by Jo Goodman
Morgan sighed. “You got that from Mrs. Sterling. She told me that you were asking questions this afternoon.”
“She said you met her husband in Lander. Is that where you’re from?”
“I’m from New York City, same as you, Jane.” He chuckled when her head came up as quick and alert as a prairie gopher’s. He placed his hand on her crown and applied gentle pressure until she lowered it again. “Unexpected?”
“Yes.”
“I was born there. Do you know Five Points?”
“I do. I was not allowed to go there. It’s not safe, even now.”
“Well, that’s where I’m told I was born. My mother, whoever she was, and it’s reasonable to assume she was a whore, had the decency to hand me over to the nuns at St. Francis. I was raised in their orphan asylum. At six, about fifteen years after the social reformers sunk their teeth into the problem of homeless, impoverished, and unwanted children, I was put on an orphan train and sent west. I was so certain I was being punished, and perhaps I was. I had friends at the asylum. None of them made the journey with me. Do you know about the orphan trains, Jane?”
“Yes. When Cousin Frances once threatened to put me on one, I made it a point to learn about them. I did not think it was the worst idea she ever had. Perhaps it was that thought lingering in the back of my mind that prompted me to answer your personal notice. Isn’t it what I did, Morgan? Put myself on an orphan train? I think, though, that my experience has been quite different from yours. Is that how you met Zetta Lee Welling? Was she the one who plucked you from the train?”
Chapter Twelve
Zetta Lee Welling was the second wife of Hamilton Welling. Hamilton, or Ham as others knew him in the territory days, had used up his first wife putting eight babies in her. The first three were stillborn, and he grieved hard for the son but hardly gave the two daughters that followed an afterthought except to make certain Essie Clare knew she was not to present him with any more girls, dead or alive.
She did not. She gave him two boys, Gideon and Jackson, with another stillborn son in between. Essie Clare begged him not to touch her again, but Ham had it in his head that he required at least four sons to manage what he intended to make of the land, and he got Essie Clare with child two more times. She presented him with two more sons, both alive at birth and both dead within days. Her last baby outlived her by fourteen hours.
Still of a mind to add two sons, and needing a mother for the two little ones he had, Ham took his sons, ten head of cattle, and rode to the outpost at South Pass on the Oregon Trail to wait for a wagon train to pass through.
He found Zetta Lee right off, and because the wagon master was happy to send her packing, she only cost Ham six of the ten head he was prepared to settle on her family. Zetta Lee always maintained that the cows were her farewell gift to the wagon party, not a bride’s price. She had no family to formally accept what Ham Welling was offering, and besides that, she was as delighted to be gone from the wagon train as her fellow settlers were happy to see her go. Even before her husband died because he was too slow or too stupid to get out of the way of a runaway wagon, Zetta Lee was at the center of unrest in the group. The women were suspicious; the men were smitten. Zetta Lee was in her glory.
She was a widow at nineteen and beholden to no one, so when Ham Welling proposed to make her his wife, the mother of his two sons, and the mistress of Welling & Sons in the Eden Valley, she accepted. Hamilton was her senior by sixteen years and range work had kept him lean and hard. He did not have a kind face, but he had the kind of face that gave her a little thrill when she caught him looking at her. She was as much taken by the way his eyes ate her up as she was by the fact that he already had two sons. She did not want children of her own. The thought of being pregnant terrified her. There was no surer means of a woman becoming old before her time than producing a litter of brats.
Zetta Lee would later say that one of the things that attracted Ham to her was knowing that she was already broke in. She would also say that he never suspected how true that was. If he thought he was ever the master in their marriage, it was because she let him think it. He put his dead wife’s ring on her finger, but he may as well have put it through his own nose because Zetta Lee led him around by it in and out of bed.
Zetta Lee was a hard worker. She made sure Ham had no complaints with her there, and she did right by Gideon and Jack, raising them to benefit from what she had learned through the eighth grade. She never turned Ham away, but neither did she give him the children he wanted. She kept her figure trim, her breasts firm, and her ebon hair glossy, and when he was range riding for days, sometimes weeks, on end, she entertained his friends from nearby Lander who stopped by to see if she needed anything. Or anyone. She always did.
Ham Welling did not know about his wife’s interests outside of their marriage bed, and because she let it be known that Ham would kill her if he ever found out, none of her lovers betrayed her—or themselves. The one concession that Zetta Lee made came five years into their marriage. Ham got it in his head again that he wanted another child. He would accept a daughter, if that’s how it turned out, but he had an unnatural fear that one of his sons would be Cain to the other’s Abel. He did not understand how it was possible to plant eight babies in Essie Clare and not one in Zetta Lee. What he knew was that it was not for lack of trying.
Zetta Lee fell into a melancholy state. She was listless, quiet, and undemanding in bed. She rarely spoke except to apologize for her inadequacies as a wife. She cried a great deal when Ham was around. She ate very little. This went on for three weeks, and just when she thought she might become as mad as Lady Macbeth, Ham took it all back.
That was when she suggested an orphan. They would take on just one boy at first and see how it went. If it was a good fit for their family, they’d choose another later. Zetta Lee was not certain how Ham would take to the idea, but when he said yes, she figured she had bought herself another five years. Raising someone else’s child was less onerous to her than bearing one.
Ham had to travel a piece to meet the orphan train. The Union Pacific’s rails did not reach as far west back then, and most orphans ended their journey in Indiana. Ham set out from Eden Valley with three of his ranch hands and two hundred head of cattle destined for the eastern markets. He returned a month later with his men, a decent profit from the drive, and a skinny redheaded boy who sat better in a saddle when he was tied to the horn.
Ham liked him because he didn’t whine about it.
Morgan Longstreet was a good fit. He didn’t look like a Welling, but he took the name because no one ever said he shouldn’t. Sometimes he forgot that he didn’t look like the rest of them. Mostly it was Zetta Lee who reminded him. She liked to point out that she was different, too. Where Ham and his two sons had coffee-colored hair, Zetta Lee’s was as black as a pirate’s heart. Gideon and his father shared sharp, angular features that Jackson would also see once his face thinned out. Zetta Lee’s face was heart-shaped, her lips fuller, her eyes rounder. Morgan avoided the mirror so he would not have to gaze into the freckled face she told him was angelic.
She called him Ginger Pie. Until Zetta Lee, he had always been “that redheaded boy.” He had never heard the word “ginger” used in reference to his hair. He didn’t mind so much. She had silly names for Gideon and Jackson as well, but it seemed to Morgan that she used them less frequently and not always kindly. He did not know if the endearment made him special or was meant to set him apart, but it was years before he objected to it, and still years after that before he objected out loud.
Morgan figured he got along with Gideon and Jack about as well as any brothers ever got along. Early on he recognized that Gideon and Jack shared a bond that he would never have with either of them, together or separately, but they did not make it their life’s work to exclude him. The three of them made a triangle, and that usually meant that one of them was sitting on the outside. Sometimes that was a good place to be, like when Gideon and
Jack were tearing into each other, but other times he was there because he was their target and they were fixing to bury him in a heap of trouble.
They all worked hard on the ranch. Everyone had chores. From the beginning, Morgan was expected to do his share, and depending on the mood of his brothers, he sometimes did their share as well. Morgan learned to ride and rope, and Ham taught him how to break a horse. There was an old hand named Hatch Crookshank who taught him how to gentle one. Gideon, owing to his age, was the first one allowed to accompany his father on a cattle drive. He came back with stories that made Jack and Morgan long to go. They talked excitedly about what they would do when their turn came, and Gideon listened to them with his chest puffed out, like he was ten years their senior and a score of years more experienced.
Jackson was permitted to ride out next. Ham let his sons flank the herd on the left, keeping them together so they could look out for each other. Morgan stood back on the porch with Zetta Lee and watched them go. She laid her hand on his shoulder and comforted him.
“Come inside now, Ginger Pie. I want to show you something.”
That was how it started. Zetta Lee took him to her bed, and in the absence of her husband, she broke him in. The two hands that were left behind to help manage the ranch came sniffing around at different times, but Zetta Lee told each one that he no longer pleased her. From the bedroom window, Morgan watched one, then the other, slink away. He wondered if he would leave her like a whipped puppy when she said the same to him.
There were men from town who stopped by. Morgan recognized them from previous visits. He also remembered that their visits usually lasted longer, and he remembered that when they came he and his brothers were sent away from the house. On one of those occasions, Jack had nearly drowned in the pond.
Now Zetta Lee did not let any of them stay beyond a few minutes. Some of them were angry, others merely resigned. She remained firm. She held a Bible in the crook of her arm and told every one of them the same story. She had been visited by an angel, and she was saved.
Morgan knew this because Zetta Lee invited him to sit at the kitchen table when she saw one of the men coming. She gave him a biscuit with honey. He nibbled at it while she spoke to the man. Even then he understood his presence tempered their exchange. After they were gone, she took him by the hand and led him to the bedroom. He forgot about his half-eaten biscuit when she showed him there were other ways he could taste honey.
He thought it would end when Ham returned from the drive. He felt different, but he wasn’t sure what he felt. Zetta Lee was beautiful, and what she did to him was exciting, but no matter what she said to justify what they were doing, the fact that she was justifying it at all was his assurance that it was wrong. He wrestled with a confession that he practiced when he was alone, and he was prepared to say every word of it to Ham, but Zetta Lee practically dragged Ham to bed when she saw him again, and Morgan felt such a confusing surge of jealousy and betrayal that he said nothing.
And on the second afternoon of Ham’s return, when Zetta Lee sent Morgan to the smokehouse on an errand and then trapped him there, he felt both joy and shame as she opened the fly of his trousers, dropped to her knees, and took him into her sweet, hot mouth.
When it came time for him to ride with the others, the cattle drives were much shorter. The advance of the Union Pacific made it possible to take the cows no farther than the nearest depot, in this case, only as far as Rock Springs, a distance of little more than a hundred miles. Zetta Lee complained prettily that she didn’t like the idea of her youngest going off with the others, and because Ham considered the ranch was better served by having Morgan manage it than ride, he agreed with Zetta Lee that Morgan should stay back.
Morgan remembered that Zetta Lee had hardly let him out of her bed, let alone out of her sight. He was old enough, strong enough, understood enough now to tell her no, but that counted for nothing. She had him so twisted up inside that he did not know the word when she was around.
Ham Welling came back from that trip to Rock Springs with the bones of his right foot smashed by the chuck wagon’s wheel. The doctor came from town to look at it, but there was nothing he could do. It would heal or it wouldn’t and that would be that. The foot became infected, then gangrenous, and the doctor returned to Eden Valley to amputate. Ham died three days later, and his wife and sons buried him in the shade of a cottonwood tree.
Zetta Lee spent the evening mourning her husband and all of the following day trying to get into his safe.
• • •
Morgan shifted. It only required that small movement for Jane to lift her head. “My arm is numb,” he said, a tad apologetic.
“Oh, yes. Of course.” She felt a twinge of sympathy for him as he eased his arm back to his side and flexed his fingers. “You should have said something a long time ago.”
“I don’t think I really noticed.” He rubbed his upper arm until Jane took over the task for him. “It feels better when you do it.”
“Mmm.” She propped herself on an elbow and concentrated on what she was doing. “How did it end, Morgan?”
He stared at the ceiling for a long time before he looked at Jane. “I told her I was done with her. Just those words: ‘I’m done with you.’ I don’t know why I said it that way. Until then it always seemed as if she had the whip hand, but saying it like that, and hearing myself say it, I took it from her, and I never gave it back.”
“Was it hard to tell her? I am imagining that you steeled yourself to say the words.”
“It wasn’t hard. Not then. Not after so long. Maybe if I’d thought about it, I wouldn’t have been able to get the words out, but I didn’t think. I just said them, and it was done.”
“Zetta Lee didn’t argue?”
“Some. But she never cornered me again or invited me to her room. She would not humiliate herself like that. I used to wish that she had argued more or set some traps again. When she didn’t, it got me thinking that I could have ended it whenever I wanted. Years earlier even. Maybe ended it before it started. It made me feel more responsible somehow.”
Jane pushed herself upright and looked down on Morgan. She searched his face, but he would not look at her. “No. She was a wicked woman. And clever. She is still punishing you. You could not have stopped her one moment earlier than you did. She would have manipulated you; she did manipulate you. You think with your man’s mind when you look back on it now, but you were a boy then.”
“Sometimes I know that,” he said. “And sometimes it slips away from me.”
Jane touched his shoulder and angled her head. This time he looked at her and held her gaze. “I grieve for that boy,” she said. “I grieve that he has never known peace.” She took his hand, squeezed it. “But I love the man who keeps him close and protects him and has the courage to let me know him.”
“The boy or the man?”
“Both. The courage to let me know the boy and the man.”
“Jane.”
She closed her eyes briefly, her smile faint but content, and when she opened them again, Morgan was searching her face. “Yes?”
“You said you loved that man.”
“I did say that, didn’t I?”
“Did you mean it?”
“Do I often say things I don’t mean?”
“Right now I can’t think of one.”
“Well, there is your answer.”
“I wish you’d say it again. Straight. To me.”
Jane leaned forward and brushed his lips. She lifted her head to stare into his eyes. “I love you, Morgan Longstreet.”
His sigh was barely audible, mostly just a gentle rise and fall of his chest. “It feels even better than I thought it might.”
“You thought about it?”
“Some.” The way his mouth curved made him look very young suddenly and just a little abashed. “All right. A lot.”
“I think that’s nice.”
“Have you ever said it before?”
“I’m sure I must have said it to my mother and father.”
“But what about to someone like me?”
“Like you?” She pressed her lips together, thinking.
“Jane.”
“No, Morgan. I’ve never said it to someone like you. Aside from the fact that there is no one like you, I have never loved another man and therefore have felt no urge to say so.”
Morgan tapped his chest with his forefinger. “It’s the boy. He needed to know.”
“I understand. It’s all right.”
“I’ve never said it to anyone.”
“You still haven’t.”
“Should I say it now?”
“Only if you want to. Only if it’s true.”
“Do you mind if I wash off the stink of Zetta Lee first?”
“I think I’d prefer it.”
Morgan sat up. Jane released his hand as he moved to the edge of the bed. Tightening the towel at his waist, he stood and padded to the washroom. Jane watched him go. When he shut the door she lay down and pulled the covers up to her shoulders. Smiling to herself, she closed her eyes. She did not remember falling asleep.
• • •
Jessop cracked an egg against the side of a bowl and prepared to separate the shell with his thumbs.
“Quiet,” Morgan snapped in a stage whisper. “I told you, Jane’s still sleeping.”
Jessop replied in a similar tone. “Then you tell me how I’m supposed to prepare them with the shell still on.”
Scowling, Morgan muttered something under his breath and sat back in his chair.
Jem answered for him, sotto voce. “Hard-boiled.”
Equally hushed, Jake said, “Soft-boiled.”
Max said, “Anyone want more coffee?” When everyone just stared at him, he shrugged and set the pot down.
Jessop turned back to the hot griddle and dropped the contents of the eggshell onto it. It sizzled and crackled loudly on a thin layer of bacon grease. Behind him, he heard Morgan swear softly and everyone else snicker.
