Aiming for Love

by Mary Connealy

  Ma ran her hand up the page. “There is no date written in for the death of your grandparents, nor your parents.”

  “I never saw anyone write in the Bible.” Jo watched Ma’s hand caress the fragile paper. “Maybe it was Grandma who wrote these things down, and how could she write in a death for our parents when we had no idea what happened to them? Then when Grandma died, I suppose Grandpa never thought to write it down.”

  “Your Grandmother lost five children.”

  “What?” Ursula gasped. “She had children besides our pa?”

  “Yes, here are two daughters during her first marriage.”

  “First marriage?” Jo almost hollered. “She was married before Grandpa?”

  Ma tapped on the Bible at a group of names. “Yes, your grandpa was her second—no, I think he’s her third husband.”

  “What?” Ilsa squeaked.

  Ma ran her hand up, then down, then up again, reading silently. Finally, she said, “Her first died at the same time as her daughters, all of cholera back east. It says Baltimore. And there was a son, Josef, who is listed as born but no death date. Then your grandma remarried and had a child in North Platte, Nebraska, so that must’ve been the year they came west, because the Oregon Trail follows the Platte River west.”

  “Not Josef.” Jo pronounced the J like the letter of her first name. “Yo-sef.”

  Nodding, Ma said, “I have heard that. It’s probably the Danish way to pronounce it. But it’s spelled J-o-s-e-f. It’s spelled much like the beginning of your name, Jo. I’m sure you were named after your father.”

  The twist in her heart was warm and hard. Tears burned in her eyes, though they didn’t fall. “I’ve always known it as Yo-sef. It never—I never thought—” She swallowed hard. “I’m named after my father?”

  So many places Jo had never heard of. Grandma had been to all of them.

  “The child born in North Platte died—” Ma’s voice faded.

  “What is it?”

  “The child died of typhoid when he was two weeks old.” Ma looked up, her eyes sad. “Then another child born a year later died, and so did her second husband. Then she lists a marriage date to your grandpa—it says only Colorado, no town listed. I have no idea how she got from the wagon train to Colorado. But look at the slashing handwriting. It looks like it was written in a fury. The paper is torn in spots. She still has a living child that dates back to her first marriage. Then another child born to your grandpa—that son died when he was ten of . . . it just says fever. Maybe that’s when they moved this far away from town, or if they were already here, maybe they went to town and caught it there.”

  “Unless Grandpa came back with a sickness.” Jo wondered about that remote little cabin and Grandpa’s long absences every time he went to town. Had that been built after Grandpa brought something deadly home?

  “We can’t tell the circumstances from what your grandma has written down. There aren’t details about how the disease came to her home. There’s a note of a death. William Anderson, fever. He’s the only child your grandma and grandpa had together.” Ma drew her finger up the page and suddenly Jo was mad to learn how to read. She wanted to understand this.

  “Why wasn’t William Anderson named Nordegren?”

  Ma’s finger moved again. From the corner of her eye, Jo saw Ursula come closer. Mitch stopped rocking and leaned in.

  Ma glanced up and saw everyone watching. She hesitated. “Do you—do you girls want to hear all this? I didn’t start this to upset you. It is a common practice to write down important dates—births, deaths, marriages—in a Bible. You can see the blank pages left for just that reason. But there’s so much loss here. Your poor grandma lost five children and two husbands. Then her only living child left and never came back. So, in the end, she lost all six of them, but her son did leave his three daughters behind.”

  Jo thought of how upset Ursula already was and regretted these tales of disease and death. Her eyes slid from Ursula, scowling and scared, to Ilsa frowning silently. Ilsa nodded. Ursula folded one arm across her belly, propped her other elbow on it, and covered her mouth with her knuckles, but didn’t insist they stop.

  “It explains a lot about why Grandma feared the outside world. I’d like to hear it,” Jo said.

  “Your grandfather’s name was Nils Anderson. Your father, Josef, was the son of your grandmother’s first husband. He was ten years old when your grandma married your grandpa. That’s why you’re named Nordegren. It was your father’s name.”

  “S-so Grandpa wasn’t our grandpa?” Ilsa clutched her hands together.

  “He was.” Ma reached out and rested one hand over Ilsa’s. “Family is of the heart, and your grandpa loved you and raised you. That makes him your grandpa. It really makes him more like your father.”

  “There’s so much death,” Ursula said. “No wonder Grandma wanted to be up here. And no wonder she snapped at Grandpa so often. She blamed him for her son dying, and she feared he’d bring illness home again.”

  “There’s a note that says your father, Josef, had a fever, too. Just a date and his name with the word fever put beside it. It’s right under the name of his much younger brother who died. I-I think your Grandma must have expected him to die, too. It’s like she wrote it in, expecting to fill in a date of death. But he obviously recovered, because he married a year later and had three beautiful daughters.”

  “Before he and our ma went to the lowlands again and died of something else,” Ursula said, sounding gloomy.

  “But Grandpa went down all the time and never died. He never got a disease,” Ilsa said.

  “Except maybe once, and he brought it home with him and killed his son.” Ursula wasn’t going to get over that.

  “We’re from the lowlands, and we’re alive and well,” Ma said.

  “Except for your gutshot husband,” Ursula growled.

  “But he’s healing well,” Ma reminded her. “Not all sickness and injury kills. Your father survived a dangerous sickness, and if your grandfather did bring it home, then he survived it, too.”

  “We’ve never heard of any of these people,” Jo said. “We’ve never even heard of Grandpa’s last name. I always thought it was Nordegren. No one was here to call him anything but Grandpa. Even Grandma called him that.”

  “And then your grandma—it must’ve been her because the handwriting is the same and has been since years before she married your grandfather—wrote the date of your parents’ marriage and the dates each of you girls were born and that’s the end of it. No death listed for her, your grandfather, or your parents. It just ends.”

  Ursula spoke haltingly. “I think now, looking back, that Grandpa couldn’t read, either. Grandma read to us when we were very little, and she must’ve just known the stories in the smaller Bible, because she didn’t read them in an unfamiliar language. But they were always the same, word for word. And she held the book and turned the pages. I was eleven when Grandma died, so I was already telling the stories. I just knew them and . . . and said them as I’d learned them. I thought that was reading.”

  Ma said gently, “I can teach you to read. It’s not a difficult skill. I taught my boys. There was no school close enough to attend.”

  “I want that,” Jo said. “I want to be able to see all those names you’ve been talking about. There are pages of them.”

  “Yes, this Bible is very old. It has your grandma’s birth listed, her name was Greta.”

  “I’m named for Grandma?” Ilsa said it on a breath, sounding very pleased.

  “Yes.” Ma touched Ilsa’s hands again. They weren’t in such a tight fist now.

  “The world got all of them,” Ursula said. “Sickness and danger. The lowlands are teeming with both.”

  “Your grandparents lived to a ripe old age. You can’t say the world got all of them.” Ma gently closed the Bible. “It’s true that the world has dangers, but it has wonders, too. You can’t stay up here, cut off, your whole life.”

&n
bsp; “I can and I will.”

  No one mentioned that she’d agreed to let the Wardens stay.

  “But don’t you want to marry? Don’t you want children?”

  “I have my sisters.”

  “But what if they leave? What if they want to marry and have children? Your grandma could cut herself off because she had her family already. But you girls have none of that.”

  “I want none of that.”

  “Do you speak for your sisters? They’re adult women. It’s very common to want to marry and have children.”

  “We’re content,” Ursula snapped. “And now it’s late. I’ll go prepare my room for three, and you Wardens can take over the rest of our house while you tell us our grandma’s loss and grief aren’t important.”

  Ursula stormed from the room.

  “Ursula, please, I didn’t mean—”

  The bedroom door slammed shut.

  Jo frowned at the closed door for a time, then looked sideways at her little sister. “It’s going to be like sleeping in a room with an angry grizzly.”

  “No,” Ilsa said.

  “No what?” But Jo thought she knew.

  “You can’t bring your bow and arrow.”

  19

  The three sisters didn’t have to fit in the room because Pa took a turn for the worse.

  “Ilsa, come quick. Quill’s fever is up.” Ma stepped out of the room she’d headed for to sleep at her husband’s side, met Ilsa’s eyes, and immediately went back in.

  Ilsa was running on the first step. Mitch had gone into Jo’s room to sleep, and he came banging out. Still dressed, he hadn’t had a minute to get to sleep. Dave hadn’t even picked up the rolled-up blanket he’d been planning to use on the floor before the hearth.

  Jo rushed into the room behind Ilsa. Dave and Mitch met in the doorway and stopped. They were lodged in the door, trying to fight their way in.

  Both stopped. “The room’s too small for us anyhow,” Mitch admitted.

  Nodding, Dave backed up a step, and Mitch dashed in ahead of him.

  A familiar, sneaky move that Dave remembered now from their childhood.

  Dave reckoned that knack for trickery was how Mitch got so all-fired rich back east.

  The room really was too small for all of them . . . and it was a decent-sized room, but this was ridiculous.

  Dave took a long, hard look at his pa, then said, “I’ll get cold water. We can bathe his forehead.”

  Jo looked up and smiled. She was on one side of the bed with Mitch beside her. Ilsa was on the other side near Pa’s waist unwrapping his recently packed and bandaged wound. Ma was near Pa’s head, holding his hand and speaking quietly to him.

  Dave saw how much Ma cared, and how brave Pa was being, mainly for her. They were the bedrock he’d grown up on. He turned his back on the crowd, praying for all he was worth.

  “Let me past.”

  He glanced back and saw Jo emerging from the room.

  “I had to get out. There isn’t room. Mitch should go, too.”

  “I’m not leaving this woman to care for Pa.”

  Jo, her back to the room, made a twisted face at Dave. He stepped out of Mitch’s line of sight to grin.

  From the room, Ilsa spoke, “It’d be a wonder if your pa could heal up without running a fever. This is to be expected. It didn’t look suppurated when I changed his bandage earlier, so I think he’ll be fine, just miserable for a while.”

  “Do they need anything but water . . . and prayer?” Dave went to a small barrel against the back wall. Jo hurried over with a tin basin. A big ladle was hooked over the edge of the barrel, and Dave dipped out plenty of water.

  They’d used up all the hot water washing dishes, so now they needed to heat more.

  Jo leaned close. “I know you want to be in there with your pa, but there really isn’t enough room. Maybe we can . . . can . . .” Jo looked around, then shrugged.

  “What we should do is get some sleep. We can take over after a couple of hours so the others can rest.”

  Jo nodded. “You could even sleep in my bed.”

  Dave stumbled and almost fell flat on his face. And he was standing still. He gave her a wild-eyed look and remembered a few unruly thoughts he’d had earlier.

  Jo studied him. “What’s the matter?”

  “You . . . you . . . want me in bed with you?” Dave couldn’t believe those words came out of his mouth, especially when he was standing only one room away from his ma.

  “What?” Jo shouted. She looked stunned and then furious. She dashed the contents of the basin in his face.

  Which, Dave had to admit, wasn’t really that bad of an idea. Still, he was glad they were fetching cold water, not boiling hot.

  “All right then, no, you did not mean that. Even though that’s what you said.”

  “I said you can sleep in my bed,” Jo hissed, then she jabbed one finger . . . which held a basin . . . so she jabbed that, too, straight at the room Dave and Mitch had been planning to share. “While I sleep in the room with Ursula and Ilsa.” Her arm came around to point at the bedroom on the far side of the fireplace and whacked Dave in the head. The basin banged, and Dave found his thoughts clearing up nicely.

  “Why are you beating on my brother?” Mitch chose a poor time to quit keeping an eye on Ilsa.

  “She misunderstood something.” Dave took the basin from her, had himself a little tug-of-war, but he managed it. He refilled it. Handed it to Mitch with little regard for any water being sloshed. “Now I’m going to bed . . . uh . . . to sleep. Good night. Wake me if you need help. I’m as much a doctor as most of you.” He headed straight for the bedroom, water dripping off of him and even squishing some in his boots. He needed a change of clothes, although sleeping soaking wet was an idea with merit.

  He glanced around to see Mitch heading for Pa’s room, and to see Jo ducking into Ursula’s room with unusual haste.

  Dave kind of wished he had that basin again so he could give himself another dousing. Maybe he should go throw himself in a snowbank for a minute.

  It bothered Wax seeing that man perched high up on the mountainside watching him. Looking out at the deep snow that kept falling, he knew tracking the Wardens was impossible. And any trail they’d found would be filled in deep with snow.

  But Wax could climb.

  As soon as this snow quit falling, he was going up.

  For now, his only work was tending his horse, which meant fighting his way through the storm to the barn once a day.

  Some careful hunting turned up a copy of a deed in Quill Warden’s name to the land Wax now stood on. There were bills of sale for cattle, horses, and supplies going back over twenty years.

  Wax stopped in front of a mirror and stared at his waxed moustache and the small, well-tended beard he’d waxed into a point. The wax darkened his naturally blond hair until, with the dark facial hair, his own mother wouldn’t recognize him.

  As he stared for a moment, he didn’t recognize himself. Or what he’d become. A man needed money to make a start for himself in this world. Wax had always been too good with a gun. Too fast with too quick a temper. Now here he was right up against becoming a hired killer for real. He had a reputation. He was a known and feared man. But he’d always believed he was a decent man, too.

  Now he had his chance to leave the gunman reputation behind, if he could outrun it, of course, and Pike’s money was the last thing he needed. Wax wanted that money, but it felt like the price of it might be his life, and maybe his soul.

  He thought of that man watching him from on high. Like God watches. Ma had always been a believer, but when Pa had gotten the switch, Ma had no power to stop the beatings. She’d held him after. Cried and prayed and bound up his wounds. But to stop Pa, she’d have to take the beating herself, Wax knew that. And it probably wouldn’t spare him, it would just delay the pain.

  He’d loved his ma and loved listening to her read Bible stories. But he hadn’t taken up the habit of reading the
Bible since he’d left home years ago, as a boy of fifteen, after Ma and his little sisters had died at the hands of marauders and set Wax on his first manhunt.

  Wax had been living off his gun for ten years now.

  It struck him that he’d laid down the Bible and picked up a firearm. He didn’t think a man could carry them both. Well, soldiers did, and lawmen. Wax was neither.

  Looking out at the deepening snow, he lifted his eyes to the hills and wondered about that man. And wondered if God was up there looking down. And if He was, did He like what Wax Mosby had become? And, if Wax stayed and took that money, could he do it and start a new life for himself that was clean and honorable? Did God forgive a man who hired out his gun? Or was that what the verse meant about an unforgivable sin?

  What he needed to do was find out exactly what those folks had done to draw Pike’s wrath. And for that he needed to talk to them.

  His hand went to his holstered guns. He always wore two, tied down. Both hands slid over the butts with cool ease. They weren’t going to want to talk, not after one of the fools who rode with Wax had shot Quill Warden. They were going to meet him with guns blazing.

  20

  The fever broke in the night.” Jo slipped out of Quill’s room whispering. She’d heard someone moving around and wanted to share the news.

  Dave was crouched low, stirring up the fire. He turned and smiled. “Really?”

  Nodding, Jo said with quiet satisfaction, “Really.”

  It’d been five days of constant stomach-twisting fear.

  Day and night, bathing Quill to bring down the fever, coaxing water and broth down his throat. Ilsa had packed bags of snow around him a few times when the fever was frighteningly high. And she had a potion she mixed up with dried rose hips, moss, juniper berries . . . Jo wasn’t sure what all. Ilsa ground it down and steeped it into a dreadful-tasting tea.

  Jo had had a fever or two in her life from a cut or other injury that went deep, so she knew this tea. It tasted like baked dirt scraped off the bottom of a hoof. But it worked.