Millie Criswell, Mary McBride, Liz Ireland

by A Western Family Christmas Christmas Eve; Season of Bounty; Cowboy Scrooge

  Matty closed the store at three o’clock that afternoon. With Thanksgiving almost here, business had slowed to a trickle. What good was staying open, she finally decided, when she probably didn’t carry what any last minute customer needed anyway? Most of her penny candy was in the trash bin along with the broken jars, and she’d sold her last vanilla beans and cinnamon sticks a little after noon.

  On her walk home she tried not to think about Will. She tried not to picture him sweeping up the broken glass and candy and the last of the wood shavings from his newly installed shelves, or the way he had looked a while later when he came downstairs with his carpetbag in his hand and said he knew she’d understand why he couldn’t keep on working so close beside her in the store every day.

  Just because she understood didn’t mean she wasn’t disappointed, though.

  “I guess you’ll be leaving town,” she’d said to him, barely able to look at him or to suppress an acidic see—/ told you so trill.

  ‘I guess I will,” he’d answered somberly. “Sooner or later. I’ll be at the hotel if you need me, Matty.”

  “I won’t,” she’d told him, but now the temptation to turn in her tracks and race to the hotel nearly overpowered her.

  She imagined herself striding across the lobby, running up the staircase and down a hallway, then knocking on Will’s door while her heart beat wildly in her throat and she searched for words to tell him it didn’t matter about Charlie. Not anymore.

  Charlie was dead. He didn’t warm her with kisses or make her feel blissfully alive. How could he? Had she fit in his arms as perfectly as she did in Will’s? Had his body felt so solid against hers? Had he ever even existed in the flesh? Sometimes—Lord forgive her—unless she consulted his photograph, she couldn’t even remember what her young husband looked like.

  I’ll be at the hotel if you need me, Matty.

  If she needed him!

  She imagined herself standing breathless and nearly giddy before Will’s door. She’d knock just once, and he would open it, stand there a moment looking handsome and unsurprised, with one of those cocksure grins on his lips as if he’d been waiting for her, as if he’d known she would come, the way a gambler knows a particular card will turn up to complete a winning hand. He’d open his arms to her and then he’d whisper like a Southern breeze and then…

  “And then he’d leave,” she muttered, glaring at the hotel door and trudging past it on her way home. What good was it to court happiness, knowing all the while she’d lose it? What good was coming fully alive, realizing she’d feel dead again so soon? Why gamble when all she’d do was lose?

  She wished Will Cade had never come to town, or that she’d never spared him from the bounty hunter. She nearly wished, when she’d stood marveling at those graceful hands of his while they tried to steal her dresser set, that she’d shot him dead.

  Once home, Matty didn’t even bother taking off her cloak, but walked straight to the bedroom where she lit the lamp on the nightstand and then opened the drawer where she kept the framed tintype of Charlie. She kept it tucked away because it made her unbearably sad to look at it. Hearing his voice was one thing, but seeing his dear face day after day would have broken her heart.

  She sat for the longest time, studying Charlie’s straw blond hair, his pale and innocent eyes, the delicate line of his jaw and the almost fragile set of his shoulders beneath the rough blue wool of his uniform.

  He was just a boy! He looked nearly young enough to be her son. A gangly boy who might amble through the door of the mercantile with a quarter from chores burning a hole in his pocket, calling her “ma’am” while he tried to decide between peppermints and lemon drops, slingshots and peashooters.

  Matty looked up and studied her own face in the mirror above the dresser. Had she ever been that young? How long had that line been digging deeper and deeper between her eyes? How long since those eyes had lost the shine of high hopes and bright dreams of the future? Where was the girl who belonged to the boy in the tintype?

  It seemed a thousand years ago, the day before Charlie was set to be mustered into the army, when they’d stolen away to say their secret, sacred vows before a justice of the peace in the next county, and then hurried home to spend their wedding night in the hayloft of the Favors’ barn.

  Matty’s only memory of their lovemaking was the awkwardness of getting in and out of clothes. If there was pain, she’d quite forgotten after all these years. If there was passion, she’d forgotten that as well. Their coupling had more to do with their youthful dreams than their young bodies, anyway, and they spent the night whispering about going West, and the little store that would grow to be a big emporium and then, at last, an enterprise.

  “We’ll move up from penny candy and pickles and soda crackers,” Charlie had crowed, “to the finest silks and laces and the fanciest silver dresser sets that anyone could ever want. You’ll see, Matty. Just you wait and see.”

  She didn’t have long to wait, as it turned out, to see her husband’s name on the list of soldiers who had fallen at Pea Ridge. She’d wanted to die, too, until she heard his voice so clearly.

  You can do it, Matty. Go on with what we planned It’ 11 be easy. You won’t ever be alone. I’ll be there all the time, right beside you. I’ll tell you what to do.

  Now, nine years later and hundreds of miles west of that honeymoon hayloft, she wanted to tell him it wasn’t as easy as they’d dreamed.

  She wanted to tell him, if he didn’t already know somehow, that despite all the consulting, the store was no closer to an enterprise than it was the day she’d proudly climbed a ladder and nailed the freshly painted sign above the door.

  Buy that inexpensive lumber with the knotholes, Matty. No sense in wasting capital on shelving nobody ever sees.

  That silver dresser set’s a crackerjack investment.

  Double up on flyswatters, honey. You can always count on flies.

  A penny saved is a penny earned, Matty.

  She wanted to tell him that his cheap shelves were wearing out from holding all the merchandise she ordered but couldn’t sell, and the back room was full of flyswatters when what it should have held were affordable linens and basting brushes and pie tins.

  She wanted to tell him that all the money she was saving for some distant rainy day wasn’t doing her or the mercantile a bit of good right now. She wanted to scream that the metal box she kept hidden under the floorboards may have been full, but what good was that when her heart felt so poor and empty?

  She ached to tell him about Will. A living, breathing, warm-blooded man. A man, all flesh and blood and beautiful hands! Not a seventeen-year-old boy who really didn’t know her anymore. Who really didn’t know much of anything at all when it came to running the store.

  She gazed at his pale, boyish face again, tracing a finger across the sweet, clean-shaven image. The sadness she usually felt when she looked at him wouldn’t come.

  “I’ve tried so hard, Charlie, and so long to make our dream come true. I couldn’t have done any of it without you. But, Charlie, I’m alive. I’ve learned a thing or two. And I’m not afraid anymore to be alone. Maybe…” She sighed. “Maybe it’s time I stopped consulting and started thinking for myself.”

  Matty held her breath, half expecting the face in the photograph to frown in disapproval, listening for a distant clap of thunder, anticipating a stern reprimand from the voice inside her head.

  But nothing happened. Charlie’s face remained just as sweet and placid as always. The heavens didn’t shake with thunder, and the voice inside her head was silent.

  As silent as the dead.

  Chapter Seven

  Just because it was thanksgiving didn’t mean Will could find much to be grateful for. With families gathered together to celebrate their blessings all across town, the saloons and gambling halls had closed their doors for lack of customers. The sporting houses had followed suit. Mrs. Runyon invited Will to share turkey and all the trimmings with her girls,
but Will declined, not being in the mood for female company unless it was Matty’s. But she, of course, had made it quite clear she preferred the company of corpses to living, breathing men.

  If the trains had been running, Will would have gotten out of town early Thanksgiving morning, but the Kansas Pacific was on holiday, too, so he stayed put in his room in the hotel with a glum meal that consisted of a dry ham sandwich, a few hardboiled eggs and several bottles of warm beer.

  While he ate, he considered his plight. Wallowing in self-pity had never really been his style, but the irony of his current predicament hadn’t escaped him. Here he was, his life completely sidetracked by a faithless wife, longing for a woman who insisted on being faithful to a dead husband. God damn her. And God bless her, too. He was forced to admire Matty for that fierce loyalty even if it meant he was thoroughly miserable because of it.

  He couldn’t help but think that if his Caroline had possessed even a scant portion of such loyalty, he’d be back in North Carolina now. He’d be home, a staunch and respected pillar of the community, a good and happy man. He’d be Dr. William Cade, as he was meant to be, presiding this holiday at the head of a high-glossed cherry wood table in a fine, candlelit dining room, smiling at his lovely wife and laughing out loud while he ostentatiously carved the big Thanksgiving bird, showing off Papa’s renowned surgical skills to a captivated audience of hungry little green-eyed towheads.

  There were little boys in crisp linen shirts and off kilter silk cravats, squirming like young pups in their chairs. There were little girls sitting primly with blond curls as thick as sausages and green hair ribbons to match their sparkling eyes. He could feel their feet straying mischievously underneath the tabletop. He could hear their impish laughter and the cherubic murmurings of their prayers as they joined in saying grace.

  For a moment he could see and hear it all so clearly. He held his breath, the better to preserve the vision of what might have been. It was the life denied him in the happy home he never had. He was seeing the children who were never meant to be.

  Then, suddenly, the picture before him wasn’t quite so clear. The woman who smiled serenely at the foot of the table seemed less and less like Caroline, more and more like…who? Was it Matty he was seeing all of a sudden? he wondered. And did the children gathered about the table all have her flaming hair and her sky-blue eyes? Was he looking at Caroline and a past that never happened, or was he seeing Matty and a future that might yet be?

  So real was the vision, in spite of its shifting cast of characters, that Will was forced to blink in order to bring back the sight of his actual surroundings. It surprised him for a second to see the hotel room with its serviceable walnut furniture and printed list of rules tacked to the back of the door, to see the half-eaten sandwich in his hand and the bottle of beer on the bedside table. It surprised him even more that he was looking at these objects through a hot sheen of tears.

  Ah, God. A good man might have been impelled to get down on his knees and pray for deliverance from past sorrows, to implore the Almighty to bestow only his most bountiful blessings in the future.

  A good man would know how to earn Matty Favor’s trust, if not her undying love.

  Will Cade wished with all his heart and all his soul that he could be the good man that he used to be. But, expert gambler that he was now, he knew it wasn’t in the cards.

  During the next two weeks, Will made valiant and repeated attempts to leave town. But short of buying a pair of snowshoes and hiking east, it simply wasn’t going to happen. Apparently leaving wasn’t in the cards for him, either. If he’d been a superstitious man, he might have believed the Fates were conspiring against him along with the weather.

  On the morning after Thanksgiving, the first time he tried to leave Ellsworth, a blizzard was mounting when he trudged past Matty’s store on his way to the train depot. He could hardly see two feet in front of him, but he couldn’t miss the huge paper banner pasted inside the mercantile’s window. Big Christmas Sale it proclaimed in huge red letters.

  Retracing his boot prints on Main Street, after being told the train had derailed in a snow bank twenty miles east, Will noticed that a second sign had gone up at the mercantile. Free Fly Swatter With Every Purchase. He couldn’t help but smile. Good for her, he thought. That dunderheaded ghost she depended on was finally giving her some good advice. Matty might make a go of the business yet. If nothing else, her sacred cash box would be filling faster than ever before.

  He longed to go inside if only to congratulate her for coming to her senses commercially, maybe even getting one of those flyswatters as a souvenir, when someone called his name. Will turned to see a man running toward him through the snow.

  “Thank God you’re still here, Cade. Lottie Crane says come quick. Her Samuel’s run his sled into a tree.”

  “I can’t…”

  “Come on. Hurry. Follow me.”

  Will followed, cursing all the way.

  In spite of the bad weather, Matty’s business was so brisk that she was almost out of flyswatters. Even

  Henry Diehl with his fancy sign on the emporium across the street couldn’t compete with her now that she was pasting a new enticement on her window every morning.

  She was giving away needles with the purchase of cotton thread. Throwing in one foot of ribbon for every four she sold. Measuring with the new long yardstick she’d made up from a scrap of Will’s good lumber so that her customers got forty inches of fabric for the price of thirty-six. Wrapping gifts for free.

  For the first time in her life she was making her own decisions, using her own experience in the store as a guide instead of relying on the advice of an inexperienced seventeen-year-old boy whose dreams had outpaced his practical knowledge.

  Every morning she’d stand at her window pasting up a new sign at the same moment Will came by, carrying his carpetbag on his way to the depot. After a couple of days, she started calling out to him.

  “Leaving town?”

  “Trying,” he’d call back.

  Then she’d stand there, paste drying on her fingertips, her heart hardly daring to beat and almost afraid to breathe, until she saw him walking back.

  “No train today?” she’d ask, trying not to grin.

  “Tomorrow,” he’d say. “For certain.”

  Matty blessed the terrible weather but wondered how long it could last. She would have consulted with Charlie about it, but he wasn’t exactly an authority on weather, either, and besides he wasn’t speaking to her anymore. When all was said and done, she guessed the farmer’s almanac was probably more reliable than any man.

  Two weeks before Christmas the skies over Ellsworth turned a brilliant blue and the sun beamed down as if it were making up for a month’s worth of lost heat. When the whistle of the Kansas Pacific sounded in the distance, Matty stepped outside the mercantile into the bright sunshine to watch Will slog through the slush on Main Street one last time.

  “Leaving?” she asked, shading her eyes from the brilliance of sun on melting snow.

  “Trying,” he said as he always did.

  Matty stood there half an hour, until the whistle blew again and a cloud of steam rose over the depot to proclaim that the train was underway with Will Cade on it.

  “Sorry you missed your train, Will,” the stationmaster said, levering up from the bench where he’d been lying, the color at last coming back into his craggy face and his pulse rate diminishing. “I ain’t had one of those spells in years. It just came over me all of a sudden. Out of the blue. If it hadn’t been for you, I don’t know what would’ve happened. I might’ve bit my tongue off.”

  Will heard the departing blast of the steam whistle a mile or so down the track, doubting that he could still run fast enough to catch up, wondering if he could “borrow” a horse from the livery and then, once he was on the train, hope the animal would find its way back to town so horse theft wouldn’t be added to his crimes.

  By God, he’d almost made it. He’d
had one foot on the parlor car’s metal step just as the old man had pitched off his stool with a seizure, and everybody simply stood around, not knowing what to do except to call for Will.

  “There’ll be another train tomorrow,” the stationmaster said. “I’m mighty grateful, Will. I’ll let you on for half the fare.”

  “Thanks,” Will said. “See you tomorrow.”

  He ambled back through town, thinking the good people of Ellsworth could almost set their watches now by his comings and goings and comings back again. When he passed the mercantile, Matty came flying out the door. She looked as if she’d been crying tears of joy and relief, no doubt, at his presumed departure.

  “Leaving?” she asked as she leaned over the hitching rail.

  “Trying.” He slowed his pace. “Tomorrow for certain.”

  “Maybe you’d like to come to my place for a farewell supper tonight?”

  Will stopped. He studied her pretty face. She looked sincere enough. “With you and Charlie?”

  “Just me.”

  Well, I’ll be damned. “What time?”

  “I’ll close up here about five. Why not come by then and walk me home?”

  “I could do that,” he said, trying to keep his heart from breaking through his ribs, doing his best not to let his mouth slide all over his face in a smile of the grandest proportions. “I’ll even bring a bottle of wine.”

  “That won’t be…” The frown that started to instinctively possess her features suddenly smoothed out. “That would be real nice, Will.”

  Well I’ll be damned.

  Will’s boots barely touched the ground as he headed out toward the Gilded Steer for a quick game of cards and the money to offer Mrs. Runyon in exchange for one of her dusty bottles of French Bordeaux.

  At ten minutes before five that afternoon, Matty closed the lid on her cash box and stashed it back beneath the floor. Just because she’d invited Will to dinner at some risk to her heart didn’t mean she was ready to risk her life savings, after all.