A Lawman's Christmas

by Linda Lael Miller

  “Yes,” Harriet reasoned, intrepidly logical, “but what if there’s a hard winter and we need to eat them?”

  “Harriet,” Dara Rose replied, walking a little faster because it was almost time for Edrina to come home for the midday meal, “there are times when a person simply has to help somebody who needs a hand and hope the good Lord pays heed and makes recompense.” Parting with a few eggs didn’t trouble her nearly as much as the realization that her five-year-old daughter had obviously been worrying about whether or not there would be enough food to get them through.

  “What’s ‘recompense’?” Harriet asked.

  “Never mind,” Dara Rose answered.

  They reached the house, removed their bonnets and their wraps—Dara Rose’s cloak and Harriet’s coat—and Dara Rose ladled warm water out of the stove reservoir for the washing of hands.

  In her mind, she heard Peg O’Reilly’s words of brave despair. The last of the oatmeal is used up, and we’re almost out of pinto beans….

  Peg earned a pittance taking in laundry as it was, and what little money she earned probably went to pay for starvation rations and to meet the rent on that converted chicken coop of a house they all lived in.

  As she reheated the canned venison leftover from last night’s supper, then sliced and thinly buttered the last of the bread she’d made a few days before, Dara Rose silently reminded herself of something Parnell had often told her. “No matter how tough things get,” he used to say, “you won’t have to look far to find somebody else who’d be glad to trade places with you.”

  Her children were healthy, unlike Peg’s eldest, and the three of them had a roof over their heads. And Parnell, at least, hadn’t left them willingly, the way Jack O’Reilly had done.

  Harriet, her mother’s busy little helper, set three places at the table and then dragged a chair over to the side window so she could stand on the seat and keep a lookout for her sister. Although they had their scuffles and tiffs, like all children, Harriet’s admiration for Edrina knew no bounds.

  “There she is!” Harriet shouted gleefully, after a few moments of peering through the glass. “There’s Edrina!”

  Dara Rose smiled and began ladling warm venison and broth into enamel-coated bowls. She’d just set the bread plate in the middle of the improvised table when Edrina dragged in, looking despondent.

  “You might as well know straightaway that I’m in trouble again,” she immediately confessed. “Thomas Phillips tried to steal my bonnet at recess, and near strangled me with the ties while he was at it, and I socked him in the stomach. Miss Krenshaw made me stand in the corner for a whole hour, and I have to stay after school to wash the blackboard every day this week.”

  Dara Rose sighed, shook her head in feigned dismay and placed her hands on her hips. “Edrina,” she said, on a long breath, and shook her head again.

  “Did Thomas have to stand in the corner, too?” Harriet inquired, already a great believer in fair play.

  “Yes,” Edrina answered, with precious little satisfaction. “He has to carry in the drinking water for the whole school.”

  “Wash your hands,” Dara Rose said mildly, when her elder daughter would have sat down to her meal instead.

  Edrina obeyed, with a sigh of her own, and pulled the stool out from under the sink to climb up and plunge her small hands into the basin of warm water Dara Rose had set there.

  “Mr. McKettrick came by the schoolhouse today,” the child announced. “That sure is a fine horse he rides.”

  Dara Rose felt an odd little catch at the mention of the new marshal and, to her shame, caught herself wondering if he’d found Alvira Krenshaw at all fetching. She was certainly eligible, Miss Krenshaw was, and while she wouldn’t win any prizes for looks, most people agreed that she was a handsome woman with a good head on her shoulders.

  “Was there some kind of trouble? Besides your disagreement with Thomas?”

  Edrina had finished washing up, and she climbed deftly back down off the stool, drying her hands on her skirts as she approached the table. “No,” she replied, “but he talked to Miss Krenshaw at the gate for a long time.”

  Dara Rose, who had long since learned to choose her battles, decided to let the hand-drying incident pass. She hoisted Harriet onto the stool, helped her lather to her elbows and then rinse and lifted her down again.

  The three of them gathered at the table.

  It was Harriet’s turn to say grace. “Thank you for the venison and the bread,” she said, in her direct way, her bright head bowed and her eyes squeezed shut. “And if there’s any way I could get that pretty doll in the window of the mercantile for my very own, I would appreciate the kindness. Amen.”

  Dara Rose suppressed a smile even as she endured another pang to her heart. Much as she’d have loved to give her daughters toys for Christmas, she couldn’t afford to do it. And even if she’d had any spare money at all, Edrina and Harriet needed shoes and warm clothes and nourishing food, like milk.

  “What do you want St. Nicholas to bring you for Christmas?” Harriet asked Edrina, with companionable interest, as they all began to eat.

  Edrina answered without hesitation, a note of gentle tolerance in her voice. “You know there isn’t any St. Nicholas, Harriet,” she reminded her sister. “He’s just a story person, made up by that Mr. Moore.”

  “Couldn’t we just pretend he’s real?” Harriet wanted to know. “Just ’til lunch is over?” She sounded more like an adult than a little girl and Dara Rose, though proud of her bright daughters, hoped they weren’t growing up too fast.

  “It wouldn’t hurt to pretend,” she put in quietly.

  Harriet’s face lit up. “What do you want for Christmas, Mama?” she asked eagerly, forgetting all about her food.

  Dara Rose pretended to think very hard for a few moments. “A cow, I think,” she finally decided. “Then we’d have milk and butter of our own. Maybe even cheese.”

  Harriet looked nonplussed. “A cow?” she repeated.

  Edrina glanced at Dara Rose, her expression almost conspiratorial, and considered the question under discussion. “I know what I’d want,” she said presently. “Books. Exciting ones, with bears and outlaws and spooks in them.”

  Again, Dara Rose’s heart pinched. She’d be lucky to afford peppermint sticks to drop into the girls’ Christmas stockings this year, never mind dolls and books.

  She cleared her throat. “Harriet and I stopped by the O’Reilly place today,” she said. “Little Addie’s under the weather again, and those boys looked hungry enough to dip spoons into the laundry kettle.”

  “And something smells bad there,” Harriet added.

  Dara Rose didn’t scold her, but went right on. “I think they’d be grateful to have firewood and enough to eat, like we do,” she said, hoping she’d made her point and wouldn’t have to follow up with a sermon on Christian charity.

  “Mama’s giving them some of our eggs,” Harriet said matter-of-factly. “She says sometimes a person just has to help somebody else and hope the good Lord pays heed and makes competition.”

  Edrina didn’t say anything, since she had a mouthful of bread.

  Dara Rose wondered if Harriet even knew what it meant to pay heed. “The two of you can take a basket over to the O’Reillys’, as soon as school’s out for the day,” she said. “And furthermore, Harriet Nolan, you will not remark on the bad smell.”

  “It’s probably the outhouse that stinks,” Edrina said. “Ours might get that way, too, without Papa around to shovel lye into it once in a while.”

  “Edrina,” Dara Rose said, “we are at the table.”

  A long pause ensued.

  “I have to stay after to wash the blackboard,” Edrina reminded her mother.

  “Fine,” Dara Rose answered, pushing back her chair and carrying her bowl and spoon to the sink. “I’ll wash the eggs and put them in the basket and you can drop them off at the O’Reilly place on your way back to school.”

  �
��There will be hell to pay if I’m late for class,” Edrina said frankly. “Don’t forget, I’m already in trouble for slugging Thomas Phillips in the stomach.”

  Dara Rose bit the inside of her lower lip to keep from smiling. “I won’t forget,” she said, heading for the single shelf that served as a pantry, bowl in hand, and fishing eight perfect brown ovals out of the crock filled to the brim with water glass. “If you hurry, you can deliver the eggs and still get back to school before Miss Krenshaw rings the bell. And I will thank you not to swear, Edrina Nolan.”

  Harriet, who staunchly maintained that she was too old to take naps, was already getting heavy-lidded, chin drooping, and yawning a little.

  Dara Rose washed the eggs and put them into the basket, covering them with a flour-sack dish towel. She handed them to Edrina, who was already buttoning her coat. “Wear your bonnet,” she instructed. “The sky may be blue as summer, but the wind has a bite to it.”

  Edrina nodded, resigned, and let herself out, taking the egg basket with her.

  “Bring that basket home,” Dara Rose called after her. “And the dish towel, too.”

  Edrina replied, but Dara Rose didn’t hear what she said. She was already scooping up her sleepy child and carrying her to bed.

  CLAY CHECKED THE BITTER Gulch Saloon and looked in at the bank, but there was no malfeasance afoot in either place.

  Figuring it was indeed going to be a long winter, he walked back to the jailhouse, where he had a tiny office, a potbellied stove and a cot, and helped himself to a cup of the passable coffee he’d made earlier.

  The stuff was stale and lukewarm, but stout enough to rouse a dead man from his eternal rest.

  That, he supposed, was what this coming winter was going to feel like. Eternal rest.

  He sighed, crossed to the single cell and peered through the bars, almost wishing he had a prisoner. That way, there would have been somebody to talk to, at least.

  Alas, lawbreakers seemed to be pretty thin on the ground around those parts at the moment, a fact he supposed he should have been grateful to note.

  Clay sat down in the creaky wooden chair behind the scarred wooden table that served as a desk and reached for the dusty stack of wanted posters and old mail piled on one corner.

  If anybody stopped by, he’d like to give the impression that he was working, even if he wasn’t. It made him smile to imagine what his granddad would think if he could see him now, collecting seventy-five dollars a month for doing not much of anything except drinking bad coffee and flipping through somebody else’s correspondence.

  He set aside the older wanted posters and read the few missives that looked even remotely official—none of them were, it turned out—and he was thinking maybe he ought to meander over to the livery stable and brush old Outlaw down, when he came to the last two letters and realized they were addressed to Mrs. Parnell B. Nolan.

  The first, from an outfit called the Wildflower Salve Company, was most likely a sales pitch of some kind, but the second looked personal and smelled faintly of lemon verbena. The envelope was fat, made of good vellum, and the handwriting on the front was flowing cursive, with all kinds of loops and swirls.

  Clay looked at the postmark, but couldn’t make out where the letter had been mailed, or when, and there wasn’t any return address.

  Not that any of this was his concern in the first place.

  Clay frowned, wondering how long the letters had been moldering in that pile, and then he smiled, holding the envelopes in one hand and lightly slapping them against the opposite palm.

  Maybe it wasn’t his sworn duty to make sure the mail got delivered, but it was as good an excuse as any for calling on Dara Rose Nolan.

  Clay rose from his chair, fetched his coat and hat and set out on foot.

  THERE HE STOOD, on her front doorstep this time, looking affably handsome.

  For the briefest fraction of a moment, Dara Rose feared that Clay McKettrick had changed his mind, decided he wanted the house, after all. Her stomach quivered in a peculiar way that didn’t seem to have much to do with the fear of eviction.

  “I found these letters over at the office,” he said, and produced two envelopes from an inside pocket of his duster. “They’re addressed to you.”

  Dara Rose’s eyes rounded. Getting a letter was a rare thing indeed. Getting two at once was virtually unheard of.

  She opened the door a little wider, extended a hand for the envelopes and spoke very quietly because Harriet was napping. “Thank you,” she said.

  He let her take the envelopes, but he held on to them for a second longer than necessary, too.

  Although her curiosity was great, Dara Rose wanted to savor the prospect of those letters for a little while. She’d read them later, by lamplight, when the girls were both down for the night and the house was quiet.

  She tucked them into the pocket of her apron, blushing a little.

  “Come in,” she heard her own voice say, much to her surprise.

  It simply wasn’t proper for a widow to invite a man into her home, even in broad daylight, but she’d done just that and already stepped back so he could pass, and the marshal didn’t hesitate to step over the threshold.

  He stood in the middle of the front room, seeming to fill it to capacity with the width of his shoulders and the sheer unwieldy substance of his presence. His gaze went straight to the oversize daguerreotype of Parnell on one wall.

  He seemed to consider her late husband’s visage for a few moments, before turning to meet her eyes.

  “He doesn’t look like the kind of man who’d die in a brothel,” he remarked.

  Dara Rose was jangled, but not offended. Everyone knew what had happened to Parnell, and the scandal, though still alive, had long since died down to an occasional whisper, especially since Jack O’Reilly had left his wife and children for a sloe-eyed girl from the Bitter Gulch Saloon.

  “He wasn’t,” she said, very softly, and then colored up again. “That kind of man, I mean. Not really.”

  Dara Rose had never confided the truth about her marriage to Parnell Nolan to a single living soul west of the Mississippi River, and she was confounded by a sudden urge to tell Marshal McKettrick everything.

  Not a chance, she thought, running her hands down the front of her apron as if they’d been wet.

  “It must have been hard for you and the children,” Clay said quietly. His eyes, blue as cornflowers in high summer, took on a solemn expression. “Not just his dying, but being left on your own and all.”

  “We manage,” Dara Rose said.

  “I reckon you do,” he agreed, and he looked more puzzled than solemn now.

  She knew he was wondering why she hadn’t found another husband, but she wasn’t about to volunteer an explanation. Maybe she hadn’t actually loved Parnell Nolan, but she’d liked him. Depended on him. Even respected him.

  Parnell had been kind to her, cherished the girls like they were his daughters instead of his nieces, and married her.

  She would have felt disloyal, discussing Parnell with a relative stranger; though, oddly enough, in some ways she felt as if she’d always known Clay McKettrick, and known him well. He stirred vague memories in her, like dreams that left only an echo behind when the sun rose. The silence was awkward.

  Dara Rose didn’t ask the marshal to sit down, and she couldn’t offer him coffee because she didn’t have any.

  So the two of them just stood there, each one waiting for the other to speak.

  Finally, Clay grinned ever so slightly and turned his hat decisively in his hands. He went to the door and opened it, pausing to look back at Dara Rose, his impressive form rimmed in wintry light.

  “Good day to you, Mrs. Nolan,” he said.

  Dara Rose swallowed. “Good day, Mr. McKettrick,” she replied formally. “And, once again, thank you.”

  “Anytime,” he said, and then he left the house, closed the door behind him.

  Dara Rose resisted the temptation to rush to th
e window and watch him heading down the walk.

  Harriet appeared in the doorway to the bedroom, hair rumpled, rubbing her eyes with the backs of her hands. “I thought I heard Papa’s voice,” she said.

  Dara Rose’s heart cracked and then split down the middle. “Sweetheart,” she said, bending her knees so she could look directly into the child’s sleep-flushed face, “Papa’s gone to heaven, remember?”

  Harriet’s lower lip wobbled, which further bruised Dara Rose’s already injured heart. How could such a small child be expected to understand the permanence of death?

  “Is heaven a real place?” Harriet asked. “Or is it just pretend, like St. Nicholas?”

  “I believe it’s a real place,” Dara Rose said.

  Harriet frowned, obviously puzzled. “Is it like here? Are there trees and kittens and trains to ride?”

  Dara Rose blinked rapidly and rose back to her full height. “I don’t know, sweetheart. One day, a long, long time from now, we’ll find out for sure, but right now, we have to live in this world, and we might as well make the best of it.”

  “I think I would like this world better,” Harriet told her, “if there was a St. Nicholas in it.”

  Dara Rose gave a small, strangled chuckle at that, and pulled her daughter close for a hug. “We don’t need St. Nicholas, you and Edrina and me,” she said. “We have one another.”

  Chapter 4

  After the chickens were fed and had retreated into their coop to roost for the night, Dara Rose made a simple supper of baked potatoes and last summer’s string beans, boiled with bits of salt pork and onion, for herself and the girls, and the three of them sat at the table in the kitchen, eating by the light of a kerosene lantern and chatting quietly.

  The subject of St. Nicholas did not come up again, thankfully. In Dara Rose’s humble opinion, Clement C. Moore had a lot to answer for. By writing that lengthy and admittedly charming poem, “’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” he’d created expectations in children that many parents couldn’t hope to meet.