A Creed Country Christmas

by Linda Lael Miller

  If it hadn’t been for the seizing ache in the middle of his chest and the sting behind his eyes, Lincoln might have smiled to remember the earlier days of their marriage, when he’d come in from the barn or the range so many evenings and found his bride with a thick book clutched to her bosom and tears pouring down her cheeks.

  “She died with a rose clasped between her teeth!” Beth had expounded once, evidently referring to the heroine of the novel she’d been reading by the front room fire.

  His mother, darning socks in her rocking chair, wanting them both to know she disapproved of such nonsense, and saucy brides from Somewhere Else, had muttered something, shaken her head and then made a tsk-tsk sound.

  “Someone had better start supper cooking,” Cora Creed had huffed, rising and stalking off toward the kitchen.

  Waited on by servants all her short life, Beth had never learned to cook, sew or even make up a bed. None of that had bothered Lincoln, though it troubled his mother plenty.

  He had merely smiled, kissed Beth’s overheated forehead and said something along the lines of “I hope she was careful not to bite down on the thorns. The lady in the book, I mean.”

  Beth had laughed then, and hit him playfully with the tome.

  Now, alone in the bed where they’d conceived Gracie and two other children who hadn’t survived long enough to draw even one breath, Lincoln thrust out a sigh and rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger.

  Morning would come around early, and the day ahead would be long, hard and cold. He and Tom and the few ranch hands wintering on the place would be hauling wagonloads of hay out to the range cattle, since the grass was buried under snow. They’d have to break the ice at the edge of the creek, too, so the cattle could drink.

  He needed whatever sleep he could get.

  Plainly, it wouldn’t be much.

  JULIANA HAD BEEN an early riser since the cradle, and she was up and dressed well before dawn.

  Even so, when she wandered through the still-dark house toward the kitchen, there was a blaze burning in the hearth in what probably passed for a parlor in such a masculine home. The furniture was heavy and dark and spare, all hard leather and rough-hewn wood, the surfaces uncluttered with the usual knickknacks and vases and doilies and sewing baskets.

  Perhaps Lincoln’s mother—gone traveling, Gracie had said at supper, with marked relief—had packed away her things in preparation for a lengthy absence. As far as Juliana could tell, the woman had left no trace at all—even her room, where she and the children had passed the night, was unadorned.

  Entering the kitchen, Juliana stepped into lantern-light and the warmth of the cookstove. Lincoln stood at a basin in front of a small mirror fixed to the wall, his face lathered with suds, shaving. He wore trousers and boots and a long-sleeved woolen undershirt, and suspenders that dangled in loose, manly loops at his sides.

  He was decently clothed, but there was an intimacy in the early-morning quiet and the glow of the kerosene lamps that gave Juliana pause. She stopped on the threshold and drew in a sharp breath.

  He smiled, rinsed his straight razor in the basin, ran it skillfully under his chin and along his neck. “Mornin’,” he said.

  Juliana recovered her inner composure, but barely. “Good morning,” she replied, quite formally.

  “Coffee’s ready,” Lincoln told her. “Help yourself. Cups are on the shelf in the pantry.” He cocked a thumb toward a nearby door.

  Juliana hurried in to get a cup, desperate to be busy. Came back with two, since that was the polite thing to do. She poured coffee for Lincoln, started to take it to him and was suddenly tongue-tied again, and flustered by it.

  He chuckled, rinsed his face in the basin, reached for a towel and dried off. His ebony hair was rumpled, and glossy in the lamplight. “Thanks,” he said, and walked over to take the steaming cup from her hand.

  Tom entered while they were standing there, staring at each other, his bronzed skin polished with the cold. Behind him walked Joseph, carrying a bucket steaming with fresh milk.

  Juliana smiled, feeling as though she’d been rescued from something intriguingly dangerous. “You’re up early,” she said to the boy. At the school, Joseph had been something of a layabout mornings, continually late for breakfast and yawning through the first class of the day.

  “Tom needed help,” Joseph said solemnly.

  Juliana felt a pang, knowing why Joseph was so eager to be useful. He hoped to land a job on Stillwater Springs Ranch, earn enough money to get himself and Theresa home to North Dakota. With luck, the Bureau of Indian Affairs would leave them alone.

  “We can always use another hand around here,” Lincoln said.

  Juliana shot him a glance. “Joseph has school today.”

  Some of the milk slopped over the edge of the bucket as Joseph set it down hard in the sink. A flush pounded along his fine cheekbones.

  “School?” Lincoln asked.

  Just then, Gracie burst in, dressed in a light woolen dress and high-button shoes and pulling Daisy behind her by one hand and Billy-Moses by the other. Both children stared at her as though they’d never seen such a wondrous creature, and most likely they hadn’t.

  “School?” Gracie chirped, her eyes enormous. “Where? When?”

  Juliana smiled, rested her hands lightly on her hips. She hadn’t bothered to put up her hair; it hung in a long braid over her shoulder. “Here,” she said. “At the kitchen table, directly after breakfast.”

  Joseph groaned.

  “Can I learn, too?” Gracie asked breathlessly. “Can I, please?”

  “May I,” Juliana corrected, ever the teacher. “And I don’t see why you shouldn’t join us.”

  “Will you teach me numbers?” Gracie prattled, her words fairly tumbling over one another in her eagerness. “I’m not very good with numbers. I can read, though. And I promise to sit very still and listen to everything you say and raise my hand when I want to speak—”

  “Gracie,” Lincoln interrupted.

  Releasing Daisy and Billy-Moses, Gracie whirled on her father. “Oh, Papa,” she blurted, “you’re not going to say I can’t, are you?”

  Lincoln’s smile was a little wan, and his gaze shifted briefly to Juliana before swinging back to Gracie’s upturned face. “No,” he said. “I’m not going to say you can’t. It’s just that Miss Mitchell will be moving on soon and I don’t want you to be let down when she does.”

  The words shouldn’t have shaken Juliana—they were quite true, after all, since she would be moving on soon, though the means she would employ to do that were still a mystery—but they did. She felt slightly breathless, the way she had the day Clay told her she was no longer welcome in the mansion on Pine Street.

  Gracie’s eyes brimmed with tears, and Juliana knew they were genuine. She longed to embrace the child, the way she would Daisy or Billy-Moses, if they ever cried. Which, being stoic little creatures, they didn’t.

  “I just want to learn things while I can, Papa,” she said.

  Tom broke into the conversation, pumping water at the sink. Washing up with a misshapen bar of yellow soap. “I’ll get breakfast on the stove,” he interjected. His gaze moved to Juliana’s face. “We could use Joseph’s help today, if you can spare him.”

  Joseph looked so hopeful that Juliana’s throat tightened.

  “I’ll hear your reading lesson after supper,” she relented.

  Joseph’s grin warmed her like sunshine. “I promise I’ll do good,” he said.

  “Well,” Juliana said. “You will do well, Joseph, not ‘good’.”

  He nodded, clearly placating her.

  When Juliana turned back to Gracie, she saw that the child was leaning against Lincoln’s side, sniffling, her arms around his lean waist. The flow of tears had stopped.

  “Saint Nicholas is going to bring me a dictionary for Christmas,” Gracie announced. She looked up at her father. “Do you think he got my letter, Papa? He won’t bring me a doll or anything like that,
just because you already have a dictionary on your desk and he thinks I could use that instead of having one of my own? Yours is old—a lot of words aren’t even in it.”

  Lincoln grinned, tugged lightly at one of Gracie’s ringlets. “I’m sure Saint Nick got your letter, sweetheart,” he said.

  “Who’s that?” Theresa asked, trailing into the room, hair unbrushed. Juliana wondered if Lincoln had heard her prayers, as he probably had Gracie’s. Told her to sleep well.

  “You don’t know who Saint Nicholas is?” Gracie asked, astounded.

  “We’ll discuss him later,” Juliana promised, “when we sit down for lessons after breakfast.”

  “I could recite,” Gracie offered. “I know all about Saint Nicholas.”

  “Gracie,” Lincoln said.

  “Well, I do, Papa. I’ve read Mr. Moore’s poem dozens of times.”

  “We’ll have cornmeal mush,” Tom decided aloud. “Maybe some sausage.”

  “What?” Lincoln asked.

  “Breakfast,” Tom explained with a slight grin. Then he turned to Joseph. “You know how to use a separator, boy?”

  Joseph nodded. “We had a milk cow out at the school,” he said. “For a while.”

  Separating the milk from the cream had always been Theresa’s chore, since Joseph considered it “woman’s work.” Mary Rose and Angelique had taken turns churning the butter.

  And then the cow had sickened and died, and Mr. Philbert hadn’t requisitioned the government for another.

  Sadness and frustration swept over Juliana, and it must have shown in her face, because, to her utter surprise, Lincoln laid a hand on her shoulder.

  Something startling and fiery raced through her at his touch. She nearly flinched, and she saw by his expression that he’d noticed.

  “Sit down,” he said, watching with amusement in his dark eyes as she blushed with an oddly delicious mortification. “I’ll get you some coffee.”

  Chapter Three

  The sky was a clear, heart-piercing blue, and sunshine glittered on fields of snow rolling to the base of the foothills and crowning the trees. Creek water shimmered beneath sheets of ice, and the cattle, more than a hundred of them, milled and bawled, impatient for the first load of hay to hit the ground. Lincoln sat in the saddle, his horse restless beneath him, and pulled his hat down over his eyes against the dazzling glare.

  He watched as Joseph climbed into the back of the sleigh—the snow was too deep out on the range for a wagon to pass—while Tom soothed the two enormous draft horses hitched to it.

  Ben Gainer, a young ranch hand who’d stayed on for the winter because his wife, Rose-of-Sharon, was soon to be delivered of their first child, rode up alongside Lincoln on a spotted pony, a shovel in one hand.

  “Best break up some of that ice on the creek,” Gainer said.

  Lincoln nodded, swung down from the saddle. It was there to be done, as his father used to say. When cattle weren’t hungry, they were thirsty, and they weren’t smart enough to eat snow or trample the ice with their hooves so they could get to the water beneath. He went to the sleigh, helped himself to one of the pickaxes Tom had brought along.

  Wishing, as he sometimes did, that he’d chosen an easier life—Beth’s father had offered him a partnership in his Boston law firm—Lincoln went to the creekside and began shattering ice an inch thick, two in some places.

  If he’d stayed in Boston, he reflected, Beth might have lived, the two babies, too. Gracie would have been able to go to a real school, too.

  Inwardly, Lincoln sighed. Left in Wes’s incapable hands, the ranch would be gone by now, his mother displaced, Tom Dancingstar ripped up by the roots and left to wander in a world that not only underestimated him, but often scorned him, too. All because he was an Indian.

  He’d been caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, Lincoln had, and if he’d made the wrong choice, there was no changing it now. The ranch wasn’t making him rich, but he’d gotten it back in the black with a lot of hard work and Creed determination.

  But what a price he’d paid.

  Tom appeared beside him, toting another pickax. Sent Gainer and Joseph back to the hay barn, nearer the house, where the two remaining ranch hands, Art Bentley and Mike Falstaff, waited to load the sleigh up again.

  “You look mighty grim this mornin’,” Tom observed.

  “Hard work,” Lincoln said without looking at his friend.

  “You’ve been working since you were nine. I don’t think it’s that.”

  Lincoln stopped to catch his breath, sighed. Cattle nosed up behind him, scenting the water. “You going to insist on chatting?” he asked.

  Tom chuckled. Cattle pushed past them to get to the creek, so they moved a little farther down the line, out of their way. “Something’s thrown you, that’s for sure. I reckon it’s Miss Juliana Mitchell.”

  Lincoln felt a surge of touchy exasperation, which was unlike him. He started swinging the pickax again. “I might have had a thought or two where she’s concerned,” he admitted.

  Tom laid a hand on his arm. “She needs a place to light. You need a wife and Gracie needs a mother. Why don’t you just offer for Juliana and be done with it?”

  A growl of frustration escaped Lincoln. He drove the pickax deep into the hard ice, felt satisfaction as the glaze splintered. “It’s not that simple,” he said in his own good time.

  “Isn’t it?” Tom asked.

  “I’m paying you to work,” Lincoln pointed out, humorless, “not spout advice for the lovelorn.”

  “Is that what you are?” Tom asked, and looking sidelong, Lincoln saw amusement dancing in the older man’s eyes. “Lovelorn?”

  “No, damn it,” Lincoln snapped.

  Tom was relentless. “You’re a young man, Lincoln. You ought to have a woman. Gracie ought to have a mother, brothers and sisters. If you were willing to bring in a stranger from someplace else and put a wedding band on her finger, why not Juliana?”

  “I was hoping for a governess or a housekeeper,” Lincoln said. “Taking a wife was a last resort.”

  “All right, then,” Tom persisted, “Juliana’s a teacher. She would make a fine governess. Maybe even a decent housekeeper.”

  “She won’t want to stay out here on this ranch,” Lincoln argued. “She’s a city girl—you can see that by the way she moves, hear it in the way she talks.”

  “Beth was a city girl, and she liked the ranch fine.”

  It was all Lincoln could do not to fling the pickax so far and so hard that it would lodge in the snow on the other side of the creek. Tom sometimes went days without talking at all; now, all of a sudden, he was running off at the mouth like a lonely spinster at high tea. “Why? Why is this different, Lincoln? Because you think you could care about Juliana?”

  Lincoln didn’t answer because he couldn’t. His throat felt raw, and a cow bumped him from behind, nearly sent him sprawling into the cold creek water. “I loved Beth,” he said after a long time, because Tom would have kept at him until he gave some kind of answer.

  Tom laid a hand on his shoulder. “I know that,” he said. “But Beth is gone, and you’re still here. You and Gracie. That child is lonesome, Lincoln—sometimes it hurts my heart just to look at her. And you’re not doing much better.”

  “I’m doing fine. And there are worse things than being lonesome.”

  “Are there? You going to tell me you don’t lie in there in that bed at night and wish there was a woman beside you?”

  Again, Lincoln couldn’t answer.

  Mercifully, the talk-fest seemed to be over. Tom went back to work, another load of hay arrived, Joseph and young Gainer threw it to the cattle and went back for more.

  Toward noon, satisfied that the stock would neither starve nor perish of thirst, Lincoln sent the whole crew back to have their midday meal in the bunkhouse kitchen and then tend to other chores around the place, like splitting firewood and mending harnesses and mucking out stalls in the barn. Winter work could be misera
bly hard, but the season had its favorable side. There was a lot of time for catching up on lost sleep and sitting around a potbellied stove, swapping yarns.

  Gainer, Lincoln knew, was always anxious about his wife, fearing she’d run into some kind of baby trouble, alone in the tiny cabin they shared, and he wouldn’t be there to help.

  God knew, the possibility was real enough. Beth might have bled to death with the first miscarriage if Cora hadn’t been around. She’d gone out onto the back porch, Lincoln’s mother had, and clanged at the iron triangle with vigor until they’d heard the signal, out on the range, and ridden for home.

  What if Beth had been alone with Gracie, who was only two at the time?

  Lincoln stuck a foot into the stirrup and swung up onto his horse’s back. No sense in agonizing over something that was over and done with. He’d raced to town for the doctor, but it had been Tom Dancingstar who’d stopped Beth’s bleeding. By the time Lincoln returned with help, Cora had bathed and bundled the lifeless baby, a boy.

  Lincoln had sat in the rocking chair in the kitchen, holding his son, and wept without shame until sunset when he’d carried him out to the graveyard beyond the orchard, dug a tiny grave and laid the child to rest. Eighteen months later, Beth had given birth to a second daughter, stillborn.

  He’d wept then, too, though not in front of his distraught wife. That time, Tom and Wes had done the burying, and more than a month had gone by before the circuit preacher stopped by to say prayers over the grave.

  Turning his horse homeward, Lincoln set the memories aside, but they seemed to trail along in his wake like ghosts. Clouds gathered, black-gray in the eastern sky, bulging with snow.

  Feeding the cattle would be harder tomorrow, cold work that would sting his hands, even inside heavy leather gloves, but mostly likely the creek wouldn’t freeze again.