Smolder on a Slow Burn

by Lynda J. Cox

  Allison drew a deep breath and began to repeat her vows. Her voice broke with the tears she was trying not to cry. A.J. squeezed her hand. When she finished, O’Cleary stated, “In so much as A.J. and Allison have promised themselves to one another and have given their consent to be joined in the state of holy matrimony, let us pray for blessings of our Father on this couple.”

  Heads in the parlor bowed. A.J.’s hold on Allison’s hand tightened during O’Cleary’s prayer. At the “Amen,” O’Cleary stated, “What God has joined, let no man put asunder.” He paused for what seemed to be a lifetime, and then said, “I now pronounce you man and wife. A.J., you may kiss your bride.”

  ****

  Tommy tossed the ranch sign onto an unlit bonfire. The wooden sign that hung in the arch to announce the entrance to the Crazy TG Ranch dropped onto a worn, threadbare gray overcoat with gold braid twisting up the sleeves. To no one in particular, Tommy announced, “Never really liked that ranch name anyway. Made me sound like I was the one who was crazy.”

  “Tommy, light that fire up, will you?” A.J. called down to the third owner of the ranch.

  Within moments, the bonfire was blazing.

  Allison sucked in a deep breath when A.J. scrambled back up a long ladder and then straddled the thick cross bar of the arch. Harrison, Drake, and Royce all tossed ropes over the cross bar and pulled up the new ranch sign. He secured the sign, then crept to the ladder and climbed down. Allison let go of the breath she’d been holding while he straddled the cross bar more than fifteen feet in the air.

  He joined Allison a few feet from the arch and the sign it carried. The new sign moved slowly back and forth in the Wyoming breeze. In the center of the sign, a bar rested atop a heart. Inside the heart was a small letter “a”. Under the ranch brand, the legend “Proprietors: A.J. & A.S. Adams and T.C. Giles” had been burned into the wood.

  Scattered applause from around the arch and near the house grew in the warm air.

  A.J. slipped an arm around Allison’s ever-growing waist. “Looks good, I think.”

  Allison dropped her head onto his shoulder. “Yes, it does.” She watched Drake walk away toward the house. “He is still really hurting.”

  “I’ve noticed.” A.J. pressed a kiss onto the top of her head. “Royce said this is the first time in months he’s even left the ranch.”

  “I still don’t understand why Jessie believed that Archer woman when she accused Drake of trying to accost her. And for Jessie to just take off… I like Dr. Archer, but his wife is simply a horrid woman. And, I thought you Adams men were made of sterner stuff.”

  “Your opinion of Leah Archer seems to be the popular consensus. We Adams men are made of sterner stuff, until we lose our hearts.”

  “Sterner stuff…hmmm…do you want to tell me now what it was you made Harrison promise the night before your trial started?”

  A.J. drew in a deep breath and Allison followed his gaze to the mountains blued in the distance. “I made Harrison promise that if I was found guilty he would take you to the stage depot immediately. He’d have Drake wait with you to make sure you stayed there. Then when Harrison took me to the jail he was to give me a chance to escape so he could shoot me in the back and kill me. It would be completely justified as he would be stopping an attempted escape. And there wouldn’t be any questions afterward.”

  “You did not make him promise that.” Allison stepped in front of him and looked up into his face. What she saw there chilled her heart. He had fully planned to die if he had been found guilty, but dying would have been on his terms. “You did.”

  He lifted a shoulder. “Dying didn’t scare me. I came so close to dying so many times it lost its ability to terrify me. Being locked in a cell—after spending hours and even days in a small box at Infernum—that terrified me.”

  “And,” Allison glared over her shoulder at Harrison’s back across the lawn, “what did he say?”

  “He promised me he would. Promised that I would never have to face being locked in another box again as long as I drew breath.”

  Allison gasped and bent double. A.J. caught her. “Alli?”

  After several long moments, Allison straightened. She clutched her swollen stomach. “We will discuss your friend promising to shoot you in the back at another time. Right now, you need to go get Cole. I think I’m going to miss this barbecue.”

  Shortly after dawn the next morning, Pamela Alice Adams was born and placed into her father’s arms. She slept for the first time in her little life cradled to his chest while her mother snuggled into his side.

  Author’s Notes

  I used as many facts as possible while crafting this novel. I mustered A.J., the hero in this work, into the famed 1st Kentucky Cavalry of the Confederacy—admittedly some of the most educated and literate men serving on either side of the battle lines—and the men that Confederate Major General John C. Breckenridge called his “beloved orphans.” The 1st Kentucky was considered an “orphan brigade” due to a lack of tactical support from their home state, as Kentucky never seceded from the Union (1). These men were the first Kentuckians to respond to the call to arms for the Confederate States of America, mustered into service on October 28th, 1861, and they were there until the very last, serving as Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s bodyguards when he was captured by Federal troops in Washington, Georgia on May 10th, 1865. They were among the very last troops to admit defeat and finally lay down their arms. There were very few battles in the Civil War these “wild” Kentuckians missed (2).

  War brings about many evils, the worst of which, in my opinion, is the cruelty man perpetuates on his fellow man. The American Civil War was no different. At the beginning of the conflict, captured Confederate soldiers were often paroled and sent home, with a promise not to take up arms again. It quickly became apparent that wasn’t working, so the issue of what to do with captured soldiers arose. The South already knew they couldn’t release their captured prisoners, as those were men who would just go and fight again against an already outnumbered Confederacy, so a rather convoluted system of exchange was worked out between both sides.

  Prisoner of war camps began to appear behind the lines of the combatants, though neither side seemed prepared for the sheer numbers of captured warriors. Beyond a doubt, Camp Sumter in Andersonville, Georgia was one of the worst. At war’s end the camp commander, Henry Wirz, was charged by the United States government with war crimes, convicted and executed in what was probably the first trial of its kind. To be fair, when conditions were at their worst, the circumstances creating those conditions were completely beyond Wirz’s control, as the South was heavily blockaded by the North. Because of that blockade, food stuffs and medicine were extremely difficult—if not impossible—to procure. However, when word reached the North of the conditions in the Southern camps, the Northern forces retaliated and began to treat their Southern brethren with the same cruelty and utter disregard for humanity that they perceived to be happening in the Southern camps. Rations were cut for the Southern prisoners, medicines denied, and brutality became the norm (3).

  Elmira, New York housed the Northern equivalent of Andersonville. The death rate in Elmira surpassed that of Andersonville and for all the same reasons combined with deliberate actions to bring retaliation on captured Confederate forces (4). As Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton’s actions and often deliberate inactions created a camp at Elmira that stood out for its horrific conditions and death rate. Even though there were never any actual written orders specifically stating such, Elmira was constructed to be the first concentration and death camp in modern history (5).

  Out of respect for the men on both sides who died in these places, so as to not to make light of their sacrifices, and to acknowledge the camp commanders who found themselves caught between the devil and the deep blue sea in attempting to house, clothe, and feed the many prisoners in their charge, I chose to create a fictional prisoner of war camp.

  One of the few good t
hings to come out of the atrocities committed by both sides in these hellholes was that the United States determined never again to operate a prisoner of war camp as any of the camps were during the Civil War. For the most part, as a nation, we have attempted to abide by that pact we made with ourselves and the men who were held as enemy combatants.

  Another product of the American Civil War was the Ku Klux Klan. Most people assume the Ku Klux Klan has been around since the end of the Civil War. Confederate Brigadier General Nathan Bedford Forrest founded the Klan as a political group to assist returning Confederate veterans and defend those men from fraud and abuse. He withdrew from the Klan’s ranks when the Klan turned to brutal violence and directed the majority of their actions against people of color. In 1874 Forrest offered to help “exterminate” the men responsible for the continued assaults (6). By 1878 most of the Klan was destroyed and the resurrection of what we know as the Klan and their loathsome ideology would not happen until early in the 1900s. But small pockets of those racists continued to wreak havoc in parts of the Deep South, terrorizing families of color through murder, intimidation, and denying their children an education. For the most part many of the names of those killed by these pathetic cowards are not available even though accounts of their deaths can be found in the historical records. The children were killed simply because they dared to better themselves through education.

  For decades, 620,000 was the accepted number of men killed in combat. The American Civil War was the bloodiest conflict America ever saw, with more casualties than all other wars in which Americans fought combined. New research (7) reveals that death toll to be much greater than ever previously imagined. Conservative estimates place the number of dead at over 750,000. This kind of wholesale slaughter staggers the mind.

  End Notes:

  Diary of a Confederate Soldier. John “Jack” S. Jackman. With Introduction and edited by William C. Davis. 1990. University of South Carolina Press.

  Ibid.

  Den of Misery: Indiana’s Civil War Prison. James R. Hall. 2006. Pelican Publishing.

  Elmira: Death Camp of the North. Michael Horigan. 2005. Stackpole Books.

  Ibid.

  Nathan Bedford Forrest: In Search of the Enigma. Eddy W. Davison and Daniel Foxx. 2007. Pelican Publishing.

  (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17604991)

  A word about the author...

  Lynda Cox earned both her B.A. in English and history and M.A. in English from Indiana State University. Growing up on a steady diet of John Wayne Westerns and the television series Lassie, Lynda has incorporated those influences into her life. Her historical romance novels are set in the American West, and when she isn’t writing she can be found on the road to the next dog show to exhibit her award-winning collies. She loves to talk books and can be reached at:

  www.facebook.com/LyndaJCox