Galveston (2 page)

“Damon Becker, at your service any time. The dog was mad,” he said, looking down at the stilled animal, “that or starved into a frenzy. Look at those ribs.

“Ah well, it's over now, and I must be going.”

I sat on Sandy and watched him gallop off, disappointed he had not offered to accompany me back into town—surely any gentleman would have done that much. In a short time he had disappeared around the other side of the thicket. I touched Sandy gently and led him back toward town, but on the way I began to wonder what it was Damon Becker was doing: I pulled in the reins and led Sandy off to the left, so that we could circle around to the other side of the thicket. I felt half foolish, half brazen, but burned with an overpowering curiosity.

We had gone a half circle around the thicket's edge when I saw two horses—one was Damon's stallion—grazing nearby. I got down off Sandy and crept forward a little ways, knowing I was half mad to dare so and would probably be caught. Maybe he'd robbed a bank and was burying the money with his partner in the shadows of the trees, I thought … that or some other important secret business.…

I stopped about twenty feet from where the horses were grazing. There were noises coming from within the thicket. I listened hard. It was laughter: liquid, giggling throaty sounds, coming from a woman, in concert with low, cooing masculine noises. I could hear, above all, the crackling of fallen leaves.

I stalked back to Sandy and whipped him hard all the way home.

Damon had gone off to sea shortly after that day, though I didn't learn this until a year or so later, when I met Charles.

Charles was an up-and-coming attorney in the town, and my cousin Betsey was his client. One day I noticed a letter signed by him lying open on a table in her house, and the last name struck a chord in my memory.

“Becker,” I remarked, spying the letter.

“Yes, seems to be a fine man,” said Betsey, then looked at me thoughtfully. “I don't believe he's married. How would you like to meet him?”

“Of course, why not?” I told her, though I didn't mention my curiosity about the man lay only in his last name.

And so Cousin Betsey invited Charles and me to dine one night with her and her young daughter Ruth, and I asked him across the table, “Are you related to a man named Damon Becker?”

“Why yes, I am,” he said, surprised. “He's my older brother. Do you know him?”

“I met him once, some time ago. In fact, he saved me from the attack of a mad dog. I don't think I'll ever forget him.”

“Well, Damon hasn't been around for—let's see—better than a year and a half now. He went to sea. If you'd known him well, you wouldn't be surprised he chose that sort of life.”

“He did seem adventurous, all right,” I replied.

Charles asked to see me again after that evening, and soon had won over my ailing mother and Betsey. I didn't dislike Charles. He was kind and good, as attentive to me as a man could be, and handsome in his way. Yet his looks reminded me just enough of his brother to make me wish I could meet up with Damon again, and I'd often ask Charles if he'd had a letter from him saying when he planned to make a visit home.

“He doesn't come to Grady very often,” Charles told me. “The town bores him. He was home once after his first voyage, and hardly stayed long enough to get the smell of seawater out of his clothes. Damon and I aren't close, as you can probably tell,” he pointed out.

“I did suspect that,” I said, thinking that Charles was a Damon with his features all smoothed out, the rough edges of his personality ground into mellow rims, and coated with a layer of diplomacy.

By the time Damon returned again, a full three years since the afternoon I'd met him, Charles had begged for my hand in marriage several times. Yet I'd put him off. I'd grown fond of him as one would of a good and steady friend, but the lack of fire in his eyes, the lack of forcefulness in his nature, left me limp and without desire to spend the rest of my life with him.

There was a party held for Damon when he came home and I begged Charles to take me, “so I can thank him properly for what he did for me so long ago.”

“All right,” he agreed, “though I'm not crazy about what Damon does at a party and you probably won't be either after you've been there for a while.”

“Maybe not,” I said, and arranged to have a new dress made.

What surprised me most, when the party night came and we assembled in a hall decorated with green bunting and “Welcome Home” banners, was that Damon was far bigger than I remembered, and far more handsome. He had grown a lush red beard during his time away and acquired a deep tan and blazing cheeks. He stood in one corner, telling sea stories, the crowd surrounding him engaged in awed silence followed by rollicking laughter. His voice carried across to where Charles and I stood, in another corner, Charles speaking legal chitchat with an attorney friend.

I tried to hear the stories coming from behind, while appearing attentive to the conversation taking place in front of me, and finally I urged Charles away and made him take me to meet Damon once again.

My heart thumped a rhythm to the screech of the fiddle sounding out a square dance tune as we walked nearer and nearer to where he stood. “This is Claire Haines,” said Charles to his brother. “I understand you two have met before.”

“Oh, have we?” said Damon, staring at me for a moment.

“You saved me from a mad dog once, three years back. I never got a chance to say a proper thank-you.”

He studied me again, then his eyes lit up with recognition. “Of course, how could I forget?” he said, bowing slightly. “Do you still ride around on that magnificent horse?”

“No, my Sandy took ill and had to be put to death. I haven't had much interest in replacing him.”

“Ah, that's too bad,” he said, then looked at Charles. “So now I find this pretty little dark-haired woman on the arm of my own brother.…” His eyes drifted off.

“Will you be staying long?” I asked him.

“No, Charles here can tell you I hate dust storms and dry weather. I soon get a bad case of parched lips,” he ended, looking back at me. I opened my fan in front of my breast and fluttered it slightly.

“Well, we'd better be going,” said Charles, who appeared to see the evening at an end.

“Stay around, the party hasn't even begun,” said Damon as he looped his arms around the waists of the two women nearest him, young sultry types, neither of whom I recognized as residents of Grady.

“Oh, I'm quite sure of that,” said Charles, “but I have clients to see in the morning, and they wouldn't be too happy about paying a lawyer's fee for a fuzzy head. Good night.”

Oh, how Charles Becker paled beside his brother.

I couldn't sleep that night, nor for many nights after, thinking of Damon, and—despite Betsey's opinion that I was crazed to dangle a man like Charles Becker from a string around the end of my finger, and my mother's oft-expressed wish that I'd settle down before her death, for she knew she would not get over the disease that confined her to bed—how he excited me in a way Charles never could.

Though I knew I ought to quit seeing Charles out of fairness to him and because his slight physical resemblance served only to rekindle my imagined place in Damon's arms, I couldn't let Charles go because if I did I'd have no way of learning about Damon's infrequent visits … might never see him again.

He did come home once more, at a time when my future in Grady loomed hopelessly lonesome, yet I was still unable to bring myself to take the obvious step and marry Charles. It had been about two years since my mother's death and a little longer since I'd seen Damon for the second time. In truth I was strongly considering going away alone for a while. I had a little money—enough to get me by so I could do some thinking—and maybe I could find another place to live, meet new people who didn't know my twenty-sixth birthday would soon be coming and wouldn't care if they did know. Oh, the small-town tongue-trilling of Grady was getting to me as it must have gotten to Damon himself.

Charles told me two weeks in advance of Damon's visit.

“It'll be nice to see him again,” I said, trying to conceal my elation at the news, which to my confused mind was like a lantern flashing in the night. “And I suppose they'll be having a soiree in his honor?” I ventured.

“I suppose,” said Charles, as though the matter bored him.

“Although his taste in entertainment may differ from yours, it's well to remember he doesn't come home often, and after all, he is your brother.”

Charles smiled. “I guess you're right, although I have a suspicion it might just be you've a mind that favors parties.”

I merely smiled back in reply.

I didn't bother with a new party dress for Damon's homecoming this time, but instead bought a horse—a brown gelding not nearly so fine as Sandy, though he'd serve my purpose well enough—and took up riding again.

On the night after Damon's arrival the inevitable party was held by his friends, and I sat outside Charles's office awaiting him to finish some business for a client. For an hour and a half I heard the sound of lively music through the open window. The party was going on not far away.

Once Charles opened his door and looked out. “You don't have to wait if you'd rather not, Claire. Go on and I'll join you there,” he said.

I almost agreed, then thought of the danger of giving my feelings away too soon, and said, “Take your time, Charles. I'll be fine.”

When at last we took the short walk to where the big hall stood, its windows lit up, doors opened wide, and its floor dusty from the strut of frolicking people, Charles said, “Slow down, Claire. What's the hurry?”

“I'm tired of waiting for you, that's what,” I told him.

“Well, forgive me for keeping you. Since you didn't get fitted out in a new dress, I figured maybe you weren't any more anxious than I was to go tonight.”

“There's no point in going at all if we're going to miss most of it, is there?” I said tartly. Though I wouldn't tell Charles, it was not strictly the waiting that had me on edge. I'd been wondering all that day whether Damon Becker could possibly live up to the man I remembered, or if I'd allowed myself to dream him into someone so awesomely desirable that my seeing him again, in the flesh, could only lead to disappointment.…

It wasn't to be. He was if anything more magnificent than before, his face roughened by the salty air, his red beard fuller, his eyes stunning and grown more alert by his experiences with the tricky nature of the oceans he sailed.

“You remember Claire Haines,” said Charles, tapping his big shoulder.

He turned around to face us, and at once I knew he didn't remember me at all. “Of course,” he said, his eyes searching. “Charles always has had uncanny good luck in finding the town's most beautiful women, eh Charles?” He took my fingers in his warm, rough hand and lifted them to his lips. His beard tickled them and and sent a shiver from the base of my spine to my cheeks.

I knew I must make him remember. “I've taken up riding again,” I said, “though my horse is not nearly as fine as the palomino I once owned.”

Something registered in his eyes.

“I find the same paths around the thicket as good as ever, but nowadays I'm more wary of dangers that might lie ahead.”

“Is that so?” he said. “Yes, riding is good sport around Grady, especially on long afternoons.”

I nodded and looked deep into his eyes. More than words had passed between us.

The next afternoon I rode the horse I hadn't bothered to name and wouldn't keep for long down the paths near the thicket, and soon I spotted Damon across the field. He waved with one black-gloved hand and motioned for me to join him. I went slowly as he had come to me the first time we met. “It's blasted hot today, for this time of year,” he said as I drew up. “Would you like to rest in the shade?”

He handed me down from my gelding, the breeze stirring his auburn hair, a mischievous smile across his face. The fleeting thought strayed across my mind that the hands locked around my ribs could just as well crush them with a simple change in mood. He pointed toward a broad-trunked oak and, sitting down beside me, told me he had already had as much as he could countenance of dry land—his ship had pulled in better than a month ago—and would soon be off to sea once again. This confession of his dictated my movements from the moment it rustled the quiet air around us.

I leaned across him to pick up an autumn leaf, one of thousands fallen from the tree. He sensed my design in doing this and lightly fingered my hair. Now, Damon was not a man inclined to go less than all the way in any pursuit, so he took my face between the black-gloved hands and studied it for a moment, then kissed me, lightly at first as the way he had touched my hair, then harder and harder still, and then his arms went around me and I felt along my back the motion of the black gloves being removed.

A thrill of fear rose up inside me but I was powerless to stop the hand that now made its way with ease into my blouse and around my breast, and the force of the body that laid me down upon a nest of newly fallen leaves and arched itself above me.…

When it was over I knew I had been won by Damon Becker, and, knowing too, of his fickle nature, asked quickly, “How soon did you mean to leave?”

He was not one for commitments of even the shortest span. “I'll meet you tomorrow again, here,” he said, and mounted the horse and rode away. I brushed the autumn leaves from my skirt and buttoned up my blouse. I wanted to shout with joy and cry with relief and cover my face with shame, all at once. But I mounted my horse and rode from the thicket thinking of nothing further away than tomorrow.…

We had twelve tomorrows, each at the same place, and I had never felt so fulfilled, so happy or blessed, so sure the future would hold nothing but lovely joyful things and beautiful, faraway places and days and nights of bliss; oh yes, I had begun to hope I was in Damon's eyes different from the other women he'd known.