Another bittersweet smile flickered across her face. Gretchen’s chubby hands reached for one of the long braids pinned in a roll behind her mother’s ear, but without ever taking her gaze from Sloan’s, Mrs. Jorvik reached for a wooden spoon and handed it to the baby to play with instead. “Dr. MacAllister,” she said, “I will say this to you. I have come to believe that whatever right choices we make are by the grace of God, or,” she paused, lips pursed, then added with a shake of the head, “ ‘tur,’ my grandfather would say. Luck. Chance. You had to make a choice that day. I do not know whether your choice was the right one, but I do know that you did what you felt in your heart was the right thing.”
“If I had known my brother was already dead—”
“But you did not. Nor do you know that you would have been able to save my husband.” She set the squirming baby back on the floor, then leaned forward. “That knowledge must rest with God. You are a good man, Dr. MacAllister. I have clung to that, these months. Now I see that the time has not been easy for you either.”
She laid her callused palm on top of Sloan’s. “I can promise that I will forgive you, one day. My pain . . . is very deep. But to see you, to hear you ask me . . . I think this is a right choice, Dr. MacAllister. And I think it must be God’s choice. So I wish you to return to your new home now. In peace.”
She stood, and Sloan followed suit, feeling awkward, as uncertain as a yearling stepping into an unfamiliar meadow. “I appreciate your honesty,” he said, his voice low.
“ ’Tis who I am.” She secured Gretchen against her ample hip. “Forgiveness sometimes comes easily, does it not? But sometimes . . . I think we must work a little harder at it, wait a little longer for it.”
“Yes ma’am. But it’s worth the effort.” He tickled the baby’s cheek, his heart twisting when she giggled in innocent delight. “Because without it, life is darker than the deepest mine shaft.” He smiled. “Believe me, I’ve been in that mine shaft. I’ll take your promise, Mrs. Jorvik, and thank you for it. I know I don’t deserve anything.”
“Dr. MacAllister, none of us deserves God’s blessings, least of all myself. But ’tis your choice, and mine, to accept them when they come our way.”
Choices, Lord. A double-edged sword You created within the human mind, this divine piece of Yourself. A moral conscience. Sloan mulled over his visit to Adlerville on the long trip home to Tom’s Brook.
He prayed it was the right decision for him, to make his permanent home in the Shenandoah Valley. For months now, the progression of his feelings about the old rambling farmhouse had been solidifying from desperation to determination to devotion. He’d fallen in love with a place, with the same unexpectedness with which he’d fallen in love with a woman. He didn’t want to leave either one.
For all of Sloan’s adult life as a Christian he had, well, chosen to believe that God would somehow guide him in the decisions he made about the course of his life. This past year he had been forced to face an unpalatable truth: Regardless of that willed belief in the presence of God’s Spirit within Sloan’s mortal flesh, he was nonetheless still as prone to stumbling as a drunken reprobate promising never to lift another bottle to his lips.
The love of God, the grace of Jesus, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit . . . he would continue to enjoy them with only limited success for the duration of his earthly existence. He would doubtless make more wrong choices in the future, or at least not-so-right choices. And life would continue to bring occasional mud holes and stones across his path that were neither his own nor the Lord’s doing. Thankfully, he could depend on the love of God to pick him up, the grace of Jesus to forgive him, and the Holy Spirit to nudge him back onto the right path again each time.
But God was never going to force His will on Sloan—or anyone, because over the course of the last year Sloan had also discovered how much the Almighty treasured the gift of free choice He had bequeathed His children.
I understand, Lord. Took awhile, but he finally understood. He wanted Garnet to love him, marry him, and move into his house in Tom’s Brook because she chose to, not because Sloan had manipulated her feelings to achieve his own ends.
So he set his face to the south and prayed that the choice to settle there was God’s as well as his own.
Twenty-Six
You’re saying that this . . . outing . . . is a test?” Felicity stalked back and forth across the barn aisle. The deep flounces at the hem of her watered-silk skirt swirled the fresh straw Garnet had just strewn to keep down the dust.
Garnet hid a smile. Three days had passed since Joshua’s visit, and for two of those Garnet had been mulling over her idea. Felicity, predictably, was not receiving it well. “In fact, yes. This is a test for both of us, since you’ll have input on the final grade.”
“Don’t assume that dry tone with me, miss. Might I remind you that you already agreed to this trip? We’ve been making preparations for weeks—I’ve written countless letters in your behalf, arranged for you to interview with two instructors whom I hold in extremely high regard. Two!”
She stopped in the middle of her hand-waving tirade, then slowly turned to Garnet. “Why, you poor dear. I understand. Would have sooner except you caught me so completely off guard.” Her gaze swept over Garnet’s rumpled house gown and soiled pinafore. “Heavens, girl, you do look like a country bumpkin who wouldn’t know a Whistler from a penny whistle. Almost gave me heart palpitations.”
“Mm . . . well, I didn’t want to clean the stalls in my Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes.” Garnet stuck a straw between her teeth and hooked her thumbs inside the bib of her pinafore. “Miz Ward, what’s a penny whistle?”
Felicity gave an appreciative peal of laughter. The fierce red spots staining her cheekbones faded. “Garnet, you’ve more facets than a Brazilian diamond. And you’re the only person I know who can so neatly put me in my place.”
She stepped closer, nose wrinkling, then gamely pressed a rose-scented cheek to Garnet’s before backing away. “Very well. I accept your . . . challenge. We’ll go to the site of your choice, you with your pens and me with my oils. We’ll reproduce on paper what we each ‘see.’ Have I interpreted this correctly so far?”
Garnet nodded. “We’ll give ourselves, oh . . . two hours, then compare each other’s works. If I like what you have to say—and you like what I have to say, I’ll accompany you without further objection.”
“You really are the most peculiar person. But—very well. Does tomorrow suit you?”
“Tomorrow suits me just fine.” Garnet removed the kerchief that had kept her hair out of her face and tossed it over the pitchfork. “I have the place all picked out.”
The bridge at Cedar Creek. Where her life had changed forever. It seemed only fitting that she return and discover if after this visit, her life would be changed forever . . . again.
The autumn sky shimmered with such an intense blue it hurt to gaze at it. Mare’s-tail clouds—white flowing strokes against the deep azure canvas—provided the only relief from that endless blue. Low humidity, little wind, temperature hovering in the midfifties according to the thermometer nailed next to the entrance of Cooper’s, where Garnet and Felicity had stopped to purchase the makings of a picnic lunch.
“I don’t know why,” Felicity groused the entire thirty minutes, “you refused to let me have the chef from my hotel pack us a basket.”
“Because we’re doing this my way.” Garnet watched Mrs. Cooper bring the lever of the cheese cutter down over a round of cheese, severing a nickel’s worth from the block to add to Garnet’s pile of apples, soda crackers, and some striped candy sticks.
When they left the store laden with two metal lunch pails, Felicity was still mumbling disgruntled remarks beneath her breath.
An hour later Felicity halted halfway up the incline of the sunlit meadow they had to cross to reach the creek. “Why haven’t you brought me here before? This is lovely, Garnet. Look, see how that old boulder is jutting up through that clump o
f sumac? If I frame the bridge between that, and the stand of cedar to the right of the bridge, the contrast of colors will be truly remarkable.”
Garnet’s mind had been fixed on the bank of the creek, where she’d found Phineas. But she stopped, obediently studying the scene Felicity had described. Reluctant astonishment seeped inside. “You’re right,” she admitted slowly. “I was so focused on a different spot that I wasn’t even thinking about other possibilities.”
“Ha. One of the first lessons a good artist learns is to frame the entire world, whatever setting one happens to find herself in. See? By accompanying me on my lecture tour—”
“I’m conceding a battle, not the war. You have good vision. Today”—Garnet smiled a mischievous smile—“we’ll see how our visions compare.” She shrugged the cloth bag off her shoulder and dropped it at her feet. “There. I’ve marked the spot. After we fetch your easel and the rest of our supplies, we should have just enough time for our two hours before we have to start back. My father’s more particular than ever, you see, about my being out after sunset.”
“It won’t take two hours.” Felicity set off across the meadow, her stride brisk, spine straight as a paintbrush handle. “Within thirty minutes, I believe you’ll concede.”
At a little before 3:30—and she knew the time because Felicity in a fit of utter exasperation had unpinned her watch brooch so she could thrust it under Garnet’s nose—they decided to continue the argument on the way back to Sinclair Run.
Garnet conceded the advantages of oil—easier to correct a mistake, greater texture, the challenge of replicating nature’s colors. Felicity conceded that there was challenge to be found in the exquisite detail that pen-and-ink demanded, and that it was possible to create the illusion of reality without the use of color. She debated which medium demanded the most patient hand. Throughout their often spirited exchange, Goatsbeard with little guidance plodded along the Pike, so well-trained he didn’t even stop to yank grass from the roadside.
On the outskirts of Tom’s Brook, distant shouts and screams of pain terminated their debate with shocking abruptness.
“Whoa, there,” Garnet automatically calmed a shying, tail-swishing Goatsbeard. She searched the countryside off to the right of the road.
A man on horseback appeared at the crest of a shallow slope, then plunged down toward the Pike at a full gallop. When he caught sight of the buggy, he sent his horse over the low stone wall with heart-stopping recklessness.
“Help!” He sawed the reins, struggling to control his lathered mount. The man was minus coat and hat; his hands and shirt, Garnet realized in horror, were smeared with blood. “Accident—other side of the hill. Logging wagon overturned—there’s injuries, bad ones. A couple of men already . . . please! Can you go for help?”
“Dr. Sloan MacAllister—he lives in Tom’s Brook?” Her father had mentioned in passing that Sloan had been in Pennsylvania. But he should have returned by now. The shock of his absence had bitten deep, but Garnet ignored it now. “Has someone sent for him?”
“Yes’m.” The man glanced up and down the road. “I’m headed for Tom’s Brook, hope to round up as many men as I can. If you—”
“We’ll round up men. You get back to yours.” Garnet jiggled the reins, lifting her hand to acknowledge the man’s heartfelt thanks as he tore back off up the hill.
“Garnet, I have to be in Woodstock before six. I’m having dinner with the mayor, then catching a train to Washington.” Felicity grabbed the arm rail with one hand and her hat with the other. “Could you please slow down? We’ll be of no help to anybody if we ourselves suffer an accident.”
“This stretch of the road’s safe enough.” Garnet urged Goatsbeard into a gallop. “Right now, speed is more important.”
“Fine! Tell the sheriff or someone then!” She had to raise her voice to be heard. “Look, there’s a house. You can have the people there dash off to—”
“I’m going to the mercantile by the railroad. More people there. And Felicity, I’ll offer a ride to anyone who doesn’t have transportation to the scene. You can either come along or stay at the store. It’s by the depot.” She slowed Goatsbeard to a trot, then turned right onto the road that led to the store.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake. I’m no Florence Nightingale. Garnet, think, my dear. This will not be a fitting scene for either of us.”
Garnet pulled the buggy to a rocking halt in front of the store. “I’m going to help if I can,” she said and jumped down.
Less than five minutes later she led a procession of anxious, sober-faced men back to the Pike. Vernon Rawls, the store’s proprietor, rode in the buggy with Garnet and a tight-lipped Felicity Ward, who for some unknown reason refused to stay behind.
“Hope whoever they sent after Doc MacAllister doesn’t have trouble finding him,” Mr. Rawls shouted over the clatter of hooves and spinning wheels. Garnet sensed his sideways regard. “This is mighty noble of you, miss. But it’s best if you let me out before we’re too close. This won’t be a sight for ladies.”
“Precisely what I said,” Felicity snapped. “But . . . perhaps we can be of help. From a distance, of course.”
“You do have a lot of underskirts that could be used for bandages,” Garnet agreed.
After that, Felicity didn’t speak again.
In spite of the men’s warnings, the carnage that greeted them shocked Garnet to queasy immobility.
A jumbled pile of massive logs covered the narrow logging road that wound between two hills. The remains of a flatbed wagon lay on its side, one of the wheels crushed, the other dangling like a broken hand. One mule lay in a lifeless heap, still in its traces. Near the dead mule, a man lay in a puddle of blood. He wasn’t moving.
The screams came from beneath the logs, where several men lay trapped, crushed, maniacal with fear and pain. Another man lay face-down, dangling arms and legs draped over one of the rough stubbled tree trunks. His head—
Garnet flinched, squeezed her eyes shut, and pressed a fist to her mouth to hold back the bile curdling in her throat. Roaring filled her head.
“God in heaven . . .” Mr. Rawls tried to take her arm, but Garnet shook him off.
“I’ll be all right,” she managed. “Go help. I’ll . . . see about the others.”
Behind her, one of the townsmen bent double and vomited. Felicity half screamed, then fled back toward the buggy. Garnet breathed deeply through her nose and gritted her teeth until her blurred vision stabilized. Then she lifted her skirts and ran toward the screams.
All about her men were shouting orders, swearing, calling for help, calling for bandages. Garnet scrambled around several logs, climbed over another, until she reached a couple of sweating men trying in vain to free one of the trapped loggers. Only his upper torso was visible. One arm strained upward toward a would-be rescuer, his hand curved claw-like, blindly grasping at the other man’s shirt.
“Get me out!” he begged. Beneath the thick whiskers and beard his face glistened, pasty white and contorted with agony. “Get me out . . .” His other arm lay oddly motionless.
Garnet spotted a bloodied, jagged splinter protruding from just below his elbow, and with a barely suppressed gasp realized it was a bone. She chewed her inside lip until she tasted the coppery flavor of her own blood, but when one of the rescuers spied her and sharply ordered her away, she shook her head.
“I’ll hold his hand. It might help calm him, until you can get him free.”
“You’re either an angel or a blamed fool.”
Garnet squeezed around the two sweating men, her gaze fixed upon the wild-eyed logger. “Take my hand,” she said. “What’s your name? Tell me your name.”
“Os—Oscar.”
“All right, Oscar. Here, rest your head in my lap. No, I don’t care about the blood. Now, take my hand . . . that’s it. I know it hurts. Help will be here soon.”
A hoarse sound, part sob and part groan, burst from his lips. His hand convulsed around hers with
such force the pain streaked up her elbow, but Garnet smiled down into his glassy eyes. “Hold on,” she whispered, and wiped the sweat-soaked hair off his forehead.
Her world was reduced to a two-foot circle, with Oscar the linchpin. All around them a swarm of noise and activity buzzed—the sound of saws and shouting and snorting mules, chains clanking and booted feet thudding ceaselessly in the chewed-up earth. Movement on either side of her, the two men grunting with exertion, their gloved hands slipping on the branch-sheared surface of a log whose diameter spanned over two feet. The nauseous odors of oozing sap and spilled blood. The acrid smell of fear.
Abruptly Oscar screamed; his eyes rolled backward, and his head lolled sideways.
“Got it!” One of the rescuers shouted exultantly.
“Here, miss.” A clean-shaven young man with a shock of white-blond hair dropped beside her. “We’ve freed him. Move away, now, so’s we can carry him to safety.” His admiring gaze caused a blush to suffuse Garnet’s cheeks.
She sat without moving for a moment after they hefted the unconscious man from beneath the log and toted him away—broken arm dangling obscenely, lower body covered with blood. Her hand throbbed, and she realized in a sort of dim frustration that she was trembling. Shaking her head, she forced her numbed legs to move, though she had to brace herself against the log until the dancing black spots disappeared.
Farther down, she caught a glimpse of a black-and-yellow checked woolen shirt, and the back of a flapped cap. “There’s someone else in here!” she called.
Nobody came. Heart thumping, Garnet scanned the scene. The narrow hollow swarmed with men, every last one of them frantically doing his best to aid the injured and to prevent the jumbled logs from shifting. There was nobody available. Nobody but Garnet in a position to help. Lord? I don’t know if I can.
Shenandoah Home (Sinclair Legacy Book 1) Page 21