Montana Rose (6 page)

Belle had to save her girls from such a fate. “You don’t have to marry some man just because you’re of marrying age. A woman can get by on her own. I am raising you girls to work and work hard. The strength of your back and the sense in your head will carry you through life without having to drag some worthless husband along with you. Might as well just tie an anchor to your leg and tow that.”

Belle took a couple of steps toward the barn door so she could see the house. “Has Anthony come around?”

“He’s not on the roof?” Lindsay came up beside her.

“No. And I saw him in town today, but I had a lot of errands and figured he headed home before me. And riding horseback he’d’ve made good time. I suppose he’ll come back. Free food.”

Emma pointed toward the Husband Tree. “He’s there.”

Belle squinted. Sure enough, Anthony was sitting on his backside ... as usual. But instead of climbing on the roof, which he was partial to—somehow that must make him think he was beyond Belle’s reach, as if Belle would ever
want
to reach him—he was sitting, his back propped up by the Husband Tree.

“Does he know he’s sitting on one of the other husbands?” Lindsay asked.

Belle shrugged. “Don’t know. You can’t tell there are graves there anymore. I didn’t waste time markin’ ’em. But I’m sure that’s the side your pa is on. I wanted him to face the ranch. I don’t remember if I buried Gerald on the left or right side. I didn’t give it much thought. And I sure didn’t care if
he
could see the ranch layout. Better he should face the Golden Butte in Divide.” Gerald had liked the Golden for its liquid pleasures, while Anthony was more interested in the sweeter enticements of the place. William had never gone there, she’d give him that. He’d just grumbled and griped and taken long walks.

“Well, Anthony’s still alive and kicking so far.” Lindsay turned to look at the chicken coop. Belle was proud of the girl for being more interested in chores than the problems of being yoked to a slug of a man.

Belle sighed. She’d been a long time in town, and then she’d had the heavy buckboard to pull home. “He could live a long time, I reckon, although he’s stupid, and stupid’ll get you killed in the West.”

“Are you done telling us
again
we don’t have to get married, Ma? ’Cuz I got chores.” Emma pulled her gloves free and started tugging them on.

“I’m done for now.” Belle wasn’t really. She didn’t think she’d said enough. “I just ... Today, hearing about that young girl passed around like she was a box of groceries, it just hit me hard.”

She looked from Lindsay to Emma and back. “I want to save you from husbands if I possibly can.”

The three of them looked at Anthony. The way he sat, his head leaned back, he looked like he was catching a nap. Resting up for bedtime, no doubt. It didn’t matter if he was rested or not, he had his own bed. Belle slept with her cast-iron skillet these days.

“We hear you, Ma.” Emma headed for the hog pen.

“Loud and clear.” Lindsay went to saddle her horse.

Belle watched them walk away. Her pride in them ... well, she was back to holding on to her temper to keep the tears away. She laid her hand on her baby, due in early spring.

Be a girl. God, let her be a girl.

She went in to have the same heart-to-heart talk with Sarah. Even at eight, the child wasn’t too young to learn her lesson. Belle ignored the pain of Anthony’s betrayal. It was an old pain. Instead, she nursed her fury over the fate of that poor, sweet, helpless Cassie Griffin Dawson.

It was, quite possibly, the sweetest moment of Cassie’s life, at least the sweetest in the years since her mother had died. Cassie stood, stunned at Red’s kind speech about Griff and her baby and keeping his distance.

For the first time, Cassie realized that Red was very young. He carried himself with such ease, and he was treated with deference by a lot of men and as an equal by the others. For some reason she’d been thinking he was Griff ’s age. But the twisted hat and the stuttered speech made her think differently. Now she wondered if he wasn’t about
her
age. He had to be twenty-one to file a homestead. But if he’d been here two years like Griff and her, Red could be twenty-three, a barely grown boy striking out on his own in the West. She wished she had the nerve to ask him his age. That wouldn’t be too forward a question for a wife to ask. Or would it? She wished Griff was here to tell her.

She explored the cave she now lived in, and somehow the combination of realizing her husband was hardly more than a boy and finding out she lived in a cave made her feel young and adventurous. She’d gotten to thinking of herself as the same generation as Griff, but she was only eighteen.

The bedroom was large and very dark. There was a goodsized bed. Only one. Not two smaller ones like Griff said was appropriate for a married couple. In fact, at Griff ’s house she’d had her own room. She felt heat rush into her face as she realized what she’d been offering when she told Red he could join her in the bedroom. If he suggested staying in the front room again, she’d agree.

She found the little notch in the back of the room. The passage winding away into the heart of the mountain caught her imagination and she was sorely tempted to explore. She stepped away from it. She had to ask Red first. She didn’t want to start her marriage by being disobedient.

She left the bedroom and went into the cooler. She was amazed at the drop in temperature. She followed the pleasant trickle of water, careful not to trip over anything. She was clumsy and she’d gotten worse with the baby on the way. Griff had rebuked her for it many times.

She found a brisk little spate of water pouring out of a crack in the rock. It landed in an overflowing pail on the floor and disappeared into the ground. She touched the water and shivered from the frigid temperature. Cold water. What if it stayed cold in summer? What a luxury that would be.

Her eyes had adjusted to the dim light and she saw food piled everywhere. Hams hanging over her head. Eggs! Cassie hadn’t eaten an egg since she came west. It was all she could do not to grab one and take it directly to the stove to cook.

Red must have chickens and pigs. There was butter, and a pail of milk hung on a nail on one wall. A milk cow, too? She found potatoes, carrots, onions, and beets. There was flour, salt, sugar—both brown and white—honey, and cakes of yeast. She couldn’t begin to search through all of the crates and barrels packed in that room.

She had lived in a beautiful home with Griff, but food had sometimes been a problem. There was the spring near their home and he’d had good luck fishing. But they’d eaten a lot of trout. Griff wouldn’t let Cassie help in the garden, although as a child she’d enjoyed working by her mother’s side. Griff had helped her understand how crude her mother had been to do man’s work. She wondered how long Red had been here to be so established. Then she realized how much time she’d spent dreaming over the food and hurried to work on supper.

The main room of Red’s home was small. The fire blazed cheerfully now and cut the chill in the kitchen. The sink was simply a hollowed-out log split in half, with a hole in the center of the bottom and a bucket under the hole to catch draining water. A small but well-built table with two sturdy chairs sat near enough to the fireplace to make a meal cozy even on a cold night.

The floor was dirt and a handmade broom stood in one corner. Cassie wasn’t sure how she’d know when she was done when she swept a dirt floor. She looked around the room and realized that except for a few pots and pans, there was nothing in the house that wasn’t handmade. Red had created this strange house with nothing but his bare hands. Cassie wondered at the pride a man would have if he could care for himself like Red did.

She started a rising of bread. They would have fresh-baked bread for breakfast. She warmed the ham in a cast-iron skillet and hung it from a hook in the fireplace. She pared potatoes, careful to waste as little white flesh as possible, put them in the covered pot full of water, and tucked the pot into the corner of the fireplace. She made biscuits. The heat was uneven and she feared things would burn, so she kept a careful eye on everything. Ham, potatoes, and biscuits. If she could get a good gravy from the ham, it would be a simple but tasty meal. She wished she could figure out an excuse to fry eggs with the meal. She’d do it for breakfast, she promised herself.

The bread had risen. She’d punched it down and shaped loaves which were rising again. The table was set with one tin plate and one chipped china plate, the only plates she could find. The food was done. Even the mashed potatoes were whipped high with butter and milk and set in a pan of warm water, waiting for when Red came back.

The door swung inward and Red entered, looked at her, and smiled rather abruptly.

Cassie had the impression he’d forgotten he was married.

Red hadn’t been able to think about anything all day except that he was married.

Married!

He’d left here yesterday a single man with too many chores and too many goals and not a second to spare for anything else. Now there was a woman in his house. He looked at Cassie and saw the most beautiful woman on earth.

She turned from his fireplace in his kitchen, and he thought back to how he’d held her in his arms all the way from town. He’d loved every minute of it.

“H–Hi, Cassie. I see you’re cooking.” He felt like some kind of monster to marry a woman standing on the freshly dug grave of her husband. But he’d seen no way out of the marriage. The crowd wasn’t even going to allow them to move out of the cemetery.

Cassie nodded and didn’t speak. Which gave Red a moment to remember why he’d married her—to save her. And why he shouldn’t have—because she wasn’t a believer.

Marrying Cassie was a sin, the greatest sin of his life.

But he’d had to help her.

But he could have thought of
something
short of marrying her.

Except he couldn’t think of
anything.

But he should have tried
harder.

But he’d tried
hard !

The events had chased themselves through his head over and over while he did his chores until he’d wanted to crack his head into a rock a few times, hoping the pain and a big knot on his head would give him something else to think about.

It was just that at the time Muriel had been nagging him to save the poor little thing. That overbearing Mort Sawyer had been ignoring Cassie’s pleas and demanding to the parson that they “get it done.” Then Cassie’d started screaming to raise the dead, which considering they were standing on her dead husband at the time, she might have been trying to do exactly that. Throw in Wade looking on all hungry and evil and it had all forced his hand.

Except that wasn’t really the whole exact truth. Yes, it was part of the truth but not all of it. Red figured the only fool bigger than a man who tried to lie to himself was a man who lied to God. Both were just a pure waste of time. Red supposed he was seven kinds of a fool, but at least he was an honest fool. And the plain honest truth was he
wanted
to marry Cassie. He wanted to marry her almost desperately. In his own way he was just as bad as all those ruffians who were fighting over her.

Red couldn’t shake the idea that somewhere God had spent a lifetime preparing a perfect mate just for him, a woman who was a believer above all else, and Red had just gone and tossed God’s plan back in His face by marrying the wrong woman. Cassie Griffin. Cassie Dawson.
God, forgive me,
he thought.
I do like the idea of her having my name.

Red had done his chores thoroughly, but it was a good thing he’d done them a thousand times before because his mind was not on his tasks. Even though Rosie was going be hurting bad by the time he milked her, he left the cow until last because he didn’t want to go back to the house to leave the milk. He almost dropped everything ten times and ran back to the soddy to see if Cassie needed help finding supplies, or lifting a bucket, or squashing a bug, or crossing a mud puddle....

Oh, no doubt about it, he had it bad. He wanted that woman, that overindulged, beautiful, non-Christian woman desperately. He sat down to Rosie and she thanked him for his prolonged neglect by kicking him soundly on his backside. He figured it was just what he needed.

And now here his wife was, smiling at him, a sweet, shy smile, and he thought about how he’d finished with Rosie and grabbed the bucket of eggs and forced himself not to run to the house.

He’d been twenty feet away when he smelled the cooking. He’d assumed she wouldn’t cook. He knew she was pampered. A person only had to look at her beautiful clothes to know that. And everyone said Griff was broke because of Cassie’s greed. Red didn’t listen to gossip, and he held that a man had free will; and no one, even a wife as pretty and perfect as a china doll—which is what everyone called her—could make a man spend money if he didn’t want to. And Red had known Griff enough to know the man was stiff-necked and arrogant all on his own. No one could blame Cassie for that. But whether Cassie was spoiled by Griff ’s wish or her own, Red had never known. He did know he hadn’t expected the cosseted china doll to cook. Yet there she stood, holding a heavy pot in her hands.

Red had seen the Griffin place and he knew Cassie didn’t lift a finger outside. He’d seen Griff working in the garden and hauling water, and everyone knew she bought all her dresses ready-made, so she didn’t sew. Those were all chores that most women would do, especially when there was so much work on a ranch and Griff didn’t hire any hands.

But Cassie refused. Why even on trips to town, on the rare occasion that Cassie would lower herself to appear, she rarely left the carriage, sitting alone, ignoring all and sundry. Yes, there was no doubt Cassie was spoiled.

But she’d cooked. He wondered how a man could unspoil a woman. He’d better figure it out, because however Cassie Griffin was, Cassie Dawson was going to have to rough it. There’d be no more silk dresses. Yup, Cassie was going to have to learn, and if it had to be the hard way, so be it.

He felt all strict and manly standing there with the milk and eggs. He was thinking that milking cows and collecting eggs were woman’s work and she’d better start carrying her weight around here with the stock, too. Then he asked God for an extra-large dose of wisdom and went inside to the wonderful smell of warm food and the even more wonderful sight of a beautiful woman.

She looked at him with that perfect china doll face. She blinked her huge brown eyes at him, and he thought maybe he could see why Griff would die trying to keep her happy.

Red stepped inside, setting the eggs down to swing the door shut without taking his eyes off his brand-new, beautiful, perfect wife.

His last thought as the door thudded shut was that he’d have to be careful, or he’d end up dying trying to keep her happy himself.

“Red Dawson, you’re gonna die.” Wade Sawyer lowered his rifle and rolled onto his back with a deep grunt of self-contempt. “I should’ve done it. I should’ve killed him where he stood.”

He’d had Dawson in his sights. One shot and the china doll would be his. He’d take her away and not bring her back until she had accepted Wade as her husband. Not even his pa would have a chance at her.

He rested against the cool rocks on the overhang near Dawson’s poor excuse for a house. “No one would have known. And even if anyone wondered, who would challenge a Sawyer’s word?”

Something quick and hard twisted in his stomach as he watched the dusk settle in through the branches of an overhanging pine. The china doll was nowhere in sight. A stray bullet could have hit her. Wade tried to convince himself that he’d held off with the shot because of that. But it wasn’t true. The truth was he was a coward. He should have killed Dawson. He should have proved to himself that he was man enough to take what he wanted.

He’d never had the guts to kill a man. He’d had his chances. Drunken cowpokes looking for trouble. Rustlers. A cardsharp once who had cheated him. His father’s men were always around, backing him up, like they’d done today with Tom Linscott. And some of Pa’s hands were salty enough that they’d step in eagerly to do any shooting without Wade having to show his yellow streak.

“I’m a coward. I should have killed him, but I’m too yellow.” Wade stared up at the sky and hated himself for being weak. Losing the china doll today was the final proof of it. He should have stood up to his pa. He should have told that old tyrant that he’d have to kill his own son in order to claim that beautiful woman.

When they’d heard about Griff, he’d told Pa he wanted her.

His pa had said, “Let’s share her, boy.”

It made Wade sick to think it now, and to stop his head from working, he sat up and fished his pint of whiskey out of his saddlebag and took a deep pull on it, trying to drown out the sound of his father’s filthy suggestion. His pa had gotten in the habit of thinking himself above the law. And that included the laws of God. Once a man started thinking that way, everything he wanted to do was right.

Surely even his father’s arrogance didn’t extend so far that he meant share the china doll.... Wade’s mind veered away from the thoughts and swallowed more of the rotgut. What Pa had
meant
was he’d take the land and Wade could have the woman. But that wasn’t what Pa
said.
And even if Pa intended to leave Cassie to Wade, Pa would still be her husband and Wade wouldn’t be able to marry her and treat her honorably. Even the hint of something so foul happening to the china doll drove Wade into a rage.

When Pa had said those words, “Let’s share her,” Wade had lunged.

Mort, in his seventies and half crippled from arthritis, had backhanded Wade so hard he’d been knocked to the floor. Then he’d kicked Wade in the ribs until Wade had cried and begged him to stop.

Mort had grabbed his hair and jerked his head back and roared, “You come at me, you’d better be ready to win, you whinin’ pup. You’re eighteen years old but you’re lyin’ on your belly crying like a baby girl. Now I expect you to back me up today.”

Wade should have crawled out of the room and come back with a gun. Instead he’d followed his father’s orders and humiliated his china doll. He’d mocked her in front of that crowd. He’d played the fool because he always did.

He thought about how much he hated his father. How often he’d dreamed of having the strength to beat him into the dirt. How often he’d had nightmares that ended in his own death at his father’s hands. But his other favorite dream ended when he killed his father. He woke up half crazy from all those nightmares, and only whiskey would quiet the torment.

Now Wade drew deep on his brown bottle, then lay on his back and nurtured his anger and fed his hatred, focusing it on Red Dawson.

The rage boiled in Wade’s stomach, a killing fury stirred in him, and he rolled back over, picked up his rifle, and took a bead on Dawson’s door. If Dawson stepped outside at that instant, he’d die.

Wade was ready. He was finally ready. He was finally man enough to kill.

He waited and watched and wanted and hated.

Cassie had been rehearsing what she’d say when Red returned. She was determined to talk at least a little, since she’d been mostly mute the whole time they’d been together. Griff had wanted an intelligent conversation with dinner. He’d always said she couldn’t hold up her end because she was so uneducated. Which was true. She’d quit school at fifteen when she got married. And he’d pointed out that her mind was naturally childlike, as was the case with most women. She thought that was true, too, because inside her head she spent a lot of time screaming and complaining and making sharp, crude remarks—very childish.

But Griff needed to be allowed to discuss his day. He said a man couldn’t relax properly without that. She had learned to smile politely and nod and make encouraging comments to keep him talking. She would try to talk enough to let Red tell her about his day but not so much as to annoy him.

“Everything’s ready. If you want to wash up, we can eat right now.” She hoped she wasn’t being bossy.

Red smiled wide. “It smells great. To walk in and have a meal set down in front of you is a real nice thing, Cassie. It makes me feel like a king. Thank you very much for this.”

Cassie was dishing the ham onto Red’s plate and she almost dropped it. Making dinner was her duty. The notion that Red would thank her for that almost knocked her over. She nodded and almost smiled, but she controlled the silly impulse. “There’s water warming in the fireplace. I could ladle it for you.” She set the ham down and moved toward the fireplace where she’d settled a pot of water to warm.

“No, I’ll get it. You’ve done enough.” Red waved her away and hurried to scoop water into a basin. He set the basin in the sink, rolled up his sleeves, and washed his hands all the way to his elbows. Then he washed his face and ran his hands into his hair, finger-combing it. He took the bowl outside and tossed the water and came to the table.

While he washed, Cassie spooned a plateful of potatoes, gravy, ham, and biscuit for each of them and hung a coffeepot over the flames to be ready when dinner was done.

As Red pulled out his chair, Cassie sat quietly, ready to memorize any critical word he said about the potatoes she’d whipped so smooth or the gravy she’d fussed over to rid it of the tiniest lumps. She needed to confess her use of yeast on the biscuits because he would no doubt disapprove of extravagance. And she was afraid she’d made too much of everything and it would go to waste. Or too little of everything and Red would go hungry. She took small servings herself, even though the wonderful smell of ham had been torturing her for an hour. She would take more later if there was any left.

She picked up her fork and lifted the first bite of the luscious meat to her lips, when Red said, “We say the blessing first, Cass.”

She almost dropped her fork. Those were words her mother had always said to her as a child.
“Before we eat, we ask God to bless the food, Cassandra.”

Griff said it was a meaningless ritual.

Cassie laid down her fork and folded her hands in her lap. She nodded at Red then bowed her head.

There was a long silence and it took all of Cassie’s willpower not to peek at Red and see if he’d prayed silently and was now eating without her while she sat, eyes closed, waiting. When Red finally spoke, it wasn’t like the sweet, memorized prayer her mother had always said. Red just talked to God.

“Father, Cass and I got married today. You were there, Lord, I felt You there. Bless this marriage we began today and bless the soul of Lester Griffin. And take care of the babe, Lord. It’s a big responsibility. I need You to give Cass and me the wisdom to be good parents. Thank You for this wonderful meal Cassie made. Let us use the strength we get from this good food to do Your work on this earth. In Jesus’ name. Amen.”

Cassie lifted her head and said, “That was a nice prayer, R—uh ... uh...” Cassie was struck speechless. She pressed her fingers over her lips as she realized that she didn’t know her husband’s name and found she couldn’t call him Red.