Her Colorado Man (2 page)

“No.” Panic rose in her chest. “You can have someone stop him before he gets here.”

“Who would I ask to deter him? Your brothers? Your nephews? Just what would I tell them? And what would we do with Burrows once we’d stopped him? He’s not breaking any laws by coming here.”

Mariah didn’t like feeling trapped, and she didn’t like
anyone having the control over her that this Wes Burrows had at the moment. The man was up to no good. “No one has ever seen him,” she said. “When he gets here, we’ll say he’s an imposter.”

“Mariah, that would—”

“I know—it would raise too many questions and still create a scene for John James.” She paced several feet away and then walked back to face her grandfather.

“I’m going to take his words at face value,” Louis said. “He wants John James to know he has a father who cares about him.”

“He
doesn’t
have a father who cares about him,” she said in a tight voice. “I’m not blaming you for anything.” She took a step forward and leaned to rest her hand on his shirtsleeve. “When I came back with a baby, I was relieved that you’d already told everyone the story about a husband. It spared me the embarrassment of making explanations. I accepted the lie because it was convenient. And even when Otto sent those first letters, I could have stopped you from giving them to John James, but I didn’t.” Her throat burned with the truth and the scalding honesty. “I wanted him to believe he had a father.”

She swallowed hard and a trembling began in her knees. “This man coming here is taking the lie too far. Even if his intent is harmless, and he pretends to be a father, he’ll leave eventually. Desertion will only hurt John James more in the end.”

Louis moved his arm to grasp her hand and hold it
between both of his. “Let’s say he visits for a few weeks. And then he goes back where he came from. Things will go back like they were and John James will have had a father like all the other children.”

“But it’s always been a lie.” She couldn’t push her voice past a whisper because her chest ached too fiercely. Maybe the lie had allowed her to pretend there was someone out there who would be returning one day.

Louis released her and stared out the window. His hair glowed silver in the sunlight. “It’s a little late to tell the truth,” he said, turning back to level a gaze on her. “Or is there a chance the child’s real father will show up one day?”

She looked into his eyes, eyes that had always looked upon her with loving trust and kindness.

The truth would tear her family apart.

With a dull pain in her chest, she shook her head. “No. He’ll never show up.”

“I’ve never pressured you, Mariah,” he said kindly, and it was true. Nor had he ever condemned her. His love for her had never wavered. “My deepest regret is that you don’t trust me with the truth…but I trust you.”

“You and my father are the only men on this earth I trust,” she said with the acidic taste of guilt on her tongue. But then she repented in her thoughts, because she had four brothers who would die for her at a moment’s notice. “Well, there are my brothers, of course…but I don’t trust this stranger.”

He took several steps to take her in his arms and hold her against his satin vest. He smelled of spice and shaving soap and everything dear and familiar. She had to hold back a sob or drown in a torrent. “Whoever this outsider is, I don’t plan to welcome him or treat him kindly,” she warned. “Even if he
were
my gadabout husband, no one would expect me to welcome him with open arms after all these years.”

“We’ll do what we have to,” Louis answered. “We’ll do what we believe is right for John James.”

“Wes Burrows doesn’t know what’s right for John James. He doesn’t even know us.” Her voice broke, and she caught herself before she lost her composure. “I’ll figure out what he’s up to,” she said. “And I won’t let him hurt my son.”

She loved her grandfather with every beat of her heart. He’d meant well. They’d both believed that saving her good name and giving her son an identity was best for him. John James had never suffered the indignity of being born out of wedlock, and she’d been spared shame and embarrassment.

Until now.

T
hat evening as the sun slid toward the western horizon, Mariah caught a ride home in the back of a company wagon leaving the yard. Her brother Arlen gave her an arm up, and she leaped over the side to take a seat in the bed beside her family members.

Arlen lived in the family home with Grandfather and their parents, as did she and John James, her two younger sisters, a widowed aunt and her cousin Marc’s family.

Mariah’s family had lived in a separate house once, but when her mother’s sight had failed, they’d moved into the big house so Henrietta wasn’t alone during the day. Now Wilhelm and his family lived in the house they’d vacated, which was only several hundred feet from this one.

For practicality, all of the Spanglers lived within a half a mile radius of the brewery and each other. Grandfather said it was like having their own Bavarian district.
They shopped, worshipped and visited in Ruby Creek on a regular basis, though, always taking an interest in the community and usually attending church.

The good-natured chatter and teasing between cousins and siblings was lost on her today; her thoughts had been narrowed to one subject—and one person—since that morning.

The wagon slowed and Arlen, along with her cousin Marc, jumped down. Arlen reached back for Mariah’s hand and Marc helped his wife to the ground. Faye adjusted her skirts and took his hand as they headed toward the rear entry.

Men and women parted in the yard, the men headed for the washhouse. Mariah followed Faye in through the sun porch to the enormous kitchen filled with mouthwatering aromas. Her aunt Ina turned from one of the steaming cast-iron stoves to welcome them with a smile.

Mariah’s mother sat on a wooden stool near a chopping block, peeling potatoes. “Hello, Mama,” Mariah greeted her.

“How was your workday?” Henrietta asked and raised her cheek for a kiss.

“It was long.” Mariah joined Faye at a deep sink to scrub her hands. “I’ll be down to help with supper after I wash up and change.”

“There you are!” her cousin Hildy exclaimed when the two of them nearly collided in the doorway. “John James has been waiting for you.”

Hildy didn’t live with them. She had worked in the brewery for a couple of years, but most recently she’d been a companion to Henrietta. She preferred helping with the household chores and watching over the younger children to a brewery position, and the arrangement suited everyone. Hildy had no children of her own.

“I gave the children toast and eggs after school,” Hildy told her. “Though they’d have much preferred your mama’s cookies.”

“You’re a blessing,” Mariah told her sweet dark-haired cousin and looked into her hazel eyes. They couldn’t have been more different in appearance. Hildy’s father had been of Irish decent, while Mariah took after the fair-haired Bavarian Spanglers.

Instead of using the back staircase, she headed for the front of the house and ran up the wide front staircase that opened into a commons room. There, the four youngsters had their own benches, desks, slates and a case of books, as well as an assortment of games and puzzles for evenings and rainy afternoons.

“Mama!” John James leaped up from his position on the rug to hug her. “I added five numbers together in my head without my fingers. Or the slate.”

“I do believe you have a calling to work in the accounting office with your uncle Wilhelm.” She ruffled his blond hair and knelt to kiss his cheek. He smelled like chalk and soap and little boy, and her heart tripped at the thought of him ever being hurt.

“Oh, no,” he said with a shake of his fair head. “I’m going to work on the machines.” His blue-eyed expression held all the seriousness a six-year-old could muster. “I like the sounds in the bottling house. And you can see the mountains from the big doorway.”

“That you can,” she agreed. “You, my bright shining star, can be whatever you want to be when you grow up.”

“Even the president?” Marc and Faye’s seven-year-old Emma asked, with a grin.

Mariah turned to tweak her pigtail. “Unless you beat him to it!”

“Emma can’t be the pwesident!” Emma’s five-year-old brother Paul said with a wide-eyed exclamation. “Her’s a girl! Pwesident’s got to have beards.”

Mariah laughed and the boys joined her. Emma only gave them a puzzled look.

“Finish your lessons before supper,” she said to John James and hurried along the hallway to her room.

Supper was a noisy affair as always, relaxed and friendly. At home like this she wasn’t anyone’s boss or coworker. She didn’t have a quota or hours and product to tally. She was simply aunt, sister, daughter and mother. Siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles talked over each other while they passed heaping bowls of potatoes and platters of
schweinsbraten,
their traditional oven-roasted pork. Half a dozen foamy pitchers of dark beer stood on the table at intervals.

Mariah set down her empty glass with a satisfied
sigh. Only perfect brews came from the barrels with the Spangler stamp.

Noticing her lack of animation, Mariah’s father, Friederick, gave her a long glance. “Are you well, Mariah?”

She assured him she was fine. “It was a long day. I’m just tired.”

Much later after the dishes were washed and the various families had retired to their quarters, Mariah tucked John James into his bed in the room he shared with Paul. He closed his eyes and she threaded her fingers through his pale silky hair.

Wesley Burrows’s written words came to mind:
I want your great-grandson to have what every boy deserves—a father who cares about him.
No one wished that more than she, but it would never be. Memories of her son as a chubby infant and a toddling two-year-old assailed her. The other children in their household—in all their family—had fathers to swing them in the air and play catch and teach them to fish and hunt.

Her brothers were wonderful, and she loved them for their devotion to her son. Arlen never left with a fishing pole without asking John James if he wanted to accompany him. Mariah often tagged along and watched as her brother taught him how to dig for worms, place one on the hook and cast the line into the stream.

She stretched out on the narrow bed and lay with her face nestled in John James’s hair where it met the collar
of his nightshirt. He was never lonely. She’d seen to that. Her family had seen to it. She owed them a debt she could never repay for loving her child and giving him a sense of belonging.

He slept soundly, his breath a soft whisper against the cotton sheet.

She was the one who was lonely. She was the one who watched couples with curiosity and awe. She was the one who lay awake at night, knowing she’d never have anything more than what she had at that moment, and vowing that she was going to be satisfied regardless.

She would never marry. She would never have another child. She would never be loved in the way a man loves a woman. It was unlikely she’d ever love a man who wasn’t her closest of kin.

Sometimes she thought she could embellish the lie she lived by saying that her husband had been killed. She’d imagined a hundred deaths for him. And if he were dead, she’d be free to be courted. Though she was decidedly unapproachable and rarely met men who weren’t her family.

But she couldn’t tell that additional lie just for her convenience. The thought of doing that to John James stopped her. As it was he believed he had a father, no matter how distant. If he believed his father was dead, it would hurt him more.

Wouldn’t it?

The partially closed door creaked open and Faye
peeked in. Paul had been asleep since before John James came to bed. Mariah couldn’t see Faye’s gaze, but knew she checked her son before giving Mariah a little wave and backing out.

It didn’t matter now. At this point she didn’t have any power to alter the husband fable. Wesley Burrows was coming to insinuate himself into their lives. And she was going to have to tell John James.

Mariah got up and went to the bureau that held John James’s clothing and opened the bottom drawer. Raising the lid on a hinged wooden cigar box, she lifted out a packet of envelopes tied with a piece of string and left the room, silently closing the door behind her.

Mariah’s room was across the hall from where her son slept and beside her brother Arlen’s. It was a comfortable space, plenty roomy enough for a big upholstered chair beside the fireplace, a writing desk and the four-poster bed in which she’d slept since childhood. A padded seat had been built before a trio of paned windows that overlooked the vegetable and herb gardens, with forested hills in the background.

Mariah lit another lamp and settled at her desk with the packet of letters. After first identifying the differences between two similar, but individual styles of handwriting, she sorted the envelopes into piles accordingly. These weren’t all of the letters, but they were the most recent, dating back nearly a year.

From those with the earliest dates, she scanned a
few, and then set them aside. Starting with the first one after the handwriting changed, she began to read.

Mariah unfolded the other piece of stationery. A smile touched her lips at the ink line drawing of a playful-looking puppy.

Her gaze fell to the end and she read his signature.

Your loving father.

John James had studied the book filled with detailed drawings so intently that more than once she’d had to remind him steam engines weren’t his schoolwork.

The next letter told of a winter storm and carried an update on the puppies. The following spoke of salmon fishing in icy rivers and camping with a native band of Cree fur traders.

What child wouldn’t be delighted by these newsy letters and exciting accounts of sled races and gold strikes? Who wouldn’t want someone always thinking of him? Who wouldn’t feel important because someone with such an exciting life was sending all these newsy captivating letters? She herself admitted a deep-down fascination. Though skeptical of this man’s motivation, she couldn’t fault his attention to detail or the caring manner in which he addressed her child. The thing that disturbed her most was that closing at the end of each missive:
Your loving father.

As much as she’d considered and reconsidered holding back the letter that told John James about this man’s arrival, she’d told Grandfather to give it to him, and she’d only had to help him read a few of the words. Maybe Burrows wouldn’t show up and she’d be spared, but John James would be heartbroken. She was pretty sure he’d turn up, though.

She believed he meant what he said, but there was no way of preparing. What did Wesley Burrows have to gain by perpetuating this charade?

She would know soon enough. She would know sooner than she’d like. However long it took him to get from Juneau City to Colorado wasn’t long enough for her.

Early June, 1882

John James had been in a constant state of frenzied anticipation for the past week. He’d told everyone who would listen that his father was coming home. Every time Mariah heard him speak the words, another layer of rigid steel reinforced the protective shell around her heart.

“My father’s coming home,” he had proudly told the postman at the window in the Ruby Creek mercantile that afternoon.

Mariah had steadied her nerves and turned a page in the Montgomery Ward catalog. “Come look at these coats, John James,” she said. “You need a new one.”

“Your husband is returning?” Delia Renlow moved from where she’d been stroking a bolt of deep blue velvet to approach Mariah. “This is interesting news I haven’t heard.”

Dressed in a flowing green skirt and lacy shirtwaist, the curvy redhead dropped her gaze to Mariah’s brown tweed trousers and scuffed boots.

Mariah managed a stiff smile. She’d attended school with Delia, but they’d never been friends. In fact Lucas Renlow, the man that Delia married, had once been sweet on Mariah. “Yes, Mr. Burrows will be here any day now.”

“My goodness! Why how long has it been? You and your man will have to get acquainted all over again.”

“He writes often,” Mariah blurted, and then caught herself sounding defensive.

“A letter is no substitute for a flesh and blood partner,
now is it? How long has it been?” she asked again. She looked at John James. “Six years? Seven? I’d be surprised if you even remember what your husband looks like.”

“Yes, well, we’d better be going. We’re celebrating Grandfather’s birthday this evening.” Mariah hurried John James toward the door.

“Give my best to your granddaddy.”

The brass bell attached to the door rang as Mariah escaped onto the boardwalk. The late-afternoon sun cast long shadows from the two-story wood frame buildings onto the hard-packed dirt street. In the distance a locomotive whistled, a sound she rarely noticed, but had been keenly attuned to the past several days. Would he arrive by train? Horseback? Wagon? She had no idea. She had studied the world map in John James’s geography book to surmise that this Burrows fellow would take a steamship to the western coast of the United States. Train would be the quickest mode from there.

“Mama, you didn’t order my coat.”

“We have plenty of time,” she assured him and took his hand and urged him toward the buggy she’d left several feet away.

That evening, the festivities commenced before dinner as family members arrived with platters of food. Wilhelm and Arlen had settled a keg of beer into the scrolled wrought-iron stand that had been in Grandfather’s family for a hundred years. It now stood in the great room near the doorway where a hall led back to the kitchen and dining hall. A bucket sat below the spigot to catch drips,
and Louis’s two mountain hounds lapped at the overflow.