Say You Love Me
Page 1
Say You Love Me
by
Patricia Hagan
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ISBN: 978-1-61417-070-9
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Copyright © 1995, 2011 by Patricia Hagen. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
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Thank You.
Prologue
Texas, 1840
Violet held the infant to her breast, though it seemed a sacrilege, somehow, to offer milk intended for another baby.
But that baby is dead, a voice inside reminded her cruelly. Born dead. She never got to draw the first sweet breath of life.
Violet looked down at the baby through a mist of tears. She was a week old, and precious as only one of God's earth angels can be. A downy fuzz covered her tiny head, promising a crown of sable black hair, and already her blue eyes had a lavender cast, which meant they would eventually be the same color as her mother's.
Violet felt the empty burning in her heart at the thought of how her own baby was buried before she even had a chance to hold it in her arms. Then just three days afterward, Violet's twin sister Iris had given birth. "Momma named us after flowers," Iris had declared, "and I'm going to do the same with my little girl. I'll name her Jacinth, which is what hyacinths are called in England." But Iris's husband Luke had immediately shortened the baby's name to Jacie, and Jacie her name would be.
Violet lifted her tear-streaked face to the sky as she knelt among the clumps of sagebrush with the infant in her arms. "Why, God?" she asked. "Why is it that Iris is always blessed with the bread of life, while I'm left with only the crumbs?"
There was no sound save for the infant feeding. Violet knew that God was not going to answer her. Not this time. Probably not ever. It was just something she was going to have to work out for herself, within her own tormented soul.
Even though it was early morning, the summer heat was smothering, and perspiration trickled from her every pore. But there was no shade to be had, and the sun's rays were searing. Violet could have stayed with the other members of the small caravan traveling from Georgia to Texas; they were camped in a grove of cottonwood trees beside a cool stream. But after the terrible things she had said to Iris, Violet had wanted to be alone with her misery and guilt, away from everyone.
It all started one morning when Iris remarked that Violet looked ill. "It's because you have so much milk in your breasts," she had said worriedly. "I'll let you nurse Jacie too, and—"
"Oh, you know everything, don't you?" Violet had lashed out at her. She lay huddled on a pallet in the back of their wagon, still weak and sore from the birth, in body and in spirit.
Iris knelt beside her holding the baby, though she was feeling weak herself. They had both delivered early, no doubt due to the ordeal of travel. "I know how you must feel, Violet. I can't imagine anything more heartbreaking than losing a child, but you have to let me help you. If you don't, you'll come down with milk fever, and you could die."
"You think I care?" Violet glared up at her. "Well I don't. I wish I was back there on the trail beneath that pile of rocks with my baby, because I don't have anything to live for now."
"You have Judd."
Violet lowered her voice to a whisper, for despite her despair, she did not want the others in the caravan to hear the embarrassing truth about her marriage. "Judd won't want me anymore when he finds out our baby died. You know as well as I do he wasn't planning on me coming to Texas. He was walking out on me and our marriage, till I found out I was in the family way."
"That's not true," Iris said, though she knew it was.
Violet got to her feet, her legs wobbly, all the resentment smoldering within igniting to give her strength. "It is true. Judd never loved me, and everybody knows it. It was you he wanted to marry. The only reason he proposed to me was because you were marrying Luke. Oh, yes, I knew about the gossip, how everybody said Judd married me because it was as close to you as he could get. I knew it that day twelve years ago when we had our double wedding on the porch. His hand holding mine was cold, and so were his lips when he kissed me, because it was you he wanted and always had been. It was always you. And he knew later that you could have given him the children he wanted, because you and Luke had four fine sons, while I couldn't conceive. And now you've got a healthy baby girl, and I've got nothing."
Violet paused to draw a ragged breath, not caring that Iris's face had turned ashen. In the past, in all those hurting years of growing up, Violet had swallowed her frustrations and kept the pain inside, but now, when her life had crumbled about her, she could hold back no longer. "We were twins," Violet reminded Iris coldly, "but not identical—oh, no, far from it. You were the pretty one. Dainty and pretty, just like Momma. But I took after Poppa. I was big and gangly—I even got his ugly hooked nose." She tapped her nose with a shaking finger. "You and I were never alike in any way. It was you the boys flocked after, while I was the one people said was destined to be a spinster."
Iris shook her head in protest, her silky black hair flying about her face. "You're wrong, Violet. You're not ugly. And in his way, Judd loves you. He's been good to you—"
"He never beat me," Violet conceded. "But he never really loved me, and when the years passed with no babies, I knew I'd just about lost him."
When the Panic of '37 finally hit Georgia, everybody started heading for Texas and the two square miles of land offered to any family brave enough to make the journey. Judd was the first to take off—without his wife. When he did come back he was wearing a shiny badge and bragging about how he'd joined the Texas Rangers. After trying to eke out a living on a fifty-acre dirt farm, Luke, too, decided the promise of over twelve hundred acres of land was too good to pass up. He and Iris made plans to follow Judd back. Violet was better off staying in Georgia, Judd had said. Being a Ranger would keep him away from home most of the time.
"If it hadn't been for me getting pregnant, like a blessing out of the blue, I'd never have seen him again. But that doesn't matter now, because that blessing turned out to be a curse, and it's all over. All of it. I don't have anything left to live for, but you've got everything. Even the daughter you always wanted. Your baby lived and mine didn't. Now I wish I'd died with her."
Iris had heard enough. "Stop it. Talking this way is blasphemy. You had a terrible delivery, Violet. You could have died, but God spared you, and it's a sin for you to say you wish He hadn't."
Violet began to cry, her whole body quaking. She felt so awful, with her breasts swollen and aching. "I don't care. You said I'd never be able to have another baby—"
Violet made a face. "Well, you should know. After all, you were the doctor's little helper, weren't you? Always traipsing around with Poppa when he made his calls. After he died you just took over, like you always do. Folks had something else to talk about besides how pretty you are and how your handsome husband adores you and what wonderful sons you have. They started calling you a 'medicine woman' and treated you like some kind of God."
Iris's eyes filled with tears. "Violet, don't say these things. You don't mean them. You're sick, and I understand. Now please take Jacie and nurse her. We won't be leaving today as early as we usually do. Luke insisted you and I should get some rest, since we're only a day away from Nacogdoches now."
Iris did not tell her about the other men's protests that they should keep moving because of the fear of Indians. An old prospector had happened by late the night before and warned them that they should get to the fort at Nacogdoches as soon as possible. Apparently, twelve Comanche chiefs had met with Texas commissioners a few months ago in hopes of a peace treaty—only there had been bad trouble instead. The Comanches had balked at giving up the white prisoners they were holding, and troops had then charged into the council room and started shooting. When the smoke cleared, all of the chiefs had been slaughtered, and the incident had set the Comanche nations on the warpath.
The other men had not told their wives of the danger, knowing how terrified they would be, but Luke and Iris kept no secrets from each other. He regretted that a delay of a few hours was all he could get the others to agree to after telling them Violet was sick.
Jacie began to mew hungrily, and Iris held her out to Violet. "Take her and rid yourself of some milk. We'll talk later, and I'll make you see you're wrong about Judd. He loves you, and everything will be fine once we get to Texas. You'll see. I love you too, Violet. I always have. And so did Momma and Poppa."
Violet started to move away, but then her eyes fastened on the locket Iris always wore on a ribbon around her neck. It contained a daguerreotype of Iris, given to her by their mother, because they looked so much alike. Violet had been hurt, feeling it was a cruel reminder that she was not pretty like her mother and her sister.
Violet's hand shot out, and she gave the locket a vicious yank, breaking the ribbon. Squeezing it in her fist, as Iris stared in wide-eyed wonder, Violet said through clenched teeth, "I am sick of staring at this symbol of the difference between us day after day, year after year. I think I hate you, Iris."
Even as she had spoken the words, Violet felt awful and knew she did not really mean what she was saying. At the same instant, her breasts suddenly began to ache even more. Finally, she yielded to the agony and roughly jerked Jacie from Iris's arms. "Give her to me. I'll nurse her. Maybe then I'll feel like I'm useful for something in this life," she said miserably.
She retreated to the distant scrub, but now she felt worse than before. Her breasts were no longer swollen and gorged; Jacie had drunk her fill and slept contentedly, tiny fists curled against her cherubic cheeks, droplets of milk drying at the corners of her little pink mouth. But guilt over the way she had treated her sister was making Violet sick to the depths of her soul. Iris had never been cruel or mean to her. It was not her fault the way life had turned out for Violet.
Violet thought of Judd and prayed Iris had been right in saying he would still want her after finding out their baby had died. Violet loved him with all her heart and could not remember a time in her whole life when she hadn't. She had sworn to be a good wife and was certain that when the babies came, Judd would love her for being their mother if for no other reason. But could she hold him now, she wondered in anguish, when there would never be any children for them?
She opened her hand and looked down at the locket, murmuring, "I've got to give it back, and I've got to apologize. God forgive me, how could I have said such terrible things to my own sister?"
She got stiffly to her knees, careful not to wake the baby, and was about to stand when she heard a strange noise, like thunder on the plains, piercing the stillness of the day. Glancing up, she noted the sky was clear. At the next moment she realized that what she heard was pounding hooves against the dry, parched land. Then came the screams of the women and the alarmed shouts of the men as they tried to gather their wits and attempt to defend their families against the rapidly approaching Indians.
The whoops and cries of the Comanche drowned out all other sounds as they swarmed down on the helpless caravan, arrows singing through the air. Some were aflame, and they pierced the canvas of the wagons, setting them afire.
Violet watched, paralyzed with horror, clutching Jacie tightly against her. A silent scream constricted her throat at the sight of Iris's oldest boy, Lukie, being taken down by an arrow to his neck.
She fell forward, bracing herself with one arm against the ground as she continued to hold the baby while peering over the top of the camouflaging sage and scrub. She could see it all—the people she had come to know so well in the past weeks and consider friends, family even, all being slaughtered. Shuddering, she felt bile rise in her throat as she helplessly watched Luke trying to shield Iris, who crouched on the ground clutching one of her dead sons in her arms.
The last thing Violet saw before mercifully fainting was Luke falling dead, a tomahawk buried in his skull.
* * *
Iris was denied the relief of fainting. Instead, she was frozen in a kind of shock, unable to speak or move as the wild-faced savages leapt from their ponies to surround her.
She was the only one spared.
The Indians talked excitedly among themselves. She was beautiful, their leader declared, bragging how he had seen her from afar and decided she would bring them much pleasure before following her white brothers and sisters in death. Another argued he should have her first, since it was his tomahawk that had felled her defender.
But one warrior's gaze fastened on Iris's bosom. He shouted to his comrades to leave her alone and, dismounting, walked over and yanked her to her feet for closer scrutiny. Her legs would not support her; he held her up only long enough to make sure the stain on her dress was not blood, and then he let her slump to the ground in a sobbing heap as he announced triumphantly to the others, "She has milk. Our chief will be pleased to have her for his son."
The Indians nodded and muttered approval, thinking how Moonstar, the wife of their chief, had died only a few days before. Her son was being fed by other nursing mothers but now that he was four years old, his demand was great and the supply limited. The chief would be pleased to have a woman with milk for his son alone.
The warrior signaled for her to be taken away. "She will live," he said. "At least until she is of no more use to Great Bear. It will be up to him to decide. Then he will let us take our pleasure as a reward for bringing her to him."
Iris did not understand what they were saying and did not know she had been spared. If she had, it would not have mattered, because she had no reason to live any longer.
Her only solace amidst the carnage was having been spared the horror of witnessing her infant and her sister being slaughtered like the rest of her family—like the rest of her world.
* * *
Violet struggled to pull away from the peaceful oblivion that shielded her mind from the nightmare of reality. But a baby was crying. Her baby? No. Her baby had died. Yet she heard the hungry wail and fought to respond, an aching in her arms and in her heart.
Her eyes flashed open, and she looked about in panic as the horror came rushing back. Lying beside her on the ground, Jacie flailed at the air with her little fists, kicking against the warm blanket that constricted her.
Violet ignored the baby as she got to her knees with heart pounding and dared to peek out through the brush that had mercifully kept the Indians from spotting her.
What she saw made her blood run cold. The carnage was sickening, and she couldn't bring herself to walk through it to look for her dead family. She wanted to
remember Iris, beautiful Iris, as she was in life.
The baby began to cry louder, furious to be neglected. Pausing only to catch her breath and make impatient smacking noises with her lips, she jerked her head from side to side, instinctively seeking to be fed.
Dizzy, stomach rolling, Violet managed to collect herself. She turned away from the silent, grisly scene but knew the image would forever more be burned into her mind and soul. Buzzards circled overhead. The Indians would have made sure there were no survivors.
How long had she been unconscious? The baby was hungry again, so it had to have been several hours. Then she noticed the sun was melting toward the west; it was late afternoon, which meant she had been asleep most of the day, probably due to her weakness, as well as to her having fainted in terror. It was no wonder the baby was screaming.
Picking up Jacie, Violet fed her, and the baby settled down contentedly. Violet tried to think what she should do, for despite the grief and anguish she felt, she wished to survive. The baby seemed to be sweating, so Violet pulled the blanket away from her, feeling a strange lump in one part of the hem as she did so. Curious and grateful to have anything to take her mind off her woes, she investigated and was startled to realize that Iris had sewn some money inside the blanket. "I will see that she gets it one day, Iris," Violet whispered aloud. "I'll never be able to tell you I'm sorry for the awful things I said to you, but I'll take care of your baby. I'll treat her like she was my own—"
Violet stiffened.
…Like she was my own.
Slowly, she absorbed the words and wondered if she actually dared make them so. Who would know? she rationalized, pulse racing. There was no one left who knew about her baby being born dead, or that the one she would call her own was actually her niece. No one would ever find out. Certainly not Judd, who would mercifully be spared such grief and heartache. There would be no harm in such a deception, only good. Jacie would have parents to take care of her, and Violet would not have to worry about losing the only man she had ever loved.