His pa was hurt the most. In large part, Thal reckoned, because his pa had planned to leave the farm to him someday. He’d naturally figured that with him gone, his pa would leave it to his brother. But now Myles had gone off too.
The sight of it brought a lump to Thal’s throat. The house and the barn, the tilled fields, they were exactly as he remembered. The house wasn’t as huge as the Hooper ranch house, but it was a wooden house and not a soddy like those a lot of Kansas farmers lived in. The house was painted white, the barn red. The outhouse, thanks to his ma, was the same blue as the sky. That never made any sense to him, but his mother insisted their outhouse should look “pretty.”
Ned had noticed his reaction. “That’s it yonder, I take it?”
Thal nodded.
“Your folks are doin’ better than mine. We lived in a cabin, and our farm is small compared to yours.”
“A roof is a roof,” Thal said.
“Lessen it leaks.”
They came to the turn into the lane, and Thal drew rein.
“What’s the matter?”
“I’m just lookin’,” Thal said. Truth was, he was awash in emotion. It had been years since he left, without a word from them the entire time. Then again, since he could hardly read, thanks to his condition, why would they bother? It had taken a crisis like Myles being shot for his sister to send that letter.
“Look all you want,” Ned said. “It choked me up too, the last time I was home. I couldn’t get over how old my folks looked. They’d aged ten years in just two or three. It was spooky.”
Someone was moving about in the front yard. A pink bonnet gave Thal a clue who. “Don’t forget what I told you about winkin’,” he said, and gigged the chestnut.
“Is that her?”
“It’s not Betsy Ross.”
Ursula was wearing one of her plain “everyday dresses,” as she liked to call them, and had sunk to her knees by their ma’s flower garden. Her back was to them, and she was so engrossed in whatever she was doing that she didn’t hear them until they were almost there. Glancing over her shoulder, she squealed in delight, leaped to her feet, and flew toward them with the biggest smile in the world on her face. “Thalis! Thalis! You’re home!”
“Land sakes, she’s pretty,” Ned breathed.
Thal had never thought about it, but he supposed she was. Ursula had golden hair, blue eyes, high cheekbones, and a clean complexion. She’d grown since he saw her last, from a girl into a young woman. He drew rein and dismounted, and was nearly bowled over when Ursula flung herself at him and wrapped her arms tight.
“Oh, Thalis. It’s so good to see you again.”
Thal couldn’t speak for the constriction in his throat. He returned her hug and thought his eyes might mist over, but fortunately they didn’t.
Ursula drew back and studied him. “You got my letter, then? Oh, I’m so happy. I’m worried sick about Myles.”
“Me too,” Thal got out. “It’s why I came.”
“I hope that’s not the only reason.” Ursula clasped both his hands in hers. “Didn’t you miss us even a little? I’ve missed you.”
“Sure,” Thal said, and coughed.
Just then Ned said, “Are you goin’ to introduce me or am I a bump on a log?”
“Oh.” Thal couldn’t take his eyes off Ursula. “Sis, this is my pard, Edmund Horace Leslie.”
Ned reacted as if he’d been slapped. “You didn’t just tell her my whole name.”
“He likes ‘Ned’ for short,” Thal said.
“Mr. Leslie,” Ursula said, bestowing a warm smile on him.
“I’m hardly much older than you, Miss Christie,” Ned said. “Just ‘Ned’ will do.”
“So long as you call me Ursula.”
Ned seemed to be entranced. “Whatever you like, ma’am. I am yours to command.”
“Why, listen to you,” Ursula said. “Aren’t you gallant?”
Thal almost laughed when Ned’s cheeks turned red. “Oh, he’s that all right. Just ask any saloon girl in Texas.”
“Oh, Thalis,” Ned said.
Ursula laughed. “Let’s put your animals in the barn and go inside. Ma is takin’ her afternoon nap. She’ll be overjoyed to see you. She frets something awful, about you and Myles both.”
“Pa?” Thal said.
“He’s out in the fields. Unless he saw you ride in, he’ll be back along about suppertime. You know how he is.”
“I do,” Thal said. Their pa was one of the hardest workers he’d ever known. From dawn until dusk, day in and day out, year after year, their pa worked his fingers to the bone.
“What’s your pa’s name anyhow?” Ned asked. “Your ma’s too, for that matter. I don’t believe you’ve ever said.”
It was Ursula who answered. “Pa’s name is Frederick. He answers to ‘Fred’ but likes ‘Frederick’ better.”
“Frederick it is, then,” Ned said.
“Ma was christened Elizabeth Collandar Beckwith,” Ursula revealed. “Everyone calls her Beth.”
“It’ll be Mrs. Christie for me,” Ned said. “To show my respect.”
“You sure are courteous,” Ursula said.
“For you, ma’am, I’ll be anything.”
Thal glared.
“What?” Ned said.
The barn was as it had been the day Thal left: the same stalls, the same hayloft, the same feed bins for the cows, and the same hog pen with the same stink. The shade inside was welcome after the heat of the sun. As he stripped his saddle, he recalled the time he stabbed himself with a pitchfork. He’d been breaking apart a bale of straw and misjudged, and a tine went through his middle toe. He was twelve. It had hurt like the dickens, but he’d refused to cry.
Ursula rocked on the balls of her feet and stared at him as if she couldn’t credit her eyes. “You’re really here.”
“You sent for me, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t know you’d come. It’s been so long since we heard from you. . . .” Ursula shrugged, and looked sad.
Stung by her comment, Thal said, “You know I can’t write any better than I can read.”
“You could have someone write for you. Like Mr. Leslie here.”
“It’s Ned, remember?” Ned said. “And I’m afraid I wouldn’t be much use. My writin’ is chicken scrawl. Mostly all I can do is make my mark.”
“You never had any schooling?”
“I’m from the hill country of North Carolina. Readin’ and writin’ don’t count for much. We’re more partial to coon huntin’ and fishin’. And pretty gals.”
Thal glared again.
“I like your friend,” Ursula said.
Thal grunted. “It’s nice somebody does.”
The front porch had three rocking chairs now, instead of two. Thal touched the brass knocker on the door that hardly anybody ever used but that his ma had insisted they’d needed just as she’d insisted the outhouse should be blue.
“Your room is just as you left it,” Ursula remarked as he opened the door for her. “Myles didn’t change anything after you left. Ned here can have Myles’s bed. I’m sure Ma and Pa won’t mind.”
The parlor’s main fixture was a sofa, not the usual settee. Another of their mother’s extravagances, on which she took her daily nap.
Thal stood in the doorway, staring at her, and was flooded with more reminiscences. Of his mother taking a large splinter out of his thumb and drying his tears, when he was little. Of her delicious meals, and especially her apple pies. Of quiet evenings on the porch, with his folks rocking and him and his siblings playing in the yard. They had been wonderful, glorious days. The bedrock of his life, you might say.
“Maybe we shouldn’t wake her,” Ned whispered.
“She’ll be upset if we don’t,” Ursula said, and going over, she gently shook her mot
her’s shoulder. “Ma? Ma? Your oldest is here. The prodigal has returned.”
Thal had never seen his mother move so fast. She was awake and off the sofa and coming toward him with her arms outstretched before he could get out, “It’s good to see you again, Ma.”
Ursula joined in the hug, and they stood there a minute or more, until Ned shifted his feet and a spur jingled, reminding them he was there.
“I’m so pleased,” Thal’s ma said, stepping back. “Your pa and I are worried sick about your brother.”
“I’ll find him,” Thal vowed.
“You’ve heard about the Black Hills, haven’t you?” his mother said anxiously. “Our parson says no decent soul should go there. They’re full of killers and thieves and confidence men, and worse. It’s worse than Sodom and Gomorrah, he says. Why your brother took it into his head to go there, I’ll never know.”
“Myles was hopin’ to strike it rich,” Ursula said.
“A foolish notion,” their mother declared. “He’s my own son and I love him dearly, but he’s not mature enough, by half. Now’s he gone and got himself shot and might be dead for all we know.”
“Ma, don’t talk like that,” Ursula said.
“Well, he might be.” Their mother placed her hand on Thal’s shoulder and fixed him with misting eyes. “Promise me you won’t do the same. Promise me you won’t get yourself killed.”
“I’ll try my best,” Thal said.
Chapter 7
That night, long after their ma and pa had turned in, Thal and Ursula rocked on the front porch in the cool of the Kansas night. Ned had gone to bed too, in Myles’s old room, although it had been plain to Thal that his pard would rather stay up and talk to his sister. But Thal wanted to be alone with her, and asked Ned that favor.
“Bein’ your pard is hard sometimes.” Ned had grinned, and gone off to sleep.
Now, with a cool breeze on his face, and the farm lying peaceful under the stars, Thal brought up what was on his mind. “So, tell me, sis,” he began. “What got into Myles? What was that whole makin’-his-mark business you wrote me about?”
Ursula’s golden hair was like a halo in the dark. “It wasn’t the same as with you,” she replied. “You wanted to be a cowboy. Why, I’ll never know. But you went off to Texas to tend cows.”
“Texas suits me,” Thal said, “down to my marrow.”
“It’s changed you,” Ursula said. “And I don’t mean just your clothes or that six-shooter. You’ve picked up a drawl, and you talk different. I think it’s cute.”
“Of all the things you can call a man, that’s the worst.”
Ursula laughed. “Your friend is cute too, but don’t tell him I said that.”
“I believe I will,” Thal said. “It will take him down a peg. He likes to think he’s candy for the ladies.”
“Does he, now?”
“Back to Myles,” Thal said.
Ursula commenced to slowly rock. “You remember how he was. Farm life never did agree with him. He complained about the cows, he complained about the hogs, he complained about the chickens. The cows were dumb, the hogs were always rolling in the dirt, and the smell of the chicken coop made him want to wring their necks. We used to laugh about it. We thought it was funny, him griping so much. But looking back, he was sour through and through, and we didn’t see it.”
“That could be,” Thal said.
“Anyway, after you left, he talked more and more about how he wanted to leave too. He didn’t tell Ma and Pa. Just me. If he brought it up once, he brought it up a thousand times. It got so I was tired of hearing it.”
“Why did he go to the Black Hills, of all places?” Thal asked. “It’s dangerous up there. Everybody knows that.”
“The dangers haven’t stopped the hordes who have gone. That’s how the newspaper described it. As a ‘hungry horde.’ Hungry for gold, that is.”
“Myles had gold fever?”
“He has money fever—that’s for sure. Had it long before he left. He and I would sit out here like we’re doing, and he’d go on and on about how wonderful it would be to not have to scrape for a living. He wanted money, and a lot of it. For fancy clothes and a fine horse and all that. You should have heard him.”
“He changed after I left,” Thal remarked.
“Or maybe he was that way all the time and didn’t show it much,” Ursula said. “People hide how they are sometimes.”
“Did Ma and Pa know about his money hunger?”
“Myles brought it up with them a few times. Pa would always say that there was more to life than money. That having a family and a roof over your head and good, decent work counted for more. It didn’t impress Myles much. Nor did Ma when she’d remind him that the Bible says the love of money is the root of all evil. Do you know what he said to her?”
Thal shook his head, realized she hadn’t noticed in the dark, and said, “I wasn’t here.”
“Myles told her that it was easy for the Bible to say it’s wrong to love money because the Bible doesn’t have to eat and wear clothes and get along in this world.”
Thal could imagine how his mother reacted to a statement like that. “Did she take him to task?”
“Did she ever! She wagged her finger at him and told him that Scripture is the word of God and God is never wrong, and if God says that the love of money is the root of all evil, then it by God is.”
“What did Myles say?”
“He just sat there. He never spoke back to her. Not even when she warned him that the Bible is the one true and good book there is, and if he didn’t take it to heart, he’d come to ruin.” Ursula lowered her voice. “Later that night, when him and me were talking about it, he called Ma a fool.”
“He didn’t.” Thal was genuinely shocked. Their ma had her faults. Everyone did. But her faith wasn’t one of them, and she loved her children dearly.
“As surely as I’m sitting here,” Ursula said. “I scolded him for being so mean. All he did was shake his head and say it would be best for all of us if he went off into the world to make his mark.”
“That again.”
“He said it a lot. You ask me, he was money-hungry, plain and simple. That’s all his mark was. He hankers after more money than he knows what to do with.”
“That explains the Black Hills.”
“It was all he talked about after he heard about the gold rush,” Ursula said. “How a lot of men were going to be rich, and he should be one of them.” She drummed her fingers on her chair arm. “You know, looking back, I can see we missed a few signs.”
“How do you mean?”
“Don’t you remember how he’d bring up gold rushes now and then? That time we were helping Pa with the hay, and Myles went on and on about the California gold rush, and how he wished he’d been born back then and could have gone so he could have made his fortune.”
Thal sighed. That fortune stuff was bunk. Anyone with any sense knew that most who took part in a gold rush never saw any gold, let alone got rich. It was a pipe dream, as folks would say.
“Myles was always interested in gold rushes. I remember him talking about that one up in Idaho, and another in Canada, and wishing he was old enough to go to those too.”
“It’s too bad we never had a gold rush in Kansas,” Thal joked, but his sister didn’t laugh.
“Then Myles heard about the Black Hills. Day in and day out, it was all he talked about. How gold was there for the taking. How if he didn’t get there soon, he’s lose out on his share.”
“The simpleton.”
“Myles isn’t stupid,” Ursula said. “It’s the gold fever. It’s made him deaf to listening to reason.”
“I wonder how he got shot,” Thal said, and instantly regretted it.
Ursula stopped rocking and let out a low groan. “Don’t remind me. I’m worried sick. The ma
n who wrote us didn’t say what the circumstances were. I wish he had. Not knowing is killing me.”
“Don’t you worry,” Thal said. “If I find Myles I’ll bring him home, whether he wants to come or not.”
“He’s a man now, Thalis. He can do as he pleases.”
Thal looked at her, trying to read her expression. “If you don’t want me to bring him back, why did you send for me?”
“To find out if he’s all right. Or even alive. I’d have gone myself if it was safe to do.”
“Thank golly you didn’t.” Thal shuddered to think of her fate if she were cast among the wolves of the world, as young and innocent as she was. He’d seen enough to know that innocence was no protection against evil. In fact, evil preyed on innocence, like a wolf on sheep.
“I’m counting on you, Thal, to do what I can’t.”
“You’ve said that before. I’ll do the best I can. But don’t get your hopes too high.”
“I only have one hope, and that’s you, big brother.”
Thal would hate to disappoint her, but they must be realistic about things. He was about to suggest she’d be wise to brace for the worst when he heard the faint beat of hooves out on the lane. Sitting forward, he asked, “Do you hear that, sis?”
“What?” Ursula said, and then: “Oh. Who would be paying us a visit at this time of night?”
Thal stood. It was only ten o’clock or so, but in farm country that was well past bedtime for most. Farmers were early risers, like his pa, usually up by five a.m. They needed to go to bed early to get their rest. “A neighbor, maybe.”
“I can’t think of any who would stop by this late.”
Moving to the steps, Thal waited. He wasn’t expecting trouble. Not here.
“There are two of them,” Ursula said at his elbow.
Thal had already seen the dark outlines of a pair of riders. Going down the steps, he moved to meet them, saying, “Who are you and what are you doing here?”
Ralph Compton Brother's Keeper Page 5
