by Nerys Leigh
She smiled up at him. “I know. You’re a good man, Sol. Too good for this place.”
He looked around sadly. “I’d prefer to be doing something else, it’s true. Maybe even go into law enforcement, like my brother. But if I wasn’t here, who’d take care of the girls?”
Even on her toes she wouldn’t have been able to reach him, so she beckoned him down and placed a kiss on his cheek when he bent his head to her. “They’re lucky to have you.”
Hiram rushed up to her. “Jo! Are you all right?” He raised one hand towards her bruised face, stopping short of touching her. His knuckles were covered with grazes.
“I’m okay, Hiram.”
“Are you coming into work later?” The look of hopefulness on his face almost made her wish she could.
“I’m sorry, but I won’t be working here anymore. After last night, I just don’t think I can.”
His shoulders drooped. “I figured you probably wouldn’t. It won’t be the same without you. I know you weren’t here for long, but you made the whole place seem brighter somehow.”
She leaned forward to kiss his cheek. “I’m going to miss you, Hiram.”
It was the truth. When she’d first met him, she’d thought him just another drunken, lecherous ruffian. But she’d been wrong, he was a sweetheart. A drunken, lecherous sweetheart, but a sweetheart nonetheless.
His mouth dropped open and he raised his fingers to his face. Then he smiled and the permanent ruddiness of his cheeks turned a bit redder. “I’m going to miss you too. A lot.”
An idea came to her. “You know what? You should come to church on Sundays. At least then I’d get to see you.”
He looked at her as if she’d suggested he go swimming in a pond full of sharks. “Me? In church?”
“Hey, if they don’t mind me, they won’t mind you.”
He grinned. “I might just do that one day, if I get to sit next to you.”
“I’ll save you a seat.”
If Hiram did actually show up, Zach probably wouldn’t mind him sitting with them. Much.
She left Hiram talking animatedly to the others at the poker table and pointing to the spot on his cheek where she’d kissed him, and headed to where Rufus sat on his usual stool at the far end of the bar.
He watched her approach.
“I’d like to talk to you,” she said before he had the chance to speak, the edge in her voice indicating it wasn’t going to be a friendly chat.
His usually impassive expression didn’t falter. “Would you like to come into my office?”
Not for a thousand dollars. After the night before, she didn’t trust him for one second. “I’d prefer to stay out here.”
He nodded and led her to a booth, the same one they’d sat in three weeks previously when she’d persuaded him to give her a job.
He leaned back, stretching one arm out along the back of the seat. “What can I do for you?”
“I know what you did last night. I know you gave me to Dunbar.”
Nothing in his expression changed, but she didn’t miss the ever so slight tightening of his jaw.
“I know you’re as guilty as he is,” she went on. “I just want to know one thing, was it the money? How much did it take to sell me out?”
His eyes flickered momentarily to the table in front of him. “Not that I’m admitting anything, but Dunbar provided me with certain... services. Services that were more valuable to me than money. It was nothing personal. Those services will be difficult to replace.”
She didn’t bother concealing her anger. “I’m sure you’ll manage somehow.”
One corner of his mouth twitched. “If you know I was involved, why am I here while Dunbar’s half beaten to death in a jail cell?”
“Because I chose not to tell anyone about your involvement. But that doesn’t mean I won’t.”
His voice dripped arrogance. “You would have done it if you’d thought it would do any good. You have no proof. The marshal wouldn’t be able to do anything, even if he wanted to. Believe me, I know. He’s tried.”
“Maybe not, but the marshal isn’t the only person I could tell.” She glanced at Hiram across the room. “These men don’t take kindly to the mistreatment of women, and even if you aren’t worried that they’ll do the same to you as they did to Dunbar, I know you care about the bottom line. They keep this place profitable. If they find out what you let Dunbar do to the women, and what you were happy to let him do to me, they might choose to stop coming here. And then you’d be out of business within a month.”
She gleaned some satisfaction from the momentary look of nervousness that passed across his face. It was so quick most wouldn’t have even noticed it, but she did.
His eyes narrowed. “What do you want? Money?”
“No, I don’t want any more of your money.” The idea had become distasteful.
“Then why are you here?”
“I’m here to tell you that if I hear one word about you allowing any of the women who have the misfortune to work for you to be hurt again, I will tell every man in here what you did. And they’ll believe me. I’ll make sure of it.”
He stared at her for a few moments, and then a smile slid onto his face. “You’re quite a woman, Jo. It’s a shame things didn’t work out. You and I could have done great things together, if business hadn’t got in the way.”
One day, he would get what he deserved. She needed to believe that. She only hoped she was there to see it.
“You should have thought of that before you tried to give me to a monster.”
Without waiting for his answer, she stood and walked out, leaving the Royal Flush saloon for the final time.
Chapter 36
The buggy Zach had borrowed from his father bounced along the well-rutted track, sending uncomfortable little jolts through Jo’s bladder.
She missed her pre-pregnancy bladder that could go for hours without needing to empty itself. She wondered if riding a horse would be more or less disagreeable. Of course, to do that she’d have to learn to ride a horse. Zach would teach her, if she asked, which was in and of itself a good reason to do it.
“It gets smoother just up here,” he said, glancing sideways at her.
There was a possibility she wasn’t hiding her discomfort well. “It’s all right. The picnic will feel all the better for having suffered to get there.”
He laughed as he guided Eagle along the left hand side of a fork in the track. It must have been the less travelled route because the ride immediately evened out.
Jo breathed a sigh of relief. At least now she could stop clenching.
“Better?” he said.
“Much.” She gazed out over a sea of gently undulating young crop shoots beside the buggy and breathed in the warm summer air. “I love it here. I don’t know why anyone would want to live in a city when they could be amongst all this.”
She amazed herself by feeling that way. Then again, she’d always dreamed of having a little house and garden with Clive, so maybe her love of the countryside had always been there. It was his loss that he would never get to share it with her and their child. He’d had his chance. She hoped he spent the rest of his life regretting it.
The moment the thought came to her, she knew it was wrong. Strange that she’d never felt that way before. At the beginning, right after he left her, she’d cycled between longing for his return and hoping he would contract a highly unpleasant, humiliating disease. Absolutely no twinges of guilt had troubled her whatsoever.
The passage she’d read in the Bible that morning came to her. One of Jesus’ disciples had asked Him to teach them how to pray, and after He did, He said, ‘For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you: But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.’
“Can I ask you something about the Bible?” she said.
“You can ask,” Zach replied. “And with God’s guidance and wisdom, I’ll try to ans
wer.”
She marvelled at how he simply assumed God would help him. One day, maybe she’d have that assurance too.
“You know where Jesus said that if we don’t forgive other people, God won’t forgive us?”
“Right after the Lord’s prayer.”
She nodded. “Well, since Jesus died on the cross so that we could be forgiven, and that’s what saves us, what will happen to us if we don’t forgive people who’ve wronged us?”
He was silent for a while as he thought. “You’re reading Matthew?”
“Yes.”
“Later in Matthew, Jesus tells a parable about a servant who owed a king a lot of money and the king forgave him the debt. Then that servant went out and demanded a debt back from a man who owed him a small amount of money, and when he couldn’t pay, the servant had him thrown in prison. When the king heard about it, he got angry that the servant hadn’t shown the same mercy he’d been shown, and he had him handed over to the jailor. And Jesus said our heavenly Father would do the same to us if we don’t forgive others, after we were forgiven at the cost of His life.”
She thought about that. “I guess that means forgiving other people is very important.”
“Yeah.”
She looked out at the field again. “I have a lot of people to forgive, but I don’t know how. I don’t even know if I can.”
“When I was fifteen,” he said, “there was a girl I liked a lot, but she liked another boy. One day, completely out of the blue, she asked me to take her to a dance the town was having. I was so happy. I thought it was finally my chance. I got dressed up, used cologne for the first time. I’d never been so nervous in my life as I was going to fetch her. But when I got to her house, I found her kissing the other boy. She’d just used me to make him jealous.”
Jo slipped her arm through his, her heart aching for the young Zach. “I’m so sorry.”
“I ran home. After I’d stopped crying, my pa told me I should forgive them both, which was the last thing I wanted to do. But he told me that parable, and he said forgiveness isn’t an emotion, it’s a choice. For example, I choose to put my arm around you.” He slid his arm from her hold and wrapped it around her shoulders, gently tugging her against him. “Now, it could be that I may be annoyed at you for some reason. Let’s assume for the sake of this demonstration that it would be possible for me to be annoyed at you.”
She snuggled into his side. “Oh, believe me, I can be very annoying when I want to.”
He laughed softly. “So if you were being annoying, I may not want to put my arm around you, but I would do it anyway. I’d choose to put my arm around you, just like I chose to forgive that girl.”
“Is this example just an excuse to put your arm around me?”
“Might be. Anyway, the people we need to forgive may not be sorry for what they’ve done or deserve to be forgiven. They may not even think they need it. But in Luke it says Jesus forgave the people who were crucifying Him, while it was happening. If He could do that, I could follow His example, and so can you. He’ll help you, if you ask Him.”
They drove on in silence for a while, Jo resting her head against his shoulder while she thought about everything he’d told her.
Eventually she said, “That girl who chose the other boy over you when you were fifteen? She was a fool.”
He kissed her temple and smiled. “I know.”
~ ~ ~
That night, Jo sat on her bed with her Bible open on her lap.
She’d found the parable of the unmerciful servant Zach had told her about and read it three times, then she’d skipped to the account of the crucifixion in Luke. It brought tears to her eyes.
It wasn’t like she didn’t know Jesus had died. She’d been in enough church services over the years, usually for appearance’s sake, for her to be aware of the basics of Christianity. But it seemed so much more real to her, now she knew He’d done it all for her. And when she read the part where He forgave the very people who had nailed him to the cross, right in the midst of his suffering, she knew what she had to do.
Wiping her sleeve across her eyes, she stared at the flames in the fireplace across the room. “How did You do it, Jesus?” she whispered. “You must have been in so much pain. How could You forgive them while they were doing that to You? And You hadn’t even done anything wrong.” She lowered her eyes to the bedspread. “Not like me.”
An idea came to her. She reached for the paper and pencil she always kept by her bedside and began to write
It took a long time to get it all down. By the time she was finished, the fire was low and the air had cooled enough that she had to pull a blanket around her shoulders. But she’d done it. On the several sheets of paper in front of her was written everything she could remember doing wrong and all the people she’d swindled and cheated. It was a shockingly long list, and even that was incomplete. There was no doubt she’d forgotten a lot.
Shrugging the blanket from her shoulders, she picked up the list and rose from the bed. She walked to the fireplace and stoked the fire, placed a fresh log into the glowing embers, and sat on the chair.
Staring into the growing flames, she began to speak. “I forgive you, Daddy. I don’t understand why you left us, but that doesn’t matter. This is my choice, and I’m choosing to forgive. I forgive you, Mama. I know you didn’t plan the road you travelled, and that you didn’t intend for me to suffer...”
Names and faces came to her as she spoke, hurt and disappointment and shame. Some were easier to forgive than others, but when she faltered, she remembered Jesus forgiving His persecutors even as they poured scorn on Him, and the will to forgive would return. She even managed to forgive Rufus and Clay Dunbar, although with those wounds still raw, she suspected she’d have to forgive them a few more times before it stuck.
Finally, the only one left to forgive was Clive. An unexpected wave of sadness came over her, not for herself, but for him. She placed her hand onto her abdomen. “You’ll never know our baby, Clive. You’ll never get to hold him in your arms, see him smile at you, watch him grow up. We’re going to be all right, but you’ve lost all of that. I forgive you. And I hope that if it happens again with another woman, you’ll have the sense to stick around.”
Breathing out, she sat back. That was it. She’d reached the end of her list, and God had enabled her to forgive each and every person on it.
She lifted from her lap the papers on which she’d written her own sins and held them against her chest, closing her eyes.
“I did all this, Lord, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry for every time I hurt someone or let You down. Thank You for taking the punishment I deserve. Please forgive me.”
She didn’t hear any words, no supernatural light shone down on her, no voice boomed from heaven proclaiming her exoneration, and yet somehow, in that moment, she knew she’d been forgiven, not because of anything she’d done, but because Jesus loved her so much He’d died for her. Opening her eyes, she held out the pieces of paper and let them fall into the fire. The orange flames grasped at the paper, sparking and singing the edges, patches of brown expanding and curling, until all that was left was the glowing ashes.
She closed her eyes again for a while, thinking. Something was bothering her and she couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was. She knew God had forgiven her, the weight of her sin was gone. And yet, something wasn’t quite right.
Then it came to her. There was one final person to forgive. And as she stared into the flames, the words refused to come.
Swallowing, she leaned forward, covering her face with her hands. Why was this so hard? Surely this should be the easiest of all? But it wasn’t. Each time she tried to speak, the words caught, refusing to pass the lump in her throat.
She stood and walked to the window, looking up through the glass at the half moon in the clear sky. “Help me, Father, please.”
A feeling of love washed over her in that moment, bringing with it the peace she needed. God loved her. He’d f
orgiven her. And she could do the same.
Closing her eyes, she was finally able to say the words.
“I forgive myself.”
Chapter 37
The following morning when Jo awoke, she reached for the Bible on her nightstand.
Ever since she’d given her life to God, reading His Word had become the first thing she did every morning. It was second nature now. She couldn’t help smiling when she imagined what her reaction would have been if she’d been told back in New York City what would happen. The horror she’d have felt. She could never have thought even such a short time ago how her life would change. How she would change. She was almost grateful to Clive for abandoning her. Almost.
She flipped through the pages, not sure what to read. At night, she read Matthew, but in the mornings she usually found something at random. There was so much to learn and she was trying to get a feel for where everything fitted. Deciding to try somewhere towards the end, she found herself in the first book of John. A quick check revealed John had written two others. One of the gospels was also called John, written by one of Jesus’ disciples, and she wondered if it was the same man. John was a very common name. She’d ask Zach later.
She’d randomly opened the book at chapter three and was about to go back to the beginning of the book when something caught her eye.
Whoever abideth in Him sinneth not: whosoever sinneth hath not seen Him, neither known Him.
She continued to read, eventually reaching verse eighteen. My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth.
In truth. Truth. She slumped back into the pillows, realisation hitting her hard. She was still sinning. She’d written down all her wrongs, she’d asked for forgiveness, and yet she was still sinning, against the most important person to her in the world.
In that moment, she knew what she had to do. And the prospect terrified her more than anything she’d ever been through before.
