The Preacher's Bride Claim

by Laurie Kingery

  Elijah groaned, but it sounded like someone else uttering the noise. Each breath was made harder by the sludge that seemed to have coated his lungs, inside and out. Parched throat. So thirsty. Had he become lost in the desert? But Oklahoma wasn’t a desert...

  He felt the presence of a darker shadow in the misty distance, a shadow that was pure evil. A voice inside him mocked, “You’ll never live to build your church. Your congregation will be scattered and forget the ways of righteous men. Gideon and Clint won’t ever find their way back to the Lord....”

  No! He couldn’t allow it! He had to survive, to get well! God, save me!

  He felt the presence of warmth, and Scripture came to him. My grace is sufficient... My power is made perfect in weakness. The words encouraged him to let go and sleep.

  I can’t sleep, Lord! he protested. I have to guard my flock against those who would tear it apart!

  Then he remembered that Jesus was the Good Shepherd, not him. Again he felt the presence of the Light encouraging him to let go and rest.

  Elijah slept.

  Even in his dreams he could feel cool, soft hands touching his forehead, bathing him with blessedly cool water. A soft, murmuring voice read the Psalms aloud near his ear. Was it Marybelle? Or Alice?

  It was Alice. He could picture her, brisk and professional, but with a caring in those sky-blue eyes that had reassured everyone he’d seen her nurse. He could see her reaching down to check a pulse in a wrist, listen to breathing with that wood-and-metal contraption of hers...

  He had to live...had to get better so he could tell her how important she was becoming to him....

  * * *

  “Alice, go get some rest. I’ll watch over Reverend Elijah for a while.”

  Alice roused from her stupor at the gentle touch of Cassie Gilbert.

  “Wh-what time is it?” she asked, even while her eyes flew to Elijah.

  He was sleeping, his chest rising and falling. His respirations still rattled as he exhaled.

  She reached out an unsteady hand and touched him. He was still hot but cooler than he had been.

  “It’s midnight, child—at least, according to your own timepiece on your dress,” Cassie said with a soft chuckle, pointing to it.

  “I can’t leave. Not with Elijah like this.” Five campsites away was too far if Elijah took a turn for the worse. Dazedly she looked around, expecting to see Clint and Gideon asleep in their beds, but the cots were vacant.

  “I can watch him,” the older woman insisted. “I’ve done some nursing—though not with formal training like you had. You can sleep right over there,” the older woman insisted, pointing to one of the cots. “Clint put fresh sheets on it. He and Gideon are sleeping outside by the fire. Go get some rest, and I promise I’ll call you if Reverend so much as twitches the wrong way.”

  “Dakota?”

  “Sleeping, too, at our campsite. I didn’t leave till Keith was back from the prayer meeting, of course. Just imagine—he says there’ll be some keeping vigil in prayer all night for the reverend. Lars talked to Dakota, explained that you were a medicine woman and that ‘Preechah ’Lijah’ was in good hands.”

  A medicine woman, Alice thought, and couldn’t help but smile a little.

  “The boy’s been chanting—I think that’s how he prays.” Cassie’s smile was fond. “Now shoo, girl,” she ordered, making swishing motions at Alice in the chair.

  She’d just lie down for a few minutes, Alice told herself. She could listen to the quality of Elijah’s breathing with her eyes shut so Cassie would think she was sleeping....

  * * *

  She woke at dawn, hearing birds beginning to chirp and the other two Thornton brothers talking softly outside the tent. How had she slept so long? How could she have slept at all, with Elijah in such danger?

  Throwing her legs over the side of the cot, she sat up, her eyes going to Elijah’s bed. Cassie. The older woman was bending over Elijah’s forehead, but at the sound of Alice’s cot creaking, she turned around.

  “I was just about to rouse you,” Cassie said. “I think his fever’s starting to climb again.”

  “You shouldn’t have let me sleep so long,” Alice mumbled, then hoped her tone didn’t sound accusatory.

  “You needed it,” Cassie said imperturbably. “And he didn’t start getting hot till just a few minutes ago. I’ve been feelin’ his forehead every little while through the night.”

  Alice flew to the bedside and confirmed Cassie’s assertion with a shaking hand. Elijah’s skin was fiery.

  “Help me sponge him off again, Cassie,” she said, and the older woman went to get some water.

  * * *

  Hot. So hot. How had he gotten trapped inside his cousin’s furnace? Surely even Obadiah wasn’t that cruel.... His brain felt as if it was on fire. If he looked hard enough, he could just see the flames....

  Incredibly, he saw Marybelle Atkins, his lost fiancée, walking amid the fire, her eyes sad as she met his gaze. Her blond hair was loose, floating around her shoulders. She shook her head at him and walked away.

  “Wait, Marybelle!” he called. “Wait, I want to talk to you!”

  But his dead fiancée kept walking, the smoke—or was it mist?—swirling around her, hiding her...

  “We’ve got to get this fever down,” he heard Alice say. “If we don’t, I’m afraid he’ll have a seizure.”

  He heard his brothers’ muttering voices, near but not as near as the soft voice. Talking about him—worried, fearful. Gideon, Clint, I’m here! Don’t give up on me!

  It was so hard to breathe. Each breath was such an effort and an agony....

  The cold cloths landed on his skin again, but the touch wasn’t soft and gentle as before.

  “Come on, big brother,” he heard Gideon say. “Don’t give in. We all need you, Lije...” His strokes with the cold, wet cloth were insistent.

  Then Clint’s voice said, “Lije, come back from wherever you went. There’s too much for you to do here, brother. Neither of us wants to run for those homesteads without you, and it’s for sure neither of us can run a church. You’ve got the congregation scared witless, brother. Get better, please...”

  I’m trying, Clint...

  And then he was cold, colder even than before. The cold was so frigid it burned. It wasn’t smoke that whisked around the evil darkness now, but snow.

  Blankets! He needed blankets. Why was everyone letting him freeze like this? He reached out with flailing arms, desperate to grab at least the one blanket he always left rolled up at the foot of his cot.

  “Easy, brother. Don’t be striking out at Miss Alice, she’s trying to help get your fever down, Lije!” he heard Gideon say.

  Why were his own brothers telling lies? He didn’t have enough breath, let alone the energy, to strike at her, even if he wanted to. And of course he didn’t want to. He loved her!

  “He’s delirious,” he heard Alice say. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’ll calm when the fever goes down.” If the fever goes down, he heard her say within her mind.

  And then he slept again.

  * * *

  He’d called for Marybelle. That had been the one sentence Alice could understand amid all his incoherent mumbling. Who is she? His voice had been anguished, the voice of a man who loved deeply, a man who loved only once. She’d been a fool to even begin to think she could matter to him the way Marybelle must have.

  “How’s he doing, Miss Alice? Is he any better?”

  She hated to quash the hope she saw in his younger brother’s eyes as he gazed down at Elijah, but it would be wrong to lie.

  “No better, no,” she said, avoiding Clint’s gaze.

  “But no worse?” Gideon asked, coming to stand by Clint at their brother’s bedside.

  �
�No worse.” They didn’t understand, Alice thought. To Gideon and Clint, if their brother was no worse, that was encouraging news. They didn’t understand the toll that fever and congestion took on the body, drying it out and making it so hard to keep air flowing through, depriving the body of the ability to fight. And if nothing interrupted that, unconsciousness would progress to something deeper, to coma.

  “Is he...is he...going to make it?” This came from Clint, and she heard the fear in the question, that even asking it was letting in the possibility that Elijah might not survive.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m doing everything I can.”

  “What can we do? Is there anything else we can do?”

  “Pray.”

  Gideon uttered a smothered sound that might have been disgust, might have been despair. “I prayed once before, and it didn’t do any good. Sorry if it offends you, Miss Alice, but I don’t think anybody up there cares what happens here on earth.”

  Alice gazed at him, knowing this wasn’t the time to argue. What had happened to this man to make him so cynical? Whom had he lost, despite his prayers? Was he speaking of the loss of their parents, in childhood, or was this a more recent raw wound of grief?

  She turned to look at Clint. Did he feel the same way?

  Apparently feeling her scrutiny, he said, “I believe there’s a God, Miss Alice. I just don’t know if we’re on speaking terms, after what I’ve seen Him allow to happen.”

  She was too bone weary, despite the restless sleep she had gotten, to counter that in any convincing manner. She wanted to rail at them: Don’t you know praying is all you can do? If there’s even a chance it will work, why aren’t you besieging Heaven with your prayers?

  Elijah would have known what to say, but Elijah was lying insensible on the bed, balanced so precariously between life and death.

  Cassie Gilbert might have known the right words, but she’d gone home to be with Dakota while her husband was conducting Mrs. Collins’s funeral.

  Clint reached out and touched his brother’s forehead. “His fever’s down. That’s a good sign, right?”

  She nodded. “But it will go up again. And can you hear his breathing?” It was impossible not to hear that harsh, wet rasping, she thought.

  Slowly, Clint nodded, then asked, “Aren’t you ever afraid for yourself, Miss Alice? Pneumonia’s catching, isn’t it?”

  Alice blinked, surprised that he had voiced the question. It was rare for a family member to even spare a thought for the one taking care of their loved one.

  “It can be,” she told him. “But mostly pneumonia preys on the old and the young, and those who, like your brother, have caught a chill and are overtired.”

  “Then you’d best take care of yourself, right? I’m going to fix you some breakfast, Miss Alice, and you’d better sit outside and get some fresh air while you eat it. I’ll sit with Elijah while you do that.”

  She wanted to weep at the kindness in his voice.

  “I think,” she began, taking care with her words, “Elijah will reach a crisis point tonight. Then he will either get better from there or...” She couldn’t say the words.

  “Or he won’t,” Gideon concluded for her and left the tent, as if he couldn’t bear to remain in the same space as the words he’d just said.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Keith Gilbert came just before noon for an update on Elijah’s condition. Alice spoke to him as frankly as she had to his brothers.

  “I’ll tell the church, and we’ll be praying,” he told her. “Mrs. Murphy said she’d be sending supper over for all of you,” he said, including Gideon and Clint in his words. “Alice, Cassie will be coming to relieve you again tonight.”

  “I’ll be grateful for her help,” Alice said. “But I won’t be sleeping.” She wouldn’t be leaving Elijah’s side until the crisis had passed, and they had either won—or lost everything.

  The deacon turned to go, but Alice reached out a hand to stop him. “Mr. Gilbert, how is Dakota? Is he... Does he seem content where he is or still restless?”

  He sighed. “He seems to like Cassie and me, but before the reverend took sick, he kept saying his father’s name and studying everyone who passed, especially those Security Patrol fellows. I hate to bring it up, since Elijah’s so ill, but were you able to find out anything that day you went out and talked to those army officers?”

  Alice took a deep breath. Their expedition to the border seemed like a decade ago, and yet it had been only two days ago.

  She told him what Colonel Amboys had told them.

  Keith Gilbert looked down at the ground for a long moment afterward. “I was afraid of something like that.”

  “Mr. Gilbert, I’m telling you so that you and your wife will be prepared. But if you’re willing, perhaps it would be best to...wait a day or so before you tell Dakota? I know he’ll have questions to ask...us—” she stumbled over the word, praying she wouldn’t have to answer them alone “—through Lars, about what the officer said.”

  “That might be best,” Gilbert said. “Honestly I don’t think he’s going to ask about it. Lars has stopped by a few times, in case the boy needed to talk, and he says Dakota’s worried sick about Elijah. He’d be underfoot here now, but Cassie made him promise to wait until the reverend was better, so he wouldn’t take sick, too.”

  Alice nodded. A child like Dakota, who had so recently undertaken a journey fraught with danger and hunger, might succumb easily to such a dangerous illness. The Gilberts would be devastated if anything happened to him.

  Just as they’d all be devastated if Elijah didn’t recover.

  * * *

  Hot again. And so tired, tired of the pain. The evil shadow was getting bolder now, closer.... His skin burned like fire—yet not fire. He burned as if there was ice coating his skin. So cold, but too exhausted to even shiver.

  Perhaps he should get it over with, let the evil shadow overtake him. But whenever he would get this thought born of weariness, the presence of the Light grew stronger and held the evil in the shadow away.

  A Voice in the Light murmured, “Not yet, Elijah. You have work to do yet.”

  Cool hands. A soft voice. Cool water on his skin that banished the fiery heat, if only for a while. A few drops of water on his tongue, not enough for him to choke on, but immediately absorbed into fever-seared dry tissues. Gentle hands turning him, placing cool, dry sheets under and over him when he had sweated the heat away.

  Alice’s voice. His brothers’ voices. This time when he dreamed, he saw his mama and papa—but only from a distance, and only indistinctly. “Wait!” he called to them. “Have you seen Marybelle? Isn’t she with you? I saw her yesterday....” But they didn’t turn and answer, and then they, too, faded away.

  * * *

  She’d heard him call out for Marybelle again, and all at once, she had to know.

  Clint sat on his cot watching his brother. They were alone in the tent, Gideon having taken refuge outside at the campfire again.

  “Clint, who’s Marybelle?” she asked, her gaze shifting to him.

  Clint’s eyes never left Elijah. “His fiancée. She died of influenza a month before the wedding, along with Gideon’s wife and child.”

  So Elijah had loved before, only to lose his love to death. No wonder he’d devoted himself to serving God and building his church. And Gideon had lost a wife and a child. It was impossible for her to imagine surviving such losses.

  If Elijah lived, was there ever going to be room in his heart again for the love of another woman?

  * * *

  At dusk Alice left the bedside, at Cassie’s insistence, only long enough to nibble at the roasted chicken and mashed potatoes Molly Murphy had sent for their supper. She chewed mechanically, not really tasting the food, her gaze going constantly to El
ijah’s supine, sheet-covered form on the cot a few feet away.

  She knew with everything in her that what she had said was true—tonight would be the turning point. She would use every bit of nursing skill she had ever possessed, every ounce of faith, to help him back away from the steep cliff he was heading for and to return him to health.

  The sweet sound of two women singing “Rock of Ages” drifted inside the canvas from nearby. Curious, Alice lifted the tent flap and saw that the singers were Carrie and Cordelia Ferguson, the talkative sisters she’d met the first time she had gone to chapel. They stood at the edge of the firelight, holding a hymnal between them.

  “We’re just here to encourage the reverend,” Cordelia told her. “Some of the other chapel folks are gonna join us in a while, and we’re going to surround the tent all night with prayers. You don’t have to pay us any mind—just let us know if there’s news.”

  Alice felt tears sting her eyes. “Thank you,” she murmured and let the tent flap fall.

  Behind her, she heard Gideon groan. “I’ll keep ’em supplied with coffee—I’m sure not going to refuse anything that might help my brother, but they’d better not expect me to talk to ’em when I go outside and sit by the fire.”

  Poor Gideon. He’ll be like a caged wolf without his solitude.

  But before she could spare another thought for Elijah’s brother, Cassie called from the bedside. “He’s starting to get restless, Alice. I think the fever’s going up again.”

  This was it—the crisis was upon them.

  Father God, if You have ever listened to me, please listen to me now, she prayed. Please save Elijah, Lord. I know now that You never intended for me to lay aside my nursing skills, and I promise I never will. I pledge to You that I will nurse anyone who needs it from this day forward. Just please save Elijah, for all our sakes, and so he can go on to do the good I know he can do for You. I ask this in Jesus’s name.

  She went to join Cassie at Elijah’s cot. The battle was begun.

  He flailed about for a while, and Alice felt the tears running down her cheeks as Gideon and Clint held him to keep him from turning over the cot. Then, when Elijah calmed, she and Cassie sponged him down.