ROMANCE: MAIL ORDER BRIDE: The Other Man’s Baby (A Clean Christian Historical Western) (New Adult Inspirational Pregnancy Romance) (15 page)

Chapter Six

“Boss,” Lyle said after he and Lucas had brought Violet’s trunks into the house and she was tending to the twins, “the boys wanted to do a little serenadin’ tonight. I’m thinking I’d better tell them no?”

A shivaree. He wasn’t surprised that the boys had something in mind, but Lyle was right. If the twins were successfully gotten to sleep, he’d probably take his Winchester to anyone who woke them up.

“Good idea, Lyle. These two are raring to go. Tell them that I’d appreciate it if they hold back on the celebrating. When Violet gets her bearings, she’ll be baking and cooking and I think they’ll find that’s the better part of the trade.”

It was dark by the time the twins were in their bed; there was a small bedroom next to his that he’d realized was ideal for the children, close enough but with privacy for a married couple in the room next door. After they were in bed, he and Violet went out onto the porch where the air was cool. Violet put on a shawl.

“Cold?”

She shook her head and laid her head on his shoulder. He’d built the porch swing shortly after finishing the house; it was a dream finally answered to having someone else sitting next to him.

He put his arm around her anyway, even if she wasn’t cold. She seemed to like it; he felt her cuddle closer to him.

“Boys wanted to give us a shivaree,” he told her. “Lyle is telling them no.”

Violet shuddered. “I’m glad of that. After getting the twins down for the night, I don’t think I’d think very kindly of anyone waking them. Will I meet them tomorrow?”

“Yep. And then on Sunday, you’ll meet the folks at church. They’ll be looking forward to meeting you.”

“The twins . . .  aren’t always well behaved during worship,” she said tentatively.

“Really?”

She heard the laughter in his voice and turned to look up at him, relieved. “You’re not angry?”

“At the shenanigans of a pair of two year olds? Why would I be angry?”

“Do you ever get angry?”

“Sometimes. Everyone gets angry. Jesus got angry. I don’t have the cause he had, but I reckon he forgives me, and he’ll forgive the little hellions for acting up in church.”
“It’s not Jesus’ forgiveness I fear for, it’s the others.”
“They’ll learn. It would be worse if we didn’t bring them to church.”

By the time Saturday night came, Lucas had conceded that his wife’s flapjacks were better than Miss Luna’s, and that she could serve her kiss pudding every day of the week and he’d never tire of it. She hadn’t done as much baking as she’d intended, just as he’d expected, due to the twins activities, but she’d triumphantly brought two apple pies, fresh from the oven, down to the cabin where the hands lived and the results had been better than she’d hoped. The men agreed that apple pies as a thank you for denying themselves the pleasure of a shivaree for the wedding couple was ample repayment. The hands had followed her back to the porch where Lucas was sitting, the twins at his feet playing with a mound of unshelled pecan nuts.

“Hey, Boss,” said Rock, scooping up all of the filling that had oozed out of the sides of his pie, “reckon this will be the year that the Baptist ladies win the pie-baking contest?”

The hands were clustered around the porch, on the steps and leaning against the fence eating their pie. Lucas was on the porch and Violet filling the cups with fresh coffee.

Lucas patted his stomach. “Could be.”

“What’s this about a pie-baking contest?” Violet asked after the last cup had been filled.

“Every year, the church ladies have a pie-baking contest to raise the money for a tent revival with a traveling preacher the following year,” Lucas explained.

“And every year,” Rock continued, “the Methodists win.”

“Who does the judging?” Violet asked.

“Judging is fair,” Lucas said, sipping his coffee. She made good coffee; that was certain. “There’s a Chinaman, Li Quan; he’s a judge, along with Harvey Cohen, who runs the dry goods store, and the padre, Father Benedict. They’ve got no dog in this fight.”

“But every year, the Methodists win.”

“They make the best pies,” Lyle said logically.

Lucas leaned against the back of the porch swing, making it move in a slow, easy motion. “They used to,” he said.

The men set up a roar. Violet was smiling, her blue-green-gold eyes gazing at him as if he’d just said something so wise and wonderful that she’d remember it forever.

She was nervous the next morning, he could tell. The twins were washed to within an inch of their lives, their cheeks ruddy with her efforts. She had fed them before she dressed them in clean dresses that she’d sewed for them before her marriage. They sat quietly enough in the wagon; Lucas had sat each child in turn on the horses and the experience had both daunted and thrilled them enough to silence them along the ride.

“Don’t fret,” Lucas told her as they arrived at church just as the bell was tolling and the last of the arrivals were straggling in. “We’ll sit in the back. If they get too rambunctious, I’ll take them outside.”

“People will think I can’t manage children,” she worried as they went inside.

The Baptist church was the oldest church in town and its pews were filled with the Sunday faithful. The worshippers turned as they heard latecomers enter, their frowns replaced by smiles when they saw Lucas Jackson and his wife and the twins entering. There seemed to be children in every pew, Violet noticed with relief. They couldn’t possibly all be little angels.

The enthusiastic singing of the hymns was loud enough to drown out Rosie’s querulous demand for Lucas’ watch chain. By the time the sermon got underway, the twins, one on Violet’s lap, the other on Lucas’ knee, were diverting themselves with ribbons that Violet had taken from her hat; it was better to ruin the hat, she decided, than risk the twins at full volume in church.

The preacher was energetically detailing the terrors of hell to his congregation, warning them of the trials that awaited them if they followed the paths of sin. Rosie and Rendell, their attention captured by his vivid presence, leaned forward so that they could see and hear him as he moved, exhorted, raised his arms to the heavens and cried out to God for mercy. Lucas and Violet smiled at each other, their relief apparent.

When the service ended, the congregation clustered around to meet the Violet and the children. She noticed that the other children were just as lively as the twins and on the way home, she commented on this to Lucas.

“Did you think they’d be otherwise?” he asked, amused at the thought of children behaving in church.  “When I was a boy, my Pa used to slap my hands when I started wriggling where I sat. I couldn’t wait for church to be over. To tell the truth, I still feel that way, but Preacher Logan was fired up today.”

“I don’t care if he preaches on the end of the world every week until the twins are old enough to sit still,” Violet declared. “I’ll sit through fire and brimstone; it’s preferable to them crawling under the pews.”

“Under the pews?” Lucas repeated, entertained at the thought. “Wish I’d seen that.”
“I hope to never see it again!” Violet said fervently. “I don’t know how they got away from me. One minute I was looking up for the next line of the  hymn, the next minute I saw Rendell’s bottom disappearing under the pew in front of me.”

There was going to be a church supper on Wednesday after the service ended. Lucas casually suggested that she bring a pie to the dinner. That night in bed, they plotted like conspirators, Lucas joining in with alacrity as they considered which of her recipes would be the most likely to take away the pie-baking crown from the Methodists.

Chapter Seven
The preacher was not warning his flock about the horrors of a life in eternal torment when he preached on Wednesday night. But the Jackson pew was shared by another couple with a young child, easing Violet’s foreboding about the hour of worship. She noticed that the young mother surreptitiously fed her little boy raisins when he became restless, which had the effect of diverting his attention from his own boredom to the appeal of the treats his mother doled out, one by one. Violet resolved to do the same for the following Sunday with the twins.

After the service, the men set up the tables and benches while the women brought out the food. Violet had decided to bring a cinnamon peach pie, using the peaches that the ladies had sold to Lucas. She was confident that her crust would be equal to anyone’s; Violet had been making pie crust since she was a child in her mother’s kitchen and her mother had been exacting in her standards.

Lucas was sitting beside her, his plate heaped with the delicious samplings from the dishes that had been brought. Violet, anxious over the success of her pie, found that she wasn’t very hungry. The twins had already eaten and were now eagerly engulfed by the crowd of children playing, their antics all watched by the eagle-eyed mothers.

When the meats, cabbage salad, beans, sourdough biscuits, baked apples and cornbread were finished, it was time for the desserts. Violet chose to sample a slice of short cake but Lucas, as much out of anticipation as loyalty, put a wedge of her peach cinnamon pie on his plate. He was tucking in to his pie while listening to the conversation around him.

Preacher Logan’s voice boomed out, “Who made the peach pie?” he demanded.

“My wife, Violet,” Lucas answered.

The preacher’ gaze circled around the circumference of people at the tables until his eyes fell on Violet, who was seated next to the young mother who had pacified her son with raisins.

“Mrs. Jackson!” he called. “Your pie is a welcome addition to our congregational repast.”

His remark was met with a round of applause by the others, including those who could agree with his verdict because they were sampling it, and those who simply wanted to welcome the new member in their midst.

“More than that,” replied Deacon Calleigh’s wife, Loretta. “Mrs. Jackson, you will be entering the pie contest next month.” Like her husband, Loretta Calleigh was an emphatic member of the faithful. But she felt that the ongoing shame of losing to the Methodists year after year brought disrepute to the Baptist women, whose pies, their menfolk assured them, were superior to anything that anyone else baked. 

Violet, hearing the name which was still somewhat new to her hearing, looked up.

“The Pie Committee meets on Tuesday afternoon,” Mrs. Calleigh announced. “We welcome you to join us.”

“That’s very kind of you, but with the twins—“

“You’ll bring them of course,” Mrs. Calleigh said.

That night, as they lay in bed, Violet asked Lucas about the women in the congregation. He didn’t know them as well as he knew their husbands, he admitted, but he knew that the pie contest losses were seen as a disgrace in the minds of the ladies.
“They take their pie-baking very seriously,” he said, laughing. Bedtime was his favorite time of the day, holding Violet close to him as they shared their thoughts in the darkness of the night.

“Why do the Methodists always win if the judges are impartial?” she asked.  “Lyle said they bake better cakes. Is that true?”

Lucas stroked his wife’s smooth shoulder. He was endlessly fascinated by the texture of a woman’s skin. Her touch revived him; his life before her seemed as if it had been lived in the desert, deprived of water. With her and the twins, he felt connected to the wider world of his community, where such things as the thwarted pride of a pie contest mattered deeply.

“I don’t know. Maybe Lyle is right and their pies are better.”

That wasn’t the conclusion which the women of the Pie Committee had reached on Tuesday when Violet, with some trepidation, took the wagon to Loretta Calleigh’s home. She had adopted the suggestion of Polly Zeiner, the mother who fed her son raisins in church to keep him occupied, and had secured the twins in the back of the wagon with leading strings fastened to the wagon boards.  They had toys to play with, and raisins to eat. It was not a long journey, and when she arrived, the twins were in good humor and still in their places.

“There’s thievery somewhere!” Mrs. Calleigh vowed. “Mark my words.”
 

“I don’t think so,” Polly said calmly, unaware that in disagreeing with the Deacon’s wife, she was insubordinate. “I think we need to mix up the pies. Instead of putting the pies on one table for the Baptists and one for the Methodists, we need to have the pies all together. Someone can register each pie and give it a number when it’s brought in for the competition. It’ll have to be someone who can be trusted,” she added. “Then the pies can be displayed on a table, all together, Baptists and Methodists. The judges will sample each by category so that the flavors don’t dull their tastes.”

Deacon Calleigh’s wife stared at Polly with respect. “You’ve done this before,” she deduced.

Polly smiled modestly. “A time or two. But I’m not a prize-winning pie baker.”
 

“How do we get the Methodists to agree?” asked another one of the women.

“If they don’t agree, we say we’re holding our own contest and we open it to all the women in town. Which we should do anyway,” Polly said. “A pie contest should represent the best of our town. We’ll talk to the mayor and see what he thinks.”

Mrs. Calleigh was not often flummoxed, but she was clearly impressed by Polly’s clear-headed thinking. “I think you should talk to Mayor Heidrich,” she said firmly.

“First I’ll talk to the leader of the Methodist Pie Committee,” Polly stated. “We’ll go to him together.”

“I know Elsie Harrow and she’ll never agree. If you listen to her, you’d think that God Almighty favors her lemon pie over anything the angels could bake.”

Polly smiled serenely. “I’ll see if I can convince her.”

“And she did!” Violet reported to Lukas a week later when they were eating supper. Lucas was almost too absorbed in the tenderness and taste of the coffee roast that she’d baked to be listening, but as he chewed, he marveled with her and agreed that Miss Polly was a force to be reckoned with. Her husband, Leon Zeiner, a cattle rancher like himself, was a quiet man, well thought of in town. “They went to the mayor and he agreed that the pie contest rules would change and it’s open to all women in town, not just the Baptists and Methodists.”

“I don’t see that it matters,” he replied. “Your pie is going to win.”

“The other ladies bake well,” she argued, pleased by his defense but dubious about her ability to compete with the others.

“Didn’t Miss Lily say that you were a pie contest winner of some repute?” He waved her doubts away with his fork before he speared another bite of meat. “I say you’ll win.”

The day of the contest dawned clear and cool, a pleasant late autumn morning and a perfect temperature for the pie contest. Lucas could detect his wife’s nervousness as they rode into town by the way her hands gripped the pie pan. Polly, who would not be entering a pie in the contest, had volunteered to keep the twins overnight so that Violet could bake late in the evening and then let her peach cinnamon pie cool and set. Violet brought her pie to the registration table where the mayor himself was bestowing the numbers on the pies and finding something complimentary to say about each entry. After she registered, Violet joined Lucas, who had collected the twins from Polly, and together they strolled through the town where the various social organizations were selling items to raise money for the tent revival that would take place in the summer of the next year. The Ladies Art Society had paintings from its members; Mrs. Wiltshire was selling her preserves; members of the Music Appreciation Organization were playing tunes  and singing; Lucas joined them in the chorus of “Annie Laurie” as he dropped coins in the hat and vowed that he and Violet would find time to make music before the year was out. The twins were entranced by the toys that old Mr. Klapper had carved; Lucas bought them each a hobby horse to ride through the streets as they travelled past the vendors.

Finally it was time to gather inside the theatre, the only building that was big enough to hold the audience waiting to find out who would be this year’s pie contest winner. Conscious of the importance of their roles in this year’s contest, the judges were particularly solemn as they sampled the pies and recorded their scores on paper which they were careful to hide from view. The judges—pigtailed Li Quan, robed Father Benedict, and stoop-shouldered Mr. Cohen—talked quietly among themselves.

“I don’t envy them,” Lucas whispered to Violet. “That’s a lot of pie to have to go through.”
“You like pie.”

Lucas did like fresh baked pie but he didn’t much like competition over it. The ladies set such a store by winning, but he wondered if it was a good thing for them to fuss so much. It was just pie, after all; a tasty dessert to be enjoyed, but it wasn’t the be-all and end-all. A woman was just as good a wife whether she baked a prize-winning pie or not---“

His thoughts were interrupted by the major. “Judges, have you reached your decision?

The judges, who had been conferring for the last ten minutes, nodded portentously and handed the mayor the slip of paper on which the winner’s name and entry were written. Lucas gripped Violet’s hand.  He knew her pie was the best and it didn’t matter what the judges said.

“Number 19—“

Violet gasped. Lucas looked at her. “What number are you?” he asked urgently. She looked faint.

“Mrs. Lucas Jackson’s Peach Cinnamon Pie. Congratulations Mrs. Jackson. Well done. Lucas must be a very happy man when it’s baking day in the Jackson household.”

Lucas stood up from his chair. “That I am, Mr. Mayor! That I am!”

Violet tugged at his and. “Sit down, people will stare.”

He did sit down. The twins were staring at him, their eyes round with wonder at his outburst.

Lucas was beaming, his brown eyes brimming with pride. “I have a champion wife,” he said to Violet. “I have everything I’ve ever wanted in you.”

“Mrs. Jackson, please come forward to claim your prize.”

Violet looked flustered. No one had said anything about a prize.  Hesitantly, she walked to the stage. She could see Mrs. Calleigh and the Baptist wives clapping furiously as the major announced that for her triumph, she would receive tickets to the opera troupe which would be performing in El Paso the following week.

Violet’s accepted the two tickets and curtseyed her appreciation to the mayor. She knew how much this prize would mean to Lucas, who had once told her how he’d attended an opera when he was a boy and had always wanted to go again someday if a troupe ever came back.

When she returned to her seat, she handed the tickets to Lucas, who placed them reverently in his pocket. Polly leaned over. “You can leave the twins with us when you go,” she said.

Lucas leaned closer to his wife. “Maybe we’ll get that honeymoon after all,” he whispered. “At least one night of it.”

And then, not caring who was watching, Lucas Jackson gave his mail-order bride a long, lingering kiss that left no doubt of his feelings for the woman who was his prize.

**THE END**