Blessing

by Deborah Bedford

  “How do you do this?” Uley asked, astounded. “Where did you learn to play like this?”

  “I just hear somebody singing a song and I can play it. All I’ve got to do is listen and there is comes. Been doing it ever since I was five. What do you think?”

  “I think you are amazing.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Did you figure these out by yourself?” Uley could barely see Laura’s fingers, they were moving so fast.

  “Nope. Not all of them. Somebody taught me once.”

  “Who?”

  “Somebody I have no right to talk about anymore.”

  “Who?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Laura, tell me.”

  “Just a fellow I knew once.”

  All at once Uley understood it. “The one you spoke about when we were at the lily pond?”

  “The very one.”

  “Who was he? Did he play in a saloon?”

  “No. He didn’t. No.” And this time, as Laura answered her, Uley was the only one who noticed her skip a few measures with her left hand so she could scrub away at her nose. Goodness, but it looked like Laura was ready to cry. Her nose had turned as rosy as a crab apple. “He was the minister who rode in over in Pitkin, trying to start a church.”

  “Laura?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it, Uley. He was like you are, you know? Always telling me I was worth something.”

  Uley touched Laura’s shoulder in front of God and everyone else who might be watching. “Seems to me that there’s a few of us you need to start listening to.”

  “Telling him goodbye was the worst thing I’ve ever had to do. I had to, though. There wasn’t any other way.”

  “It that why you left Pitkin and came to Moll’s place?”

  “Of course it is. All I’ve got left of him is this piano playing. Most of what I can play is church hymns. Guess I’ll start on those in a little while, too, if everybody here keeps singing along.”

  When Laura struck up the tune to “Little Brown Jug,” her fingers raced along at the same robust tempo as a horse’s canter. When Aaron stepped close to Uley and chimed in with everyone else in his deep baritone voice, the room spun around her and the music filled her head, and all she could comprehend at that moment was the rainbow array of everyone around her. She felt a span of warmth across her shoulders and realized that Aaron had wrapped his arm across her back. All the world seemed to reel around Uley.

  This is what happiness is, isn’t it, Lord? Oh, Father. I don’t want it to ever end.

  “Uley?” Aaron whispered. And in the way he uttered her name, he asked scores of questions that she couldn’t answer.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she whispered back. “I don’t know how…”

  “Neither do I.”

  “I want everything to change. I want nothing to change.”

  “They may well hang me in sixteen days. It isn’t fair to you if I’ve made you care for me. I’ve tried so hard not to.”

  “Everyone in this room thinks I’m something I’m not,” she said. “I don’t know how to be anything else.”

  “I think,” he said, very quietly, “you could be anything you wanted to be.”

  Oh, Father. It’s what I’ve been telling Laura. So easy to say the words to someone I love. So difficult to believe them for myself.

  On the piano, Laura began a rendition of “The Little Eau Pleine.” In that precise instant, Dave McNally clomped right up to the piano and deposited a rusty tin can on the polished cherrywood beside her wrists. “Here you go, Tin Can Laura. This is what you’ve forgotten, I think.” His laughter was mean, loud enough to get everyone’s attention. “Can’t have you performing without your tin can, can we? Best leave it right here.”

  Laura’s hands froze on the keys.

  “Aw, shut up, Dave.” Levy yanked his gun out of his holster. “Couldn’t you have left your sour mood outside?”

  But Uley could see the damage was already done. Laura started the song where she’d left off. But as she played the gentle ballad, her arms began to shake. Tears pooled in her eyes. She missed a note. Uley saw a tear roll down her nose and drop onto the ivory.

  “Confound it, Laura.” Ongewach rushed forward with his hankie. “Stop your crying.” He didn’t hand the handkerchief to her. Instead he dried off the piano keys. “You’ll mess up the finish on my cherrywood.”

  In frustration, Laura let the song dwindle into silence. She stared at her fingers for a full ten seconds before she pounded the keys with all ten of them at once and made such a racket it made everyone jump. She picked up the tin can and chucked it as hard as she could into the crowd. It glanced off Peter Sturge’s head and then bounced off one of the plate-glass windows. She squared her shoulders, gave an unnatural smile and, holding her head high, headed for the front door. She shoved it open with both hands and marched straight out into the night.

  At Laura’s exit, the entire room—remarkably—remained silent.

  Uley gripped Aaron’s arm. It was amazing how close she felt to him, after standing beside him and singing, participating in the evening’s gaiety. “I’ve got to go after her.”

  “You should. She’ll be in need of you about now.”

  Uley shot him one glance, one glance only, that told him everything he needed to know. His support at that moment meant everything to her.

  She elbowed her way past the miners who had gathered around the piano now that they’d heard it play. She wove her way toward the huge mahogany door. She sidestepped her way past Charlie Hastings and Hollis Andersen. Just as she reached the lantern-lined vestibule, she found herself nose to nose with her father.

  “I’m going after her, Pa.”

  “I had a strange premonition you would be headed that way.”

  “I’ve got to. I know you don’t approve. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t figure there’s any use trying to stop you.”

  “There isn’t.”

  Her father stepped out of her way and sighed. It was a heavy sigh, a sound that carried the weight of the past years in it, the weight of everything he’d tried to do without Sarah, bringing up a child in this forsaken place all on his own.

  “You’re growing up, Uley,” he said softly. “It isn’t easy for me to let you go.”

  They stood this way, toe to toe, face-to-face, for one long moment, silent, loving and respecting each other, sizing each other up.

  “I had best go find my friend,” she said at last.

  “I won’t stop you, Uley.”

  He stepped back a pace so she could pass.

  Uley stood in the street, peering first up one side of the avenue and then down the other. The dirt thoroughfare appeared deserted.

  “Laura?” she called.

  No answer.

  “Laura? It’s me.”

  The only sound Uley could hear was the sparkling dance of Willow Creek purling against its banks beside the meadow. She waited a long time, listening, before she started in the other direction.

  “Uley,” came the timid voice behind her. “I’m here. Wait up, would you?”

  “I’m sorry.” Uley spun toward the voice. “I’m so sorry for what happened in there.”

  Laura stepped into the moonlight from the shadows that fell from the Tin Cup post office. When she raised her eyes to her friend, the moonlight struck her face, making it look like it glowed from within. Tears sparkled on her cheeks.

  “That was awful in there.”

  “Makes you never want to step out and do anything, doesn’t it?”

  Uley sat on the edge of the boardwalk.

  Laura sat beside her.

  “I deserved what I got in there, I figure. I’m being stupid, crying this way.”

  “You cry,” Uley said. “When you’re hurting, it’s good to cry. And it seems like there’s nothing these men around here know how to do except hurt people.”

  “I didn’t think anybody would take exception to me playing m
usic at a community gathering. Don’t they know I’m just like them inside? It had nothing to do with that pouch of gold. That’s not why I was playing. I was playing because of something inside my heart.” She held the pouch in her palm where they both could see it. “I just wanted to do something special for everybody. Something different.”

  “You did something special, Laura. Don’t you ever question that.”

  Laura gazed at Uley through two eyes ringed with smudges of kohl. “You think so?”

  “Of course. Everybody was having the time of their lives in there before McNally had to get obnoxious. Your eyes are all messed up. Reminds me of a coon.” Uley reached with the tip of one finger and wiped off a smudge. “Here.”

  “It’s supposed to make me look pretty.”

  “It did at first in a funny sort of way. But I like your face better the way God made it. Without anything to cover it up. You don’t look like you with Moll’s kohl and dye all over everything.”

  “Funny thing,” Laura said. “I don’t feel like me, either.”

  Uley rocked back and surveyed her work. “That’s much better.”

  “I wish I could go downstairs at Ongewach’s and play the piano every night. But Moll would never agree to it.”

  “You have a right to make a living any way you want to, Laura. Moll doesn’t own you.”

  “It’s different than you think. I owe her something. She’s been good to me, Uley.”

  “Not as good as someone else might have been.”

  “She took me in when I might have starved to death otherwise.”

  “She’s added gold dust to her larder because of it.”

  “Every man in this town knows what I am. I could never be seen as anyone else.”

  “You never know until you try,” Uley said.

  “These miners see you one way, they’ll always see you that way. And it ain’t just in Tin Cup, neither. It’s all over the state of Colorado.”

  Father, haven’t I also said those words?

  “That’s just how people are.”

  Is that why You’ve brought me to this place, making me hurt, so I can help someone who’s hurting worse than me?

  “Well, you don’t have to be how people think you have to be. The Father doesn’t look at you the same way people do.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “Laura, the preacher in Pitkin who taught you how to play hymns—did he tell you how asking Jesus into your heart could make all things new again?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I never could have been good enough.”

  “Don’t you understand about the Lord, Laura? There isn’t anyone who could have been good enough. That’s why He gave His life for us.

  “You don’t have to know,” Uley said. And as she spoke she might as well have been speaking to herself, too. “You just ask Him. You invite Him to take over all your struggles and to help you let go, and then you watch to see what He’ll do.”

  Oh, Father. I believe that with my head. It is my heart that falters.

  “That’s what you think, isn’t it, Uley? But that’s not so easy to do.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Look at Aaron Brown,” Laura said. “There’s a question about him bein’ innocent now. But these folks around here ain’t gonna give him the benefit of the doubt in any case. They stand firm on their idea that every man in Gunnison County is guilty until proven innocent. Ain’t supposed to be that way, but it is. They see things as they see ’em.”

  “Mr. Brown,” Uley said very carefully, “may go free.”

  “And he may not.”

  Laura wasn’t staring straight into the night anymore. She’d tilted her head and was scrutinizing Uley’s expression, one ear propped atop a knee.

  “You’d best get used to that idea, Uley. Else you’re gonna have a bad heartache later. I figure I know the name of the fellow you were talkin’ about down by the lily pond the other day.”

  “I sure don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I reckon you’re starting to care for Aaron Brown.”

  “Now, why would I go and do a fool thing like that?”

  “Don’t know. Guess it’s a question you’ll have to ask yourself.”

  Uley propped her chin on her knees, too. “I’m not asking myself questions right now.”

  “No,” Laura said. “You’re just answering them for other people.”

  Uley was silent.

  “These miners found out you’d been fooling ’em all this time, saying you were a fellow when you are a gal, they’d probably run you out of town on the next supply wagon.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  “Me, they look at me and know what I’m worth. Just plunk the money in the can and walk away. And Mr. Brown, they won’t rest easy until his dead body’s swinging from that cottonwood by the three forks of Willow Creek.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “I’m scared for all of us.”

  “Laura.”

  “Uley, will you help me do that Jesus thing that preacher was talking about? Will you help me pray and get Him to take charge of my life the way you say He will? So these things won’t turn out the way I think they’re going to happen?”

  And so, Uley took her hands, much the way her own mother had taken Uley’s hands when she’d been a little girl, and helped her pray to ask Jesus to make His place of love and salvation deep in Laura’s heart. She hugged Laura hard and long. Then she peered up into the stars, looking for answers in the millions of them that glittered in the sky above. How she wished that, just this once, she could see into all eternity. But maybe…maybe…it was better that she couldn’t. “Now, it’s over now. You’re wrong to be afraid.”

  “I ain’t wrong. You know I ain’t.”

  And so they sat together, Laura with both knees snuggled up close to her, Uley with her back against a cottonwood trunk one knee drawn up, the other foot set squarely in the dirt.

  Well, maybe she’d helped Laura find her new answer. And they’d found each other. Maybe that was a beginning to what the Father had in mind.

  Chapter Ten

  “I’ve been thinking,” Aaron said to his sister as he hauled water upstairs for Aunt Kate at the boardinghouse, “about staying forever in Tin Cup.”

  “You will be staying forever,” Elizabeth answered without missing a breath, “if Dawson Hayes won’t come for your trial.” She hated talking about it, but it had to be faced. “You’ll spend an eternity here beneath the dirt up on Boot Hill.”

  “I won’t spend an eternity up there no matter what happens,” he said. “I’ll be in heaven, without a care in the world. Angels will be strumming their harps, and the streets will be lined with what everybody’s digging in the dirt for here.”

  “Angel songs,” Elizabeth said pensively. “Do you think they could ever be as beautiful as the song of the meadow-lark and the robin?”

  “I don’t know,” he commented offhandedly. “I may soon see.” He set the pail down on the pine washstand and watched as the water sloshed against the sides. “Now Kate’ll have water for all her folks.”

  “So…what do you mean about staying in Tin Cup?”

  Aaron faced his sister. “I mean that I like it here.”

  “You’d leave Fort Collins?”

  “It’s different than the Eastern Slope. Full of life. Full of promise and brawn. Full of gold. It appeals to me.”

  “Oh, no,” she said with a sigh. “Don’t tell me you’ve gone and picked up the gold fever, too.”

  “No. It just seems like Tin Cup is sitting on the edge of the new frontier, Beth. My guess is that ladies’ll start coming here soon. It would be a fine place to open up a business. Another livery stable. We could offer choice horses and well-built wagons—” he grinned “—and carriages.”

  “Who ever heard of a carriage in Tin Cup?”

  “We could bring in the best Studebaker carriages money could buy. You might just be surprise
d, Beth,” he told her.

  She was surprised…by the eagerness she saw in her brother’s eyes, and the hope. She hadn’t seen him so happy and so full of dreams since before he’d left to pursue Harris Olney to Tin Cup. What could it be, she pondered, that was making him dream of a future when he was facing a trial in eleven days that might very well send him to his death?

  “I mean, if a miracle happened and Dawson Hayes came and I wasn’t found guilty and I settled somewhere new—” he dumped the pail into a barrel and made ready to make his fifth trip to Willow Creek “—it might as well be here.”

  Laura and Uley’s best place to meet was the lily pond. Now that Uley knew where it was, she wandered down there often in the afternoons after the mines had closed, usually carrying a pail containing warm corn bread slathered with honey and molasses from C. A. Freeman’s Miners’ Service Depot.

  “Maybe, for all our sakes,” Uley said quietly to Laura one afternoon as she licked crumbs from her fingers, “I’m going to have to prove you’re wrong about some things.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Laura told her.

  “You figure nobody around here will give you a respectable job. I figure somebody will. D. J. Mawherter ran an ad in the Tin Cup Banner. He’s looking for a clerk.”

  “It won’t happen. He’ll take one look at me and turn his nose up in the air like he smells something sour.”

  “You don’t know until you try.”

  “I know what Moll will do if she finds out. She’ll have my hide on a fence post. Plus she’ll charge you two dollars an hour just for squirin’ me around town.”

  “Are you afraid, Laura? That’s what it is, isn’t it?”

  “You don’t have to be, Uley. But I do.”

  Even so, Uley fought to convince Laura she wasn’t giving the miners around town an equitable chance. And she realized she was fighting to convince herself, too. It was, she supposed as she lay in bed thinking of it, a venture she needed to take on for herself, as well. Father, we’re supposed to do things we know are Your will, even though we’re afraid of them, aren’t we? What happened to Laura now would directly affect the choices Uley knew she must make, too…choices about what she wanted…who she wanted to become…and how she was going to get there.