Divided Heart

by Sheryl Marcoux

  ~*~

  The wagon jarred Hattie as she sat in silence, as did Nate.

  He’d hardly said a word on the way to his mother’s home. As they headed toward Hattie’s house, he glared ahead at a sandy road worn into a brown, brittle field.

  What was he thinking about? She hoped not about Zachariah. Not with the way Nate’s arm quivered beneath her hand. Years ago, Nate’s anger toward Zachariah had been one in which Nate would go into a melancholy mood and threaten to kill him, but she’d held him back. Did Nate still have that rage?

  Learning he’d been true to her had thrilled her to the core. Furthermore, going to church when he’d once called the Bible a book of fairytales showed a change in Nate. But had he changed enough? Despite the dry heat and a glaring sun, a chill ran through her. How bad had he gotten to have required treatment at an asylum?

  She stared into the past, to one near-disastrous day when Lillian was trapped in a burning building. It was a day that echoed an even more distant and tragic event when Sally, Nate’s sister, had died in a fire. It had been Nate’s turn to get the stove going in the schoolhouse that morning, but he was lollygagging so Sally went ahead and fired it up for him. He couldn’t face that she’d died trying to keep him out of trouble, so he’d convinced himself it was Zachariah’s turn to get the stove going. Nate had wanted to kill Zachariah ever since.

  Then, when the past came back to haunt them and Lillian almost died in a fire, Nate was gone the very next day. Rumor was his father had demanded Nate forget about marriage and finish school. But…

  She stared at memories of a father trying to console a weeping son and a marriage between Zachariah and Lillian that happened too soon after. But his father had sent Nate to the asylum instead. She threw her hand over her mouth. Because his father knew Nate had set that second fire. It was hatred that had stolen Nate’s senses. How could she have not seen this sooner? “It’s best you stay away from Zachariah.”

  “Funny.” Nate’s voice was as dry as the scorching sun. “That’s the same thing he said about you—except he also threatened to throw me in jail.”

  Zachariah wasn’t a man who spoke warnings lightly.

  Much to the protest of a cranky rooster, they pulled up in front of Hattie’s house.

  Nate sat, reins in his hands, staring at the chickens squabbling behind a wire fence.

  She bit her lip on her worry as she put her hand over Nate’s still-trembling fingers. “Everything will be all right,” she said in her most soothing voice.

  He stared ahead. “Yes, everything will be all right.” He turned to her. “I had a better place in mind to do this, but…Hattie, will you do me the honor of becoming my wife?”

  A breeze fondled his hair as she gazed into his face. Her breath caught in her throat at how handsome he was. But there were hitches in becoming his wife. “Let’s not talk about this now, Nate.”

  He frowned. “I was under the impression you loved me.”

  “I do love you-”

  “Then what’s there to talk about? We can’t put this off, not with Zachariah hankering to lock me up to keep us apart. Hattie, the sooner we leave for Massachusetts, the better.”

  And that was the biggest hitch. “We need to discuss going to Massachusetts.”

  “What’s there to discuss? I have a fine house and a great job. We have everything there.”

  “You have everything there. I’ve made a life for myself here.” She shook her head at him, because there was something else. “Love’s clouded you, Nate, because you forget I’m a half breed and not everybody can accept that like you do. But most of all, I don’t want to leave Ramsden. I have friends here who have become family. And now that I’m getting close to your mother—”

  “You know I can’t stay here.” The tremor in his arms deepened. “You’ve seen the way Zachariah treats me.”

  She closed her eyes. How could she tell Nate how much Zachariah meant to her? That he was the brother she couldn’t leave behind? How could she tell Nate that he was to blame for making Zachariah his enemy by wrongfully blaming Zachariah for Sally’s death and trying to retaliate by using Lillian, whom Zachariah loved? It was a good thing Zachariah was a godly man, because otherwise Nate would have fared much worse. Zachariah had good reason to hate Nate. Yet at one time, they’d been the best of friends.

  “What happened to the two of you?”

  His eyes gleamed. “You know what happened.”

  She knew a lot more than he realized. Dare she say it? “Didn’t they help you?”

  “They?” His voice flattened. “Who are you talking about?”

  There was no use keeping it from him. “I know where you’ve been, Nate. You poor soul.”

  He hesitated. “And where exactly is that?”

  She squeezed his hand. “An asylum.” She hoped uncovering the secret between them would draw them closer together, that he would wrap his arms around her. Instead, his eyes hardened.

  “How do you know about that?” He raised his voice. “Who told you where I’ve been?”

  The blood left her face. He’d never looked at her with such fury in his eyes. She refused to answer. Couldn’t answer. The fury…

  “Get out, Hattie. Get out of the buggy.”

  She stood stiffly in front of her house, watching Nate’s wagon speed down the road in a storm of dust and the fury of his humiliation. He hadn’t wanted her to know he’d been in an asylum. She’d embarrassed him. No, she’d done something worse, because Nate was no fool. He would figure out who had told her about the asylum, and when he did…

  She regretted loaning her horse to Clayton. Now she was unable to ride out and warn Zachariah. She prayed God would protect him and his family.

  23

  “Giddy up!”

  Though the horse was already running at a fast clip, Nate cracked the reins again. He had to get away from Hattie and her pity. The way he used to behave in front of her, sobbing to the ghost of his sister, had been pathetic. But for Hattie to know he’d been in an asylum was outright humiliating. No wonder she’d talked to him like a child. “You poor soul.” He didn’t want her pity; he wanted her respect. More so, he’d never asked to be sent to a place where the doctors were crazier than the patients.

  ~*~

  Though Nate’s mind was trapped in a maze, he had a dreamlike awareness of his surroundings. His room was a gray box that accommodated a bed with a hard mattress and a chair no one ever sat in. He sat in his nightshirt in a corner, rocking. The drapes were drawn and the darkness was cool but for a splinter of sunlight that cast a fingertip of heat on his knee. Tears trickled down his face as he begged his sister’s forgiveness yet again.

  “I’m sorry, Sally. I’m sorry.”

  He’d been trapped inside himself for so long. Where was Hattie? It was she who would call his name, her voice that would guide him out.

  “Pick him up.” This voice belonged to a man and came from a faraway place Nate didn’t care about.

  Something clamped down on his arms and bruised him as they tugged him to his feet. Sally’s body tumbled from his arms, and he groped for her as he was pulled away.

  He squinted from a sudden burst of light. He tried to shield his eyes, but the clamps wouldn’t let him. A creak and a click, and the brightness disappeared.

  “Do you think this will work on him? Everything else we’ve tried hasn’t.”

  A stranger’s face appeared in front of Nate’s in the fog. The man had eyeglasses. Studious men wore eyeglasses. But Nate had seen this man in the fog before, and he had no name for him, only a feeling. Pain.

  “Give him this,” Pain said. “It’s calomel. It’ll purge him of impurities.”

  A tin cup pressed against Nate’s lips. He turned away.

  “Drink it.”

  Pain forced Nate’s mouth open, and Nate choked on thick, tasteless fluid. He spat it out, but Pain forced more in so that Nate felt like he was drowning. The fluid burned his throat with each forced gulp.


  The hands of Pain released him, and the other men in the fog stepped back and waited.

  Waited for what?

  Nate’s stomach began to sour. Then cramp.

  Pain said, “Get the bucket ready.”

  Nate doubled over with spasms as the contents of his stomach spewed from his mouth. He retched again. He kept vomiting until there were only dry heaves left. Finally, when his stomach had given up everything and his strength had been spent so that he trembled, he collapsed.

  “Nate,” Pain demanded. “Nate Powell. Answer me.”

  But the treatment had only served to send Nate deeper into himself to retreat from the nausea. And that enraged Pain.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Pain shouted. “I’ve used spinning boards with you, temperature fluctuations, purgatives, everything I can think of. Nothing works on you. You’re obstinate!”

  “Should you be talking like this in front of him?”

  Pain threw up his hands. “What does it matter? He can’t hear a word we’re saying.” Pain put his spectacled face so close to Nate’s, Nate could see the pores on his nose. “And that’s because you’re too stubborn to come out of your melancholy.” Pain waved his hand. “Well, you can stay in there for all I care. I give up. Get him out of my sight.”

  ~*~

  They’d moved Nate to “The Cottage for the Hopeless,” which was little more than a warehouse to keep the unwanted. But while his soul remained trapped in a deep, dark pit, at last this was a place where they left his body alone. So it wasn’t the doctors who’d “cured his mind” as Hattie had thought. He would have been there forever, but for a most unusual woman.

  He was sobbing to Sally as he’d been doing for an eternity, when he heard a faraway voice. This time it belonged to a woman.

  “I’m here for you, Nathan, you dear child of God.”

  Was it Hattie’s voice? It didn’t sound like her, and those were strange words for her to say. But she touched his hand so differently from the grabbing he’d become accustomed to. It was a touch so gentle, a groan filled his soul and a tear trickled down his temple.

  Hattie.

  It had been so long since he’d seen her. He yearned to see her beautiful smile again. She was and had always been the only reason he went back to a world that had caused him so much grief.

  But he felt as if he’d been asleep a hundred years. Rousing himself from the slumber was like swimming from the depths of the ocean up to the surface. Opening his eyelids was like lifting anvils. But when he saw her at last, what started as a surge of infuriation from within came out as a mumble. “Who in blazes are you?”

  Standing by his bedside was a middle-aged woman wearing a gray dress and a white apron. Streaks of silver glimmered at the temples of her coal-black hair, and her brown face broke into a grin. “If this Sally loved you as much as you loved her, I’d say she never blamed you in the first place.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” His voice was that of an old man’s. What was wrong with him?

  “Oh, I think I understand more than you’re giving me credit for,” she said with a chuckle. “In fact, I don’t think it’s this Sally who needs to forgive you at all. I’d say it’s you who needs to forgive yourself, you dear child of God.”

  “Don’t call me that. I don’t believe in your religious rubbish.” He tried to get out of bed to chase her away but couldn’t move. His heart pounded with panic.

  “Your legs have gone weak from lack of use.” She opened the drapes and let in a flood of daylight. “You’ve been lying in that bed a long time.”

  “Where am I?” He demanded in a hoarse voice.

  “I think you know where you are.”

  As cloudiness cleared from his head, nightmares of being sick and scalded turned into memories. “I’m in an asylum.” His heart thundered. “How long have I been here?”

  “Suffice it to say that you’ve been laid up long enough that you’ll have to learn how to walk all over again.”

  Another failed attempt to move his legs proved her right. “You’re not a doctor. Who are you?”

  She gave an easy laugh. “A doctor? Do I look like a doctor to you?” She held up a mop. “I’m the cleaning woman, and I’m here to clean your room, Nathan, you dear child of God.”

  He hated her calling him that. “I want another cleaning woman.”

  She put a hand over the apron band around her thick waist. “Why? You don’t like the job I’m doing?”

  “I don’t like you.”

  “Why not? I’m just doing what I’m paid to do. Don’t you want a clean room? ‘Clean room, sound mind’ they seem to think around here.” She took a deep breath, and started mopping.

  “But you think that cleanliness is next to Godliness,” he muttered.

  “No,” she answered. “I think the only thing next to Godliness is Godliness.”

  He huffed. “So who are you? Priscilla?”

  She stooped to mop under his bed. “To know that name, you have to know a little about the Bible.”

  “I’ve read Gulliver’s Travels as well,” he said, “but I don’t believe in Lilliputians.”

  She laughed at his sarcasm as she moved to the other side of his bed. “Yup. Mopping and dusting. That’s what I do around here.”

  “And talk a lot.”

  “You don’t like me talking? Then I’ll be quiet.” She worked in silence, and that was even more maddening.

  “Well,” he demanded in a small voice, “say something.”

  “What do you want me to tell you?”

  “I want to know what’s wrong with me.”

  She lifted the mop. “Have you forgotten?”

  But he persisted. “How long have you been working here?”

  “Long enough to know every scuff on these floors,” she said, looking down as if she were familiar with every scratch.

  “Then you’ve been here long enough to know something about lunacy. What do you think is wrong with me?”

  “You really want to know what I think?”

  “I asked, didn’t I?”

  She stopped working and leaned on the mop. “From the first day I saw you, you never struck me as a man who was sick in the head so much as you were sick in the heart.”

  How dare she say that. He demanded with a feeble finger, “Get out of here.”

  ~*~

  Nate cracked the reins and cursed the Morgan stallion. “You run like an old nag. Faster!” But it wasn’t the horse he wanted to spur so much as it was his thoughts. How did Hattie find out I was in the asylum?

  To his knowledge, the only ones who knew were Marcus and Aunt Sarah, whom Marcus needed to conduct Nate’s business and provide a place where Marcus could tell Nate’s mother and everyone else where he’d gone. A proud man like Marcus didn’t exactly announce to his community that his son was a lunatic. Marcus wouldn’t have told Hattie because as far as he was concerned, she was no more than a place Nate would retreat to when he’d had enough of Marcus’s complaints.

  So who else might Marcus have told of Nate’s whereabouts when he hadn’t even told Nate’s own mother?

  Spinster Aunt Sarah didn’t know anyone in Ramsden, and she was too proud to have spilled a word. She’d likely hidden behind a parasol when she came to the asylum to conduct Nate’s business. To his knowledge, she hadn’t visited him once, and when he got out, he never visited her either. He’d always disliked her. She was too much like Marcus.

  Way too much like Marcus. “You’re as sweet as cinnamon,” Aunt Sarah would say to Sally and indulge her with dresses, ribbons, and dolls. When Sally turned sixteen, Aunt Sarah commissioned Sally’s portrait. But she never gave so much as a stone to Nate, and she’d once said to him with a curled upper lip, “You know what little boys are made of.”

  Nate huffed. Favorites.

  Suddenly, he knew who Marcus had told about Nate being in the asylum—and who, in turn, had told Hattie.

  24

  Hattie paced, regret
ting that she’d told Nate she knew he was in the asylum and worried about Zachariah and his family. A rap on her door stopped her short, and she rushed over to open it hoping Nate had come back. She threw open the door to find an unpleasant surprise.

  “Forgive me for my intrusion, but the owner of the saloon told me where to find you,” said a stranger whose face flushed pink. With his white hair, fancy white suit, and fair-skin, he looked like a glass of milk, and he appeared to be just as innocent.

  Hattie knew her pa was white but never fathomed he’d be this white. She wanted to slam the door in his face. It figured Boss would retaliate for her quitting by telling the last person she wanted to see where she lived.

  “I’ll be leaving on tomorrow’s stagecoach,” the stranger said, “and I must talk to you about something of dire importance. May I?” He poked the hat he held in front of him toward the inside of her house.

  Arms crossed, she stood in his way. Whatever Jonathan Garrison Parker deemed “of dire importance” was likely important to him alone. Why else would he come looking for her? Lord, I’ve got a lot on my mind with Nate. I don’t know if I can deal with this man right now. Or ever.

  The Lord’s answer began with what she could do—invite the man inside.

  She tossed her hand. “Have a seat.”

  He accepted the glass of lemonade she offered him but hesitated at the sight of her old dining set with its scratches and worn varnish.

  “Not what you’re used to, huh?” She smacked the glass on the table with the same bluntness she’d done back when she worked as a saloon girl, because that’s how he made her feel. Like an outcast. “Well, do you want to talk or not?”

  “I do.”

  “Then sit down.”

  He was nothing like what she’d pictured her father would look like. He stood there frozen as she glared at his snow-white suit and shiny silver buttons. Even his shoes were perfect without so much as a scuff. If only her life had been that spotless. It seemed she and her ma had taken all the scuffs and scrapes for him.

  “Miss—Henrietta…I—I don’t know what to call you by.”