"Luke!" she gasped.
"Luke..." she pleaded.
"Oh, please, Luke," she beseeched.
And he replied, "Yes, Katie girl. Yes!" as he surged up along her body, taking her mouth and sliding smoothly into her.
"Your ma's right," he said, a long time later. They lay in each other's arms, sleepy and content. He had pulled the comforter up, for the room had grown chill.
"Ummm?"
"I said your ma's right. We can't live our lives fighting all the time. So what are we gonna do about it?"
She let her hand slide down his belly. "I have some ideas," she told him.
"We can't do that all the time." His hand caught hers and brought it back to rest over his breastbone. "Much as I'd like to."
"Did your folks fight?" she asked him, finally, when no ideas came to her. "I don't mean disagree about something. I mean fight. Like we do."
"Nope. I can't remember ever seeing them do more than argue now and then, about everyday stuff mostly."
"Mine didn't either." She raised up on one elbow so she could look him in the face. "You know, Luke, I can't believe that people as opinionated as Ma and Pa didn't have some pretty strong disagreements."
"Me neither. My folks, I mean." Catching a lock of her hair with his fingers, he tickled her nose with it.
She sneezed. "Stop that!" Surely there was something Ma and Pa had done to avoid fighting. She remembered one time when Pa had plowed up some flowers Ma had planted. She'd yelled at him, then turned around and walked off. Later she'd told Katie and Ellen that she'd gone down to the hot springs beside the river and had a soak.
Since the children weren't allowed to go there without supervision, Katie had been jealous.
She thought back to other times when her parents had seemed upset. In every instance, one or the other had gone off for a while. To let their anger cool? That must be it.
"I think we need to agree that we won't argue," she told Luke.
He opened his mouth, but before he could say more than "How--" she'd put her hand over it.
"Let me finish. I'm saying that if one of us gets really angry with the other, we have to promise not to yell or cuss or throw things. Instead, we just turn around and walk off."
"That won't work. What if we're in the middle of something? Like driving to town? Or doctoring a sick horse?"
"Well, we have to be realistic, too. How about we agree to walk off if possible, and to shut up until we can, if it's not possible. Will that satisfy you?"
He frowned, as if in deep thought. At last he said, "Yes, but I won't promise I'll remember. Not at first."
"Neither will I," she said, knowing how easy it was to answer first and think later. "But if we try--"
"I'm willing. Anything to avoid another day like today." He pulled her to him, held her close. "Honest to God, Katie, I never felt so alone, so damn lonely, as I did today. I don't ever want another day like this my whole life long."
"Neither do I, Luke. Neither do I." She snuggled against him. "So. Starting tomorrow, we'll never fight again. Agreed?"
"Starting tomorrow, we'll do our best," he said.
Katie had seen Luke Savage's best. It was good enough for her.
* * * *
In the morning the first thing Luke saw was his trunk. He remembered then that Katie had mentioned its arrival last night. Quietly he slipped from her loose embrace and got out of bed. The room was cold, so he slipped on the wool britches and shirt he'd worn the night before. Be good to get some clothes of my own that aren't full of holes and about worn out. He found the key and unlocked the trunk. Can't remember what I packed in here, it's been so long. He had filled the trunk and locked it the day he'd walked away from the farm in Kansas, just before his last visit to the graves of his mother, his father, and his little sister. Three years ago and some months.
The shallow wooden tray held socks and underwear, his father's good hairbrush and his mother's silver-backed mirror, tarnished now, but with her initials still discernible: LES, intertwined fancy letters. Lucinda Ellsworth Savage. He remembered her telling him Pa had given it to her their first Christmas together.
There was more. A large rectangular parcel, wrapped in linen. Luke folded back the cloth, curious, for he did not recall looking inside when he'd packed it.
The gilt letters on the dark leather binding were faded, but still readable. Holy Bible. He opened the cover. Inside, in elegant copperplate writing, was his grandfather's name. Isaiah Lucas Savage. A lump formed in his throat. Inside were records of his father's birth and that of his sisters and the brother who had died in infancy. Luke had no idea where the sisters--my aunts--were, for they had been older and married when the family moved from Ohio to Indiana.
He wrapped the Bible carefully in its linen covering and replaced it in the tray. I wonder if Pa wrote down when Melissa and Ma died. I'll look sometime. But not today. Today is all about the future, not the past.
He lifted the tray out and looked underneath. A crocheted bedspread. Ma wouldn't use it in the soddy. She was keeping it until Pa built them a real house. A length of rust-colored cotton, intended as a dress for Melissa, but never made up. A small box, fashioned from stiff silk-covered paper, held together with careful stitches of variegated floss. He opened it. Inside, on a bed of cotton wool, lay his mother's wedding ring.
It was a wide gold band. Luke had a memory of her hands, work-roughened and twisted from rheumatism, but always wearing that ring. He picked it up and looked inside. "LJE�EIS�1843"
With the ring clenched in his fist, he went to the bed. "Katie?"
"Ummm?"
"Wake up. I've got something for you."
She turned over and lifted her head. With her hair in her eyes and her face swollen from sleep, she was still the most beautiful sight he'd ever seen. Luke sat on the edge of the bed and reached for her hand. "I said it once, but it's worth repeating. We're married, Katie Savage. For better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and health, until death do us part." He slipped the ring onto her unadorned finger, for there hadn't been a wedding ring to be found in the little railroad town, the day they'd wed.
"Forever and ever," she said, smiling up at him from a face glowing with love and happiness. Wet with tears.
Luke took her in his arms then, and hid his own welling eyes against her hair.
* * * *
The day after Luke's reign as Lord of Misrule ended, they rode out of Boise City together. The men of the family had gone out half a dozen times since Christmas, until all agreed that they had found the perfect land for the Savages to homestead.
The sky was the clear, cold blue of January. Their shadows stretched ahead of them as Luke and Katie rode west, toward their future. Today they rode alone, for this was the day they would choose a site for the home they would make together.
THE END
About the Author
Among her varied careers are a couple Judith B. Glad actually chose, rather than falling into. With her children in school, she decided it was time for her to follow her own dreams, so she went back to school and studied botany. After completing her M.S., she became a botanical consultant, and spent the next twenty-odd years picking flowers for a living. Well, it was a little more complicated than that, but she picked enough flowers to keep her happy.
Consulting is not always steady work, so one slow winter Judith decided to spend a little time at her second career choice. Now she'd done a lot of writing as a consultant, but somehow describing proposed mine sites and interpreting statistical data wasn't the kind of writing she wanted to do. So she wrote a book. And another, and... Before she knew it, she was spending more time writing than picking flowers.
Judith lives in Portland, Oregon, where her garden blooms all year 'round and the long, rainy winters give her lots of time for writing. Visit her website (www.judithbglad.com) for samples of her stories.
* * * *
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