Crossings

by Stef Ann Holm

  “Libertyville wasn’t on the beaten path, but it was built up enough so that a man could buy himself a drink and a woman every Saturday night after he got paid.” Carrigan paused, wondering how much he should candy-coat, and how much he should just plain come out and state. Seeing Helena’s unflinching gaze, he opted to hold nothing back. “There was one whorehouse, The Exchange Club, that caused quite a stir one night when the madam, Glory, announced the arrival of a new girl. She was rumored to be a Shoshoni princess. Curiosity got the best of every man, myself included, and the place was busting at the seams to get a look at her.” Carrigan need a moment to bring Jenny to his mind first, picturing how she’d looked that first time he’d seen her. Dressed in doeskin regalia with beads and feathers. Her skin had been a burnished brown, and her unbound hair a lustrous raven. The large, sad brown eyes that softened her face were not downcast. Pride lifted her chin, but her shoulders trembled. The man next to Carrigan boasted Jenny had been sold to Glory for an outrageous price by two packers who’d found her wandering in the mountains after her family had been killed. The madam claimed Jenny was a virgin and would expect top dollar for her.

  He’d taken his pleasure with the whores with little conscience, for he’d known they were in a profession of their own choosing. But Jenny had been sold into it. As the bidding had begun, he hadn’t joined in. Rather, he sought the company of one of the other girls, eager to please.

  “Go on . . .” Helena’s voice hurtled Carrigan back to the present.

  “Her name was Jenny, and she was a beautiful woman.” That was all he would elaborate on. The portrait of Jenny was on a canvas in his head. Like a selfish artist, he didn’t care to share its fine details. “I never touched her when she worked there. One afternoon, two weeks later, she cut herself. A bunch of us filed into the brothel, and we saw Jenny laid out in a filmy dress with a towel on her face. She’d tried to disfigure herself by that heathen Indian custom of cutting off her nose. She would have succeeded if Glory hadn’t stopped her. But the damage was done and Glory was sure her best girl would be scarred and so tossed her into the street.” Carrigan cringed, clearly seeing in his mind’s eye Jenny lying in the dirt, holding a towel to her face, neither crying or moving. Jesus, he’d known she’d been violated in that house, but interfering with a madam and one of her boarders was not something a man did unless he felt like having the crap beat out of him—or worse—by the house watchdogs.

  “My friends went into the saloon. So did 1.1 needed a stiff belt to erase her face from my thoughts. But I couldn’t forget. When we left the saloon, we found her. She’d crawled to the opening of an alley and was barely conscious. My friends moved on, but I was rooted to the spot. She opened her eyes and gave me a soulful gaze that shot right through me. I couldn’t walk away, no matter how badly I wanted to.”

  The rest of her recovery was a painful time for Carrigan. Moments he didn’t want to divulge. But he was helpless not to relive them right now in his own head. Jenny had allowed him to pick her up, perhaps because he’d been the only one never to touch her before. Since he couldn’t keep her at the bunkhouse, he’d taken her just outside of town, ridden back to get his gear, then put up a camp in which to tend to her. She never said a word. She just stared at the campfire. Day in and day out. After the fifth day, she spoke, but in the Shoshoni language of which he had no experience. She made gestures for him to allow her to do the cooking. He’d figured as soon as she was well, she’d leave. But she didn’t.

  “Did she die?” Helena’s gentle query sent sorrow through him, like the dart of an arrow, piercing deep.

  “Not then . . . no. I took care of her, and she stayed as my companion through the winter. Just my companion,” he restated. “Nothing more. I’d built a crude little cabin for us with Hart’s help just in time for the first snow. With a combination of Shoshoni and English, Jenny and I were able to communicate with one another. I never made contact with her in an intimate manner. But as the long months wore on, her faith in me turned to trust.” Meeting Helena’s eyes, Carrigan took no pleasure in saying, “One night she crawled into my bed and our relationship took on a new meaning. That spring I realized I’d fallen in love with her. I decided to marry her, seeing as I was enjoying all the comforts of a husband.”

  “You were legally married?”

  “Yes.”

  He saw that this saddened Helena. It wasn’t his intention to cause her grief, or to make their own marriage look more invalid than it was. But she’d wanted the truth, and this was it. No holds barred. “I wrote to my parents and told them about Jenny. To my surprise, my father came to Libertyville, announcing after thirty years, he’d split the blanket with my mother and gone on his own way. He also informed me my other brother had died of pneumonia that winter.

  “It wasn’t an easy life. My wife was taunted when she went to town, but she never let them know how much they hurt her. That summer, Hart and I and a dozen of the men were sent on a mare roundup some miles away. I left Jenny in the care of my father and was gone for a month. When I returned . . .” Carrigan’s voice dried as if it were parchment blowing in an arid desert. He felt pain slicing in his chest, a wound reopened. Raw and aching. “I returned and found out a week prior to my homecoming, my wife was attacked and raped by two cavalrymen who were in Libertyville with their company on reconnaissance. My father tried to stop them and had taken a severe gash on his forehead before being knocked unconscious.”

  Helena put her hands to her lips and shook her head. “I’m sorry . . . so very sorry.”

  Carrigan couldn’t afford to absorb Helena’s comfort. Like a man confessing on a witness stand, he had to go on before he changed his mind. “I found her sitting beside the hearth, mesmerized by a blazing fire. The season being early summer, it was hotter than Hades in the house. I didn’t understand why she needed to be so warm. She wouldn’t respond to me. She refused to speak about the incident and merely stared at the flames with a transfixed gaze. My father told me she hadn’t said a word since the attack.

  “The sheriff in Libertyville said he wasn’t about to dispatch a posse after one of the army’s own.” The company name replayed in Carrigan’s head. Detach D, Ninth Infantry U.S. Cavalry Indian Scouts. “They were men who served their country . . . not animals who raped women, the sheriff told me. It was all bullshit, and I wasn’t about to let the crime go unpunished.

  “My father wasn’t able to describe the two men to me, his memory having been faded from liquor. Never more than then did I resent his fondness for the bottle. But I wouldn’t be put off. I meant to hunt them all down, and if need be, slaughter the whole damn company.

  “I tried to reassure Jenny that I would find and kill the men responsible for hurting her. She didn’t speak to me. She’d withdrawn in the same manner as when I’d found her in The Exchange Club. I should have known. . . . I did know. . . .” Carrigan felt the sting of tears biting the backs of his eyelids. “All I could do was hold her in my arms and tell her that I loved her. I packed my gear early the next morning.

  “The time frame being what it was, I had no fresh trail to follow other than the mention in Libertyville that Detach D was headed into Cheyenne Territory. I was gone for over a week and found nothing. It was as if their tracks had been swallowed by the plains of grass. Fury devoured my insides. I couldn’t eat or sleep. My desire for revenge was so strong, it threatened to break me. But it was a futile chase, and I turned my horse around and headed for home.

  “The afternoon I returned to Libertyville, I found the cabin in ashes.” The scene of destruction haunted him until this day. Smoldering ruins. A fireplace standing alone. Walls blackened and fallen. The ground putrid and reeking. “I rode to the sheriff’s and was informed my wife had died in the fire the prior day. My father was barely alive at the doctor’s office. I went to him. . . .” Even now, it was too painful to imagine the state his father had been in. Like a breathing corpse . . . dark and stinking of smoke. “My father’s dying words were sp
ent on telling me she’d done it on purpose. She’d sat on the bed and burned the place around her. He’d tried to get her out, but couldn’t. Jesus, God Almighty, she killed herself, and I knew she was suicidal before I left, but I wanted to avenge her so bad, I didn’t acknowledge that she needed me more.”

  Helena had left the chair and sat quietly on the bed next to him. She took the cup from his hand and held his fingers. “Don’t do this to yourself,” she said in a soothing voice. “Don’t . . .”

  He glared at her, unable to accept the consolation she was giving. “I might as well have started that fire myself and killed them both.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “I left that goddamn town the day I turned twenty-seven. I had become so disillusioned with civilization, I wanted to get away from it before I lost my mind. Even the thought of tracking the bastards who’d violated Jenny became a numbness in my head. I tried to pick up their trail once again, but there was no hope for it. At a stage stop, I heard that most of the company had been slaughtered in a raid near the Bighorn River.”

  Drawing in a shaky breath, he nailed the last spike into his coffin and laid the final piece of his past to rest. “I wandered south for a year, searching for a place to live in solitude. A place where no one would find me and I wouldn’t have to deal with people. I found this mountain. I encountered some sodbusters near Pierce Town—the last folks I spoke with for a long time. They put me up in their barn for the night. Before I left in the morning, they gave me a pup. Obsi.” Carrigan smiled at the dog, who lifted his head at the sound of his name. “I wouldn’t have made it without him.

  “My first year of true isolation, I nearly died of starvation. The cold, lack of someone to talk to, and my grief killed my spirit. I survived on the wild berries I’d picked in the summer and small game I trapped. I was never so happy for a thaw in all my life. I built this cabin the spring and summer of ’fifty-eight. In doing so, I accepted that I would never go back to where corrupt men’s rules governed the law of the land.” His gaze rose to hers. “But they found me . . . the settlers who came to this town. And I was lured by the prospect of a newspaper and its information. Fresh eggs. And the things I’d taken for granted. Not only that, but conversation. Jesus, talking to Obsi or my horses . . . they don’t talk back. But your father did. And we shared a common interest. Horses. Then you came, and now things are different again. Your place reminds me of my working days at the ranch and how much I’d liked it. I have no use for that now, but getting myself to admit it is hard.”

  Helena let out a long breath, her fingers stroking the top of his hand. He wasn’t used to caring gestures, soft words, and remorseful sentiments echoed in his behalf. This was a new experience, and he wasn’t certain what to take from her and what not to. Helena knew how to give genuine comfort, knowing just how to soothe, how to reason, and how to understand. She could sympathize with him. She had a past of her own. Now they both had given a part of themselves to each other. Not unlike the symbolic gold bands on their fingers that had originated out of false adornment. Beyond the gold was a silent token of trust. And faith.

  It amazed him that what was to have been a marriage in name only was turning into more. By trading thoughts and emotions, they’d superseded the physical need and release between a man and a woman. There was a deeper bond now. One that he had neither expected or sought. He had feelings for her. Deep-seated in his heart. But those very feelings were his worst enemy. Because he constantly fought them, unwilling to give up his way of thinking that he was better off alone.

  What he could concede was that he wanted her arms around his neck, her hair against his cheek. There was nothing sexual in his want. It was a purely affectionate craving. Wanting her body, he could rationalize as a man desiring a woman. Wanting her friendship, he could not readily define. Friendship didn’t come easy for him. He’d been a roamer for most of his life, wherein friendships were born out of necessity to stay alive. A man had to count on his fellow puncher to keep the cattle in line, or else they’d all suffer the consequences. But once at the end of the trail, those hasty friendships that had been formed usually dissolved.

  Just like this relationship would in October. It seemed a fair amount of time away. Too long a span to be together with Helena without feeling something for her.

  Without saying a word, he held open his arms and she came into them. Her hands fell softly on his shoulders. She didn’t embrace him with false abandon, nor touch him with personal indifference. Her body compliantly met his. The stubble on his chin caught in her hair, and he smoothed the few golden skeins with the flat of his palm. She’d worn the curls twisted and pinned at the nape of her neck. He had no thoughts to remove the confining pins from her hair. This was a moment of tender expression, one in which he took just as much pleasure as he did in sex. In this, the coupling of arms where warm clothing met warm clothing, he could admit there was more to his emotional frame of mind when he was near her than just the desire to bring her to his bed.

  Holding a woman and enjoying her feel, smell, and breath on his neck without needing passion was the beginning of love. And no man was ever cured of love once he discovered its hidden riches.

  Chapter

  14

  Helena decided she was going to start thinking of Carrigan by his given name, Jake. The name Carrigan was nothing more than a front to a man who was no longer someone she thought of as a recluse with a hefty Colt that kept people at bay. Jake’s character came from within and wasn’t cut of stone. He had many sides to him. There were still some elements of the Carrigan she’d first met—the man with a pensive side who was, more often than not, silent and brooding. Yet she had seen that he felt pain, laughter, joy . . . love. That was Jake.

  He had loved his first wife. That much was very evident when he spoke about her. Oddly, Helena didn’t feel cheated that he’d been married before. Nor was she angry at him anymore for not coming home and scaring her half to death. She felt saddened he’d had to lose Jenny in such a horrible way. The circumstances surrounding the people they’d once loved were tragic, and it was those knowing feelings that had them holding each other for unchecked minutes after he’d finished telling her why he’d come to the mountain. Never more than then had she felt so right in a man’s arms. Not even with Kurt had she sensed such a profound closeness. Was it unfair of her to feel this different kind of kinship with Jake? She didn’t want to do anything to lessen the joys of her magical first love.

  Love. The irresistible impulse toward it after the night she and Jake had spent at the lake had seized on her suddenly and without warning. She had to remind herself this was no charming romance in which picnics, poems, and presents were the order of the day. Love could not endure indifference. She had to stop herself before she magnified her emotions into a vast deal of nonsense and no sound common sense.

  It was just as well when they left the mountain together, with Obsi sprinting every which way, there was no more touching. Not even a joining of hands.

  “I found out the fire in town was started by the Paiutes,” she told Jake while minding her steps. “Mr. Brown, the Indian agent, is going to call in troops from Carson City.”

  “You shouldn’t go far from the station, then,” Jake said as he bent a branch back to let her pass. “No more coming to my cabin.”

  She wondered if that meant he’d be frequenting his former residence more often. Though she didn’t question him.

  “If you have to go anywhere in town, take me or Eliazer with you.”

  The name of her stock tender brought forth a recollection. “I’m going to talk to Eliazer.” Helena lifted her skirt and petticoat a notch higher so the hems wouldn’t bead with rainwater from a cluster of violets. “I want to make him understand that you had nothing to do with the horses being let out. I don’t want any animosity in the house when there’s no reason for it.”

  They reached the general store and entered through the front doors.

  “I’ve got fences to
finish repairing,” Jake said, and continued on with Obsi trailing after him.

  While Helena walked between the aisles, Emilie glanced up from the female customer she’d been waiting on and gave Jake an accusatory stare. Another person Helena was going to have a talk with. Emilie would have to accept that the land their father bought them was gone, and it wasn’t Jake’s fault that it was. Helena had traded it to him without any pressure. She could have said no. Emilie needed to believe that Helena would get them a better parcel when they got back on their feet.

  “Eliazer was looking for you,” Emilie mentioned. “It’s time to saddle a horse for the morning rider. It’s Thomas McAllister, you know,” she added with a smile she couldn’t keep back.

  Helena knew, but hadn’t a moment to ponder how to handle the budding romance between her sister and Thomas. No sooner was Helena outside than the morning and afternoon were taken by the demands of the Express station. She found a few minutes to slip away and offer the victims of the fire free mail service for as long as they needed it. That was all she could do for now. Had she the money to spare, she would have donated some to the fund. But even without her currency in the pot, both Mr. Lewis and Mr. Wyatt had seemed genuinely impressed. They’d been among the group of men standing in front of the damaged buildings assessing the repairs and talking about the cost of lumber to rebuild.

  Just as long, cigar-shaped clouds formed off the eastern slopes of the Sierras, forecasting dust devils, Helena took shelter in the stable and set up the candle-making equipment for beeswax dipping tomorrow. With no one else in the building, she lit a lamp and hung the wire handle on a nail above her head. She went to work by laying out the plaited cotton wicks and sorting through the strong stems of cattails she used as molds.

  One of the double doors pushed in, and Helena turned to see Emilie approaching. Her sister’s smile hadn’t faded since Thomas’s speedy departure some hours before. She held a fancy, printed circular in her hand. Helena knew what it was and went back to measuring lengths of wicks.