Mary Connealy (59 page)

There was silence again. Then Daniel roared, “Get back to work on that diggin’, boys.”

Grace turned to John. “They made it through. They’re coming for us.”

John smiled. His lips wobbled, but he held them steady. “I was powerful worried about ’em, Ma.”

She dashed the tears away with her wrist then hugged John’s shoulders. “We’ll be out in a minute,” she said. “Let’s scoot up to the stove and take a break until our fingers get warm.”

Without waiting for him to agree, Grace sat down and pulled John onto her lap. He seemed to fit there comfortably. She hugged him close and thanked God for her family, even though they still scared her to death.

Parrish had always scared her, but that hadn’t stopped her from being brave. Well, it was time to remember how to be brave again.

“We’ve rested enough, John,” Grace said with a firm jerk of her chin. “Let’s get back to digging.”

A
fist, delicate and lily white, punched out of the snow and smacked Daniel in the nose.

He jerked backward, his feet slipped, and he landed on his backside. He looked at the hole in the snow made by the fist and saw Grace’s cherry-red nose poking out of the snowdrift. He suspected his nose was now the same color, and not because of the cold.

“Well, it’s certainly nice to see you boys.” Grace smiled and pulled her nose back out of sight.

“We got through!” Mark dived at the hole and began clawing with his mittened hands.

The other boys plunged in.

Daniel scrambled around on his hands and knees and began digging. The hole grew wider. He saw little boy hands and big girl hands digging from the inside.

“We didn’t think you guys were ever going to get here!” John shouted.

The sound of his son’s voice gave Daniel such a thrill that his heart almost pounded right out of his chest. He’d been so scared. He’d been fighting off the urge to begin mourning. Then he’d heard Grace and then John through the stovepipe.

“We’re sick of being stuck in here!” John yelled as if he were disgusted.

They all laughed as if that was the funniest joke they’d ever heard. John and Grace laughed, too. All of their spirits were so high that, although Daniel was exhausted from hours of hard work in the sharp cold, and he knew the other boys were, too, Daniel could feel them bursting with energy.

Daniel heard Grace’s gentle laughter from under the mountain of snow. He didn’t think he’d ever heard her laugh before. The music of it warmed him as much as the hard work.

Before long, John poked his head out of the widening hole, then dived forward and tumbled through into the outside.

“Hey, don’t leave me behind.” Grace’s good-natured voice—something else Daniel had never heard before—was full of mock indignation. Nowhere did he hear the prim, overly polite schoolmarm.

Grace scrambled out next, laughing. She jumped to her feet, threw her arms around John, and hollered, “We’re free! We made it!”

John slung his arms around her waist, and she whirled him in a circle. Then, as John’s legs flew out, she let go deliberately and tossed John into the feather-soft snow. She turned on Mark and did the same thing to him.

Mark landed in the snow beside John, who grabbed a large ball of snow and slammed it into Mark’s head. Ike got tossed next as Grace wrestled with him.

The reunion turned into a riot. Grace tackled every one of the boys. They ran wildly away from her, screaming, only to turn and attack. John joined her side and lunged at anyone who got close to them.

They were all shouting and shoving at each other when Grace turned from the chaos. Daniel caught the wicked gleam in her eye just before she charged him. She ran smack into him with her shoulder and slammed to a stop. Daniel looked down at her, feeling her arms around his waist and seeing her upturned face just inches below his. She weighed just slightly more than the average feather.

“You’re a moose,” she pouted. “How am I supposed to knock you into the snow?”

Daniel couldn’t help grinning down at her impish exasperation. “Boys, how about a little help?” Grace shouted.

In a split second, all five boys pounced. With a shout of protest, Daniel went down in a flurry of arms and legs and snow.

They continued the battle until they had nearly turned themselves into a family of snow-people.

Finally, Grace plowed a huge armload of snow into Daniel’s face. “Give up, big man. We’ve got you. Admit it.”

Daniel lay flat on his back with Grace straddling his stomach. Two of the boys were on his legs. John and Mark were clinging to his arms. Somehow Abe was halfway underneath him, with his arms wrapped around Daniel’s neck. They were all laughing like loons.

Daniel made one more Herculean effort to throw them all off, chuckling through the mouthful of snow. He managed to knock Mark loose and tip Grace forward until she almost smacked face-first into him, eating a mouthful of the snow that she’d smeared on him.

“Mark, hang on. He’s getting away.” Her golden eyes sparkled inches from his. Her cherry-red lips curved in laughter and glistened from the gleaming snow. She filled his sight. For a moment the weight of her filled his whole world.

Then his boys were back in the fray and pinned him down again. He quit fighting them from pure exhaustion. “I give.” He let all his muscles go lax and lay flat on his back, panting for air. “I give. You win.”

Grace began giggling. “We beat him, boys.”

All five of his sons cheered and jumped off him. They began dancing around in the snow like a tribe of Indians at a medicine dance.

Grace scrambled off him. Aware of every move she made, Daniel studied her. She didn’t seem to notice what she was doing to him. Leaping up, she celebrated with the boys.

Daniel lay there trying to cool down. Then he remembered his son, and the long, frightening day, and the victory over death. He staggered to his feet, his energy returning, and he joined the riot, only occasionally noticing Grace’s long, snow-soaked tendrils of hair and the glitter of gold in her hazel eyes. Only now and then, when she sassed him or laughed in his face, did he wonder how her smile tasted.

The snow had buried an overanxious prude. He’d dug up a little spitfire.

At last, with a final laugh, Grace sat right down in the snow. “That’s it. I’m tired. Party’s over.”

The boys all collapsed beside her, and Daniel dropped down on his knees in front of the line of them. They all breathed hard for a time.

“Say, how’d you know it was me Pa threw off his arm?” Mark asked, breathing hard.

Daniel braced himself for whatever trouble Mark might cause, such as telling Grace to go away and putting out that pretty spark in her eyes.

Grace laughed and pushed Mark backward in the snow. Mark just flopped back. He didn’t even try to fight.

They’d sleep good tonight, Daniel thought. As long as they didn’t have nightmares about John being buried alive. John and their ma.

“Okay, boys, here’s how it is.” Grace got to her feet. Snow stuck to her front and back, head to toe. She turned to face them.

The boys were in a straggly row in front of her, sprawled back on their elbows while Daniel knelt in the pounded-down snow at Grace’s right. He watched as she nodded her head at the boy farthest left and went down the row without hesitation. “Ike, Mark, John, Abe, and Luke.” The she jerked her head sideways and looked down at him. “And this big one, who’s so hard to get down, is Daniel. Am I right?”

Abe crossed his legs at the ankle and sat forward, plopping his elbows on his knees. “No one knows us apart. Pa’s the only one who’s mostly always right, but we fool him from time to time.”

“You do not.” Daniel tossed a handful of snow at his oldest son.

Abe smirked, and Daniel wondered what tricks these scamps had pulled on him over the years.

“Well,” Grace said, studying them, “if you set your mind to it, I’m sure you could fool anybody, because you’re a smart bunch. But when you’re just being yourselves, I never have to think about it twice.”

“But what’s the difference in us?” Luke set his face into such stubborn lines that Daniel knew they’d turn into wrinkles before he was thirty.

Grace crouched down in front of Luke. “You’ve got a line right here.” She drew a finger down between Luke’s eyes. “It’s there because you’re always thinking, planning. You’re the best planner of the bunch, I’d say, always keeping in mind what you’ve got in front of you to do.”

Daniel knew the exact line Grace was talking about.

She turned to Abe. “You and Ike are as alike as two peas in a pod, but right here,”—Grace touched the corner of Abe’s mouth—“when you smile, this corner of your mouth curls up first; then the other corner follows.”

“With Ike,”—she turned to him and reached past John and Mark—“both corners turn up together.”

She put her left thumb and index finger on Ike’s mouth and pushed his face into a grin. She smiled at him until he smiled back. She leaned away. “Two great smiles, but as different as your pa is from me.”

When Daniel thought of the differences between his wife and himself, it wasn’t their smiles that came to mind.

“Now John I know because he’s…” Grace hesitated.

Daniel knew why. John was the best behaved, the most polite. His son would die of embarrassment if Grace said that out loud, and his brothers would torment him about it forever.

“John’s got this little arch in his eyebrow, right here.” She touched him, and Daniel watched John enjoy that touch, leaning closer to Grace to make it last. She rested her cold, snowy hand on the side of his face.

Every touch she bestowed poured over the boys like water in the middle of a parched Texas summer. He saw them, each and every one, drink in the pleasure of her touch.

She’d left Mark until last. Daniel covered a grin, wondering what Grace would have to say about this rapscallion. He didn’t think Mark’s heart was tender, so she couldn’t hurt him when she described him. But he could dig in deeper in his wish to have her gone.

“And Mark. Let’s see—what do you think, Mark?” She dropped to her knees so she knelt beside Daniel in the trampled snow.

He felt as if they were together. Them against the kids. With Margaret, he’d always felt as though he was parenting mostly alone. Margaret had never been strong. Despite being large and looking hearty as a lumberjack, she’d spent a lot of time in bed, before and after the babies were born. They’d been married only six years, and the first babies had come along quickly. She’d been sick more than not that whole first year. For a year after the twins came along, she’d taken to her bed, mending from the birth. They’d had a couple of good years with the boys mostly tagging him around their Kansas farm. That had been a good time, and Daniel had been firm in his wish for there to be no more young’uns.

He hadn’t been strong enough to resist his wife, though. She was a warm, generous woman, given to a lot of laughter and far and away too many tears, especially in the year after Abe’s and Ike’s birth. One night of weakness between them after nearly three years of holding firm and he’d given her another child.

Looking at Mark, Luke, and John, he corrected himself. He’d given her
three
more children.

“Just one this time, though, Daniel,” Margaret had joked, but underneath she’d been serious. Who could have known they’d get three?

Then another year with Margaret either sitting in her rocking chair or staying in bed altogether. Daniel tended the twins, who were four at the time and starting to be real helps around the farm, doing his best to keep them away from their ma, who was more prone to tears than laughter when she was brooding with young’uns. And then the triplets came.

And Margaret went.

He was grateful when Grace interrupted his unhappy memories. It was Grace’s fault he’d started thinking of Margaret. Because he could see that if he wasn’t careful, there’d be babies between him and his new wife, too.

“The truth of it is”—Grace laid her hand on Mark’s cheek—“I just know you by the fire in your eyes. Luke’s the planner, figuring out how to make things work.”

Daniel noticed she didn’t mention planning revenge. That was Luke’s greatest talent. But come to think of it, he did have a practical streak. Daniel knew that. He’d just never put it into words.

He watched Mark pretend to ignore Grace’s soft hand. But he didn’t pull away, and Mark was a boy who didn’t put up with anything he didn’t like.

“You’re the idea man. You come up with one great idea after another.” Grace arched her eyebrows at Mark, and he grinned at her, not a repentant bone in his body.

“You come up with them.” She jabbed a finger at Mark.

She turned to Abe. “You throw in.”

“Ike and John do the hard work to make sure your scheme of the day gets done, and you”—she turned to Luke—“make sure nothing gets missed, no detail is overlooked, and no poor, defenseless teacher or mother is left untormented.”

With an indelicate snort, she shook her head. “My word, if General Grant had you boys on his side, the Civil War would have ended the first weekend. How could I not know you apart?”

Daniel looked at his boys. Yes, as alike as peas in a pod. Yes, as different as day and night.

Ike studied her. “No one else can tell between us.”

Abe sat up straight. “You know, you’ve been telling us apart since the first day we came to school, haven’t you?”

“She has,” Luke said, nodding. “I didn’t think much of it—figured you knew where we sat or something—but you’ve always gotten it right.”

Grace shrugged. “It’s easy.”

“It’s hard,” Mark insisted.

“Not for me.”

Luke said quietly, “For everybody.”

Grace grinned at them all. Daniel thought she looked like a child herself down in the snow teasing his boys.

“Well, I’m not apologizing for it. You’re as different as can be and that’s that.”

The boys stared at her with a mixture of fascination and fear, as though maybe she had some magic power that let her know who was who.

As he studied them, his boys so alike, he remembered how this whole snowball fight had started—a celebration of life.