Dakota Dusk (13 page)

“Alma!”

“Mrs. Sampson.” Her voice cut through the air like the buggy whip she’d used earlier.

“I want to press charges.” Nels thumped his fist on the table. “Put them all behind bars. Look what they did to my saloon.” He thumped again.

Sheriff Jordan swung around, his fists clenched. “Just get outside right now, Nels, before I throw you in the clink. I got fifty women here to deal with and I ain’t got enough jail cells for ten. You got any better suggestions, you just tell me now or leave. I’ll talk with you later.”

“Well, I never!” The saloon owner looked around the room until he was impaled on Mrs. Sampson’s glare. “I’ll be back.” He pushed his way out of the room, no “Please” or “Excuse me” left in his gullet.

Mrs. Sampson and Sheriff Jordan faced each other over the desk again, like a replay of the Monday before.

The women kept on singing.

Out of the corner of her eye, Rebekka watched the standoff, careful to keep on singing even though her throat felt raw like a ground-up piece of meat. She tried to keep a grin from cracking her face. The orders had been to keep a straight face and keep on singing. She tried to hear what they said but, short of moving out of her place, she couldn’t distinguish the words.

Their faces said plenty however. Glare for glare they stared and stormed like two bears over a kill.

Sheriff Jordan threw his arms up in the air. “All right, ladies, about face. Go on home. And stay there!” His roar matched the shotgun that he used for crowd control.

The singing stopped.

“And what are you going to do about the saloon?” Mrs. Sampson cut through the silence.

“I don’t know.”

The women turned as one and marched out the door. Out on the street, they let themselves smile for the first time.

Rebekka watched them head for their homes.
But what will they face when they get there?
The thought wiped the smile from her face.

“Don’t you worry none about us,” Mrs. Jordan said in a low voice, as if having read Rebecca’s thoughts. “We know how to handle these men of ours, most of us anyway.”

“Nels won’t be rebuilding.”

“What? You mean that?” Rebekka asked as she dropped her satchel on the table. “How did you hear?”

“Sheriff Jordan came by to say there are no charges being filed. Gave me a lecture on civil disobedience, however.” Mrs. Sampson spread the frosting on a chocolate layer cake in front of her. “Said if he’d had a bigger force, he’d a’clapped us all in jail until we rotted.” She turned the cake, her eyes twinkling above the smile that came and went. “But he’da needed a bigger hoosegow, too.”

“But what will Nels do about the saloon?” asked Rebekka as she dipped a finger in the bowl and licked off the frosting.

“Well, the building wasn’t his, he rents it, so I ’spect he’ll build a place somewhere on the outside of town.” She checked the cake to make sure she hadn’t missed any spots.

“Then we failed.” Rebekka felt her shoulders slump.

“No. We stood up for what we believed and now the men of this county know their women can accomplish something when they all get together. But unless prohibition goes through, there’ll always be places men can drink and play cards. You gotta remember, some women like to join them.”

In mid-November, the setting sun was slanting across the snowdrifts when Jude was returning to the boardinghouse. As he rode past the school, he wished it were earlier so he could have given Rebekka a ride home or at least walked with her. The snow in the schoolyard had been trampled by many feet, a circle for “Run, Goose, Run” packed by the game players.

Just past the school he saw three angels formed in the snow, one large and two small. “Who do you think made those?” he asked the only live creature around, his horse. The black gelding tossed his head and snorted. Jude shook his head. Here he was, the man who’d rather not talk with anyone and now he was so starved for conversation, he even talked with a horse.

“It’s all her fault, you know.” Prince nodded then tugged on the bit. Home lay just across the wooden bridge. “What am I to do?” Prince lifted his tired feet a bit higher. He pulled at the bit again, his ears pricked toward the town ahead.

The horse’s feet thudded across the bridge. Beneath, the creek lay frozen, drifted snow filling the creek bed nearly to the tops of the banks. Snow muffled the clop, clop of the hooves on the timbers.

The stillness of the schoolyard and winter silence of the creek made the jangle of the bit ring loud on the crisp air. Somewhere ahead a door slammed. Smoke curled up from chimneys and lighted windows beckoned a traveler home.

Prince turned on Sampson Street and broke into a trot. “I have to tell her, don’t I?” Prince shook his head and picked up the pace.

Before he headed up the walk to the house, Jude led the horse into the barn, threw in some hay, and dumped a pan of oats in the manger. By the time he hit the back porch, he was nearly running. He leaped up the steps and kicked snow off his boots. His coat caught the hook along with his hat, and his saddlebags hit the floor. He pulled off his boots at the jack and padded to the door to the kitchen. Heavenly smells assailed his nostrils, and the sounds from inside said supper wasn’t yet on the table.

As he opened the door, he knew why he was so excited—he was home! Rebekka jumped up from grading her papers at the table and took a step toward him, her smile wide as the sun on a summer day.

“Welcome home, stranger.” Mrs. Sampson spun around and gave him a hug.

Jude stopped as if he’d been struck.

Mrs. Sampson patted his cheeks with both her hands. “Does you good, boy. You need more affection in your life. Just want you to know how much we’ve missed you.” He looked over her shoulder to Rebekka.

What he wouldn’t give to have her in his arms instead. He returned the older woman’s hug and squeezed Mrs. Knutson’s hand. When he straightened, his gaze refused to leave Rebekka’s. The two looked deep into the other’s eyes, all the while separated by five feet of kitchen floor and a lifetime of sorrows and fears, hopes and dreams.

“Hello, Rebekka,” his voice cracked.

“I . . . we’re glad you’re back.” She clamped her fingers around the back of the chair so she wouldn’t throw herself in his arms. Why could Mrs. Sampson hug him? What would happen if she just walked across the canyon separating them and into his arms? What would he do? What would she do?

“I hear you’re a prohibition rabble-rouser.”

“Oh.” She mentally shook herself. A grin broke loose and shattered her reserve. “It was nothing. We just busted up a saloon and almost got thrown into prison. All fifty of us, all women.”

“Way I heard it, there were axes flying and whips and over a hundred yelling and screaming womenfolk, driving the poor men of Willowford right out into the cold of night.”

Rebekka threw back her head and laughed, a contagious sound that invited everyone to join in. “So that’s how the story has grown.” She looked to the two widows who were chuckling along with her. But when her gaze returned to Jude, her breath stopped.

He was smiling. A real smile that banished the sadness from his eyes and crinkled the corners. “You women are some piece of work.” Even his teeth showed.

It was all she could do not to fling herself across the space. He smiled! Jude, the sad, not only spoke a longer piece than she’d heard from him yet, but his smile . . .

“Supper’s on the table soons you wash up.” Mrs. Sampson plunked a pitcher of hot water in front of Jude. “Your room’s been closed up, so it’ll be a mite chilly, but leave the door and the register open and it’ll be warm in no time.”

“Thanks.” Jude walked back out into the back entry, picked up his saddlebags and then the pitcher on his way back through the kitchen. “You musta known I was coming.” He nodded at the cake on the counter.

“If I’da knowed you was coming, I’da baked you an apple pie.” Mrs. Sampson turned to finish the gravy she was stirring on the stove.

Rebekka heard a ghost of a chuckle float back from the dining room. A smile and a chuckle all on the same day? Would wonders never cease?

That night after filling Jude in on all that had gone on in his absence, they broke out the instruments and played all the tunes they could think of.

“How ‘bout another piece of cake with our coffee?” Mrs. Sampson asked as she put away her gutbucket. “This sure has been mighty pleasurable.”

Rebekka closed the cover on the keyboard. “I’d love some.” She spun around on the stool and caught herself falling into the deepest blue eyes she’d ever seen. Clear, warm, like a lake on a summer’s day.

“Me, too.” Jude reached for her hand and pulled her to her feet. “Rebekka, we need to talk.”

“Cake’s on.” Mrs. Knutson stopped in the doorway arch. “Oh, excuse me . . . I mean . . .”

“We’re coming.” The mood lay in tatters at their feet.

As Christmas drew nearer, the days seemed to move in double time. Rebekka, like many others, ordered many of her Christmas gifts from the Sears catalog, at least those she didn’t make herself. As the packages arrived on the train, she wrapped them and placed those for her family in a trunk. She’d take them with her when she boarded the train for Minneapolis the day after the pageant.

At school, preparations for the pageant progressed on schedule. One night Rebekka asked Jude if he would help make the sets for the Christmas play.

“Of course. When would you like the help?”

“Would tomorrow be all right? John and two of the other boys need some carpentering help and then the painters can go to work.”

“Sounds like a major production.”

“Oh, it is, and the children wrote most of it themselves. They even composed two songs to use.” She sat down at the piano and played through both tunes, singing the words along with the melody. “See, aren’t they wonderful?”

Jude nodded.
Yes, you are,
he thought.
Wonderful and beautiful and . . .
He closed his thoughts off like shutting the damper on a stove. And not for him. When he told her what he’d done, she’d close down that wonderful smile and turn away, afraid to be with a man who had killed his wife.

The day before the pageant, the blizzard struck. It howled across the plains and the Missouri for three days, burying everything in drifts ten feet tall and twice as wide. Then it shoveled up the drifts and tossed them in the air, blowing with a fury unstopped by humans or their flimsy houses.

No one ventured out. The trains stopped in the nearest town. Only the furious wind, driving the snow before it, lived on the prairie.

On Christmas day, the world awoke to silence. Silence so deep it hurt the ears to hear it. While bitter cold captured the drifted snow and froze it into mountains and ridges, the sun reflected off the glittering expanses to blind anyone who ventured forth.

“Are you sorry you couldn’t visit your grandmother?” Jude asked as he and Rebekka stood at the kitchen window. They could see the rope connecting house and barn that lay partially buried beneath the frozen crust. Jude had followed it to go out and feed Prince during the storm.

“I’m more sorry about the pageant. The children worked so hard and, for some of them, the presents at school might have been the only ones they received.”

“You can always put it on in January.”

“We will. It’s just that they were so excited. You lose some of that with delaying,” Rebekka sighed and turned from the window. She couldn’t tell him she’d been glad to see the blizzard that stopped the trains. She wouldn’t want to be guilty of wishing anything as awful as that storm on the farmers and townsfolk alike, let alone all of God’s other creatures.

After dinner, they gathered in the sitting room around the piano to sing all the carols they knew and then some over again. Mrs. Knutson brought out her Bible and read the Christmas story from the Gospel of Luke.

Rebekka heard herself saying the so-familiar words along with the reader. “And in those days . . .” Into the hush of the afternoon, the story carried the same message as it has all through the ages. A Babe was born, the shepherds and angels rejoiced. When Mrs. Knutson closed her Bible, they all sat in silence for a time.

“I love the part where ‘Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.’” Rebekka leaned her head against the high back of the wing chair.

“I wonder about the innkeeper. Here I have a boardinghouse. What would I have done if I was full up and a young couple came, asking for a room?” Mrs. Sampson rubbed under one eye. “It’s so easy to sit here and say ‘Shame,’ but what would I have done?”

“Knowing you, you’d have moved them right into the sitting room and helped deliver the baby yourself,” Mrs. Knutson said, smiling at her dear friend. “You’ve never been able to turn anyone away.”

“Thank you. I always said God gave me this big house for a reason.”

Jude listened to the exchange, agreeing wholeheartedly. She could have turned him away but she didn’t. “I think about the shepherds who believed what the angels said and right away went looking for the Baby. Shepherds are a mighty tough audience. But then, I guess if the whole sky starts singing and you see a multitude of angels, that oughta about you convince anyone.”

What about you?
Rebekka thought, trying to listen to what he was saying between the lines.
Will it take the entire heavenly choir to convince you that God loves you no matter what?
Love, what a wonderful word. She turned it around in her mind, looking at it from all angles. She loved her teaching and her students, playing the piano, singing. She loved the sun on her face and the breeze in her hair. She loved Jude. Wait a minute! Sure, she loved Jude like a friend and brother in Christ.

But Mr. Larson was a brother in that way also and walking with him didn’t set her toes to tingling. Her toes and all other parts inside and out. Sheriff Jordan’s smile didn’t make her go mushy in her middle.

She used the conversation flowing around her to watch the man who set her heart afire. While he rarely smiled, she knew what it did for his face now. And his voice, that deep, melodic way he had of talking, as if he thought out each word in advance so as to use the best one. She hadn’t planned to feel this way about any man. Was this her Christmas gift from the Lord of Hosts?

“I have something for each of you.” Mrs. Sampson rose to her feet. “It’s not much but, well, what would Christmas be without presents?”

Each of them went to their rooms and returned with wrapped gifts. Rebekka handed hers around and sat back in the wing chair to open her presents. A lace collar made by Mrs. Knutson, a warm muffler with matching hat and mittens in a warm rust color that set the roses blooming in her cheeks from Mrs. Sampson, and the third box, she hesitated to open. She looked up to catch Jude watching her, the smile lurking at the corners of his mouth.

She unwrapped the parcel. Inside knelt a hand-carved wooden angel, her arms spread as if to welcome the world. The feathers on her wings, carved in intricate detail, invited the caress of a fingertip.

Rebekka struggled against the tears clogging her throat and burning her eyes. “She’s . . . she’s just beautiful.” She looked up to see Jude watching her. Was that love she saw glowing in his eyes? Could she feel the way she did and not have him return the feelings?

“My, my, son, I didn’t know you could carve like that.” Mrs. Sampson shook her head. “You’re a real artist.”

“I didn’t know, either. Out there at the Jamesons, old Grandpa spent his evenings whittlin’ so I asked him to show me. That little angel was hiding in a hunk of cherry wood, just waiting to come out.”

“Thank you. I’ve never had such a perfect present.” Rebekka traced the grain of the draped gown. “She’s so beautiful.”

Like you,
Jude thought but didn’t say. He had no right to say such things, but he couldn’t stop thinking them.

Mrs. Sampson opened a set of eight napkin rings of rich walnut and Mrs. Knutson two spools for her lacemaking.

Jude opened his presents as if he couldn’t believe anyone would give him something. The red muffler from Mrs. Knutson he wrapped around his neck, the gray wool socks from Mrs. Sampson he promised to wear the next day, and the final package he held in his lap. His fingers had a life of their own as they untied the silvery bow and carefully pulled apart the paper. The mouth organ lay in a bed of tissue, gleaming as the light hit the chrome-and-brass trim. He picked it out of the nest and put it to his mouth. Long, sweet notes hung on the air, each a part of another, as he played “Silent Night.”