Blessing

by Deborah Bedford

  “That woman doesn’t have much schooling,” Hollis said, grinning, “but she is a smart one when it comes to practical things.”

  “I’m finding that out. I’m grateful to her, no matter how much work she’s gotten out of me.”

  Uley had seen him, apron and all. He could see Old Croppy veering toward him. “Hello, Mr. Brown,” she called out.

  He decided her low, lilting voice was as pleasing as wild honey. She flopped the reins over the mule’s head and jumped down beside him.

  “What’s this you’re wearing?” She tugged at the hem of the unsightly apron, cocking her head at him like a sparrow.

  “It’s Kate Fischer’s. I can’t seem to get it off. I was in a hurry, and there’s a knot back there, and I don’t—”

  She had already walked around him. “Ah, apron strings,” she teased him. “I hear they’ve been the undoing of many a man.”

  “That,” he told her, “and a late supply wagon.”

  She laid one hand on the back of his shoulder. “You waitin’ for the wagon today, Aaron? You think he’ll be on it?”

  “I don’t rightly know,” Aaron said, wishing he could take her fingers in his and turn toward her. “He could be.” Her fingers, against his shoulder blade, seemed to sear into his very bone.

  “You haven’t heard anything, then?”

  “No,” he answered sadly. “I don’t figure I will. Hayes’ll come if he gets my letter in time. He won’t bother to send word. It wouldn’t beat him here.”

  Why are you watching for the wagon, Uley, after I’ve done my level best to push you away?

  The jangle of a wagon rig cut into the still afternoon.

  “Wagon’s comin’ in,” Hollis hollered, jumping from his step and dusting the brim of his hat against his leg.

  The cry echoed up and down both sides of the street, seeming to come from everywhere at once.

  “Wagon’s coming in!”

  “McClain’s bringing his team in!”

  “Look’s like he’s got passengers.”

  “Wagon’s coming in!”

  “We’d best get rid of this knot,” Uley said softly from behind him. He felt her hand uncurl and slide to the base of his spine. “You won’t want to be wearing this if Hayes arrives today.”

  While she worked on him, he rose to the toes of his boots and shaded his eyes against the glare.

  He’d never seen a wagon move so slowly.

  “Yah!” he heard McClain bellow to the mules as he cracked a whip above their heads. “Get on along.” The sound carried a good half mile. “We got passengers to unload.”

  Chapter Eleven

  All the while the wagon bumped up Washington Avenue, Uley’s fingers flew at the knot. Even the excitement of McClain pulling in couldn’t rival the tumult she felt as she stood behind Aaron, unfastening his work-worn apron strings. Was this the way a wife would untie apron strings for her husband? Perhaps after he’d spent a grueling day as a smithy or a cooper or a shop clerk?

  Uley felt, for this one moment, as if an untying such as this one could be some ultimate act of caring. She pretended, just then, that it was so. She found one end of the bleached canvas and followed it gingerly as it wove through two loops and then back again. She found the other end and pulled it out backward. It came, flapping. “What did you do to this thing, Aaron Brown?” she asked, not certain whether he could hear her voice quaking. Was it only her ears that noted the difference as she tried to speak? “I’ve not seen such a rat’s nest since I tried to knit once.”

  She heard the lift in his own voice. “You tried to knit?”

  “I wanted to make Pa a warm sweater for Christmas the first year we were in Tin Cup.”

  He laughed. “I can assure you I wasn’t trying to do some fool thing like that. I only wanted to untie it quickly. I saw you and Old Croppy coming up the way. I didn’t want you to see me unless I had on my fine suit.”

  “Ah…” She chuckled lightly as her fingers continued to work. “So that’s why. And I only want you to see me in a dress that’s pink, with so many petticoats under it I look like a chime in a church steeple.” Aunt Delilah had sent her a copy of Graham’s just last week. It wasn’t the latest, but Uley had still read it cover to cover.

  “Keep describing it,” he said teasingly. “I can almost picture you.”

  She hadn’t forgotten what they were both waiting for. “You see him on that wagon yet?”

  Several of the men on the steps beside them had run on ahead to greet McClain. But not Aaron. He was purposely prolonging the waiting. If Dawson Hayes wasn’t on today’s wagon, he didn’t want to know it. “I don’t recognize anybody.”

  He stood stock-still, legs spread wide, gazing up the road, while she stood behind him, taking him in. The cotton shirt was pulled taut between his shoulder blades and wrinkled at the hip where his apron bunched it. His sleeves clung where his forearms twisted with muscle. The domestic garment from Kate Fischer’s only served to emphasize his brawn and broadness. She guessed he’d been in such a hurry to get down here, he’d forgotten his Stetson. So many times when she saw him, the brim of it shadowed his eyes. Without it, he seemed strangely exposed, vulnerable.

  Her hands paused. Vulnerability. Broad ruggedness. And this was Aaron Brown.

  The moment forced her to acknowledge the flush that filled her every time she came into his presence, something she didn’t entirely understand. She stood absorbing it, anticipating it, this sweet longing that rose from nothingness into burgeoning flame.

  It was everything she could do to keep from laying her head against his back, drawing him near, turning her anticipation into action. But she had entirely no idea how a proper lady would respond to something like this. Would a proper young lady feel this at all? Laura had said so. But suppose Laura was wrong. Suppose this longing, this…this desperation, was something unprecedented.

  The instant passed and was gone. She felt, rather than saw, Aaron tense. “Do you see who’s in the supply wagon?” she asked, not really wanting to know the answer.

  “Yes,” he answered her quietly. “Dawson isn’t with McClain. I should have figured as much.”

  Her spirited plummeted. “I’m sorry, Aaron. I’m so sorry.”

  “Me too.” He sighed, sounding more lost than ever. “Ah, I didn’t figure he’d make it in today, anyway. Everybody else started me expectin’ it.”

  At long last, Uley freed him from the apron. “There you are,” she said, throwing the strings wide. “You’re unfastened.”

  “Thanks.” He tugged the thing off and held it wadded in one hand, facing the wagon.

  Neither of them knew what to say.

  Neither of them wanted to leave.

  “Well,” he said finally, tucking the discarded apron up under one arm. “You have to take nails or something back up to the Gold Cup?”

  “That and two spools of filament. I’ve got to strap the spools onto Old Croppy.”

  “I’ll help,” he said.

  And so he did. Uley handed the rope to Aaron beneath the mule’s glistening flank. He took it from her hand, masterfully crossing it back over beneath the packs, line over load. Instead of flipping it across Old Croppy’s back to her, he held it out so that Uley could take it from him.

  When she did, his hand released, then gripped again, trapping Uley’s fingers lightly against the hemp.

  She looked at her hand. She looked at him. She felt the warm pressure of his flesh against her own.

  “Aaron?” she asked, mesmerized.

  He said nothing. He just slid his hand up toward the pack, releasing her. She stood there for a moment as their gazes locked across the spindly mane of the mule.

  Abruptly she broke the spell, bending to put more of the mule’s barrel-shaped body between them.

  She passed him the rope again. This time, as she did, he claimed her hand.

  She pulled it away.

  Wordlessly he worked the rope over Old Croppy’s back again, waiting for
her to extend her hand and take it.

  She did, this time giving him pause by meeting his palm beneath the mule’s body. In her eyes Aaron plainly saw the illicit turn her thoughts had taken as she stood with him at the roadside. She let her hand slide between his own, and their fingers slowly meshed together. There they knelt, with Old Croppy between them, bound together by their absorption in each other as certainly as the rope lashed Old Croppy’s packs.

  The mule brayed impatiently above them, and Aaron suddenly seemed to remember where they were. He squeezed her hand, freed her and cleared his throat. “Can I walk you up the hill, Uley? I’d like to know you’ve made it safely.”

  It was these small hints of gentlemanliness that endeared him to her totally. “Yes,” she said, making ready to stand. “Oh, Aaron, please do.”

  He took Old Croppy’s reins, and they started across Grand Avenue.

  At last he found the courage to ask the question that had been plaguing him since he first saw her craning her neck in the direction of the wagon. “Why did you come, Uley? What did you have at stake in McClain’s arrival this afternoon?”

  How could she answer such a question?

  My heart is at stake, Aaron. I wait for that wagon with my heart skipping just like I know you do.

  Father, what should I say to him? “I watch for the wagon every day it comes in. That’s all. There might be something important on it.” Or somebody. Like Dawson Hayes, who could save your life.

  They walked on, both of them silent, as the aspen leaves quivered above in the breeze, casting mottled sunlight upon the ground in startling green hues.

  Could I truly make my life here? Aaron wondered. If that jury lets me live and Uley agrees to stay by my side?

  Would I leave this? Would I give my life up to go to Ohio, to become somebody different? Uley asked herself. Because I’d want to be somebody different for him.

  As Aaron walked, he faced the very real possibility that Dawson Hayes might not heed his letter. Until he’d stood by the town hall with Uley fiddling at his apron strings, he hadn’t even considered the possibility that Hayes might not come. Now the full weight of that possibility struck him.

  What could he do?

  His own stubbornness had got himself involved in a situation that he couldn’t get away from anymore than he could swim upstream.

  The answer was simple. He couldn’t. He could only ward it off for the few days remaining by remembering his dreams, by sharing them, by focusing upon the treasures life had given him and on what might be yet to come.

  Aaron hesitated beside an aspen, snapped off a low-lying branch and ran it alongside his leg, the way a boy would run a stick along a picket fence. “Beth and I have been talking,” he said.

  “I’d have given anything for a sister to talk to,” Uley commented.

  “She is quite refined,” he said, staring off into the sky. “A refined lady can be a prize for any man, whether she is his sister or his love.”

  “Yes. I’m sure that’s so.” He didn’t see her face as she said it, so he couldn’t see that his words had cut into her very soul.

  “Beth and I will stay in Tin Cup if the jury finds me innocent. Beth has too many sad memories to face at home at the farm. And I’ve always wanted to try my hand at a livery. I plan to rent out the finest horses, carriages and drays. I believe I could give Smith some healthy competition.”

  He’d expected his words to please her. But now, as he glanced sideways, he saw that her face had gone pallid.

  “What is it, Uley? What’s wrong?”

  None of the things she wanted the two of them to share could come if he stayed in this place. She’d even entertained the notion of returning from Ohio to Fort Collins, twirling a parasol as she sauntered up beside him. “Hello,” she’d say as she gave him a delicate curtsy in a dress just like the one she’d seen in Graham’s. “Fancy meeting you here, Mr. Brown.”

  “Oh, Aaron…” she said bleakly. She couldn’t say more. She wouldn’t discourage a dream that might give him strength during these last heart-wrenching days.

  “And if I get out of this alive,” Aaron said, “I’m going to hire John Kincaid to prosecute Harris Olney. Beth has convinced me I was wrong to take matters into my own hands. But to me that always seemed the right way to accomplish things. I learned a long time ago not to rely on anybody else.”

  “Why is that?”

  “When I was a boy, I had a pa who taught me such things. He taught me the only proper way to build a barn was to hammer in every peg myself. He was a stubborn man, my pa. He taught me the only way to make certain a cow had given all her milk was to keep my own hands squeezin’ the udders. He thought the best way to hay a field was to go out with the thresher and cut it down himself.”

  “Sounds like he didn’t trust other people much.”

  “He didn’t. I found out when I was older that he’d had an older brother who’d stolen money once. My grandma kept their life savings in a tin canister on the warming shelf of the stove. His brother up and went to Texas, saying he was gonna make a living bringing longhorns up the Colorado Trail to Kansas. Three days later she found all the money gone. She never saw him again, and she never forgave him. I figure, from things Pa said, she never forgave my pa, either. She held him guilty just on the grounds they were brothers.”

  “What a horrible burden for a mother to place upon her son.”

  “I know that. He lived under it all his life. And he passed it down to me.” Aaron stopped where he stood then, just gazing at Uley, not knowing whether he should tell her how much what she was doing meant to him. But if he didn’t tell her, she’d never know. “A month ago, I wondered if I could trust you. Everything you’d ever done for me had come because I blackmailed you into it. You have seen me at my worst. You have viewed me as a murderer. Yet I don’t believe you see that anymore.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Why not?”

  She hadn’t admitted it to anyone, not even herself. “Because I believe you told Judge Murphy the truth, Aaron. I don’t think you’re guilty of the accusations brought against you.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “A feeling I have. A…a…reassurance, I suppose.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I know you.”

  They were nearing the mine. Anxious to postpone their parting, Uley stopped, dropping Old Croppy’s lead rope, and bent to pick several candlelike stems of kingly purple larkspur. Their scent was strong, not quite pleasant but she still held the flowers against her nose, scarcely daring to look at Aaron.

  “That’s how it is,” he said softly. “A man learns to trust when others trust him.”

  She raised her eyes to his. “Surely there has been someone else who believed in you. What about Beth?”

  “Never in the same way. Never in a way that took the worst of me and turned it into the best of me, as you’ve done.”

  She had no answer for him. She was powerless to still the thundering of her heart.

  “Tell me about you, Uley,” he said gently. “Tell me about your life before you came to Tin Cup. Were you once a carefree little girl?”

  Despite herself, she smiled. “Of course. Pa ran a dry goods shop in Wheeling, West Virginia. We had a willow tree in the backyard that made a perfect playhouse. I could slip inside the circle of its limbs with all my tea-party things, and Ma couldn’t find me.”

  “You? Tea parties?” He eyed her mischievously, looking her up and down.

  “I had grand parties. But that wasn’t the only thing. We had a limestone cave back behind the house. A neighbor boy, Jarvis Henderson, was afraid to go in. He said his mama told him not to go in because the cave had a ghost. I had to prove to him that was just an old mama’s trick to keep boys out of caves.”

  “How did you prove it?”

  “I took him by the hand and led him all the way back. Mrs. Henderson about skinned me alive when she found out about it. She wouldn’t let Jarvis play with me for
a month afterward.”

  “Were you excited when your ma and pa decided to come out West?”

  This time, she took longer in answering. “Pa had talked about gold for years. He kept hearing the stories and dreaming of them. Ma didn’t want to come. He was making a good living at the store, and we were all comfortable. I heard them talking one night. He said, ‘Sarah Kirkland, a man has to have something to look forward to. A man has to follow what’s in his soul, or else he’ll wither up and die like a bad crop of corn.’ So we sold everything and started out.”

  “Even though she didn’t want to?”

  “I know you are a God-fearing man, Aaron Brown. You’ve spoken to me about the Lord. I found your Bible among your personal belongings that day you sent me to your room. You know what the Bible says about a woman following her husband. It would have made it easier on Pa if she’d been excited about it. When she died of pneumonia, in Ohio, it was like she gave up her life doing something she didn’t want to do. I sometimes thought she gave up because she didn’t want to try life this way.”

  Uley turned away so that he couldn’t see the tears that were coming. “I’ve been mad at her for a long time for that. I’ve been mad at her for dying.” Now that she was finally confessing it, the frustration she’d been carrying came pouring out. “I’ve been mad at her for ruining Pa’s dream. I’ve been mad at Pa for making her do something she didn’t want to do.”

  “Mostly, I’m mad at both of them for her not being around now. I’ve got so many womanly questions to ask her. I don’t know how—” She looked up at him then, tears streaming down her face, like an innocent child begging for help. “I’ve had to decide so many things and be so many things.”

  “I see.”

  “And now I think I’m getting mad at God because He hasn’t saved you.”

  Gently, he reached for one of her hands. Aaron held her hand within two of his own. “We’re quite a pair, aren’t we, you and me?”

  “I suppose.” She stood motionless, as perfectly still as a fawn in the wilderness, ready to run, not knowing if she should move and give herself away.