Paxton Pride (35 page)

Karen stood and looked down at her new mother-in-law. So tiny, so frail for one so strong. Impulsively she bent and gently hugged her. “Good night, Elizabeth.”

“Good night, dear. I'm so very, very glad you're here.”

Karen smiled at her, turned to leave, stopping at the door but not looking back when Elizabeth said, “He loves you, Karen. I know he loves you.”

Karen closed the door quietly behind her. She was angry at herself for lying, yet knew it had been the right thing to do. As for the party, she was expected to return. She went to her room and glanced in the mirror. Already her gown was grimy from all the dancing and eating but she was determined to keep it on. Deciding an extra touch was needed she opened her trunk and took out her jewel box. The cameo pendant was gone!

In the courtyard, Marcelina had joined the festivities, dancing with first one then another of the ranch hands. Occasionally her eyes locked with Karen's but they remained cold and unrevealing. And Vance? Not dancing nor at the tables. Nor with his father. Then she saw him across the patio. He had changed clothes and was wearing exactly what he had worn the night of the party when they had looked into the depths of each other's heart and knew their love. He was walking toward her as he had then, through the dancers, through the clusters of amiable conversation, his eyes straight ahead, unswerving in his goal.
He is still the most handsome of them all
. Close to her now, be stooped and picked her up, held her as if she weighed no more than a feather. The move surprised her and left her too shocked to struggle. The men cheered wildly and, to the sound of shouts and laughter and gunfire, she found herself half up the stairs before she realized she was not prepared, had not planned for the wedding night.

He shoved open the door to her room with his foot, closed it the same way. A coal oil lamp burned low, burnishing the walls with orange. Vance set her down and kissed her, but she broke free. “No … please, Vance.”

“We are husband and wife now.”

“That's not what I mean.”

“If you're thinking of San Antonio, forget it. It is behind us now.”

“Is it?”

“For me it is.”

“Perhaps my memory is clearer than yours. Perhaps I cannot forget as easily as you. I can still see that poor man. What we did was wrong.”

“What we did was right. Violence is only one aspect of life.”

“I don't agree.”

“Yes, you do. The violence before was always hidden from you. Done by other men far from your sight. Here we are more honest.”

“Death is honesty?”

“No. Death is a change, to be accepted honestly.”

Karen scowled. “Change, change, change. Everyone keeps saying
I
have to change, to accept.”

Vance pulled her close, kissing her again, bruising her lips with his hunger.

“No. No, I don't want this.”

“Yes, you do. We both do.” He unbuttoned his shirt, kicked out of his boots. The rest of his clothes followed and he was naked. Karen averted her eyes. “This is our room, Karen. From now on.”

“I shall sleep elsewhere.” She started for the door but Vance stepped to her. This time his embrace was unbreakable, his tongue darting, provoking. The bed was beneath her now, the bed … how? She didn't remember being forced backward, only the kiss … the kiss. Suddenly the hunger in her was unleashed. Her eyes glazed and closed as she watched the man and the woman; and the woman was her and she experienced … everything.

And when later she lay next to him in the night and felt the slowly cooling furnace of his body, she wondered how complete their passion had been, for there was still within her that which she could not give him. Their love had yet to be truly consummated. The dark closed around those thoughts, around the bed and the woman who would not change, who had locked her heart. And the man who pretended to be asleep, but knew he had lost the key.

Elizabeth dreamed of the hill, the twin cedars, gnarled and beckoning, whispering her name. Underneath the trees three restless forms shifted in their long wait. After all these years, did they too call? Or was it only the south wind, the wind of infinite whispers? Time.… Time.…

She awoke and reached out for True, then realized he was in the next room.
All for the best. Poor Karen … trying so hard to fool me when it is plain as day something is wrong between them. Love is never easy. Karen and Vance. They'll learn. They need time, is all. We did, too, didn't we, True. Two peas in a pod. Thirty-eight years. True. Thirty-eight lovely years. Vance! Three sons and a daughter … now a real daughter … I wish I could tell you.… I wish I could tell you.… True …? True!

“Did I ever tell you True?” she asked aloud, grasping at an imaginary hand.

CHAPTER VII

The wind whispered eulogies of dust among the weathered crosses tightly clustered within the wrought iron fence under the gnarled cedars. The dust rose, swirled and settled, silent as memories. Her hair drifting out behind her like a cape of glittering flaxen gold, Karen kept her face to the breeze, savoring the faintest touch of fall in its northern breath. The oaks were changing from their deep green to brilliant yellow. Sumac there was on a far hill, purple now, tinged and ribboned with crimson and flaming orange. The mesquite would quietly slip to brown and shed their light summer coats, leaving naught but a puzzle of scraggly bare lines against the sky. The cedars would remain ever green. Enduring.

There were four crosses now. Four.… Karen placed a handful of tiny bright yellow button asters beneath the name of the only person she knew who might have understood her, led her to understand more clearly. It was the tenth of September. Elizabeth had been gone two months—how quickly time passed—and Karen still felt her loss deeply.

She had died the very night of Karen and Vance's wedding. True found her the next morning, lying peacefully, smiling, her face utterly calm with but a hint of an unanswered question in her blindly staring eyes. That same morning Harley Guinn shaped a crude coffin and lashed it between the two sure-footed mules which led the somber procession up the winding, broad path to the hill—to the waiting garden of crosses wrapped by the wrought iron fence and watched over by the wind—where Elizabeth was placed with her sons and infant daughter, at rest at last. A stranger ceremony Karen had never seen. The preacher, an overnight guest, read from the Bible. Then Ted Morning Sky stepped forth and chanted a Comanche prayer, having first built a little fire of fragrant cedar, the smoke of which he wafted to all four directions with a broad, fan-like eagle feather. The chant intrigued Karen. So lonely, a solitary, sing-song lament, sent to echo down the long corridors of wind and hide for all time among the wild, unvisited places. Yet not plaintive. Not pitiable. Rather a voice at one with its surroundings, a voice of peace, a voice of the ages gathered into repetitive syllables suggesting not so much an end but rather a continuation. The chant finished, True knelt, crumbled a handful of earth and sifted it onto the living flames until the fire was snuffed out and only a faint trail of smoke drifted up to dissipate in the sharp cedar needles above. True looked up at Vance, his eyes red-rimmed and old. “Over thirty-eight years, boy. It's hard. Goddamn, but it's hard.” Vance nodded silently in answer, turning his face as the men set the cross. like the others, the name had been burned into the wood.

ELIZABETH ANN PAXTON

Born January 12, 1817—Died July 10, 1873

A wife and mother. No man ever had better
.

Karen read the inscription again. How little was left behind. A memory, a heart's pang, a name charred on a hand-hewn board. Was this all? And as if in answer the wind sprang up, washed around her with its airy tides. The cedars shimmered beneath the chilly caress and added their beauty, at one with the spirit of the woman gone but never truly absent as long as the evergreens pointed to the stars and the verdant yellow plains spent their grassy tides on the breakers of the hills.

This was not the first time Karen had come to visit Elizabeth. Hardly a week went by when she did not ask Harley to saddle the chestnut mare, by now her favorite. And always she came to this same sun-washed, lofty hill. There were other taller, bolder, greener hills to be sure, but it was here she came, where her one friend lay. She turned away, staring out across the plains. A blue jay squawled at her from the tree overhead, cocked an inquisitive and blaming eye, examining the woman who watched the tableland stretch into an infinity of shifting umber and cinnamon. “Elizabeth.… I'll be having Vance's child. I should have told you two weeks ago when I was here, but I was so confused. Do you remember your first time? It's funny, in a way. I'm not frightened yet, even if I will be later. I still have trouble believing it. Vance and True.… Oh, the way news gets around, I'm certain the whole ranch knows. And everyone seems so different. So concerned. Even True, and he doesn't even think me a fit wife for a Paxton. But their attitudes toward me haven't changed, not underneath where it counts. They're being nice to me because I carry a Paxton, not because they've made any attempt to understand how I feel. I'm always being compared, Elizabeth, constantly compared to you and found lacking. Never quite measuring up nor meeting whatever standards they've decided I should meet. You are gone and nothing is ever going to bring you back, though I wish otherwise. If they'd only teach me, perhaps … no. No excuses. I am quite simply not you. Karen Olivia Hampton … Paxton … is not their Elizabeth.”

It was early afternoon when she led her horse back up the valley, her mind still awash with thoughts she had not been able to reveal even to the dead Elizabeth. In spite of the haunting reminder of the dying woman's last words, she had come to believe the match between her and Vance had been ill-fated from the first. She didn't want to believe so, hesitated to admit she could have deluded herself so completely. And yet … what else could the last two months lead her to believe? Ruefully she had to admit she had adapted poorly to the new surroundings and way of life. Already teetering on the edge, Elizabeth's death had sent her plunging into a pit of despondency, bitterness and disillusionment, a state viewed by everyone else on the ranch as surly indolence and peevish, aristocratic incompetence. Consumed, exhausted and drained by the heat, the confusing business of running a ranch, of which she was totally ignorant, and the unexpected and unvoiced demands from all sides that she assume Elizabeth's varied and myriad roles, she could do little but reel about ineffectively from sunup to bedtime. At first she clung to Vance as she would a rock. She forced herself to rationalize and minimize the events in San Antonio and the irrational anger leading to and following their wedding night. The hazy confusion of the days was relieved by the incandescent fantasies filling the nights as she sought with her body the surety she could not find in her mind. And for a while the tactic worked. Vance disguised his growing fury at her ineptitude and inability and, driven by his own insatiable needs, reassured himself during the frantic nights: she would become the woman of whom he had dreamed.

But the deception could not last forever. One early morning Vance rose early as usual, silently so as not to waken her. He dressed in the dark and headed for the door, tripping on a small box Karen had inadvertently left lying in the middle of the floor. Karen wakened in time to hear him curse under his breath and add, his voice low and venomous as he stalked out of the room, “Jesus Christ! Can't you do
any
thing right?”

The words froze her, curled her stomach in a knot. His true feelings, stripped of their disguise, shocked her into a stupor from which she could emerge only slowly and with great difficulty. The day that followed was a nightmare. She noticed little things theretofore passing beyond her recognition. Maruja's patience as she tried to teach her for the tenth time how to make
tortillas
was followed by a secret, despairing shake of the head. And worst of all, she picked out the tiny, subtle differences in Vance at supper and afterward when they sat around the living room. He seldom looked directly at her, and when he did his eyes slid quickly back to his book. He seldom spoke, and when he did the tone was faintly conciliatory, the dissatisfaction but barely hidden. That night when they went to bed, Karen turned her back to him and ignored his probing, teasing fingers. Real love denied her, she would deny them both the false balm of flesh.

The next two weeks were a hollow charade in which she turned every bit of Hampton energy in her to the problem at hand, forcing herself to listen and learn, to become, at the very least, coldly efficient in spite of the emptiness in her heart. Her plan was simple. When she knew all she needed to know, she would leave, somehow return to San Antonio and from there eventually to Washington or New York. Not back to her father, certainly, for that was denied her. Yet there were friends she could count on in either city. Somehow she would function.

The simple plan was thwarted the day she suspected another life grew within her. Assuming the first missed period the result of the arduous journey, she hadn't worried, but when the time came again and nothing happened, the thought of a child crept in unbidden. A thought that would not be shaken. Four days later she knew as surely as if the best doctors in Washington had issued a proclamation and that night, as they were preparing for bed, she told Vance.

The world changed. Vance warmed to her, watched her carefully lest she do too much. The tension in True's eyes eased suddenly and he could be seen looking at her with what might even have been called tenderness. Maruja was more patient, more explicit, could be seen at odd hours with a sewing basket filled with blue yarn. At first Karen enjoyed the change, but joy switched rapidly to bitterness as the realization grew that no one cared about her, cared only for the new baby—the new Paxton—burgeoning inside her. Then even the bitterness waned: for whatever the reason, she was grateful for any respite from the theretofore unnaturally formal atmosphere in which the house was so thoroughly steeped. She remained wary, though, and still resisted Vance's nightly suggestions, guarded though they were. In spite of the enforced celibacy she imposed so completely, the new warmth persisted until that morning when she awakened to scalding tears and the shattering knowledge she was even more intricately, inextricably caught by the swiftly growing, unseen baby. With a logic as sharp as crystal she realized all earlier traps were but artifices of the mind compared to this one. Vance, no matter what his real or hidden opinion of her, would not be denied his own child. There would be no escape, and there was no one to tell but Elizabeth. But when the time came to speak, even to the empty wind, she had not been able to say the words.