddeas kept her safe, but even the elegance of the Delaware Hotel seemed tainted after that. Her brother recognized his error, apologizing so desperately that Audra went dancing with him, per their original plan, simply to reassure him. But she came home from Fort Worth determined to find a way to make her own amends.
She wrote the Women's Christian Temperance Union asking for suggestions. She spoke to Mrs.
Col ins about forming a Candon Ladies' Aid. She finished reading Duty and Domesticity, then packed it with Thaddeas's baggage for him to carry home to their sister Kitty.
Perhaps if Audra had read it but a few years earlier, she would never have joined Mr. Harwood in wandering off the path of righteousness herself. Now that she saw the true dangers of
compromising one's behavior, she knew she must not allow him—or herself!—such liberties again.
She felt some guilt about that, too. As the lady, she bore the responsibility for setting the moral tone for their acquaintance, and she had fail
ed miserably. She feared she could too easily fail again, were she to see him on a friendly basis.
Considering her weaknesses where Jack was concerned, that meant not seeing him at all.
She hoped he could understand.
Jack did not understand. By the end of the second week, he was in no mood to deal with Ernest Varnes's continued paranoia about the close proximity of Mosier Valley to "our own innocent daughters." Yes, rumor had it that a six-year-old girl in New Orleans had been attacked by a negro.
But New Orleans was in another state.
“And not a one of us in this room even has daughters,” Jack pointed out on Saturday, disgusted by their continued bigotry, as he showed Ernest yet another revolver from the firearms case. He would have preferred to shed his role of storekeeper right about here—putting Ernest Varnes and a new sidearm together felt lower than dealing marked cards, and nearly as dangerous. But Ferris hated Varnes even more than he did, so Jack waited on Varnes, Ferris waited on folks like the widow Parks when needed, and they all got along. More or less.
It wasn't like any man in Texas didn't already possess a shooting iron or two.
“With the exception of Charlie and Ned, over there,” Jack thought to add, raising his voice. Charlie looked up, curious, but Ned just continued to stare at the checkerboard. "And their gals have daughters themselves," he added to Varnes.
He wondered at what point he'd gotten so familiar with the lineage of Candon families.
“Damn foolish, if you ask me,” said Varnes darkly, spinning the barrel of this latest revolver, then sighting down it by pointing it across the room.
Jack gently nudged both arm and weapon, unloaded or not, away from the direction of Hamilton and the glassware and toward the back room.
“I know I wouldn't do the disservice of bringin' a little girl into this world, just to fall victim to some colored,” their customer added.
Ham set a box onto a shelf a little more forcefully than necessary. Noticing, Jack made an attempt to lighten the tension in the room. "Well, Ernest, I do not know how you manage to fight all them willing women off."
Varnes did not get the joke. "I don't know what they think they're doing, living so close to decent folks like us. If you ask me—"
Hamilton apparently lost his battle for self-control. "But nobody is asking you, Varnes, 'cause you're ignorant. Those Mosier Valley folks live near the rest of us because their people were
brought here as slaves by the white folks who settled this area, that's why. They worked on the Mosier and the Lee plantations off Hurst way. After the war, they were given some of the land as gifts for their loyalty, and they bought more of it, and they settled in to work it, same as anyone else does. They didn't ask us to build a town this close to them, but we did, and they haven't done a damned thing to us since."
“They ain't been here longer'n us!” protested Varnes. “Just look at some of them graves of your own people, next time you ride by the cemetery.”
Something about the way he said that made the hair at the back of Jack's neck prickle.
Ferris didn't seem to notice, though. "And we haven't been here longer than them, either. Why not just leave them be?"
Varnes set the revolver on the counter and muttered, “Now ain't that a fine question?”
Jack said, “What?”
Varnes just shook his head. “I reckon I'll be doing my business up Euless way, from here on out.”
Hallelujah, thought Jack—but Varnes hadn't left yet. "We missed you last Sunday, Harwood. You oughtta come by this week. I'm thinkin' we'll have real good fun."
Which only reminded Jack that he hadn't seen Audra Garrison since the last time he'd had “fun” at one of Varnes's hellhole games. “I believe I'll give it a miss, Ernest.”
Varnes narrowed his eyes and nodded knowingly before heading out.
Charlie said, “That feller there could be plenty ignorant without strugglin' to make such a job out of it.” And, being half-deaf, he said it loudly.
Their shared laughter eased Jack's mood some, but only temporarily. The mail express came by, and as he sorted the letters he fell across one from the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the very folks who championed the likes of ax-crazy Carrie Nation.
It was addressed to none other than Miss Audra Garrison.
Enough, decided Jack, slapping the letters onto the counter in disgust. The least Audra could do was let him explain things to her—even if he could think of only one place where the lady could not avoid him.
Hypocrisy it might well be, but Jack Harwood was going back to church.
His resolution wavered when the time came to actually do it. Pretty much everyone stared and whispered, just as they had at Christmas. He didn't even have Ham beside him to deflect their gaping curiosity. But Audra was there, too, and just seeing her, after two weeks too long, was worth every name he'd called himself on the way here, every rebellious self-image he'd shattered.
Audra's sorrel hair curled delicately around her pale, china-dol face from under what looked to be a new hat. Her gray eyes slowly widened the longer she stared, almost comical y revealing the inner battle he'd set off within her. Her soft lips—he knew just how soft—parted in silent protest.
But that hesitance was pure Audra, too. Knowing that, could he blame her?
I'm sorry I disappointed you, he thought at her. Let me explain. Then, not wanting to frighten her, he smiled—and she immediately spun away to face the front of the church again, leaving him
alone.
Well, he'd figured she would take convincing.
Jack looked for a place to sit and spotted Whitey Gilmer, the blacksmith—if not a friendly face, at least more familiar than the others—and made his way to sit by him.
“You comin' to the fun tonight?” asked Whitey in a gravel y whisper. In a church!
Then Jack wondered just why Whitey shouldn't invite him in church to a poker game. It wasn't as though he'd come for religious reasons himself, was it? Still , he used a thumbs-down gesture to silently indicate the negative before turning to his pious surroundings. He took slow, deep breaths to brace himself against the worst of the memories. It would last only a few hours, and then Audra would speak to him again and ...
Jack had not planned much past that. Al he knew was that whatever else he did with his life, he'd improve on it tremendously by putting things right with Audra Garrison first.
Look at me, Audra, he thought at her. But her spine might as well have been steel.
The woman at the piano began to play “Rock of Ages,” and everyone stood. The long-forgotten words came easily as Jack joined the singing, waiting for the crawling discomfort.
But the memories didn't come.
In fact, there was something almost comforting about the bone-deep familiarity of the song.
Despite years of absence, Jack did know this world. He recognized the Bible passages. He knew the next song, too; even enjoyed it. And it didn't hurt to occasional y catch glimpse of the prettiest nape in Candon, about six rows ahead of him.
He'd prefer her delicate profile, if she would only turn. Look at me, Audra. I came to church for you. But the back of her neck had its attractions, too.
The amusement of watching the youngsters fidget, the ladies silently compare fashions, the younger couples discreetly link hands, the older couples speak volumes with mere glances, and old Ned Cooper fall asleep sitting up ... all that entertainment was, Jack figured, gratis.
Before he knew it, the congregation sang their last verse and the folks of Candon started the slow process of exiting the church and catching up on news at the same time . . . except with him, of course. Joining their exodus, Jack was not actually shunned—a surprising number of the menfolk nodded toward him or said, “Harwood” as they passed. But what with the moral stance on
gambling, it would take more than two visits to church to put folks at ease concerning his soul.
Not that he meant to come back, he reminded himself. B
ut he found himself less set against the idea than he would have expected. He could at least think on it. If he did stay for another week or two, what harm could it do? especially if it pleased Audra.
Jack figured that if he approached the schoolteacher in sight of God and everybody, hat in hand and leaving a respectful pace between them, nobody would think the less of her ... even her. If she put her mind to avoiding him, she still might manage it. But surely if she just looked at him—saw him sober and neat, instead of drunk—she would relent.
And here came his chance to find out.
Unlike him, Audra fended off any number of “how-dos” and “good-mornings.” But even
surrounded by well-wishers, she searched the church grounds with cautious little darts of her eyes until her gaze met Jack's—at which point she looked immediately away. That was fine. He would happily pretend that they were all but strangers.
As long as she let an all-but-stranger apologize to her.
When she reached the bottom of the steps, he made his move. “Miss Garrison? Ma'am?”
Four sets of female eyes turned to him—Melissa's brown and excited, Claudine's dark and
intrigued, and the two schoolteachers' identical y gray, except that the widow Cribb's eyes were narrowed in suspicion and Audra's were wide and . . . frightened?
He couldn't remember the finer points of his drunken encounter with her, but surely he would remember saying or doing anything to scare her! Hell, if he'd done anything to warrant fear, her brother would surely have dealt with it then and there. Of that, Jack felt certain.
Still, it was his move.
“I won't take but a moment of your time,” he assured her, sounding to his own ears like a traveling salesman. “I just—”
“Young man,” said the widow Cribb, interrupting his apology, “there is nothing you could say that would be of any consequence to my niece. Good day.”
“It's all right,” Audra said softly, ducking her gaze from Jack's surprised glance. “I may have caused a misunderstanding. Let me hear what Mr. Harwood wants; then we'll go home.”