Grace of a Hawk

by Abbie Williams

  “Oh holy Jesus, Rebecca, I have missed you,” I whispered, studying her eyes with their wealth of color, green and gold and the brown of sunlit earth, open at last and shining with love for me. Me, Boyd Carter. Joy struck from all sides.

  She swallowed with difficulty, and whispered, “I have been in agony, missing you.”

  “All I want is you. Tell me you know this, darlin’, tell me you know.”

  Her tears welled. “I know. I truly do, Boyd. I fell in love with you the very night we met. I was so afraid you would never know.”

  I leaned farther over the bed, taking care not to put any weight upon her, and kissed her flush upon the lips, tender and worshipful, wanting to claim her sweet mouth and drink of her until the day I died, content in this moment to simply be near, to hear her voice. Afraid she was hurting I drew a breath away and cupped her face, avoiding the bruised spot.

  She took my wrists in her hands, her grip weak but determined. “Where are the boys? Is Lorie delivered? What has happened?”

  “The boys are downstairs with Tilson an’ Jacob just now, don’t you worry. Tilson brought them up here last night to kiss you, while you was sleeping.” My eyes stung at the memory of Nathaniel and Cort bending over the bed to rest their faces to their mama’s cheek. “Lorie an’ Sawyer have a beautiful baby girl this morning. They named her Lorissa Rose.”

  Rebecca’s shoulders drooped with relief. She breathed, “Oh, thank the Lord. The boys must have been so frightened. Were they…”

  “No,” I assured, looking deep into her eyes. “Jacob kept them away so’s they didn’t hear a thing.”

  “But you…”

  Again I knew what she meant even though she did not finish. “I was. I didn’t leave your side.”

  She studied my eyes with such intensity I longed to beg her to tell me what she was thinking. Allowed the blessing of looking so closely upon her in the morning light, I soaked up tiny details: the sweep of her dark lashes, the gold and brown flecks upon the deep moss-green of her eyes, the faint, nutmeg-colored freckles that decorated her pale skin. Before I knew I’d moved, I brushed my lips over these, following their path along her cheeks. A sweet, soft sound issued from her throat as I tenderly kissed her jaw, her chin, the side of her neck, tasting the warm, salty sweat of her skin, before my senses were restored like a blow to the head – she was wounded and hurting, had only just awakened – but she tightened her hold on me, flushing crimson as she whispered, “How I have longed for you.”

  A richness of contentment swelled from my heart, my nose resting against her warm temple. “Sweet woman. How I love to hear you say so.” I shifted so I could see her eyes, and my smile faded as I whispered, “Forgive me for leaving, Rebecca. I should never have ridden away. I will never ride away from you again, if you’ve a mind to allow that.”

  She smiled then, slowly, and there was a glint in her eyes I remembered well; digging her fingers into my hair with a distinct air of possessiveness, she murmured, “It is so very curly.”

  “I must look a sight. Forgive my ragged appearance, darlin’.”

  She caressed the sides of my face, sending spasms of shivers along my flesh, continuing her course over the unkempt hair growing from temples to jawline, coming to rest along the edges of my thick beard, the likes of which belonged on a billy goat. She whispered, “How I love to hear you call me ‘darling.’”

  I grinned anew, one happiness atop the next. I gathered her hands in mine and whispered, “If I am the luckiest man alive, you will let me call you my wife.” As though she hadn’t understood, I hurried to say, “What I mean is, will you do me the honor, sweet Rebecca?”

  Rebecca grasped my ears as though to make certain she had my full attention – and she did – before saying in the proper way of speaking I so cherished, “Boyd Brandon Carter, I thought you would never ask.”

  WE WERE QUITE a sight in the sunset glow, July the first in the year of 1869.

  The month of June had unfolded as sweltering and humid as any Tennessee summer I recalled, and July promised more of the same, but I didn’t mind. Truly, I felt as though I’d never mind a thing again; a foolish presumption, I knew, but I let my happiness soak into my soul and tried not to fear its presence, but instead to welcome and acknowledge it as our collective due – mine and Rebecca’s, Malcolm’s, Sawyer’s and Lorie’s. All eleven of us, from Jacob to tiny Rose, had ventured north over the course of the past five days, leaving behind St. Paul during the last week of June, once Tilson deemed Rebecca fit for travel. We traveled in a caravan of wagons and livestock, creaking over a trail created by years of hooves and wheels carving through the sweet-scented prairie grass.

  The prairie itself was flush with blooms whose wavering stalks surpassed Cora, Cort, and Nathaniel in height. In the dusty-gold sunglow of late afternoon, the three of them liked to chase striped pocket gophers and the plump, flitting birds that trilled until the entire landscape rang with their songs. Tilson told them he’d pay out a silver dollar if they managed to catch one for our supper. Cora had taken at once to Tilson, curling up on his lap at the nightly fire. Malcolm, always close by, would hold her hand as she rested, braiding together their fingers in a way that made me glad I’d not been forced to endure their separation.

  Just now, a half-hour from dusk on this first evening of July, I stretched the twinge in my back, twisting at the waist as Sawyer and I watered Whistler, Admiral, and Trapper; fifty paces up the bank, Jacob was teaching the boys a song about a wolf named Bardolf.

  I leaned my forearms over Trapper’s gray hide as the mule sloshed his nose in the river, drinking his fill, hunching my shoulders and rolling my head side to side. Sitting atop a hard-edged wagon seat for hours on end had never been my favorite of tasks, but on this journey it was pure heaven, with Rebecca at my side. Merely the thought of her, just up there in our camp, and the promise of coming nightfall, when I would kiss every blessed inch of her skin, measuring my way with stroking touches, made me weak in the knees. I grinned, my gaze straying towards the top curve of the wagon I shared with my wife, just visible from where we stood, and Sawyer kicked at my ankle, a knowing grin stretching across his face.

  “It’s a grand sunset, ain’t it?” he asked, teasing me with his tone.

  “It is, indeed,” I murmured, rubbing a thumb along my chin – which, despite a thorough shaving back in St. Paul and the daily scraping of a razor over my jaws, still retained prickling black stubble by each day’s end. My hair had also been trimmed; I’d appeared as proper and gentlemanly as was possible for my wedding service.

  Sawyer and Malcolm had rustled up a preacher for Rebecca and I the very day I’d proposed; we did not want another night to pass without being wed and the little boardinghouse room split its seams that evening. Sawyer and Lorie had attended as our witnesses, the ceremony further celebrated by the presence of Malcolm and Cora, baby Rose, Tilson, Jacob, Cort and Nathaniel, and little Meggie Jeffries, who crept in and would not allow her mother to persuade her to leave. Rose fussed and fretted in Lorie’s arms, and Nathaniel kept sneezing; the preacher had a slight and unfortunate stutter, which made Meggie and then Cort giggle, muffling their naughtiness behind cupped hands.

  But all I saw and heard in those sacred moments was Rebecca becoming mine in every sense of the word. I sat on the bed at her side, our hands clasped and my heart full to bursting. I’d thought, Daddy, if you can hear me I want you to know I have found my woman. I aim to make a life with her. I’ve assumed care of her boys, and Malcolm, and a girl he loves, named Cora. I pray that you know these truths, Daddy. I won’t let them down. Not ever again.

  I played my fiddle after our vows, lifting the instrument from its hardback, velvet-lined case with a reverence borne of ancestral love. Its familiar heft felt so damn good in my hands I’d been reluctant to tuck it away; the music I’d not been able to make all through the long, preceding winter thrummed in my blood and quickened my fingertips, and waltzes flowed from my bow. Later, alone with Rebecca
in the little room, the two of us whispered as so not to wake Nathaniel, who was curled like a beloved kitten on the bed near her feet.

  “Good-night,” I told her, husky with love. Her eyelids were heavy from the laudanum she required to dull the pain.

  “Good-night, sweetheart,” she murmured, and I squeezed our intertwined fingers; the endearment flew straight to my already-besotted heart. So soft it was hardly more than a breath, she whispered, “I love watching you play. It seems an outward expression…of your passionate soul.”

  “I love when you talk so fine, my sweet Rebecca Carter.” I kissed her forehead, her nose, her cheeks, lingering over her lips; I stroked her hair as sleep claimed her, drawing the bedding to her shoulders and lifting Nathaniel to the pallet I’d made up on the floorboards so neither of us would jostle her in our sleep.

  The days directly following our wedding existed now as a blur in my memory; overwhelmed by the necessity of explaining to everyone the past year’s events, dealing with the sheriff and the details of Hoyt Little’s death; Hoyt Little, the man I’d conversed so unpleasantly with at Fort Pierre last winter. No doubt he had been the one to ride across the Territory to inform the others that we’d survived, and Malcolm’s account of his grapple with Fallon suggested Hoyt Little’s brother, Bill, had also been a part of Fallon’s plan. Neither Fallon, Bill Little, nor Church Talk resurfaced before we resumed our journey northward, but my guard would never completely resettle, not concerning the Yancys or anyone associated with their thieving, rotten lot.

  “I shoulda shot Fallon dead, Boyd,” my brother whispered in the restless midnight hour of a night beset by thunderstorms, before we left St. Paul. “I shoulda shot him with the Henry, but I was too much a coward. I thought he was dead, I swear. He looked dead.”

  I mustered the sternest tone I possessed. “Malcolm, I should have given chase and killed the bastard the night we shared a fire with the Hagebaks. You are one of the bravest souls I know. You ain’t to blame. Don’t let me catch you thinking so, you hear?”

  There was a part of me, deep down where I understood things without knowing exactly how or why – what Mama would have called a notion – that recognized I should waste no time in riding out after Fallon and his party, track them to the ground and kill them, no matter what it took. This belief was so strong I felt it in my gut like a fiddle string snapped by an overzealous bow; it was the same way I felt that night back in 1865, when Sawyer had stabbed to death Corbin Yancy in the clearing on our march home after the Surrender. We hadn’t known the man’s name at the time, but I’d insisted to Sawyer and Gus that we ought to ride after the two survivors and make certain they didn’t live to tell the tale.

  Look what trouble you could have stopped, had you pursued and killed them fellas that night in the clearing.

  And yet, had we killed Thomas Yancy in 1865, he would never have later hunted us through Iowa to enact his vengeance; Sawyer would still possess both eyes. We would have ridden straight through Iowa City that hot afternoon last summer, had we not been delayed by Yancy and Jack Barrow – and I would never have met Rebecca. Our paths would have run near one another’s that day, but not crossed. Cold and sick at the idea, I realized, I would not have found her in this life. The thought left me feeling removed from my physical self, struggling to understand something too profound to put into words.

  “You ain’t under arrest, Mr. Carter, it was an incident of self-defense from all I can gather,” Sheriff Tate had told me in St. Paul. “But someone’s got to answer for the dead folk. See to their burial. I understood you rode from the Territories with Royal Lawson.”

  Cora’s uncle had been laid out in an icehouse, the best as could be managed under the circumstances; until someone could ride the many hundreds of miles to his homestead, there would be no way for Royal’s poor wife to know he was dead. Time would pass and she would wonder at his continued absence, but as no mail service reached that far west, she wouldn’t know for certain. Someone would make the journey, eventually, but it would not be me or mine, not this time. I thought of Grady saying, Some four hundred and fifty miles from where we sit tonight.

  And then I thought, Aw, Grady. I should have hauled your bones back here. I would have buried you proper, and Mary beside you. Quill, too. I am so goddamn sorry. And somewhere in Pennsylvania was a woman named Eleanor, who’d married another and would never know that the old man who’d loved her, even after all these years, was now dead. Quill, if you can hear me wherever you are now, please know I found my woman.

  I despised letting Fallon go free but I refused to ride away from Rebecca, or to endanger my brother and those under my protection. The life I intended to make for us would be far from St. Paul. We would never return this direction, not once we settled near Flickertail Lake. I believed we would be safe there, with Jacob and Hannah, Sawyer and Lorie, on nearby homesteads.

  There won’t be any reason to fear, not once you get there. You’ll be ready next time, if there is ever a next time. Fallon Yancy won’t take you by surprise again.

  I recognized that the Yancys were connected to us, their path linked to ours by some strange quirk of fate, but I would be ready if they ever came looking for us. This time, I would be ready.

  “I’d like to see to it that the woman Mary is properly buried,” I’d told the sheriff.

  Rebecca’s recovery during the months of May and June was slow but steady; she was healthy and strong, and under Tilson’s watchful eye and our collective care, she reclaimed the ability to sit, then stand, and at last walk about the room, my arm secure about her waist. Lorie sat with her for a spell every day, bringing little Rose, a plump, pink-cheeked cherub of a babe with the ability to rouse the entire boardinghouse with her nightly wailing cries. Colic, Tilson called it, and the blue smudges beneath Lorie’s eyes attested to her lack of sleep.

  “Cort was every bit as fractious for the first four months of his life,” Rebecca assured Lorie during one of their talks. “It is a trial, I’ll not deny, but just you wait. Rose shall grow out of it as sure as the sun shall rise tomorrow.”

  “Sawyer is so very patient,” Lorie murmured, twining a strand of Rose’s golden hair about the tip of her index finger as she spoke. Dismay gathered in her eyes as she confessed, “All while I’ve done little but weep and fret, and worry him. Oh Becky…” No sooner had the words been spoken when Lorie began crying.

  “That is entirely natural and shall also pass, sweet Lorie, never you fear,” Rebecca assured, squeezing Lorie’s hand, cupping her cheek. “Let it all out, dearest. You must take these early days of motherhood one at a time.”

  Sawyer was endlessly patient, as Lorie said, gathering Rose into the crook of his arm and making a habit of walking about the town as dusk fell, allowing his wife to steal an hour’s sleep. He spoke to Rose in a low and murmuring voice, telling her stories in both Irish and English, walking until her cries quieted. My oldest friend, who’d longed for a family of his own since I could remember, would return to the boardinghouse with a smile of contented satisfaction, cradling his sleeping daughter, whose eyes shone gold and green just like his, and his father’s before him.

  “It takes a right toll on a body,” I said to Rebecca the night Lorie had cried. “Being a mama, I mean. I can’t say I’d ever rightly realized.”

  “Most especially with the first,” Rebecca whispered, nuzzling her nose to my chest, bared by my unbuttoned shirt. She rested her lips there, her hands warm upon my ribs, and thoughts of anything but her fled my mind as swiftly as clouds chased by a high wind.

  I lay so my body bracketed hers, continuing to take great care with each and every movement I made. The necessity of her healing overrode all else – most especially the adamant blaze of desire to make love to her rising to ever-frantic heights within me, but that I must resolutely deny for now; and the truth was, I was so happy to simply lay talking into the night hours with her, her voice like a caress along my skin, that were this all I was ever allowed, I would content my
self with it. Alone in our room each night I kissed her until we were breathless, the taste of her sweet, pliant mouth helping to sustain me through the nights, and held her close as she slept; the pain-dulling laudanum remained necessary and exhaustion was quick to claim her. Before I fell asleep, I dutifully returned to the pallet on the floor, afraid to crowd her on that narrow bed.

  After the first fortnight, once she’d been able to sit, and with the bandages swathing her ribs freshly replaced, she had not required a nightly dose of laudanum.

  “To feel clear-headed is worth the lingering ache,” she had said after Tilson checked on her before retiring to bed, after Cort and Nathaniel came to say good-night. Uncle Jacob was a godsend, remaining in St. Paul long after he was due home, to help with the care of the boys, entertaining them all through the lengthening days, regaling them with tales of the lake, and his Hannah, and the cousins they would soon meet there. Jacob, along with Malcolm, Cora, and Tilson, kept the boys in camp with them at night, allowing us precious time alone.

  “You tell me what you need an’ I’ll make it happen,” I promised, kneeling at my wife’s bedside and stroking the dark silk of her loose hair, tucking it behind her ears, valiantly keeping my eyes and hands from the curving swells of her lithe, lovely body, a task I found increasingly difficult, if not to say downright impossible. The fresh bandages beneath her muslin shift were less inhibiting, no longer covering her breasts; I was lightheaded at the sight of them beneath her shift. But I was responsible for taking care of her, for protecting her, and I knew damn well this meant refusing to relent to my lustful desires when she was far from recovered. I whispered, “Are you hurting?”