I Promise

by Joan Johnston

  It clicked on an empty chamber.

  “Have you got the message, Delia, honey?”

  “Y-y-yes, Daddy,” she said.

  “Now get undressed for me and get in bed.”

  “But Mama—”

  “Your mama’s not home. She had to go to San Antonio to pick up some special medicine for that Grand Champion bull of hers. Don’t expect she’ll be back before midnight.”

  Delia glanced at the wind-up alarm clock beside her bed. “It’s eleven-thirty now!”

  “Then you better hurry on up, girl, hadn’t you. Ray John’s got an itch, and he wants it scratched.”

  That night, for the first time, Delia dreamed of murdering Ray John Carson. She shot him in the head. His brains splattered all over her pillow.

  Chapter Four

  Marsh drove his pickup to the back door of the Texas dogtrot home that had been the North ranch house for generations. In the old days, the one-story house had consisted of a central hallway—a shotgun blast going in the front door would come out the back—with two large rooms on each side.

  Years later, someone had added a shaded porch out front with a couple of willow rockers for sitting and watching the sun set. A kitchen had been appended to the back of the house and, more recently, a mud porch behind that. The yellow clapboard house, with its slanted porch, peeling paint, and lopsided shutters, looked every bit of its 150 years.

  Marsh had spent a great deal of his youth sleeping on the screened-in mud porch, and he had fond memories of nights lying there on an iron cot listening to the crickets and the lowing cattle and the occasional raccoon that came by to raid the garbage can out back. Sleeping outside hadn’t been entirely a matter of choice. In the first years after his grandmother died, it had been safer to keep the back wall of the house between himself and his father.

  Their relations hadn’t improved much since.

  The kitchen door wasn’t locked, and Marsh let himself into the darkened house. He went directly to the knotted string that turned on the bare lightbulb above the sink. One of these days he was going to replace the broken bulb cover.

  The red-and-white checkerboard linoleum laid over the hardwood floor in the 1940s had worn black in front of the sink and the refrigerator, where he retrieved a bottle of Pearl. He set the cap against the Formica counter and popped it off, then took a long, cold swig.

  He found his father in the parlor. An eerie glow from the television provided the only light in the room. Cyrus North was sitting frozen, eyes glazed over, holding a longneck Pearl braced on the arm of a ragged, overstuffed chair. It looked like a scene from “The Twilight Zone.”

  “I’m home, Dad.”

  His father didn’t answer. Marsh was already headed toward his room when he heard his father’s favorite cop series, “Starsky and Hutch,” break for a Ford Mustang commercial. His father’s head swung around, and he said, “Where the hell have you been?”

  “What the hell do you care?”

  His father came out of the chair as though to backhand him and seemed to realize belatedly that Marsh was four inches taller than him and wasn’t budging an inch. Cyrus halted in his tracks. A scowl appeared on his craggy face as he took a belligerent stance across from his son.

  “If I’d ever talked to my father the way you talk to me, he’d have knocked me flat,” Cyrus said.

  Maybe he was more of a father to you than you’ve been to me, Marsh thought. But he said, “I do my share of the work around here. I don’t have to account to you for where I go.”

  “If your mother was alive—”

  “She isn’t,” Marsh interrupted. “She’s dead. Been dead since I was born.” I’m all you’ve got left, Dad. Why can’t you love me?

  The commercial ended, and as though a bell had sounded for the next round, Cyrus turned abruptly and settled himself back in his chair. Eyes glued to the TV set, he said, “Make sure you mend that fence along the south pasture tomorrow. Got a call from the Circle Crown foreman that a few of my cattle have strayed onto Carson property.” His father smirked. “Seems that Santa Gertrudis bull Hattie Carson is so persnickety about was giving out free stud services to North cows.”

  Marsh made a disgusted sound in his throat as he turned away. His father had been talking for weeks about how easy it would be to shove down some fence and let a few of his cows in season stray over to where Hattie Carson’s prize bull could get a sniff at them. Come spring, Cyrus would have himself some pretty good-looking calves. Damned if the old man hadn’t done it.

  “I’ll take care of it, Dad,” he said.

  His father wasn’t listening. He never listened. Mostly he ignored his son, except when he wanted the stock fed, or the barn roof repaired, or some fence mended. Then he wanted it done quick and done right. He had used his belt liberally, along with his fists, to give instruction—until the day fifteen-year-old Marsh had punched him back.

  Marsh had been as astonished as his father when the old man hit the ground that day nearly six years ago, but it hadn’t been necessary for either of them to repeat the lesson. After that his father had browbeat him with words, but he hadn’t laid a hand on him again.

  Marsh stepped into his bedroom and closed the door behind him, shutting out the sound of a police siren across the hall.

  The room reminded him of his grandmother, the one person in the world who had ever given a damn about him. He missed her. He bought a lavender sachet at the H.E.B. every so often when he was grocery shopping and hid it under his pillow, because that was the scent she had always worn.

  Doilies Grandma Dennison had crocheted adorned his bedside table and the chest. She had made the quilt on his old sleigh bed from colorful scraps of material that each had some family history she had explained to him.

  “This here red is the dress your mama wore on her first date with your pa to the high school dance. Ooo-eee they were so much in love! That’s why your pa gets so testy sometimes that she’s not here with us anymore. And this is a piece of your pa’s Air Force uniform. In the Big War he was stationed in Burma refuelin’ fighter planes.

  “This lace-covered satin bit is from my wed-din’ gown. Don’t pay no ‘tention to all these wrinkles I got now. Believe you me, I was one bee-u-tee-ful bride! And this flowered calico is a piece of your great-grandma Hailey’s Sunday-go-to-meetin’ dress.”

  He listened to the stories sitting cross-legged at her feet, the porch creaking as she kept her rocker moving with a boot-shod toe.

  They were wonderful tales. Like, how Great-grandma Hailey had locked Great-grandpa Hailey out of the house one spring until he tilled her garden. “This piece of chambray is from the shirt he had on that day,” she confided to him.

  “This is part of your great aunt Eulalie’s dress she wore on the train to St. Louis to meet her beau. Only, she borrowed it from me without askin’, so I guess her claim to this here scrap of cotton is only secondhand.

  “And this here patch is from your first pair of long pants. I made ’em myself. Kinda cute, don’t ya think, boy?”

  He could remember feeling agonizingly embarrassed as a nine-year-old by the scrap of pale blue denim embroidered with a brown teddy bear. Now every time he glimpsed it while making his bed, he got a lump in his throat.

  A photograph of his grandmother as a young woman sat on the copper-plated dry sink. It was the only thing he had that gave him even a remote idea what his mother might have looked like. He had overheard his grandmother confiding to a friend that his father had torn up every last picture of Rosemary North in front of Marsh’s crib one night in a drunken frenzy.

  If it hadn’t been for Grandma Dennison telling him again and again that his father was only grieving, that he didn’t mean the awful names he called his son, Marsh might have turned out a lot worse than he had.

  As it was, he had absorbed enough of his father’s invective in the years after his grandmother’s death to become the worst discipline problem Uvalde High School had ever known. He had been angry with his
father and taken it out on the whole world.

  He had spent almost as much time suspended from high school—for smoking in the bathroom, disrespect to teachers, and fighting—as he had in class. He lost his driver’s license the third time Sheriff Davis caught him driving drunk. He was nabbed shoplifting at Shepherd’s clothing store on Getty Street and spent an uncomfortable hour sitting on an upended wooden crate in the storage room until his father came to get him. Cyrus had paid for the fancy tooled leather belt Marsh had swiped, then taken him home and beaten him with it.

  Because of his looks—and because he seemed reckless and a little bit dangerous—a lot of wide-eyed girls had been his for the asking. He had taken his share of them out in his pickup and kissed them and held them and pretended he had more experience than he really did.

  Gloria Perkins, the mother of one of his classmates, had seduced him the summer he turned sixteen. After that, he had found girls with reputations like his who would go all the way. He had been lucky none of them ever got pregnant. It sure wasn’t because he had been careful, because he hadn’t.

  A short stint for vandalism in the Texas Youth Commission’s Brownwood Correctional Facility—he had spray painted some downright nasty words on the bus of a visiting football team—had made him realize that his father wasn’t suffering as much from his antics as he was. After that, he had pretty much straightened up his act, at least enough to finish high school.

  Of course, the damage to his reputation was already done. In a small town, once you’d made a name for yourself, it was pretty near impossible to change people’s opinion of you. He was known in Uvalde as “that wild North boy” and would be until the day he died.

  It had never much mattered to him what people thought. Until now. He had an idea what kind of hassle his reputation was going to cause with Delia Carson’s family. She was the pampered princess of the Circle Crown. He was the town’s bad boy.

  Why had Delia agreed to go out with him in the first place? Maybe there was a little bit of rebel in her, too. All Marsh could think about was seeing her again. He wondered whether she would show up at the live oak to meet him. He hoped she would. It surprised him just how much it mattered.

  Delia knew she was asking for trouble. Her father had made it plain what the consequences would be if he caught her with Marsh North. But it had occurred to her as he held a gun to her head and threatened her, that he might kill her someday whether she was guilty or not. She might as well be guilty.

  When she arrived at the spot where North was supposed to be waiting for her, she was disappointed to find he wasn’t there. She stepped down off her horse in the shade of an ancient, moss-draped live oak and tied the reins out of the way on the saddle horn so her palomino gelding wouldn’t step on them as he grazed.

  She stuck her hands in the back pockets of her jeans and stood with her hip cocked, staring across the barbed wire fence dividing Carson cultivated pasture and North scrubland, wondering what she should do now.

  “Hi.”

  She whirled so fast she lost her balance and nearly fell before North steadied her. She stepped back as soon as she could free herself from his grasp, but it was too late to avoid the jolt of pleasure where his callused fingertips had touched her.

  “Where did you come from?” she asked, as annoyed at being scared half to death as she was glad to find him there.

  “I was leaning up against the other side of the tree. I heard you coming, and I wanted to see if I could surprise you.”

  “You did,” she said. “Where’s your horse?”

  Marsh pointed, and she made out the rangy buckskin camouflaged behind the tall yellow grass and a thick patch of scrub mesquite on the North side of the fence.

  “Do you want to ride some more right now, or would you like to rest a while?” he asked.

  “The shade is nice,” she said, lifting her hair to let the breeze catch the sweat on her nape. She saw his nostrils flare and felt her body tighten like a drawstring. “Why don’t we sit here for a while.” Her knees felt weak. If she didn’t sit down, she was going to fall.

  She made it the few steps to the base of the live oak and settled herself on a thick branch growing about a foot off the ground. To her consternation, Marsh sat so close their thighs nearly touched.

  She noticed the ring of sweat around his hatband and the grass stains on the knees of his jeans. She pointed to the leather gloves hanging out of his back pocket and asked, “What was so important it had to get done on a Sunday morning?”

  “I had some fence to repair.”

  She chuckled and relaxed against the rough bark of a slightly higher branch of the tree behind her. “I don’t think that’s going to make Max very happy.”

  “Who’s Max?”

  “My mother’s Grand Champion Santa Gertrudis bull. I think he was enjoying the company.”

  A muscle worked in Marsh’s jaw. “My father shouldn’t have done it. It was stealing, plain and simple.”

  Her eyes widened. The town’s bad boy was constantly amazing her. She waited for him to continue the conversation, but he didn’t say anything, just stared at his boots.

  “Do you work for your father?”

  He nodded. “There’s more than the two of us can handle sometimes. I’ve been trying to talk him into hiring some help, but he doesn’t want strangers around.”

  “They wouldn’t be strangers for long once they started working for you.”

  “That’s what I told him, but there’s no making him see reason. Sometimes I get so mad I feel like quitting.”

  “Why don’t you?” Delia asked.

  From the startled look on Marsh’s face, the idea had never occurred to him. “What else would I do?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. What would you like to do?”

  “I never really thought about being anything but a rancher. How about you? What are you planning to do when you graduate from high school?”

  “I’m going to college.” She took a deep breath and added, “Then I’m going to law school.”

  Marsh whistled. His face cracked into an amused grin. “Those are pretty big plans for such a little lady.”

  Delia bristled. “These days a woman can be anything she wants. I want to be a lawyer.”

  “Why?”

  “I . . .” She narrowed her eyes at him. “You’ll laugh.”

  “I promise not to laugh,” Marsh said, crossing his heart with a forefinger. “Tell me.”

  She wasn’t sure he wouldn’t laugh, but she had been wanting to talk to someone about her plans for the future, and it wasn’t anything she could comfortably discuss around her father. And these days, her father seldom left her alone with her mother.

  She took a deep breath and said, “I want to be a lawyer so I can help kids in trouble.”

  Marsh’s brow furrowed. “Like juvenile delinquents?”

  “Not exactly. Kids who have problems.”

  “What did you have in mind?” Marsh asked.

  “Kids who . . .” She shrugged, unwilling even to hint at her own problems. “I don’t know. Just helping in whatever way I can.”

  “Sounds dumb to me,” he said.

  She socked his shoulder with her fist. “I knew you would laugh!”

  “Hey!” he said, catching her wrist. “Not one chuckle escaped my lips.”

  Their eyes met and held. His thumb caressed her knuckles. Her pulse leaped.

  “Delia . . .” His voice was raw and needy.

  She leaned toward him and he leaned toward her and their mouths met, softness on softness. Her body quivered. She swallowed, and their lips parted. But their faces remained so close she would have had to look cross-eyed to see him.

  Delia wanted more but knew she should quit now before things went too far. Her hand had somehow found its way to Marsh’s forearm. It was rock hard with tension. But she didn’t move away. She didn’t move at all.

  Her eyes slipped closed as Marsh lowered his mouth to hers once more. His kiss
was hungry this time, his lips and teeth and tongue devouring her mouth, though no other part of him touched her. Her hand on his arm remained the only other contact between them.

  Feelings rose inside her, emotions so powerful and compelling they frightened her. She jerked her mouth free and sat staring at Marsh, panting, wide-eyed. But she didn’t stand up. She didn’t run away. Neither did he.

  “Delia.”

  The sound of his voice rasped over her, making her shiver. She had just met him. She didn’t know him. Yet she wanted to belong to him. It was crazy. She was crazy.

  “Marsh.” Just his name. Said with yearning. She wasn’t sure who moved first, but a moment later he held her clasped tight and her arms were around his waist and their mouths had merged.

  Her breasts were crushed against the hard wall of his chest, and her hips slid into the cradle of his widespread legs. His hands curved around her buttocks and pulled her tight against him so she could feel his arousal.

  Alarm bells went off in her head.

  She wrenched her mouth from his and struggled to free herself. “Let me go, Marsh,” she cried. “Let me go!”

  He let her go and took a step back, but there was nothing understanding about the look on his face. He was madder than a rained-on rooster.

  “What the hell is going on, Delia?” he demanded. “Don’t try to say you didn’t want to be kissed, because I was hearing yes all the way!”

  “I know, but . . .”

  “But nothing!”

  Tears welled in her eyes, but his face didn’t soften with sympathy. His jaw stayed locked, and his fists remained clenched.

  “What kind of game are you playing? Did you make a bet with somebody? Is that it? You’ll get me all hot and bothered and see how far you can make me go?”

  “No!” she retorted. “It’s nothing at all like that!”

  “Then what the hell is going on?”

  Delia nearly blurted the truth. She caught herself in time. Marsh wouldn’t want anything to do with her if he knew what went on in her house. “I’m not playing games, Marsh,” she said in a subdued voice. “I . . . I simply never realized how fast . . . I never wanted . . . like I want you.”