In Love's Territory

  ~ ~ ~

  “—an honor.” Sam finished, but the door was already closed. He let out a long sigh and watched through the glass as Kate walked down the hall, her form soon becoming a vague outline and then disappearing as she went into the dining room.

  Sam turned and went down the steps. That could have gone better, I suppose. He drove the carriage down to the barn, berating himself all the way. Having a cow named after her. Yeah, a real honor for a high-society girl. Boy, you really stepped in it, didn’t you?

  With one poor suggestion he’d undone all the good will he’d built up so far, and the thought sat in his stomach, eating away at him for the rest of the evening. He completed his chores as if asleep, only paying the slightest attention to what he was doing, and although he stopped to check in with the other farm hands, he’d forgotten everything they talked about only a few minutes later. By the time he made it back to his cabin, the sun had sunk out of sight and an orange-and-red sky was blooming overhead.

  Sam let himself collapse onto the stump outside the door and looked down the hill at the house. He took a deep breath and let out a long sigh. Well, maybe we’ll look back on this and laugh about it someday. Like my dad’s old sock.

  He burst out laughing at the memory. His parents hadn’t had many problems communicating when they’d first gotten together—certainly not as many as one might have expected for an English husband and a Lakota wife, anyway. Still, there had been some moments that had stuck with them for some time.

  Sam had heard the story countless times, and now that both his parents had gone on, it was a memory that he relied on to raise his spirits when he thought about them.

  Working the farm—especially back when his dad had been running things, when there were fewer hired hands to spread the work around—was very tough on clothing, and his father had absolutely no skills when it came to repairing his clothes. As a bachelor he had simply thrown things away instead of trying to fix them, and he continued to do so as a married man.

  Sam’s mother had hated that. She, in fact, was able to repair most things, and what she couldn’t fix, she used for something else, so his father’s waste of what she considered perfectly good fabric drove her absolutely crazy.

  They had actually had a knock-down, drag-out fight one time that began when his father tossed yet another undershirt onto the ash heap out back; when his mother saw the tiny ripped seam that had prompted him to throw it out, she had blown up at him and forced him to promise not to do it anymore.

  A month or so later, in the heat of the high summer, Sam’s father had come home for dinner after a full day of working out in the fields. After entering the cabin, he’d taken off his shoes and seen that his socks were a lost cause; they were mostly holes, barely connected by the thinnest threads. He peeled them off and was about to throw them away when he remembered what his wife had said, so as a dutiful husband, he turned to her, raised the sweaty, stinky, threadbare rags in the air, and asked “Do you want these?”

  Needless to say, she didn’t, and his father had learned some interesting new Lakota terms that day.

  Sam laughed again as he thought of his dad. He had been well-meaning but sometimes not as quick on the draw as he might have been. Still, it hadn’t stopped him from landing a good woman; maybe Sam would get lucky too.

  He stood up and went to the well alongside the cabin, drew up a bucket of water and returned inside to cook himself some dinner. As he ate in the dim light, his thoughts were jumbled, with memories of his parents mixed together with thoughts of Kate. By the time he cleaned up and was sitting by the fire, he found it difficult to keep his attention focused on his journal. Instead, his mind kept flitting back to the image of a gray-haired Katie, leaning on an equally gray Sam and telling the grandkids how he had once tried to name a cow after her.