“I don’t know what your ma’s going to think, Jewel,” he said. As soon as he finished his meal, he got back on the pallet and practiced coughing. When Becca walked in, he wanted to look as sick as he could.
“Don’t be frettin’, Pa,” Jewel said. “When she gets here, me and Liza will tell her how bad you was.”
“I expect I just needed to get out of the wet and see my girls,” Zeke said. “I hope this trouble with the white law blows over. I’m too dern old to go on the scout.”
“You ain’t old, Pa,” Liza protested. “I bet you’re still the best dancer in the District.”
Zeke nodded. He had always been wild in the dance. In his youth, he could dance down three or four ladies—in plain fact, he had danced down Becca the night he met her.
He decided Liza was right in her opinion: he was not old. Sully Eagle was old, and White Sut Beck, too. He himself was forty years younger than either man, well short of age. But another truth fitted with that one—the truth that he was not young, either. Going on the scout had once been nothing to him; cold or hot had been nothing to him; and likewise wet or dry. He thrived in whatever weather befell him, but that had changed. Now, three weeks in the damp had nearly killed him. Hunted men sometimes had to stay out months until the white law forgot about them, or lost interest in their crimes. Zeke did not believe he could make it for months out in the elements. It was not a prospect he relished. Thinking of it caused his fever to come back a little.
When Becca walked in and took a close look at her husband, she knew immediately that the crisis had passed. But she also knew, from his hollow cheeks and dull eyes, that there had been a crisis—a severe one.
“Hello, Bec. I’ve been poorly,” Zeke said. “Jewel’s fed me up, and I’m gonna live now, I guess.” Pete, who walked a little wobbly after his long ride in front of the saddle, did his best to run up and lick Zeke’s face.
Becca saw the fearfulness in Zeke’s eyes, and it touched her. She smiled at him, and felt his forehead. It was the first time she had felt like smiling at him since the trouble between them began.
“It’s good you’re fed up, Zeke,” she said. “We need to be going home as soon as you’re able. The garden’s weedy, and the livestock are running all over the hills.”
Jewel looked downcast.
“Ma,” Jewel said. “You just got here and you’ve had a hard ride. You ain’t even hugged me, and I’m gonna have a baby.”
With that, Jewel burst into tears at the thought that her mother had only been there a minute and already wanted to leave. She had not seen her mother since Ned came and took her away. Ever since she learned she was pregnant, Jewel had yearned for some time with her mother. Now that she had her here, she wanted a proper visit.
Becca turned quickly, and hugged her daughter, knowing she had been rude to speak of leaving so soon. Jewel seemed more grown—so tall, and womanly—a wife now, and almost a mother. Becca felt she scarcely knew her daughter anymore. She knew she ought to settle in for a spell and counsel Jewel—sit in her house, watch her be a wife, get to know her tall husband a little. That would be the proper thing. Yet she felt distracted from propriety by the need to recover her own husband and get on with her marriage again, and the sooner the better.
“I’m a homebody, Jewel—that’s all it is,” Becca told her daughter.
She laughed a little at herself, as she dried Jewel’s tears.
“I don’t know how to be in nobody’s house but my own,” she confessed.
It was true, too. She had not spent a night away from home in the seventeen years she had been with Zeke, not until the trouble came, when she left him to return to her people. She doubted she could sleep in a strange house, although this house was her own daughter’s home.
“Pa’s a lot better, Ma. We cooked a hen and he et like he always does,” Liza said, just as Ned walked in the door. He had been unsaddling the horses, tired from having ridden seventy miles to fetch a wife to a sick man.
But instead of a sick man, he saw Zeke Proctor sitting by the fireplace with his guns piled around him, a shine in his expression. He did not look sick enough for Ned to have ridden seventy miles for him, or seventy feet, for that matter.
“Why, Zeke . . . you rascal,” Ned said. “When I left, you had one foot in the grave. Now you’re up eating cobbler and taters.”
He said it in a testy tone, testy enough to provoke a snappy reply.
“Why, I’m sorry I didn’t die, just so you wouldn’t waste a ride, Ned,” Zeke said, with a feisty look.
“I didn’t want you to die . . . I’m just hungry,” Ned said.
He knew his irritation was unseemly. After all, Zeke had been sick enough to die. It was just that he had been spending his life lately riding between his own place and Zeke’s, when he ought to have been getting some useful work accomplished.
There was not much of the chicken left, either, just taters and greens. Jewel saw that her husband was brooding. She offered to cook him some hog back, but Ned was in such a mood, he denied that he was even hungry anymore.
“It’s good you’re better, Zeke. I expect we’ll have to be back on the scout in a day or two,” he said.
Jewel opened her mouth to protest, but her father beat her to it.
“Not me, I’m going home with Bec and try to get my place back under control,” Zeke pronounced. “Bec says I’ve got livestock running all over the hills. Some damn rustler’s liable to drive ’em off if I don’t get home and look to them.”
“I feel the same, but it’s hard to work a farm with a posse of marshals apt to show up any minute,” Ned said.
“If they show up at my place, they better show up blasting,” Zeke said, looking around at his arsenal. “I’ve just put my weapons in order. I figure I can hold a posse at bay for a while, if I can just get on home.”
“We’ll get home, Zeke,” Becca assured him.
She took her daughter upstairs, sat down on the bed, and had a good, long talk with her. She wanted Jewel to be well informed, when her time came. She also meant to do some sewing for the baby when she got back home. Jewel was grateful her mother took the time to visit, though she was disquieted by this new, distant manner her mother took with her now. She did not know what to say. She was still her mother’s child, yet not a child. They were two women now, and their menfolk were in the same predicament.
“Ma, I don’t like it when Ned’s gone at night,” Jewel admitted. She had to express that fear while her mother was with her.
“I’m afraid men might come . . . I’m afraid of what they might do!” she said.
“You got that from me, I guess,” Becca said. “I’ve always been afraid some rough men might come while Zeke’s gone.”
She looked at her daughter, not knowing what to say. There would always be things to fear, if you lived in a wild place.
“Keep a heavy bar on the door. And be sure you have a gun inside with you, when Ned’s away. I don’t know what else you can do, Jewel,” she said.
Zeke and Ned were downstairs, smoking. Pete was asleep under a chair. Ned had gotten over his annoyance at Zeke for his quick recovery and was dozing by the fire. Zeke kept looking upstairs. He wanted Becca to come back down. Now that his wife was in a friendly mood with him again, he was jealous of her time. He knew she needed to visit a little with her girls, but he kept looking up the stairs, hoping she would soon be coming down.
When Becca finally did come down, the mood took them both to head on home, though it was nighttime.
“It’ll be cooler traveling for the horse,” Zeke said.
The fact was, he and Bec wanted to be to themselves, and there was no place they could be to themselves in Ned’s house, not with Ned and both the girls.
“Easier traveling on what horse?” Ned asked, when he got awake enough to realize that Zeke and Becca wanted to set out for home immediately. “I’ve got Tuxie’s horse, and he’s rode down. Becca’s mare is rode down, too. Your horse is lame. All that leaves
is a slow mule.”
“We’ll take the slow mule, then, if it ain’t too much bother,” Zeke said at once.
“It’s a passel of bother,” Ned assured him. “Becca’s rode thirty-five miles with no rest. Thirty-five more on that slow mule will take you all night, and most of tomorrow.”
Ned could not believe his ears, or his eyes, either. Only a few days before, he had tried to coax a good word out of Becca Proctor about her husband, but she had looked at him as if he were asking about a stranger. There was such ice in her expression that he had felt tongue-tied, and gave up trying. Now she was sitting by Zeke as if no cloud had ever passed between them. All Zeke had on was a borrowed nightshirt, with a blanket around his middle. How could he be planning to set off on a long ride, at night, no less?
“Zeke, you ain’t even dressed,” Ned pointed out. “Why can’t you stay with us a day? Becca and the girls can wash your clothes, and we can send you home clean. Becca’s mare will be rested up by then, too.”
“Stay, Ma. You ain’t even seen the place in the light,” Jewel urged. She had come as a bride to a rough bachelor house, and had taken pains to clean it up and make it pleasant. She had a good, well-weeded garden, although she did want to ask her mother’s advice about planting tomatoes and squash.
Mainly, she wanted her mother to understand that she was a good wife, and had done the correct things to make her husband’s life healthier and happy. She wanted her mother to know that, despite her fears, she was doing things in the proper manner. How would her mother know that, if she did not stay long enough to see her new home in the daylight? Jewel wanted to show her mother the smokehouse, and where she did the laundry, and the barn, and the garden, and the milk-pen calf. Her mother owned a good, solid cradle, the one the triplets had slept in—Jewel was wondering if she could borrow it for her baby.
But those questions did not get asked, nor would Becca consider waiting for daylight to start home.
“I ain’t sleepy. I’d just as soon make a start,” Becca said. “We’ve got a world of work to do when we get home,” Becca said, several times. She meant it, too. She had put things right with her man, and now she wanted to get him home.
Zeke let Becca do most of the talking. Ned was arguing, and Jewel was pleading, but he knew they ought just as well save their breath. He had a line of stubbornness in him, but it was nothing compared to Becca’s line. Nobody was likely to out-stubborn Becca.
The one problem they faced was clothes. Zeke’s were so filthy that Becca would not consider letting him put them back on.
“You’ll be needing a good delousing when I get you home, Zeke,” she said, throwing his old clothes in the fireplace. All he was left with was his coat, his gunbelt, and his boots. Ned finally gave in and loaned him a pair of pants. They were too long in the leg and too tight in the waist, but Zeke solved the waist problem by only buttoning the bottom two buttons.
The mule was named Pelican, because he had a long, droopy jaw. He was not happy to find himself loaded up in the middle of the night, with two heavy people and a black dog. He bit Ned’s finger twice during the saddling; Ned had to cuff him to get him to stand. It was, on the whole, a vexing business. Jewel and Liza stood there holding a lantern, crying because their mother was leaving without even spending a whole night with them. Zeke was trying to pretend he had never felt better in his life, when in fact he was still coughing and spitting on a regular basis. Becca gave her girls a hug and Ned a handshake, before climbing up behind Zeke. She was all business. It reminded Ned a little of how Jewel became when she threw all her passion into some kind of work—scouring the pans, or cleaning out the fireplace. Jewel’s jaw even jutted forward as Becca’s did—the sign of stubbornness, Ned thought. He wondered a little uneasily if Jewel would get more and more like her mother as she got older. Would his own wife get so out of sorts with him someday that she would walk out the door and go home to her folks?
Soon, Becca and Zeke were out of sight. Ned heard Pelican, the mule, snort a few times from somewhere in the darkness; then, after a moment or two, he heard nothing.
“Now that’s what I call a short visit,” Ned commented.
Jewel and Liza were too weepy to reply. As they were walking to the house, Ned put his arm around Jewel to comfort her. Jewel immediately clung to him, squeezing him tight, so tight that it suddenly occurred to him that there might be a bright side to the fact that Zeke and Becca had taken themselves away so abruptly. If they had stayed, there would have been little chance for him to slip in with his own wife. He would have had to bunk on a pallet, or even outside. But now there was only Liza left with them, and Liza would soon cry herself out and be asleep.
“I wish Ma had stayed,” Jewel whispered. “Just till mornin’, at least. I miss Ma.”
“Now, Jewel, they had the livestock to think of,” Ned pointed out gently. All of a sudden, the Proctors’ departure seemed a lot more sensible than it did when he had had to rouse himself and go catch the mule.
“It’s still two hours to cockcrow,” he whispered back to Jewel. “Let’s slip into the covers.”
Jewel was thinking that she was not going to have her mother very much anymore, the mother who for so long had watched her every day and helped her with the problems of life. Her mother lived thirty-five miles away, and she had the triplets to finish raising, a husband to care for, a farm to tend. Jewel knew she would have to learn for herself the things she needed to know to be a mother, or a gardener, or whatever she might need to be, now that she was gone from home. Her mother had her own duties; she would not be coming to visit much. It gave Jewel a lonely feeling, even more lonely than when she had first gone away with Ned. She wished now that she had paid better attention, or talked to her mother more in the years when she had still been at home.
When they were nearly to the house, Ned suddenly cursed and jumped aside. He had stepped right on a snake. Jewel saw a flash of coil in the lantern light.
“It’s a dern snake! Shine your light on it, I might be bit,” Ned said. Jewel managed to locate the snake, just before it slithered under the house. It was just a harmless old black-snake, one that was usually to be found by the woodpile.
Ned was still shaky from the scare, when they went up the stairs. He was fumbling at his own buttons, as if his fingers would not work properly. It amused Jewel that her husband could take such a scare from an old blacksnake. She undid his buttons for him, to keep him from getting impatient and popping them off, which would mean a passel of sewing if he did.
“I do despise stepping on reptiles in the dark,” Ned said. “That dern snake should stay by the woodpile, where he belongs.”
His legs were wobbly, those strong legs that took such a long stride. Besides his eyes, one of the first things Jewel had noticed about Ned was his long stride. She liked to watch him walk. He walked much more gracefully than other men.
It touched her that he was shaky. For a moment, it was Ned who was weak, too unsettled to get his clothes off. Jewel’s confidence rose, for now she was the strong one. Ned stood patiently and let her undo his buttons, as trusting as a child.
“There could have been a rattler there, too. Rattlers and black-snakes have been known to coil up together,” he told her. “Shine the lantern on my legs—I want to make sure I ain’t bit.”
“You ain’t bit, Ned, though I might bite you myself if you don’t hush up about that snake,” Jewel said, with mock annoyance.
“Shine the light,” Ned insisted.
Instead, Jewel blew out the lamp.
Then she did bite him, and kept biting him until she got him safely in bed.
30
AS ZEKE AND BECCA WERE MAKING THEIR SLOW WAY IN THE DARK across a grassy meadow on the mule Pelican, Zeke thought he saw a spot of light in the forest above Tuxie Miller’s farm. He saw it just for a moment—it was as if a lantern flickered, high on the wooded ridge.
“What’s that? Did you see it, Bec?” he asked, stopping the mule.
Becca, more tired than she had wanted to admit at Ned’s house, had been nodding against her husband’s shoulder. Before they had ridden a mile on the slow mule, Becca realized that she had been a little foolish for insisting that they leave, when she could have taken a short rest with her girls. Seventy miles on horseback and muleback was hard on the bones, though she felt a driving urge to get home and did not much regret her haste. It was hard to keep her eyes open, though, with the mule plodding along at a walk. Now Zeke was talking to her about lights on a hill, even stopping the mule to watch.
“I had my eyes shut, Zeke,” she confessed. “I didn’t see nothing.”
“I swear I saw a lantern flash, near the top of that ridge over toward Tuxie’s,” Zeke said.
“Who’d be out with a lantern this time of night?” he asked, as much to himself as to Becca.
Just then, a shooting star arched down through the dark sky.
“Maybe that’s what you saw,” Becca said. “Maybe it was just a shooting star.”
Zeke was not convinced.
“A shooting star is white,” he replied. “What I saw was yellow. It looked like a lantern light, to me.”
Becca expressed no further opinion. She put her head back against his shoulder and closed her eyes, thinking a little sadly of what a fine grown woman Jewel had come to be. That was the purpose of being a mother—to turn daughters into fine young women. Becca knew that, but still felt a little sad. She would not be seeing very much of her Jewel, now that her daughter was grown and soon to be a mother herself.
Zeke was troubled by the light on the ridge. He had only glimpsed it once, out of the corner of his eye, but the light had been made by a lantern, of that he was sure. Who would be up in the hills with a lantern, in the hour before dawn? Coon hunters usually gave up and went home well before this time—and if it was coon hunters, they would have hounds. He heard no hounds.