Everything else had been discussed—the coming of the Confederate soldiers, Lance, and all the things that had happened to Zeke back East. Abbie’s heart ached for him when he told what had happened to his father, but at least there had been a final reunion and the chance for Zeke Monroe to face his past and the reality of it. But when he had mentioned seeing Joshua, she had stiffened and paled.
“Don’t ever tell Bonnie … about … about … what happened,” she said quietly. “She must never know. She might feel badly about it.”
“I think she should know,” Zeke argued. “She should know the kind of woman you are—know that you allowed yourself to suffer to keep that boy’s identity hidden.”
Abbie shook her head, her breathing quickening. “No! If we … tell her … she might find out about … the other. I could never face her!”
“Face her!” Zeke exclaimed in astonishment. He reached out and touched her hand. “You can face anyone you want! You did nothing wrong, Abbie. Why should you have to worry about facing people?”
She shook her head, tears spilling down her cheeks. Zeke grasped her chin and forced her to look at him. “My woman doesn’t go around hanging her head. Not my Abbie!” he almost growled. “The woman I married is proud and strong and honorable. She is Abigail Trent Monroe, and the only thing that could make me or our children ashamed of you is if you allow what those men did to come between us, Abbie, and let it destroy us and destroy you. Then all I went through to come for you will have been in vain.”
He stood up then, taking her Bible from the mantle and shoving it into her lap. “You have not looked at that since I brought you home, Abigail. Before when you needed strength and help, you always turned to that book. It is not my religion, but it is yours, and I know you need it. I tell you now what I think of you. You are the most honorable woman I know or have ever known! You are that same, stubborn little girl I married—that little girl who withstood the loss of her family and bravely asked me to end her little brother’s life because he was dying a slow, terrible death. You are still the same Abbie who rode with me against outlaws to find her sister and who shot a Crow Indian and saved my life, then turned around and dug a bullet out of me. You’re the same Abbie who came to live with a people she knew nothing about, and who bore all of her children alone on the plains with no doctor to help her, who nearly died in childbirth but fought to stay alive for her family.” He knelt down and took her hands. “Now you must fight again, Abbie. You must overcome this terrible thing that has happened to you and be our Abbie again—and be my wife again. We have both known horror and things worse than death, Abbie. We survived, and we shall continue to survive. I love you more than my own life. And if you truly love me, Abbie, you will understand my own need to reclaim you—to remind you that you still belong to me and have never belonged to another. And there is only one way to do that!”
He kissed her cheek and left her there, the Bible still in her lap. That had been in late October. Now it was nearly Christmas, and she had barely spoken to him in all that time. Zeke felt out of his mind with his need of her. It was over a year now since he first left to go search for Danny. In all that time he had been unable to make love to his woman, and his desires made him feel crazy, so that he began being absent more than he was home, in spite of the fact that he adored her and wanted so much to help her. She had become like a closed door, and he had not tried to turn the lock, for fear he would frighten her and she would hate him. It had to be her decision. There was no other way.
He worked harder than ever, spending most of the autumn cutting and hauling wood and adding another room to the cabin so that the children would have a place to sit and study without being under their mother’s feet in the kitchen. Any free time he had was spent riding, sometimes with Wolf’s Blood, sometimes alone. The distance between mother and father had turned the initial household happiness at having their mother returned to a lingering pall over the entire family. Abbie’s health and color continued to improve, but her spirit did not return, and there was little laughter in the house. Wolf’s Blood continued to suffer a trace of guilt himself, and became more remote and difficult to talk to, often standing on the porch at night and listening to the wolves, pining for Smoke.
Christmas neared, and Abbie sat sewing a new pair of moccasins for her husband. He had always allowed her to celebrate her Christian holiday by baking and exchanging gifts, although they had never had a tree. But this Christmas of 1863 would be the most unhappy Christmas she had ever experienced. She looked up when Wolf’s Blood came barging through the door.
“You would not believe where I have been!” the boy spoke up, shaking his head.
Abbie put down the sewing. “And where is that?” she asked, her eyes showing the same dull spiritless gaze the boy had grown accustomed to seeing.
“Out in the east pasture. Father and I went there to check on some horses that strayed over there, and there was this big, painted wagon stuck there where the ground had thawed some and mixed with the snow. The wagon was bright red, and two men drove it. When we went to help them, three ladies opened the door and looked out. It was a strange wagon—all enclosed like a house. The ladies were all white women, those painted kind like Anna Gale. Those silly women were so scared, and they all talked at once and laughed too much. It was funny to watch them.” The boy snickered. “You should have seen the way they looked at father when he put his shoulder to their wagon and helped push. I never saw women act so silly. They gave father some whiskey. He is still over there with them. He told me to come and get some potatoes for the ladies. They are out of food.”
Abbie looked away, her emotions awakened for the first time since her attack. Painted ladies! How long had it been since Zeke had had a woman? More than a year! Why had he sent Wolf’s Blood back to the house? It was a good twenty-minute ride or better one way. It would leave plenty of time. She looked back at Wolf’s Blood.
“Painted ladies?” she asked. “What were they doing out there?”
Wolf’s Blood shrugged. “They got lost. Father told them which way to go. They are headed for Independence and strayed off the Santa Fe Trail in the snowstorm we had last night. They are going to keep going today now that Father has shown them the right direction. They want to get to Bent’s Fort as soon as they can so they can rest up there and get supplies.”
“I see,” Abbie replied. She walked to a corner where she kept a crate of potatoes, taking out a dozen and putting them into her apron. She held the potatoes in the apron and told Wolf’s Blood to get a gunny sack from the wooden cupboard in the corner of the room where she kept her pots and pans. He brought her the sack and she dumped the potatoes inside. She looked at Wolf’s Blood. “Tell your father to …to please come back soon,” she told the boy.
Wolf’s Blood frowned. He had not even considered that his father would do anything wrong with the painted ladies, but he suddenly realized his mother thought that he might. “He is just helping them,” he said, feeling awkward then. He sensed there had been nothing between his mother and father since Abbie had come home, and now his mother reddened slightly. Perhaps it was good she knew about the painted ladies. She had a new look in her eyes, a new life he had not seen there in a long time. “I will send him right home,” he told her. He felt compelled to lean down and kiss her cheek. “I think I should tell you, Mother, that … that Margaret and Jeremy and the others—and myself—we miss you. You are here with us, but you are not really here. We wish you could be the mother that lived here before those men came. Jason asked me this morning if you were ever going to smile again. It was then that I realized I don’t remember seeing you smile since you came home. I wish you would smile, Mother. Just that much would gladden Father’s heart.”
He turned and went out the door. Abbie stared after him, then walked to the door and looked out at the children playing, listening to their squeals and laughter as they threw one another down in the snow. It was the first time they all seemed to be enjoying themselves
in many months. Wolf’s Blood mounted up and rode off toward the east pasture and Abbie watched after him. She fought the hot jealousy that the boy’s news had stirred in her heart. So afraid! She was so afraid to lie beneath a man again—even Zeke. What if he didn’t even truly want her any more? What if he secretly looked at her as a used woman, one that no longer belonged just to him?
Yet he had done nothing to make her think such a thing. On the contrary, he had been warm and gentle and constantly patient, his eyes showing love and need, two things she had pushed aside. They had been distant, but she knew it was her own fault. She had deliberately allowed the wall to build between them so that she would not have to face being a woman to him again—would not have to make love again, even though somewhere in her own soul she wanted it just as much as Zeke did. Yet somehow her rape had left her feeling guilty, as though it was now wrong to enjoy sex with her own husband. How could the same act be so vile and ugly on the one hand, and so sweet and right on the other? Somehow she could no longer separate the two. It was all vile and ugly.
She looked out at the children again, and it suddenly hit her. The children! Her beautiful children! They had been conceived through making love to Zeke Monroe. He had planted his seed in her belly and the children had come forth—a product of their love, a beautiful result of their beautiful relationship. The children! What could be wrong and ugly about something that had produced her precious children? What could be wrong and ugly about giving the man she loved, the man who had so many times risked his life for her, pleasure in the arms of the woman that he in turn loved and needed? To deny him that right was to bring him continuous pain, for he needed emotional healing just as much as she did. What had happened to her had left scars on both of them. There was only one way to begin a healing of that wound, no matter how frightening and traumatic it might be. She had given up many things for her man and had braved many things to be with him. This was just one more.
It was like Zeke had said—if they went on this way, then Winston Garvey would win after all. She could not let Winston Garvey win. She was Abigail Trent Monroe. She was Jason Trent’s daughter, the fiesty young girl who had come west with her family and met the man she would spend her life with. She had made that man promises that she was now breaking.
She looked off to the east, her heart burning, the thought of Zeke being out there with the prostitutes bringing on a jealousy that helped surmount her fears. After all, Zeke Monroe was a man, and a man had needs. And the fear of making love was mastered by the terrible jealousy at the thought of Zeke turning to another woman for the things his wife would not give him. Besides that, she had to face her own needs, and the fact that she would never be really strong again until she could absorb the strength she always found in her husband’s arms. How she longed to feel them around her in the night again, to be held that way again! She knew why he had not held her much—knew how difficult it would be for him. He had stayed away from her out of respect, doing everything he could to help her but staying out of their bed at night.
She closed her eyes and swallowed back tears. “God help me!” she squeaked. “Just don’t let me see shame in his eyes!”
It was an hour before Zeke and Wolf’s Blood made it back again. Both father and son slowed their horses to a slow trot when they saw the unexpected sight. Abbie was playing in the snow with the children, and she was laughing as they buried her and washed her face. Father and son looked at each other in surprise and Wolf’s Blood smiled.
Zeke rode closer then, dismounting and walking over to help Abbie up out of the snow. “You shouldn’t be out here like this,” he told her. “You’ll be sick again, Abbie.”
She just laughed. “I want to play with my children,” she announced. “I haven’t played with them and laughed with them since …” She looked away and shook snow from her elkskin coat. She breathed deeply, fighting the terrible fear. Now that he stood so near—so tall and strong, so much man—she was afraid again. She looked back up at him, tears in her eyes but a smile on her lips. “Zeke, I want a tree.”
He frowned. “A what?”
“A tree. You know, a Christmas tree. Some kind of pine tree. Anything.”
He grinned, his heart taking hope in the new light in her eyes and the strange new attitude she seemed to have. “There’s nothing around here but cottonwoods, Abbie,” he protested.
“Then have Wolf’s Blood go and find us a pine tree. There must be one that would do. Load up the children and have them go find a tree.”
Zeke watched her closely. Was she saying she wanted to be alone with him? A tear slipped down her cheek.
“Please?” she said quietly. “I want a tree for Christmas. I know it means nothing to you, but for some reason it means everything to me. I want us to laugh again, Zeke. I want to bake and make presents and I want the children to use their imaginations in making things to decorate the tree. I want us to be a family again.”
Her lower lip quivered and he touched her face. She had not mentioned the painted women, and he sensed she was not going to ask. “Abbie,” he said softly. “Nemehotatse!”
She rested her head against his chest, and he wrapped his arms around her. He turned to Wolf’s Blood. “Your mother wants a tree,” he told the boy.
“A what?” the boy asked with a frown.
“A tree. A Christmas tree. Some kind of pine tree.”
“You mean—in the house?” the boy asked.
Zeke chuckled. “Yes, in the house. Take the children and go see what you can find. Cut down something small enough to—no, cut the biggest one you can find. We have the extra room now. We’ll put it in there.”
“A tree in the house?” the boy asked again. “Why?”
Zeke petted Abbie’s hair. “Because it’s a Christian tradition, Wolf’s Blood—one of the white customs I will not deny your mother. Now just do like I say and go find one. And take your brothers and sisters along.” He met the boy’s eyes. “All of them.”
The boy suddenly grinned. “Yes, Father.”
The next several minutes were spent rigging up horses while Abbie sat warming herself by the potbelly stove. Suddenly the minutes seemed like hours until Zeke finally came inside and they were alone. He walked over and sat down in a chair near her, removing his winter moccasins and his coat. He stood up then and removed his buckskin shirt. “It’s too cold out there and too warm in here,” he spoke up. “At least it seems too warm sometimes when you first come in with all these clothes on.”
He shook out his long hair, and he suddenly seemed twice as big to her as he really was, standing there tall and dark and broad, scars of battle on his chest and back and face, a man capable of untold violence. Could he still be as gentle with her in their bed as he had once been? He saw the strange fear in her eyes and knelt in front of her, taking her hands.
“Abbie, are you all right?”
She nodded.
He grinned. “It was so wonderful to see you smiling out there, to hear you laughing.” He suddenly felt like a nervous young man taking a woman for the first time. “Abbie, it can wait.”
“No,” she replied softly. “It can’t wait any longer. We are either husband and wife, or we are not. It’s time to know.” He felt her trembling. “Zeke, I’m so scared! Perhaps … perhaps you don’t even want me!”
He sobered, fire in his eyes then, his eyes moving over her still-too-thin body lovingly. “I want you so badly sometimes I feel like I’m going crazy,” he replied. “There is something I must do, and you know it.” He kissed her lightly, their first real kiss since he had left her over a year before. How good it tasted! How sweet and delicious and tender! The kiss lingered, becoming more hungry, more demanding. She knew that she had started something that she would be unable to stop if she changed her mind. To stop him now would be the cruelest trick she could play on him.
He released the kiss, bending down to remove her own winter moccasins. He ran his fingers along her legs, his heart aching at how thin they were, h
oping he would not frighten her or somehow damage her emotionally by moving too quickly. He reached up and unlaced her tunic at the shoulders, and she reddened as it fell away from her breasts. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, leaning forward and gently kissing the whites of her breasts.
“Abbie! Abbie!” he groaned, resting his face between her breasts. She stroked his hair and began to softly cry. He moved his lips over her neck and back to her mouth, kissing her tenderly and moving his arms under her to pick her up out of the chair. He carried her to the bed of robes and laid her on it.
He pulled the tunic the rest of the way off and she lay there in short woolen underwear, teasing him in her half-nakedness. She curled up and he laid down beside her, taking her in his arms.
“You are mine, Abbie. Mine. I was the first to take you, and I am the only man you have ever willingly given yourself to. That is all there is to remember. Nothing can change that. Nothing. Do you understand?”
“You aren’t ashamed? You truly aren’t ashamed?”
His eyes teared. “Oh, Abbie, how could you think such a thing? There is no woman alive who can equal you.” He kissed her gently. “I need to take you, Abbie. I need to reclaim you for myself. You are my Abbie—mine! You are my property, my woman, my beautiful, sweet Abbie-girl.”
He gently removed her woolen panties and she began to cry more. He kissed her tears. “God, don’t cry, Abbie. Please. Don’t be afraid.” He kissed her mouth then, groaning with his deep passion and joy. He would have her! He would finally have his woman again! He would be gentle. He would move slowly. He would do nothing that might frighten her or make her think ugly thoughts. He would be careful how he touched her. He would save exploring secret places for another time, when she was ready. For now it would be enough to simply be one again, to enter this woman and mate with her like they used to do and remind her there was nothing wrong in wanting her man that way.
Embrace the Wild Land Page 39