Blessing

by Deborah Bedford

  “What?”

  “I—” she took a deep breath and plunged in “—haven’t trusted you completely.”

  “Oh,” he said, grinning, glad that was all it was. “Is that why you turned me in and got me locked up?”

  “No.” She shook her head, and he could imagine all her hair waving around her shoulders. “After that. I’ve thought…”

  She hesitated again.

  “What have you thought, Uley?”

  “That you…”

  “That I what?”

  At last she said it, as fast as she could. “That you were being untrue to Elizabeth because of the way you went looking at me sometimes.”

  He threw his head back and laughed right up at the stars. Then he took off his hat and grinned at her. “Nope. I wasn’t being untrue to Elizabeth. She’s my sister.”

  “I found that out today. It’s the first I’ve known of it. It surprised me, I can sure tell you.”

  “I’ll bet it did.”

  “That’s why I came tonight.” It was her turn to gaze straight up at the stars. “I just wanted, wanted…” She trailed off.

  He completed the sentence for her. “To tell me why you keep backing away.”

  “Yes.”

  The wagon halted in front of the Kirklands’ cabin. She sat gazing at him, the anticipation in her eyes palpable, waiting for the assurances he might pass on to her now. But he gave her none. He couldn’t. All he could think of as he sat there in the dark beside her was the cottonwood tree where the three forks of Willow Creek met, with the hemp rope slung over one of its strongest branches, waiting, just waiting.

  It wasn’t fair of him to make Uley start caring about him now that his life might have a heart-wrenching end to it. Chances were Dawson Hayes wouldn’t even see the letter he still had to compose until it was almost autumn. Aaron knew he’d be long gone by then, buried up with the rest of the crowd on the knoll marked Boot Hill.

  “Best go in now, Uley,” he told her, knowing he was disappointing her now, knowing he had no other choice. “It’s getting late. And I’ve still got that letter to write.”

  Harris Olney slept at his desk in the jailhouse, his boots propped up higher than his head, his arms jutting akimbo from his shoulders, his hands cradling his neck. His snores came in short, insistent bursts, fierce enough to rattle the weekly Tin Cup Banner that lay spread open on his chest.

  The snoring stopped suddenly, and the marshal’s feet hit the floor as he moved to a sitting position. “That’s it,” he bellowed, “that’s it.”

  “What’s it?” Ben Pearsall was whittling on a chunk of pine, dropping the shavings into the fire. “You been dreaming about bears, Olney? You sure did sound like one.”

  “Bears? Not at all, Pearsall. I’ve been dreaming about how to get rid of Aaron Brown once and for all. This is so easy, I don’t know why I didn’t think of it yesterday.”

  “What’s easy?”

  Olney got up from the old oak chair and rummaged through his things on the shelf. “Where’s my inkwell? Where’s some paper? I can write my own letter.” He found the paper he sought, dipped the pen and began printing laboriously. Pearsall watched as he saw a vivid blue stain start to soak through the paper.

  Harris wadded up the paper, pitched it into the corner and began again. He worked so hard at it, he held his tongue pinched between his teeth. Finally, he finished. “There. What do you think of this?” He held it up so Old Pearsall could read it.

  Ben Pearsall leaned forward and squinted.

  Dear Dawson Hayes

  Here—blotch—is sum money. No need to come to Tin Cup. We—blotch—do not need you.

  Pearsall went back to his whittling. “You didn’t sign your name. Cain’t send a letter without signing your name.”

  “That’s just it,” Harris said, grinning. “That’s just what I’m going to do. It’s a letter from me. But Hayes won’t know that.” Olney shoved the pen away and pulled his six-shooter from its holster. He began to polish it with a piece of hide. “He’ll think that letter is from Brown himself.”

  “I don’t like it, Harris,” Pearsall said. “I don’t like it at all. It makes me think sometimes, seeing you acting like you’ve got something to hide.”

  Harris’s eyes met Ben Pearsall’s over the upturned barrel of the gun. “I’m the law in this town, Ben. You questioning the law?”

  “Naw,” Ben said, backing down nonchalantly, but figuring he’d gotten his point across. “I guess I wouldn’t be doing anything like that.”

  Harris laid the gun down and stomped to the door. “Hey!” he hollered out the door. “Anybody trustworthy around here who wants to make good money?”

  Several men in the street stepped forward to volunteer.

  “I just need one fellow,” Olney said, placing the letter in the hands of the first one who approached him. “I’m looking for a messenger to get over to Buena Vista.”

  Chapter Nine

  The day Charles Ongewach’s new piano came in over the pass, the saloon owner set up a flyer in his front window, inviting everyone in Tin Cup for a celebration. It had been eight months since old man Scheer had climbed up on Ongewach’s upright grand while wearing his hob-nailed boots. Scheer had paid eight months’ worth of gold dust to buy the establishment a new one.

  Pastor Benjamin Creede, the circuit preacher who rode into town on a bay mare one day with saddlebags full of Bibles, read the flyer in the window and immediately removed it. “How can you invite the entire community to an event that takes place in an establishment of ill repute?” he asked Ongewach that morning when the saloon owner happened to poke his head outside to check on the weather. “If you want to have a community event, you ought to have it at the town hall.”

  “You don’t undertand,” Ongewach said in the same tone of voice as if he were telling someone that the floor needed mopping. “Nobody in this town has problems attending a function in this place. Everybody comes here every day anyway.”

  “That is exactly why I’m here,” Pastor Creede said. “To evangelize this wild country.”

  “If we needed somebody to do that, we would have hired a preacher ourselves.”

  “I figure you’ve got one or two law-abiding citizents who wouldn’t be willing to attend a shindig at your place. Besides, I heard a rumor that there might be a hanging up in this part of Gunnison County. Wouldn’t do for a man to be God-forsaken at such a time, to meet his Maker without making his peace.”

  Although Ongewach curled his lip at the idea, a new flyer went up advertising the piano delivery party in the Tin Cup town hall the next day. The party was moved. And the piano, all gleaming and polished like a Sunday shoe, was moved again by wagon and stood in the town-hall corner when Uley and Sam arrived soon after supper. Its wood glowed with the maroon patina of hand-rubbed cherry. Its stool sported a brass plaque on one side that read St. Louis, J. Watsabaugh. Its music rack was encircled by elaborately carved pea vines and flowers.

  Bunting hung in scallops from the ceiling, and lanterns flickered behind glass chimneys. Uley found herself hard-pressed to picture this as the same room where the town had been named Tin Cup or where the charges had been read against Aaron or where the circuit-riding preacher, Pastor Creede, had endeavored to set up worship services on Sunday. Samuel and Uley had attended, along with two others whom Uley recognized from a neighboring mine. Now, as everyone from ten miles around seemed to be arriving, she heard someone calling, “Uley! Over here!”

  She found Laura waving frantically from where she stood beside the woodstove among a group of Moll’s other “upstairs girls.” She had never seen Laura gussied up before. If Uley hadn’t recognized her voice and seen her waving, Uley might never have recognized her friend.

  Laura wore a vermilion dress covered with velvet and bows. A thick feather boa fell across Laura’s creamy, white shoulders. Laura’s eyes seemed huge and round and dark. She’d painted them with kohl, Uley supposed. Her lips were stained a brilliant crimso
n, the color of a plump, ripe strawberry. She looked like a porcelain doll someone had decorated with an artist’s brush, a bit unreal.

  Uley made for the woodstove but her father grabbed her arm. “You mustn’t do that, Uley.” It had been a long time since she’d seen him so reproachful. “Here we are within sight of the whole town. Ongewach got a fit of conscience when that pastor talked to him about the party, decided he’d invite the whole town over here, including the hurdy-gurdy girls. It wouldn’t do, you walking over there to talk with the whole town watching. Those girls are dressed for work.”

  “But it’s just Laura.”

  “I know that. And I know you fancy yourself her friend. Goodness knows, that girl needs one. But people are talking and I don’t like that the talk includes you.”

  “Let them talk. It’s just a bunch of old coot miners anyway.”

  “I have certain responsibilities,” her pa said. “Many I have neglected with you. Your mother would never forgive me for letting you live as roughly as I have.”

  The weight of frustration leveled in her chest. She couldn’t help being angry at her father, being angry at all of them for their conventions and their antiquated rules. Even living out here in the barren wilderness, they thought they knew how things should be!

  “You don’t know what goes on between men and women, Uley.”

  “Well, I’d sure like to find out.” Her anger took its final form against her father and against the responsibilities he’d let her take but, still, imposing rules on her these years. She conveniently forgot the fact that this charade had all been her notion in the first place.

  She spun away from her pa just in time to see the double doors swing open. “Hey,” a big Swede hollered from the porch. “It’s the fellow who tried to shoot the marshal, and he’s got the lady with him.”

  Sure enough, here came Aaron, with Elizabeth on his arm. He doffed his Stetson in the familiar one-handed way that made Uley’s heart pound. Instantly half the men in the room began to line up beside Elizabeth.

  “There’s no use being angry at me,” her father said, still following their prior course of conversation. “We both knew it would come to this some day. I know you’ve befriended Laura. But you mustn’t be seen with her here.”

  Uley saw Aaron glancing around the room. Breath caught in her throat. He’s looking for me.

  Their eyes met. Then, once he’d found her, he never glanced in her direction again. Instead, he headed to the opposite corner of the room while the other men gathered around his sister yet kept as much distance from him as they could.

  A cry went up. “Where’s the piano music?”

  “Yeah. What good does that fancy piano do sitting in the corner if there isn’t anybody tickling the ivories?”

  “To my new piano and my old friends.” Charles Ongewach held up a hand in a mock salute. “We only got one problem I can think of. Nobody in Tin Cup knows how to play the thing.”

  Uley sensed Aaron by her side before she saw him. She looked straight up and met his dark eyes. “It’s going to be a long evening,” he remarked blandly. “All these miners and only one lady to go around.”

  “If we had a piano player,” she said slowly, her eyes never leaving his face, “I guess we could sing or something. If we were singing, you wouldn’t have the time to worry about that horde of men following Elizabeth.”

  “Elizabeth wasn’t the lady I had in mind.”

  She colored.

  “I love it when you do that.”

  “What?”

  “When you blush the color of an Irish tea rose.”

  That left Uley quite beyond words.

  “Your eyes look as green as a good fishing pond.”

  “Blushing is the one thing that’s often threatened to give me away, Aaron Brown.”

  “So what were you mad about when I walked in here? I found you in the crowd and you looked like a snarling mountain lion waiting to spring on something.” She’d looked ruffled and mad and beautiful, only he wouldn’t tell her that.

  “Laura’s my friend. Pa knows that. And he wouldn’t let me go.” She pointed toward the girls in bright-colored dresses beside the woodstove. The tarnished doves, Laura among them, were waving at fellows in the crowd and giggling among themselves.

  “Don’t blame him. I wouldn’t have let you join that group, either.”

  “I don’t like it anymore,” she said. “I don’t like everybody judging everyone else by their appearances or by the choices they’ve made. They’re doing it to you, too, Aaron, or else you wouldn’t have had to move out of the Pacific Hotel.”

  “Aunt Kate’s been kind,” he said. “She’s letting me do chores around the place to help earn our keep. And you’ve been kind, too. But appearances are important, too, not in the way you mean, but because we choose how we want people to see us.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I chose to come to Tin Cup after Olney. You chose to come to Tin Cup with your father. Laura chose the way she makes a living.”

  “Yes, but when the time comes to do it differently, people won’t let us back up and start all over.”

  “There’s only one person who lets us do that,” Aaron said. “Jesus Christ. Who loved us as we were and died so that we might be made new.”

  Uley’s heart caught in her throat. So the Bible she had found among his belongings had meant something. He loved the Lord as she loved the Lord. If they shared faith, they might be able to get through this together.

  “We make choices. We live with them, Uley.”

  “Or die with them,” she said very quietly, wishing she did not have to speak those words.

  “Yes.”

  As conversations rose around them, there might as well have been nobody else standing in the room besides Uley Kirkland and Aaron Brown.

  “Life is never fair, is it?” she asked.

  “No.” He looked like he wanted to slip his hand over hers again, only he didn’t dare. “It isn’t.”

  The chorus about the piano rose around them. “There’s got to be somebody in this room who can play the piano.”

  “Craziest thing I’ve ever heard, old man Scheer spending his life’s earnings on a piano and Ongewach’s gone and thrown a fancy party for it and nobody’s here who can make it play?”

  Lesser Levy pulled a leather pouch from his pocket, flipped it in the air and caught it again. “Here’s a pouch of gold dust for anybody who can make that thing play a song.”

  Jasper Warde started toward the pouch.

  “Not you, Jasper. I want somebody who can play with two hands.”

  The sound in the room skittered away to silence. One miner looked at another. No one moved. No one stepped forward. No one uttered a word. Not a one of them knew the difference between a middle C and a B flat.

  “What? There ain’t nobody?”

  Levy looked just about ready to tuck the pouch inside his shirt when a diminutive voice spoke from beside the woodstove.

  “I can. I can play it for you.”

  All eyes turned in her direction. All eyes stared with disbelief at the assembly of questionable women, where one had stepped forward as if she had some right to be a regular member of this community.

  “Who? Who said that?”

  “I know the songs. You let me play, everybody’ll be singing clear until sunrise.”

  All eyes traveled up the satin skirt covered with ruffles, the velvet fabric and the satin bows as gaudy and bright as the carriage Moll had purchased and decorated. Everyone looked to the pretty little mouth painted the color of a ripe strawberry, and the eyes rimmed with dark kohl.

  “I’ve been playin’ since I was little.” Laura’s chin was set as high as if she’d been the governor’s daughter or the queen in some far-off land. “Ain’t nobody knows it, though.” She laughed. “Until now, I guess.”

  The mutterings swept through the crowd like a breeze swept through the aspen leaves.

  “Ought not to let her get anywh
ere close to the piano.”

  “Ongewach shouldn’t have invited women like them to this party anyway.”

  “Shut up, Warde. It’s not like you don’t frequent Moll’s establishment once a week. Always willing to point a finger.”

  “Come on down here, girl.” Lesser Levy motioned her to step forward. Santa Fe Moll stepped right beside her.

  “Not you,” Levy growled at Moll. “This here’s Tin Can Laura’s night. She’s the one who’s going to save this party. And if I hear you took away half of her pay for this, I’ll come over there and rob you myself, just the way you’ve been robbing these girls.”

  Moll stepped back.

  “That’s the way. This pouch of gold belongs to Tin Can Laura.”

  As Laura stepped through the crowd, the men cleared a path for her to the shiny new piano. She pulled the stool out and made herself comfortable upon it, wiggling back and forth once or twice and adjusting her skirts to make certain her feet were situated as they should be. She laid her fingers upon the keys and, for one full moment, looked at them as if she liked remembering them there.

  Finally, satisfied, she glanced over her shoulder at the room full of men and grinned. “Just learned this one last year.” Her fingers darted over the keys without her even having to look at them. Out came the first strains of “Where the Columbines Grow.”

  No one moved. No one sang. Everybody stood frozen, listening to Laura play.

  Uley tugged at Aaron’s sleeve. “See? It’s just what we were talking about.” There she sat, the young girl Uley had befriended, the soiled dove, playing as if she were a fine miss performing in some parlor.

  When Laura finished that song, she moved right along to “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.” All around her, the miners began stomping in rhythm and joined in with the song.

  Uley refused to listen to Aaron and her pa. She couldn’t keep herself any longer from standing beside her friend.