ROMANCE: MAIL ORDER BRIDE: The Other Man’s Baby (A Clean Christian Historical Western) (New Adult Inspirational Pregnancy Romance) (21 page)

L
arkin hitched up Grant and Lee to the wagon and set out on his journey to Santa Teresa, stopping midway in the town of Claire Hancy, where he spent the night in the hotel. Before leaving for the last leg of the trip, he made a stop at the general store to buy supplies that a woman might want. The storekeeper didn’t know him and wouldn’t be curious about a stranger presenting him with a list for bolts of gingham, calico, and cotton; seeds; lengths of ribbon in assorted colors; several pounds of horehound candy; a new skillet; a blanket; and needles, thread, pins, and scissors.

Lorna’s sewing basket was packed away, not to be used ever again by anyone; his memories of Lorna’s hands flying briskly across a length of cloth were too vivid for him to allow another woman to take her place. He wavered for a moment as he considered the toys; a four-year-old girl might want a doll, he supposed, so he told the storekeeper to add one to the other purchases.

He paid for his purchases and turned to leave. As he did, he saw the candy jar. “A bag of peppermint sticks,” he said. He knew even less about children than he knew about women; he and Lorna hadn’t been blessed. Peppermint sticks might make the child feel a little more at home.

As his wagon methodically marked away the miles, until Santa Teresa was in sight, Kenyon reined the horses in and stopped. Grant and Lee tossed their heads, awaiting the signal to move on. It was Lorna who had named the horses after the famous generals who had led the opposing forces, not because she thought the conflict that split the Union was a trivial matter, but because she was glad it was over.

Larkin gave the reins a light slap and the horses began to move forward. At least there was some consolation in this marriage, he reasoned as the buildings of Santa Teresa came into view. If something did happen to this wife, he wouldn’t be wrenched in two again. He’d never feel that deeply for anyone else again.

The morning was passing quickly. The distance between Beulah Land and Santa Teresa seemed to be diminishing, both for the lanky Texas and for the subdued widow, each awaiting and dreading the arrival of the other.

Feather looked up at her mother. “You look pretty, mama,” she said again.

Salome placed her hand on her daughter’s braids. “Thank you,” she responded soberly, accepting the girl’s praise for the tribute that it was. It had been a long time since Salome had taken note of her appearance and Feather was used to seeing her mother with an ever-present apron over a faded dress.

But the women of Santa Teresa had insisted that she should be dressed properly for a wedding, and Father Diego had agreed with them. Santa Teresa needed to see that it was possible to begin again, he had told her. If she went to her wedding in her old, worn-out clothes, where would the others receive the inspiration to rise to new life? The women had sewn her dress for her; it was a simple blue-checked frock with a white collar and cuffs. She wore a straw bonnet that one of the women gave her; the bonnet has a blue ribbon around the crown that matched her dress. Her bare, ringless hand looked odd to her; all morning, as she waited for Larkin to arrive, she found herself rubbing the barren finger.

“I think he’s coming,” said Margarita excitedly. Margarita was only fifteen and any wedding was romantic to her. She had been skipping back and forth to the window all morning. “Shall I go and tell him to come in?”

“Father Diego is waiting for him,” Jeanne, one of the older women in the community, said. “But go ahead and welcome him.”

The women smiled as Margarita danced out of the room. Through the window, Salome could see the horse-drawn wagon entering through the gates. She saw a man step down from the wagon in a single, seamless leap to the ground. His hat concealed his features from view, but she could see that he was lean in that way that Texas men seemed to have, as if a life lived out of doors knitted their muscles to their bones and discarded any excess.

Father Diego approached. She saw Kenyon Larkin tip his hat to the priest, standing while Father Diego greeted him. Margarita, belatedly remembering her dignity, abruptly stopped running and went up to him and began to speak. Kenyon tipped his hat to her as well.

“He’s a gentleman,” Jeanne pronounced.

Salome felt nervous and wasn’t sure why. He could choose against her; they weren’t married yet. She didn’t know if she was pretty enough; John Cloud Feather always told her she was beautiful, but she hadn’t felt beautiful since losing him. But she hadn’t wanted to feel beautiful. On this second wedding day, she wanted to be whatever she needed to be in order for him to marry her and accept Feather into his home. In the end, that was why she’d consented to let the women make her new dress, and why she’d agreed to wear a borrowed bonnet. This wedding was for Feather.

Margarita raced back into the room. “He’s very handsome,” she said excitedly. “He’s tall. He has blue eyes. His hair is so blond that it almost looks white. But it’s not,” she corrected hurriedly, lest anyone misunderstand and assume that Salome was marrying an old man. “His eyes are so blue,” she repeated, determined to emphasize the point because for Margarita, the blueness of his eyes seemed important.

The women smiled, remembering in Margarita’s enthusiastic praise their own youth, when a handsome young man had caught their eye. Santa Teresa had little to offer a pretty young girl these days. In Salome’s marriage, the young girls dared to hope and the older women allowed themselves to reminisce.
“Salome?” Jeanne had taken on the role of bride’s mother during the time of preparation, doing everything she could to turn a mail order marriage into a courtship. “Are you ready?”

Tears welled up in Salome’s blue eyes. “I don’t—“

Margarita stared. “Why are you crying? He’s handsome. I thought he might be ugly.”

Jeanne started laughing and the mirth was infectious. The other women clustered in the small room also began to laugh until Salome was laughing with them, her sobs conquered by the happiness of her friends who were joyful for her. Father Diego was right about the wedding; the community needed it. Few towns had as much in common as this motley assortment of orphans, widows, and lost souls, and yet Salome doubted if any town had as much affection for its inhabitants as Santa Teresa’s people had for one another.

Now that he had arrived, there was an argument over whether Salome should see her future husband before the wedding. Several of the women said it was bad luck, but Jeanne scoffed. “It’d be worse luck to say your ‘I dos’ to a man you’ve never even said ‘howdy’ to. Tell him to come back here and meet his bride, and all of us mother hens will clear out and give them some privacy.”  Jeanne squeezed Salome’s hand as Margarita rushed out to deliver the message. “You’re doing what you have to do for that little one and for John Cloud Feather. It’s not good to be alone, you mind me?”

Salome nodded in acquiescence. “John would want that,” Jeanne went on. “He was a good man. But this world doesn’t always let the good live. We keep on going. You build a home with this Mr. Larkin and you keep on going.”

“I will.”

There was a movement at the door, and then the entrance was filled by a tall man who had to bend his head to enter the room. He had taken off his hat, holding it in his hands tightly. Margarita was correct in her description; his thick blond hair was so sun-bleached that a quick glance made his locks look white. But no old man had such a thick head of hair, curling slightly at the neck and forehead from the heat of the day. Margarita had been right as well about his eyes; they were jewel blue, lighter than sapphire, darker than turquoise, and they were all the more remarkable against the deep tan of his skin. He had a rangy build, his body tall and lean; he was the kind of man who was built out of bone and muscle with the flesh that covered it stretched taut. She couldn’t help herself as she thought of John Cloud Feather, who had been stocky, dark-haired and dark-eyed, a man who greeted the world with a smile on his lips and in his eyes.

Salome felt relief because her new husband looked nothing like her first husband.

L
arkin had intended to head back as soon as the ceremony was finished, but Father Diego suggested that it would be better to spend the night in Santa Teresa and then set out early the next morning. Kenyon could see the wisdom of the priest’s advice. The day as already half over, and they’d be traveling with a child. She was a quiet child, but alert; Kenyon noticed that she watched him with those round, brown eyes intent upon him throughout the ceremony.

The woman, Salome, repeated the vows in a low-pitched voice, her words clear and her voice devoid of inflection. Larkin doubted if he sounded any more enthusiastic. He was just relieved to see that she looked nothing like Lorna, whose curly brown hair was the color of molasses and whose brown eyes lit up like the 4
th
of July when she smiled, which she generally did. This woman was yellow-haired and blue-eyed; the child must have taken after the father. Kenyon hadn’t expected an Indian child, but that was his own fault for not asking. Beulah Land might not take to an Indian child in school, but it wasn’t the child’s fault that she came of Indian stock. Her mother was fair and womanly looking. But she was not Lorna. If he’d been a praying man, he’d have thanked God for giving him that much, at least.

The ladies had prepared a wedding feast; there was roasted chicken and pork; beans; biscuits, and cake; they were all foods that reminded him of Lorna. He didn’t have much of an appetite. He noticed that the woman didn’t either. She didn’t talk much and when she passed him the bowls of food, her eyes were lowered. He moved the fork from his plate to his mouth and chewed, then thanked her when she passed the food to him, but he wasn’t hungry.

The other women kept the conversation going; there was laughter, a lot of it. Larkin wasn’t any ways sure what caused the laughter but it made it easier for him to be silent and he liked that. The priest didn’t have much to say but Larkin saw how his eyes watched them together. What he was watching for, Larkin couldn’t have said, but he seemed all right for a Roman. Larkin had mainly known Methodists and Baptists in his life, but the priest wasn’t too out of the way in his way of talking about God and those sorts of matters. Larkin supposed he should tell her that Beulah Land didn’t have a Roman church.

She looked startled when he addressed her. He had a low voice, not much range to it; the kind of a voice that could yell “Fire” and “I love you” and sound pretty much the same. Larkin explained about the church.

“There’s just a Baptist,” he said. “If you’re a churchgoer, that’s the only one.”

“That’s fine,” she answered, which didn’t tell him whether she planned to attend Sunday services or whether she didn’t. He’d gone with Lorna because Lorna was raised in the church. He had been church-raised too, but somehow war took that out of him. He’d gone to church for Lorna. When God took Lorna from him, Larkin saw no reason to go back on Sundays.

Larkin concentrated on his plate of food. It would be unmannerly to leave food on it; they’d gone to some effort and trouble to feed him. He chewed with diligence as his way of participating in the celebration which was foreign to him. These were good people; he could see that. They’d suffered too from the floods. The priest had told him that the residents of the mission community were being relocated because the floods had caused so much damage that it wasn’t worth rebuilding, even in an area where pine, oak, and other trees flourished.  But it was likely that it wasn’t just the buildings, Larkin realized. It was likely the spirit that had gone out of them. People could only take on so much grief and loss before they figured it was quitting time. The priest would never quit; Larkin could tell that he wasn’t the type. But he wasn’t the one who made the decisions. Priests had bosses, too, probably, although Larkin didn’t know who they answered to besides God.

He saw a white-cuffed hand on his forearm; startled, he realized that the woman was handing him a bowl of potatoes. “No thank you,” he said. “Plenty on my plate.”

He noticed that as the woman lifted her arm, two round brown eyes were looking at him. The little girl was now his stepdaughter.

“Howdy,” he said. He hadn’t exchanged words with her yet and didn’t really know what to say. He didn’t know much about children.

She nodded. “Hello.”

The woman, Salome, set back a bit so that the child could see better.

“What’s your name?”

“Feather Gascoigne. You’re Mr. Kenyon Larkin.”
 

“I am.”

She continued to watch him. Her gaze was steadfast but not unsettling. She had a clear-sighted way of sizing up a person, he realized. He wondered what she was thinking.

“Do you like dolls?” he asked.

“I don’t have a doll.”

“Yes you do,” he said.
“She had a doll before,” the woman said to him softly. “We—it was lost in the flood.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Could you use another one?”
 

The little girl looked at him curiously. “You have dolls?” She sounded disbelieving that a grown man would have such a thing.

Despite himself, Larkin felt a smile, and then a laugh, emerge from him like something taken out of storage. “I do,” he said in a jocular tone. “I have one doll. Would you like to see her?”

The little girl looked to her mother, who nodded. Before he realized what was happening, the child had scrambled from her seat and was standing at his side.
 

“Guess you better deliver on that doll,” called out one of the women, a plain-faced woman of middle years who probably, before the flood, had a husband and a family and a home and now had become the mother to this lot. Or maybe there had been some other disaster that robbed her of what she loved. East Texas had plenty of weapons in its deathly arsenal.

“Guess so,” he said, standing up.

He was surprised when the little girl took his hand. He didn’t know that he’d ever held a child by the hand before. She had a trusting grip, even with those little fingers that were fairly lost in his grasp.

When they left the room, Jeanne said, “I’d say Feather has found a friend.”

She didn’t say that Feather had found a daddy, although Salome guessed that was what everyone was thinking and hoping. To be realistic, Salome knew that she had to hope the same, even though she didn’t want John to be displaced in Feather’s affections or memory.

“A good man,” Father Diego said quietly. Salome knew that the priest was a shrewd judge of character and not one to lavish praise where it was unmerited. She’d seen him talking with Kenyon Larkin before the wedding, and they’d been joined together in conversation before the eating got underway.

Father Diego would tell her that there were times when it was necessary to put trust in God, regardless of how she felt. “Don’t get in God’s way,” he had advised her more than once. “He has a plan and you’re part of it.” After her husband’s death, when she’d cried out to ask if that meant that John’s death was part of God’s plan, the priest had folded his hands in front of him. “God has a plan,” he’d repeated. “We don’t understand it. We laugh when there is joy and we cry when there is grief. But we must remember that God laughs and cries with us.”

When Feather came back, she had a doll in her arms and a bag of peppermint sticks in her hand. She was no longer holding Kenyon Larkin’s hand but it was apparent that they’d reached a new level of understanding because when she sat back down, she planted herself between her mother and her mother’s new husband. Salome didn’t say anything; she just moved down a space on the bench and put her daughter’s plate in front of Feather.

“Did you thank Mr. Larkin for the doll?” Salome asked, knowing that of course Feather had done so; she was a well-mannered child.

Kenyon Larkin answered for Feather. “She did.  She’s been well brought up.”

“I need to name her,” Feather announced, ignoring the conversation about her manners and concentrating on the more important matter of her doll.

“Name her Jeanne, after me!”

“Name her Margarita!”

Feather considered these suggestions, then looked up at Kenyon Larkin.

“What should I name her?”

“She’s your dolly, you should decide.”
“But you brought her,” Feather argued with straightforward logic. “What’s your favorite name?”

“Lorna,” he said before he thought better of it.

Feather held her doll in front of her, giving the toy the unblinking stare that revealed the intense importance of the decision. “Lorna,” she repeated. Then she nodded. “Lorna.”

“Feather, finish your food before it gets cold,” her mother told her. “There’s pie for dessert and you know how much you love Jeanne’s pie.”
Jeanne had made extra pies so that they would have one to take back with them. Food didn’t last long in the heat, which even in the spring was building to its usual temperature, but it would be good to have something from home to bring to the new place where she and Feather would live. Memories would have to serve her when the food was gone.