The Diamond of the Rockies [03] The Tender Vine

by Kristen Heitzmann

  She swallowed the surge of fear and hissed, “Quillan is my husband.

  What would you have me do?”

  Tony shook his head. “I don’t know, Carina. I only know that when Flavio threw the balls, he was not—”Tony spread his hands—“he was not Flavio.”

  She looked back at the old man in Papa’s hands.

  Lorenzo leaned over, assisting. “He was also hit on his back. You might want to check him there.”

  Carina looked back at the Chinaman as Papa eased his shoulder up from the table. She said, “Flavio struck him twice?”

  “Before I stopped him.”

  Carina chilled at the implication that Flavio might not have stopped himself. She couldn’t fathom it. Yes, Flavio was temperamental, introspective, and emotional, his moods unpredictable. But murder? She had warned Quillan but had not really believed it, not deep inside as she did now. Signore, is it possible? She thought of Flavio as she knew him, as she had loved him, his hypnotic appeal due as much to his unpredictability as to his charm.

  But there was no appeal to such lack of control. She thought how hard Quillan had tried to avoid violence, even toward the roughs who had terrorized Crystal. Quillan protected life, though no one had ever protected him. She ached inside for the man she loved.

  And then she remembered begging for Flavio’s life. “What if self-defense becomes deadly force?” And she had told him no. But now she saw what Flavio could do. What if Quillan couldn’t defend himself without killing Flavio? Or God forbid, what if he were killed? She pressed her palms to her head. “Tony, what do I do?”

  He lowered his eyes, then said, “Annul the marriage.”

  It was a hammer to her chest. Annul the marriage that was life to her? And what? Marry Flavio? To ease Papa’s guilt? To save Quillan’s life?

  Did she love him enough to release him? For his life’s sake? She gripped a hand to her mouth and rushed outside.

  Trembling and weeping, she ran out to the vineyard, stood among the vines ripped from the ground, their roots drying. She could almost hear them weeping with her. Il Padre Eterno! Help me, please. How can I give him up? How can I lose what you have given? Would you strip him from me as you stripped the baby from my womb? Must I lose everything?

  She looked at the dying vines. Just so would she wither and die without Quillan. He was her life.

  I am sufficient.

  Spoken to her soul, the words reverberated. God had told her that before, but she had believed He added Quillan’s love to His. And, God forgive her, she had delighted more in Quillan’s. “Oh, Signore.” It was God she must love with all her being, Gesù she must love enough to surrender Quillan. She dropped, sobbing, to her knees. “I can’t do it.” Like Abraham she would hold the knife to Quillan’s heart if she rejected him now. God couldn’t ask it. Could He?

  She dropped to the ground between the rows, her fists in the soil that had nourished but now killed the vines. She sobbed until she could cry no more, gripping the dirt into her hands, grinding it under her nails. “I can’t. I can’t.” But then she knew she must. If God asked it, she must do it. Her love for Quillan must be wrong, or God would not take it from her.

  She slowly raised up, turned dull eyes to the hazy sky. Then closing her eyes, she said, “Signore, if you require it, I will obey.” There was no joy in that surrender, only pain and obedience. But obedience would have to be enough.

  She dragged herself up from the dirt, turned, and trudged toward the house. A man stood at the gate to the courtyard, his natty dress and posture somehow familiar. He tapped a newspaper against his arm, seemingly unsure whether to open the gate and admit himself or wait to be acknowledged. He turned as she approached. “Mrs. Shepard!”

  And now she recognized him. The man from the train, Roderick Pierce of the Rocky Mountain News. She sighed.

  “Mrs. Shepard.” He said less confidently when he drew close enough to see her condition. “Are you . . . is everything . . .”

  “What do you want, Mr. Pierce?”

  He held up the paper. “I brought the article.”

  Carina looked at the headline, entitled A Hero for Today?, feeling a sick ache in her stomach. An article about Quillan’s heroism, as if she didn’t know enough. “Could you not have sent it in the post?”

  “I could have.” He smiled. “But, well the short of it is, the article has sparked some good things. I’ve sold Harper’s Monthly on a series of biographical sketches featuring your husband. I say, from what I learned in Crystal, it’s as good as Wild Bill Hickok. They’re crazy for it.”

  Carina could do nothing but stare through tear-streaked eyes in a face smudged with dirt. The sight was not lost on Mr. Pierce.

  “But perhaps now is not a good time?”

  She laughed bleakly. “Now is certainly not a good time, Mr. Pierce. But as for the sketches, you’ll have to ask Quillan.”

  “Is he . . . Forgive me, Mrs. Shepard, are you in trouble? Can I assist you?”

  She looked into his earnest face. “I’m such a sight, am I?”

  “Please don’t think me untoward.”

  Again she formed a weak smile. “At this time my husband . . .” How much longer could she use that word to describe Quillan Shepard? How could he ever be anything else? “My husband will be at Schocken’s quarry.”

  Waving her arms, she told him how to get to the quarry.

  “Shall I leave this?” He held out the paper. “I have another copy.”

  She looked at the extended paper, slowly took it in her hands.

  “Thank you.”

  He tipped his hat. “Until next time, ma’am. I hope it will be soon and under better circumstances.”

  She smiled. A likeable man, though he did show up at the worst of times.

  Quillan eased the wagon into the shade of the rock bowl, from which they blasted and cut the basalt cobbles. He set the brake and jumped down. His right shoulder sent a twinge from having been slept on without moving—the sleep of emotional exhaustion. He had awoken missing Carina with everything in him, but almost as strong was the sense that he didn’t suffer it alone.

  The verses he had read that morning from the prophet Isaiah left him no doubt that God knew, that Jesus understood personally all his grief. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Quillan had dropped to his knees, thinking of his own rebellion, his own rejection of the Jesus Cain had tried to make him see. Then he’d read on.

  Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. Just as everyone had assumed Quillan’s guilt, imagined wickedness where there was only want.

  But He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities. Quillan didn’t want to think how many wounds he had personally added to the Savior’s pain. The hateful thoughts, the bitter self-absorption. He was all too aware of his failings. The chastisement of our peace was upon him. The chastisement of our peace. Quillan pondered those words. He had felt the peace of God’s presence, an inner trust of complete abandonment he’d never known before. Because Christ had borne the chastisement.

  And with his stripes we are healed. That verse had brought tears. Again. Why would God himself take the whippings Quillan deserved upon himself? Why would Jesus succumb for the likes of him? Before, Quillan had felt he owed nothing to anyone. He went his own way, living by what conscience he had, with a fierce ingrained need to protect the weak, the mistreated. But for himself he’d refused redemption. Now he basked in it. God understood his failings and suffered with him. An awesome and incomprehensible thought.

  That was the vine to which he clung, the vine that gave him life. He needed nothing more, yet . . . human weakness still made him ache with thoughts of Carina. Would that ever end? Surely even a branch shuddered at the pruning knife.

  Quillan had already watered the horses, so he took the feed
bags from the bed and hooked them over each animal’s head in turn, with a soft word and stroke to their necks. Jock nuzzled him affectionately, and Quillan held the horse’s muzzle to his face, then gave him his feed. He reached up to the box for the flat leather bag that held his own bread and cheese and his journal.

  He perched on a gray heap of basalt, away from where the others ate, talked, and sent him dark looks. It mattered less today than it had before. He is despised and rejected of men. At least he was in good company. Quillan wasn’t even sure why he had shown up at the quarry, except that he had taken the job, and until he was certain he should leave it, he meant to do it.

  He was a man of action. Sitting around undirected would make him crazy. At least at the quarry he could work the strain away, something he’d learned early and employed nearly every day of his life. Others might long for empty time, but that was Quillan’s enemy. His body was strong, his mind active. Both required work. He suddenly thought of Mae telling him he must learn to be still. Not likely. He bit hard into his bread.

  He was halfway through the bite when he saw Flavio. The instant tightening in his chest quelled any thoughts that he was delivered from this present strife. There was the man who stood between him and his wife. If not for Flavio, Dr. DiGratia might think more kindly on him.

  More than that, it was Carina’s own lingering connection Quillan fretted over as he looked at the figure Flavio Caldrone cut.

  There was something fine in both build and manner that made him starkly out of place among the sharp hewn rocks and rough hewn men. But Flavio walked among them with an easy grace, confident of both their acceptance and respect. What was his story, Quillan wondered. A rich aristocratic family? Plenty to eat, plenty to wear, all the blessings of God and man at his disposal?

  He watched Flavio draw the laughter of the men and wave it off as his due. Oh, to be so confident of approval. Had he won his way back into Carina’s heart? He’d possessed the better part of an evening to do it; the Garibaldi House had been loud with frolicking well into the night.

  That thought hurt more than it should. But Carina was the sweetest grace he had experienced; her love had brought him from bitter solitude to joy. He couldn’t keep his thoughts there or he would break down. He forced a subjective observation of Flavio, the disarming features seductive in their beauty. Flavio looked like a work of Italian artistry, a Greco-Roman hero. Not Herculean—perhaps more like Narcissus.

  After some banter, of which Quillan could only catch the cadence since he was too far to decipher any of the words he had learned, Flavio drew one man away from the others. They talked together with much nodding and gesturing, then gripped each others’ shoulders briefly and parted.

  Before striding away, Flavio sent a pointed glance his direction. Quillan stiffened, surprised. Flavio knew he was there? And now he noted a distinct tightness in Flavio’s gait, like a dueler stepping out his paces. Unconsciously, Quillan’s hand dropped to his hip. No Colt. But neither was Flavio armed, as far as he could tell. Quillan slid his palm to his thigh.

  The man slowly turned on his heel and sauntered away. Quillan wrapped up the rest of his cheese. He was no longer hungry. The men were openly studying him, discussing him, too, no doubt. What did Flavio want? Why had he come there? To sow more discord?

  Was it some sort of challenge? A flame flickered inside—Quillan’s natural instinct. If he knew he was supposed to fight for Carina, nothing would stop him, not the whole mass of them together. But he was no longer sure she wanted that. Her face had been pained when she begged him not to endanger Flavio’s life. By now that concern for the man she had once loved could have been stoked into the passion Quillan knew too well.

  Walled in by her family and fed a diet of Flavio’s attention, why would she think twice about the rogue she once deigned to love? The pain was like a living being in his heart, draining him of hope. How must Jesus have felt when all those who loved him turned away? Quillan brought out his journal and lost himself in words. It was the best way he could think to keep the pain at bay.

  Flavio left the rock yard with the strain once again reaching intensity. He had spent the night in a storm, gusts of regret for his violence sliced by bolts of fascination and a rumbling confusion. He had lain still and thought of his father. He didn’t know much, only the sensation of the man’s virility, his energy, and a vague sense of equally potent rage and gloom. Probably akin to Flavio’s own.

  His papa had been a republican—less kindly, a troublemaker. That trouble had cost him his life. Flavio had never discussed it with Dottore DiGratia, but it stood between them in spite of the kindness, the acceptance he’d found from the man. Once his misplaced hatred had faded, Flavio had gravitated to Angelo DiGratia like a bee to nectar, seeking sustenance of a kind he found nowhere else.

  He had thought for a time to learn the man’s skill, to become a doctor himself. But the tedium of the scientific study in which Dottore DiGratia excelled was too much for Flavio. He could not sit still behind a microscope, could not still his hands long enough to mend torn flesh and damaged tissue. His mind flew from the task at hand to other thoughts more commanding, more creative.

  The doctor wanted to mend, but Flavio wanted to make. The arts— they were his passion. In pictures and in music he spent his soul. No, he was not meant to follow the doctor. But that did not mean he loved him less.

  Dottore DiGratia had become the father he lost. Signore Lanza was all right; Flavio had nothing against him. The man had fed and clothed him and allowed him his way. But Angelo DiGratia had taken him to his heart. Was it because he had failed to save his father?

  Flavio wondered if the doctor carried that guilt or if it was just part of his profession. What was monumental in Flavio’s life might well have been forgotten in Dottore DiGratia’s. Except that sometimes he caught on the doctor’s face a look of regret and . . . shame. He felt a stirring of power and remembered one of the few things his papa had told him. “When you see a man’s weakness, use it.” Flavio had not understood the words as a child of six, but he did now.

  Flavio thought with pride of the doctor’s protection of his contract with Carina, in spite of his indiscretion—which the doctor may or may not know about. Either way, Dottore DiGratia did not accept Quillan Shepard’s claim. Yet the man would not give up. Surely that justified the possibilities he had just set in motion. Quillan was a threat to the DiGratias, a threat to him, and most of all, a threat to Carina. If an accident should occur . . .

  He reached his stallion and mounted. Flavio had not brought the animal into the quarry where the shards of rock could damage its hooves. He brought the animal around, remembering Carina’s trick when she had sent him sprawling and galloped off on his horse. He’d been torn by fury but also moved to ecstasy at her spirit. She was the only woman who matched his passion.

  But she was too softhearted, too easily won, her love given irrepressibly. She could be deeply hurt. He knew now how deeply, and he cursed his foolish liaison with Divina. For that moment’s conquest, he’d lost Carina. For a time. But not forever. As long as Dottore DiGratia upheld his contract, he had a chance of redeeming it.

  Maybe Carina would not marry him willingly, but once Quillan Shepard was removed, then carefully, so carefully, he would win her heart again. He knew the words she liked to hear, and he was a proficient lover, though at the moment she did not appreciate his experience.

  He frowned. If only she hadn’t walked in on them. How stupid to use the doctor’s barn. Divina had not been worth it. He thought now of Nicolo, sick with love for Divina. Did Nicolo appreciate the seed Flavio had started that made her willing at last? Flavio felt a twinge. Was he a monster not to care that his child would be raised as another man’s?

  Was there something wrong with him that he cared so little for Divina’s distress? When she came to him, sobbing her news, he had felt nothing. Surely there should have been something? Maybe it was walled off in that place inside where he stood sometimes, wanting to
go in, but unable to. In there was the child whose papa lay dying, whose mamma gave her life for his, whose family discarded him.

  But he couldn’t go in. And what, he suspected, might make him human, stayed safely buried. His emotions stormed around it, but like the eye of a hurricane, that part remained still and untouched.

  Anyone hearing his thoughts would be amazed. Flavio without feeling? Flavio, whose feelings were always evident—his love, his passion, his choler. But they were all on the outside. It had begun on the ship, when his dismay and terror made him savage and he learned what power such emotions could have on people. Had Signore Lanza once taken a belt to him? Never.

  But Flavio knew he gained more through benevolence than rage. Oh, how he melted Signora Lanza. She was butter in his hands. And as soon as his body came to manhood, so were the girls. Flavio turned into the lane to the DiGratias. Yes, he would win back Carina’s love. He had been a fool to wait. He should have shown her what a husband he would be.

  The gates were closed, but he opened them with a sense of authority.

  He crossed the courtyard, seeing no one and expecting no one. They would be in the fields ripping out the vines, the unproductive struggling grapes that could no longer yield a productive harvest. Just so would he yank Quillan Shepard and replace him with a hearty root stock.

  He knocked on the door, then entered. “Dottore?” Flavio walked toward the study where the doctor researched and read, adjoining the treatment room where he saw the patients who came to him. “Ti’Angelo, are you—”

  The doctor emerged from the treatment room. His face was stern.

  Flavio stopped. “Are you seeing someone, Dottore?”

  Angelo DiGratia closed the door behind him. “Come with me, Flavio.” He led him to the study with its walls lined with books, the sort Flavio shuddered to read. Nothing beautiful—only facts, details, theories.

  “What is it, Tio?” Flavio read his concern, his consternation.

  “Is it true you struck a man yesterday with bocce balls?”