Lawman

Cal woke to the bite of a needle piercing his cheek. “Ow! Damnation! What do you think you’re you doing, Annie?” he growled, opening his eye as far as the swelling would allow. His sister was poised over him with a needle and black thread.

“Land sakes, Cal, is that any way for a minister to talk? And I should think it would be obvious what I’m doing, though I’d hoped to finish this while you were still passed out,” Annie responded tartly. “I’m stitching up your cheek, brother dear. Now hold still while I do just one more.”

Cal set his teeth and gripped the edge of the table, trying his best to focus on his mother, whom he could see hovering anxiously behind Annie. Not a sound escaped his lips as the needle flashed past his eye and bit him twice, once on either side of the laceration. He felt the odd sensation of the thread tugging at his skin as Annie’s nimble fingers knotted the stitch and then snipped it with some sewing scissors she took from the table. “Now hold on, this is going to sting,” she cautioned, and dribbled whiskey from a bottle over the stitched cut.

The resultant fire on his cheek felt like a foretaste of hell. “Annie, who’d have thought you were so good at piling on the agony?” he groaned. “I already hurt right smart in muscles I didn’t even know I had.”

“You’re very welcome, I’m sure,” Annie retorted. “Maybe I should have just left you with another couple of scars after those no-accounts settled your hash in town.”

His head was pounding again, but he managed to say, “Thanks. I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful. How’d I get home, anyway?”

“In Olivia Gillespie’s buckboard. It was God’s own mercy she happened to be in town buying supplies and saw those men whaling on you just as they got the notion to get out the tar and feathers. She stopped them with a blast from her shotgun.”

“Livy Gillespie is the one who saved me?”

Annie nodded. “Her an’ Sam, who’d started feelin’ uneasy a little while after you rode away from here. Then she was kind enough to offer her buckboard to haul you home. You didn’t even rouse when Sam an’ one of the hands carried you upstairs an’ laid you in bed.”

“Is she—is she still here? I suppose I ought to thank her,” he said, his mind still reeling at the thought of his rescuer’s identity. He hated the idea of her seeing him like this, broken and battered. His face was probably more black-and-blue than white.

“No, she left as soon as we had you safely in bed,” said Annie, to his relief. “Said she had to get back to her farm before it got too late. Land sakes, but that’s one independent woman. She wouldn’t even hear of Sam riding along to make sure those rowdies wouldn’t bother her again when she went back through town— she just made sure her shotgun was loaded again.”

“How’d she…was she…” He couldn’t find the words to ask if she was still the prettiest girl in Brazos County.

“Is she showing yet, is that what you’re tryin’ to ask? No, I can’t really say she was, though she was wearing a wrapper, not a dress, and Lord knows a woman can hide a thick waist in one a’ those for a long while.”

“Oh.” His head ached too severely for him to hear any more about the intricacies of female garments. He wished Annie hadn’t mistaken his meaning, for in his astonishment at hearing that Olivia Gillespie had helped rescue him he had forgotten all about the scandal that clouded her name.

Cal closed his eyes, and Annie took the hint. He heard her chair scrape against the floorboard. “You get some rest now, you hear? I’ll bring up some soup at suppertime.”

He’d have to go and thank Livy for saving his hide, Cal thought. It was only the polite thing to do. But not until he looked a little less fearsome.

However, it was a good fortnight before Cal felt well enough to venture beyond the boundaries of the Devlin farm. The pain from the beating he had endured had diminished within a week, for nothing had been broken except his nose—and perhaps his confidence. He hadn’t expected to be welcomed like the prodigal son, but he had to admit he hadn’t figured on the amount of hostility that had greeted him the day he’d ventured into town. The pain of the community’s rejection had hurt him every bit as much as his bruises had—maybe more so, for this pain hurt in his soul.

He strapped on the gun belt that Garrick had found for him, and shoved Annie’s late husband’s Colt into it. He wasn’t going to ever let himself get caught in the same helpless position he had been in a fortnight ago.

But how was he ever going to make a place for himself around here, where only his family accepted him? Should he have stayed in Abilene, where he had been liked, and helped Mercy’s father get a church built in that wild cow town?

Maybe he should just concentrate on the task he had set himself for the day, he decided as he got dressed. Today he was going to ride over to Gillespie Springs and thank Livy for her role in saving his life. There would be time enough tomorrow to figure out what he was going to do with the rest of his life.

All in all, he didn’t look too frightening, he decided as he took a last look in the small mirror that hung over his dressing table. The bruises had faded. He had a slight bump at the top of his nose that hadn’t been there before. His left cheek, which had been unmarked, now bore a pink slash that would in time lighten into a pale scar, but he was growing a mustache to cover the small scar over his lip. Already the mustache didn’t look halfbad, he thought. Maybe it would give Livy something to look at besides the patch over his right eye—not that it mattered. He was only going to deliver his thanks, nothing more, he reminded himself as he went downstairs and out the kitchen door, pausing to kiss Annie, who was churning butter on the porch.

“You’re goin’ to see that woman, aren’t you?” she asked with narrowed eyes.

Cal paused. “That woman?’” he repeated, raising an eyebrow at her tone. “I’m going to pay a thank-you call on Olivia Gillespie, who saved my worthless hide.”

Annie looked back down at the churn, her mouth tightening. “Well, just be careful.”

He didn’t know if she meant for him to be careful around Livy, as if she was some dangerous female who might corrupt him merely by breathing the same air, or to be careful in general, after what had happened in Bryan, and he didn’t ask.

He saddled Blue, a roan gelding. Sam had taken Goliad, his stallion, to breed a mare who had come into season late, which would help them get a jump on getting the Devlin stud farm back to its former position of prominence.

It was a pleasant hour’s ride southeast to Gillespie Springs, over rolling farmland that paralleled the Brazos River. In the spring some of these fields would be flooded for rice growing. In others, on higher ground, cotton would be grown, but now desiccated rows of the dried plants stood minus their white bolls, except for a few dirty white puffs scattered around. Cattle and horses grazed in some of the fields. A mockingbird sang from its perch in a gnarled live oak.

Reaching the little town of Gillespie Springs, which stood where the road bent to accommodate the wide red expanse of the Brazos, Cal stopped when he saw a sign on a building that said Jail. He didn’t know where else to inquire about the way to Livy’s place, and in view of recent events, he figured the sheriff would know.

He did, though the puzzled frown on his weathered old face made it clear he couldn’t understand why the decent-looking stranger in the black frock coat would want to know.

“Miz Gillespie’s place? Down there at the end a’ town, across from where the springs is,” he replied curtly to Cal’s inquiry, and then went back to the dinner he’d been eating at his desk when Cal came in.

Cal got back on Blue and rode the half mile back in the direction from which he had just come, where a stand of cottonwoods revealed the existence of the springs the town had been named for. A sign proclaimed the shady grove Gillespie Springs Park, but across the road a fence much in need of mending enclosed a white frame, two-story house with a dried-up front lawn. A windmill creaked in back next to a barn. In the pasture beyond the barn a cow bawled mournfully once or twice.

Then it was utterly quiet except for the clucking of some pullets looking for bugs among the sad-looking, wilted roses. No one answered his knock.

Perhaps she wasn’t home, but did she have no one to help her with the house or the livestock? Had the Mexican alleged to be her lover been the only employee the Gillespies had?

Could she be in the barn, gathering eggs or doing some similar chore? He walked around the side of the house.

Was the ache of regret never going to get any easier to bear? Olivia wondered, standing in the shade of the big cottonwood tree that stood in the backyard between the house and the barn. She stared down at the makeshift grave marker, which was actually a hunk of limestone she’d waded into the spring to get. Smoothed and rounded by centuries of running water, it had been as heavy as her heart felt now. Behind it, she’d lashed two sticks together to form a cross. Someone—one of his Mexican friends or relatives, she assumed—had hung a rosary on the cross and left three roses in an earthen jar. She never saw these offerings left; she assumed whoever brought them came at dawn or after dark, or during the rare times she went to the stores in town.

Francisco, you deserve better than this, she thought, feeling the familiar stinging of tears in her eyes. You deserve better than a makeshift marker and a grave in the yard of the woman whose lover they say you were. But the sheriff had had a vicious sense of humor and had insisted Francisco be buried here—”so you don’t ever forgit what you done, Miz Gillespie.”

Livy had half expected the Mexicans in the community to move Luna’s body in the dark of night to someplace else—to one of their yards over on North Street, perhaps, for there was no Catholic church in Gillespie Springs. But maybe they felt Francisco had already suffered enough, for the grave had not been disturbed.

Rest in peace, Francisco. You know and I know it was all a lie.

Something—a rustling in the grass, a snapping of some tiny twig—warned her she was no longer alone.

She whirled, already wondering what she could use for a weapon, for she hadn’t had one the last time she’d been taken by surprise.

The man standing at the edge of the tree’s shade was a stranger to her, yet not a stranger—tall and lean, his hair streaked with gray, a patch over his right eye. It was the latter detail that caused the hand that had curved instinctively over her abdomen to relax.

“Cal?” she breathed. “What are you doing here? Are you…are you all right?” she asked, remembering the day she’d seen him in Bryan, beaten senseless to within an inch of his life. “You—you’re growing a mustache…” she babbled, as he came closer.

He smoothed long fingers over it self-consciously. “Yeah, I thought it might cover up one of my new scars, at least. But I’ve mended, thanks to you. Sam told me what you did that day, and I—I just came to thank you. I reckon I might be singin’ with the angels now—or worse—if you hadn’t shot off that gun.”

“I—I didn’t even know who you were when I stepped forward,” she said, staring at him, seeing a new scar on his cheek. Even in the shadows she could see the faint discoloration that remained around his left eye.

“Or you wouldn’t have helped me?” His mouth curved into an ironic smile, a smile that transformed the scarred face into one that still had the power to make her heart pound.

“No! Yes! I meant I…well, I would have helped anyone in your position,” she said, feeling flustered. “I— I just didn’t find out it was you until one of those rowdies said you deserved it because of fighting for the Yankees,” she added, but when she saw his face cloud over at the mention of the war, she wished she could unsay it.

“And what do you say, Livy?” he asked, in that husky drawl that had always wreaked havoc with her resistance. “Are you still mad at me for wearing blue?”

No. Livy wanted to say. Oh, no. Cal. I’ve had thousands of hours to regret not telling you to do what you had to do, then return to me safely. She heard the unspoken question in the tone of his voice, saw in his face his desire to recapture what they once had. She had but to say the right words and he would reach out and they would begin to bridge the enormous gap between them.

“Cal,” Livy began, “it was a long time ago. Years. A lot has happened,” she said, and was about to ask if he still wanted to be her friend in spite of what was being said about her when his eye fell on what lay behind her.

She saw when he grasped the fact that she was standing in front of a grave, then noticed his gaze narrow and realized he must have glimpsed the roses.