Dorothy Garlock (5 page)

“I suppose you’re right,” Eli admitted.

“Darn straight I am,” Hank said, nodding solemnly. “What’s best for Abraham is for him to stay here on the ranch among people who care for him. We can best keep a watch over him and make sure that things don’t get any worse. After all, that’s what family is for.”

Eli looked across the ranch to where Abraham stood near a cattle pen. He couldn’t be certain, but it appeared that his brother was regaling a large heifer with some tale or other. For reasons that couldn’t possibly be explained, his brother believed himself to be the former president of the United States. The gentle young man, who had been such a large part of his life while he was growing up, was gone.

“What about Father?” Eli asked his uncle. “How is he dealing with this?”

The same look that had crossed Hank’s face back at the depot returned, but this time, it didn’t quickly disappear. Eli found it difficult to read; it held unease and even a touch of sadness. Hank gave no answer.

“What is it?” Eli prodded. “Why won’t you answer me?”

With a sigh, Hank placed his hand on his nephew’s shoulder. “I think it’s time,” he said slowly, his eyes never leaving Eli’s face, “for you to have a talk with your mother.”

Eli rounded the corner of the house to find his mother toiling away in her garden. It wasn’t much—a small plot set just off the back porch that ran the length of the building—but it was an important part of his mother’s life. Every summer without fail this was where she could be found, engaged in a labor of love to which she devoted as much time as she could spare.

Even now, Eli could see the fruits of her work: bean plants bunching against cucumber and squash, potato vines lining one end of the garden, and even tomatoes, small and as green as the vines to which they clung. She fought against weeds, rabbits, and any other threat to her charges, and she coaxed the plants along until they were ready. As the weeks passed, her garden flourished until those same tomatoes were large, juicy, and red.

Much like her beloved fruits and vegetables, Adele Morgan was much more robust than her outward appearance might lead a stranger to believe. Bent over among the plants, her gray work dress stained with sweat and dirt, she looked no bigger than a child. Though her frame was small, her face showed her true age; an oval with a small nose, thin lips, and chestnut eyes, it was crisscrossed with deep lines. Her salt-and-pepper hair was pulled back in a tight bun that hardly moved as she worked.

For a moment, Eli simply watched his mother weed. The last time that they had spoken to each other, voices had been raised and feelings hurt. She had been adamantly opposed to his leaving for the army and hadn’t been shy about making her feelings known. Still, she was his mother and no amount of time away would change that.

“Mother,” Eli called to her.

She looked up quickly at the sound of his voice and turned her head to face him. There was a moment of recognition mixed with surprise, but it vanished beneath a tight-lipped look of scorn.

“What are you doing here?” she said without rising.

Momentarily taken aback by her brusqueness, Eli stared hard at her. It seemed that little, if anything, had changed between them. “Hank sent me a telegram asking me to come back. He said I should return immediately. After seeing Abe I—”

“He shouldn’t have done that,” she cut him off. “Hank’s always putting his nose into other folk’s business. He’s been like that since he was a boy. What happens here ain’t no concern of yours.”

“But now that I’m—”

“You just go back to where you come from,” she said, refusing to let him speak. Turning back to her garden, she added, her voice dripping with scorn, “You needn’t act like you give a damn about what goes on around here.”

Eli was nearly beside himself with anger. From his mother’s short, harsh words, he knew that she regarded him with the same disdain she regarded the rabbits and weeds that attacked her garden; he was just another threat to her way of life. What she failed to understand was that for all his days he had wanted to see what was beyond the ranch, beyond Bison City.

“Where’s Father?” he demanded.

Mrs. Morgan didn’t even bother to lift her head as she tossed a weed over her shoulder in answer to her son’s question. She acted as if he had already followed her command and left.

“Don’t ignore me!” Eli barked. His hands were clenched tightly into fists and he knew his face must be a bright crimson. “I asked you where Father was, and I deserve an answer!”

Slowly, as if time had indeed withered her old bones, his mother rose to her feet and stared at her son. In her eyes there was not the slightest trace of motherly love or concern; there was only venom and disgust. She held the moment, letting her gaze speak more than any words she could give voice to. When she finally spoke, her words drove a dagger through Eli’s heart.

“Your father is dead,” she spat coldly, “and you’re the one who killed him.”

Chapter Four

Y
OUR FATHER IS
dead . . . and you’re the one who killed him.
Adele Morgan’s words flew at her son’s head as if they were crows looking for a place to roost. Eli kept shooing them away, refusing to allow them to alight, even as more and more of their number darkened the sky. His heart pounded furiously, and the hot breath of the summer day was momentarily trapped in his chest. He felt as if he were back at sea, his legs wobbly and unsure beneath him, ready to betray him at any moment.

“Father is dead? What—what in the hell are you talking about?” he managed.

“Don’t you use that kind of language with me,” Mrs. Morgan scolded. “I’ll—”

“Answer me, damn it! Why wasn’t I told?”

The harsh coldness of his mother’s gaze hadn’t thawed; if anything, it had grown icier as she stared unblinkingly at her middle child. As he roiled in the confusion and concern that raged in his breast, Eli searched his mother’s face in vain for some sign that he had misheard her.

“There ain’t no father under God’s watchful eye that can take all of his sons leaving. One, maybe two, but not all. It’s more than a man’s heart is meant to bear,” she declared. Scowling, she folded her dirty arms across her narrow chest, and added, “But then, I can understand why you wouldn’t know what your father went through. You’ve never cared for anyone but yourself. You left us to sink or swim. You didn’t care that we could have lost the ranch.”

“I didn’t leave you alone—Abe is here.”

“You’re selfish, always have been.”

“I left because—”

“He’d just lost one son. It broke his heart.”

Eli felt as if he were trapped within a dream from which he could not wake. Even though he wanted to argue with his mother, to refute her hateful words as lies, he could do nothing but stand silent and listen; the anger that raged through him had momentarily struck him as mute as a post. Even his fists, still clenched tightly at his sides, were worthless to protect him. His mother’s words struck him as if they were blows, battering him mercilessly from all sides without end. With great effort, his voice cracking, he asked, “What happened?”

Much as she had when he was a child, his mother refused to give him the easy answer to his question. “From the day you packed your bags and ran away from the only people who ever cared about you, from the place where you were born and raised, your father waited for you to come to your senses.” Sighing deeply, she continued: “Every morning and every night he’d look out at the horizon, always expecting to see you there, but always turning away with his heart broken all over again. He was a fool.”

“Don’t speak of him that way!” Eli spat, but his mother kept on.

“I figured that eventually he’d get tired of looking, that he’d realize how little you cared, but he never stopped. No matter how often I pleaded with him, he refused to give up hope you’d be back. Years passed and still, there he was, looking and waiting for his boy to come home. He never quit believing in you, no matter how much pain and suffering that belief caused him. When the time came, he died with the broken heart you gave him.”

“Stop saying that!” Eli barked, another flash of anger rising.

“Even though I loved him with all of my heart, it wasn’t enough,” she said with a frown. “The way he kept holding out hope for you, only to have you let him down again and again. He should have just written you off as dead.”

“I wasn’t dead.”

“You might as well have been.”

His mother’s words cut him to the quick, and he looked out over the ranch to keep from being overwhelmed. As he took in the buildings, cattle pens, and the land on which they stood, a vision of his father leaped to his eyes. As plain as the brilliant sun in the sky, there he was: leaning on the fence, his broad shoulders framing his wind-worn face, lined yet strong. He was sharing a joke with Hank, his laughter warmer than the summer day. If what Eli’s mother was saying was true, it was a sight he would never see again.

He can’t be gone . . . he just can’t be!

Though they had often fought and argued, cussing and yelling, Eli held nothing but love in his heart for his father. All that he was and much of what he would be, he had learned from that gruff man. To think that his leaving the ranch and striking out on his own, as necessary as it had been, had caused his father such worry and anguish was painful.

“Tell me what happened to him,” Eli demanded.

His mother sighed deeply. “It all became more than his broken heart could take. One morning while he was out in the barn, it finally gave out on him. Hank was the first to find him. By the time I reached his side, there wasn’t a thing that could be done. He was already gone.” She paused; Eli could see the sadness in her eyes, but it soon was lost behind the mask of anger and stubbornness. “Even though losing him nearly killed me, I was glad he was done worrying about you.”

Eli’s heart was as raw as a hammered thumb. He felt as if a knife had been stuck deep into his belly, the blade hot and twisting.
How could this possibly be true?
But it was more than the loss of his father that wounded him; it was the way in which his mother wielded that loss like a weapon.

“When did he pass?” he asked.

She stood silently, offering no answer.

“How long ago?” he demanded, his voice rising in anger.

As he stared at the rigid face of his mother, her eyes regarding him as warily as she would have a wolf or other predator, Eli wondered if she would ever bring herself to tell him what he wished to know. She was famously stubborn, refusing to yield an inch when she held the belief that she was right. He was about to shout at her again, when she finally spoke, her voice was flat and emotionless.

“Six weeks,” she said. “He died and we buried him six weeks ago.”

“Why in the hell didn’t you tell me?” Eli shouted incredulously, all the words exploding out of his mouth with a will he could not have stopped even if he had wanted to. “Why, Mother? Why didn’t you at least send me a letter so that I would have known that Father was gone? Tell me why!”

“I reckon that’s why Hank wrote you.”

“Why didn’t
you
write?”

“Because you’re dead to me.”

His mother’s words were the last straw. As if he were the vicious animal his mother thought him to be, Eli shot across the rows of his mother’s garden, his boots pounding the tender plants into the ground, and grabbed the woman by the shoulders. His grip held her locked in place, his face turned down to hers, his eyes burning with fury. Through it all, she didn’t flinch.

“I am
not
dead, Mother!” Eli insisted. “I’m right here!”

“But I don’t want you to be,” she retorted. Her small body seemed to grow larger with every angry word. “When you left this place, you left for good. You were more than willing to leave your father behind, no matter how much he begged you to stay. If he didn’t matter to you when he was alive, why should it matter to you that he is dead?”

“You’ve never understood—” he began, but his mother was no longer listening.

“It’s not just your father, either. Where were you when poor Abraham was sick?” she asked accusingly. “It was for your father and me to bear, watching him lie in that bed, unable to say a single word and then, when he woke, to no longer even remember that he was our son. You were nowhere to be seen.”

“If I had known that Abe was sick, I would have done all I could to see that he was cared for,” Eli argued. “When I left, you knew damn well I had no intention of turning my back on you, Father, Abe, or any of this forever. That was never what I wanted.”

“But it’s what you chose.”

Eli was at his wit’s end. Try as he might, he couldn’t think of what he could possibly say to make his mother understand why he had chosen the path he had taken. So much had changed for him after he left Bison City and the family ranch, but so much there remained exactly the same. He was about to try again, to attempt to find another argument, when his mother mentioned the one name that always managed to stop him cold.

“Then, of course, there was Caleb.”

“What about him?”

“It’s still so hard for me to believe that my boy has left me,” she said, her gaze turning away from Eli for a moment, as if facing the son who had returned was more painful than speaking of the one who was forever gone.

“What happened to Caleb was not my doing, Mother,” Eli explained, his ire rising at her suggestion. “You can hate me for many things, but I won’t allow my brother’s death to be one of them.”

“It’s more than that,” she shot back, shaking her bony shoulders free from his grip; he let her go without comment. “That you, Caleb’s own brother, could bring himself to up and leave town just as soon as we put his body in the ground . . . well, it’s more than I could stand.”

“I left because it was what Caleb would have wanted. I left—”

“Don’t you even pretend to speak for him,” Mrs. Morgan barked, her wrinkled face growing crimson with rage. “You don’t know the first thing about the matter! What he would have wanted was for you to find the bastard responsible for killing him!”