“Cain’t. Got to go home and milk Aggie. I came to see who was left. I don’t reckon I kin work that farm by myself. Was hoping I could hire someone to come help me now and then. I got me a pig I’d trade.”
“You live up next to ol’ stone face don’tcha? The one that looks like a man with a beard?”
“Yes’m.”
“I’ll ask Simon if he kin go up once in a while. That’s a fur piece to walk and still have time to put in a day’s work. The men are still coming back, Abigail. Maybe one of them boys of yourn will return.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. I’m not bettin’ on it.”
“I thought the Buchanans lived the other side of you.”
I told her how the missus Buchanan got sick and just gave up on life, and when the mister got home and she died soon after, he shot himself. I said how Mally had left once her folks were gone. “Mally was a good shot. Me, I let the boys do all the shooting. I can’t hit the broad side of a barn when it’s sitting in front of the barrel. So I cain’t hunt for food.”
“Have you tried trapping?”
I nodded. “Mally showed me how and I’ve caught some rabbits. Could I possibly get a hen from you? I’d pay, once I knew what you’d take in return.”
“The raiders killed our flocks, but I have a goose you could have. It was a baby when the rest were killed and I hid it in the brush when the thieves came by.”
“I couldn’t take your only—”
“Simon is going to go get us some chickens and more geese once the crop is planted. You take that there goose back with you. She will walk right along if you put a cord round her neck.”
“Then, thank you.”
Things were looking up. Jessica brought out a long cord and we put a loop around that goose’s neck and tied it with a bowline knot, so as not to choke her.
My time was short, so Jessica walked to the top of the ridge with me and we said our goodbyes there. We used to see each other once a week at meeting time. I didn’t even know if the church was still standing, and neither did she. Jessica and I hugged again, and I walked the goose home.
She squawked and waddled, grabbing a bite to eat now and then as we traveled. Maybe the mountain wouldn’t be so lonely with her nearby, honking at me. A good goose was better ‘n a watchdog, for it can make an awful clamor when it’s aroused.
I kept feeling the rocks under my shoes, and when I stopped to rest, I looked at the hole that was forming there. I wondered if the whites of a goose egg would act like glue, the way the whites of a chicken egg did. I was going to try it, for egg white sure did hold well. Jacob had used it all the time.
One more thing needing fixing. I could feel the weight bearing down on me.
It was well past dark when I arrived home, as the goose slowed me down. I’d spent the last half-hour kickin’ the side of the trail to find it, as it was worn down in the dirt, forming a small ditch. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it, and I’d made it home many a times like this.
I expected Aggie to be bawling at me for neglecting her so long. But she was quiet, not waiting at the fence.
I stopped. Something warn’t right.
A light went on in the cabin and I backed away into the brush, pulling the goose with me. I tied her to a small sapling, then moved over to a stand of trees where I could see into the cabin. I couldn’t leave her tied up for long, or the critters would git her, but she was too noisy to take with me.
Someone was inside and the bulk of the body made it look to be a man. I warn’t expectin’ no man.
I went back past the goose, skirted the cabin on the far side and entered the barn. My lantern hanging there had been lit, and I poked my head in, cautious like.
A horse stood in a stall, unsaddled. I’d never seen it before, munching away on the grain I’d been so carefully saving. Angry, I went further into the barn, looking around. Next to the saddle hung a blanket, Union blue. As far as I knew, my boys had all joined the Confederates.
What in tarnation was I goin’ to do? Hide until he left? Yet...what if it were one of my boys?
If it were a stranger, he’d know someone lived here. A cow left unmilked will get milk fever or go dry. He’d be able to tell, from the size of her udder, that she’d been milked this morning. And that there’d been a fire in the fireplace last night.
Maybe I should go over to Mally’s house and spend the night there. It was pitch dark now, and I’d probably break my neck on the rough trail, but I didn’t want to face a man alone, with no gun.
Suddenly a dog barked, startling me, and as I backed up, it charged around the corner and into the barn. I turned to run, but it caught my dress in its teeth and tore it. It was the size of a wolf, and I backed away to where the pitchfork leaned against the side of the barn and grabbed it with both hands.
“I wouldn’t do that,” a man said. He walked though the door with a pistol in his hand.
“Abigail?” he said.
I looked at this stranger with his long beard and Jacob’s voice. After five years? Could it be?
“Jacob?”
He put the pistol away. “Yes. Down, Barney. Sit.”
The dog sat immediately. My legs felt so weak I almost joined him.
“Sorry about him. He’s still young. Aggie was waiting when I got here. I milked her and hoped you hadn’t got yourself hurt, since you wouldn’t have left her uncared for. I figured you’d gone to the Buchanan’s and were just late getting back.”
“I went to the settlements. Got me a goose.”
He nodded. “Where are the boys?”
“Grown and gone.”
“Even Razzel?”
“Yes. They didn’t stay any better ‘n you.” I didn’t intend to accuse him of neglect, but it came out that way, and thinking of it, he had.
“Did you get yourself another man? I wouldn’t blame you.”
“No.” Jacob had always been man enough for me. It was just that he had to see what was on the other side of the hill.
“You done with your seeing?” I asked him. He had grown older, there was a touch of gray in his beard, but he still had the size to fight a bear if he came across one. My boys were all like him, big men who could handle life. I could only hope they’d handled the war.
“There’s another ocean out there,” he said, his voice glowing with remembrance, “past some plains and some mountains. When I got to it, I turned around. Was coming home when a war got in the way.”
“You come to stay?” I wanted him to. Oh, how I wanted him to.
“No.”
My heart fell. It was as I expected, the wanderlust would never leave him. I felt like all the gumption had plumb gone out of me. He’d never settle down until he died and got buried in some foreign land.
He looked me over. “You always were the prettiest gal on the mountain.”
“I aint any longer.”
He shook his head. “Can’t prove it by me.”
“Jacob, I’m the only gal on the mountain.”
That brought a smile to his face. “I crossed many a mountain. Wherever I went, you were always with me, always talking to me and showing me your love in the little ways you do.”
He shifted his weight from one leg to the other, sort of hesitant like. “You should see it out there, Abigail. The wind blowin’ off the water. It makes you feel alive.”
“I like the mountains. And trees.”
“There’s mountains. Higher than these. And the trees are so big it takes a day to walk around one. If you cut one down, you can build a whole town with the lumber.”
“So?”
“You were always doing something for someone. I wanted better for you—for us. I built us a place in California. Near that ocean. Hired a man to care for it while I come to fetch you and the boys. That is, if you’ll leave this here farm. We’ll have a fine living on my new place. Soil is good and black. And deep. We won’t have to plow around the boulders.”
When Jacob had left, I’d refused to go with him. Our youngest, Razzel,
was only twelve, and I had heard of the western lands and the wild Indians and the blizzards and wildfires. I’d wanted no part of it.
Now, what was here for me? A farm that had taken the best years of my life and almost killed me a few times? And would certainly kill me this winter. I didn’t owe it anything. And if it had been the strongest house on the mountain, I wouldn’t have stayed. If Jacob was leaving, I was going with him. This time I wasn’t about to be left behind.
“I know you’re attached to this place, but—”
“Not attached. Not any longer. Oh, Jacob, I’ve missed you so much.” And I started to bawl, louder than Aggie when she wants milking bad.
He stepped near and circled me with those long, strong arms of his. “And I missed you, too. You were too stubborn to go with me, while I was bound and determined to find us a better place than this.”
“I wasn’t being stubborn, Jacob. I was afraid.” But too stubborn to admit it.
“You? Afraid?”
“I didn’t want to take my boys out in that wild land. This place was so secure.”
“They went anyway,” he said, leading the way to the house. He slapped his hand on the side of his leg, and Barney shot out ahead of us, tail wagging.
“Yes. First Gage, the week after you left. If you remember right, he was twenty. Then Daniel, then the rest of them, whenever they reached sixteen.”
We went inside. I looked around. It was the only home my boys had known. “What if they come back and I’m not here?” I worried.
“We’ll tell the Buchanans.”
“They’re both dead.” I told him what had happened to them. “Only Mally is alive, and she went to Missouri to live with kin.”
“Good for her.”
“I don’t know how we could leave a message.”
“We’ll tell people as we go along, mentioning California. If any of those boys do look for you, they’ll come. I aint waiting here for ‘em.”
“Then I won’t either.”
He drew me into the firelight, looked me up and down and kissed me soundly. I loved his kisses. It was how he’d wooed me away from that young flatlander who thought he’d get a chance with me.
“I love you, Mrs. Courtney. I’ve been a long time waiting. I’d ‘ave been back a lot sooner, if I could’ve. Got swept up into that there war. Man with a gun said I either joined them or I was the enemy. So I became a Union soldier. Wasn’t particularly fighting for anything, except to stay alive and get back to you.”
I believed him. “I love you, Jacob. Just don’t leave me again.”
“Never.” He pulled off his boots and I shucked out of my dress, then stood there in my raggedy chemise, as he took off his shirt, then his britches.
I was thinking hard. I knew I’d forgotten something.
As he grabbed my hand to pull me into bed, I stopped him, saying, “Wait! Jacob, the goose!”
THE END
This is Abigail’s story. If you wish to find out what happened to young Mally, read THE HANDSOMEST MAN IN THE COUNTRY, a novella and #1 in The Traherns.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nolan Radke was in Law Enforcement for 9 years, during which he wrote the Amber Alert Policy and several other policies and procedures for his department. He has an English Writing Degree from the University of Washington and worked briefly as an executive editor at a publishing house. He has spent many years helping others with their books and has recently started to dedicate time to his own stories. Nolan lives in Kirkland, WA, with his wife and two teenage daughters.
CONTACT INFORMATION
email NOLAN: [email protected]
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 2012 Nolan J. Radke
All Rights Reserved
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are all products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
DEDICATION
To officers who gave their lives in duty.
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DEDICATION
Dear Reader,
For a writer, some projects are just a lot more fun than others. This was one of those stories where the characters on both sides were so colorful and engaging for me that I may have to see them again in some future project.
Richter
For Aaron, Richard and Jocelyn and those great trips to Lake Tahoe.
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Chapters:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 | 64
1
A door? Or did something fall?
Alone that Sunday afternoon in the closed fish hatchery, Sydney Jesup, holding a tiny cutthroat fingerling trout in one gloved hand, a syringe in the other, paused when she heard a noise that might have been a door in the other building. She ignored the hum of generators, focusing only on the noise.
Finally, deciding it was her overwrought imagination, Sydney just shook her head and laughed at herself. All the damn stress had built to the point where she found herself hearing boogie men and talking to fish. She wiped sweat off her forehead with her arm. It was a lot cooler in the cavernous hatchery than out in the boiling sun, but she had on rubber boots and jeans, and that didn’t help.
But then something made her stop again to listen.
Her weapon, a snub Colt—her backup piece when she was with the sheriff’s department and, later, chief investigator for the DA in South Lake—was in her shoulder bag fifty feet away in the clean room. She suddenly felt naked.
C’mon, ease down. Damn. It’s probably Dave.
I’m getting paranoid, she thought. The fish hatchery in Lahonton, managed by her cousin, was the safest place for her anywhere around Lake Tahoe these days, she figured, mostly because it was government property.
She went back to work, shaking off the lingering feeling of caution. What she needed to do was concentrate on the problem at hand. They were dealing with an outbreak of Ich and Furunculosis that had nearly destroyed the cutthroat trout. They’d been using UV disinfection after having had to euthanize something like a quarter-million production fish that had been targeted for release by the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe. Only about two hundred thousand were saved and released into Walker Lake.
“You think you have it bad…” she said as she inserted a syringe with red dye into the fins of the tiny fingerling. She held the tiny body firmly yet carefully between the fingers of her left gloved hand, while the flow of negative thoughts swirled angrily in her mind about the disastrous investigation and the deaths of her two witnesses.
She struggled to stay focused on this welcomed temporary job. Her cousin, and about everyone else she knew, had advised her in no uncertain terms to get the hell out of the area, take a long vacation. Move. Let it go. And she knew they were right. She couldn’t win, but she couldn’t let go, either. I’m nuts, she thought. Maybe I’m getting OCD. Or is it obsessive stupidity disorder. She chuckled to herself.
Lost in bleak thoughts, it took a moment to realize that she was definitely hearing something. The clean-room door opened. She was no longer alone in the “wet” building with the fish tanks.
“Dave, that you?” she called out, knowing even as she spoke that she shouldn’t have, not without knowing for certain who it was. Christ, I’m getting rusty.
A man stood in the
doorway.
“The hatchery is closed to the public,” she said. “And this building is in quarantine.”
He stepped forward from the clean room, a dark cutout beneath the dull ceiling lights of the cavernous interior of the hatchery’s main floor.
Ah, shit.
She saw the gun. This was no tourist. The short, heavyset guy moved gingerly and awkwardly down the center aisle, his gun hand shaking a bit, like he was nervous or even a little drunk.
Thorp sent a drunk to get me on government property?
He was in enough light now that Sydney could see the weapon he carried was most likely a Glock fitted with a suppressor as long as the weapon’s barrel. Extending from the trigger housing like a goiter was a TLR-l light, an utterly useless bit of additional apparatus.
He was now about twenty feet away. A real pro would never have come down the center aisle. Or, for that matter, come in from the clean room. The side door would have been the preferred entrance. He was giving her the fish tanks for cover and the side door for an escape attempt.
Unless he had a partner waiting out there.
The intruder stopped. “The man says hello,” he said as his other hand came up to steady the one with the weapon, and then he turned, as if mimicking a TV-show detective.
Sydney ducked and bolted between the tanks for the side door, holding the fish bucket up by her head as a shield. The gunman fired multiple times, the crack crack crack amplified in the metal building like cannon blasts.
Bullets ricocheted off fish tanks, generators, the walls. She felt a sharp sting on one side and as she crossed the side aisle, another sting on the inside of her leg.
Sydney dropped the bucket as she slammed out the side door, hoping like hell the shooter was alone, that she wasn’t going to run into his backup as she emerged into the brutally harsh sunlight. More bullets clanged the door behind her as she sprinted between the outside mesh-enclosed fish reservoirs, glancing left and right and looking for a potential ambusher.
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