Bittersweet

by Anita Mills

  Finally, tired of watching the water in the pan, he stripped off his sweaty shirt, then pulled off his boots, socks, and pants. He’d just have to be careful he didn’t swallow any of it, he decided as he plunged into the river itself. Sinking down, he felt the water lift his hair and swirl around his body, and he realized it was damned cold. As quickly as he’d gone in, he climbed out. His wet drawers bagged with the added weight as he picked up the pan, soap, towel, and razor before heading into a stand of cottonwood trees.

  He soaped everything he could reach, including his wet hair and the rough stubble on his face, then positioned the mirror in a crevice between a branch and the trunk of a tree. He’d had better lather, he decided as he drew the straight razor along his jaw to his chin. His eye caught movement in a corner of the mirror, and he spun around.

  Her first instinct was to run when she saw the nearly naked man, then she recognized him. “Dr. Hardin! What on earth are you doing out here?”

  His gaze took in her flushed face, the damp hair that clung to her neck and temples, then dropped lower to the decided swell of her abdomen beneath the faded calico dress. Whisking the little towel from a tree limb, he held it over his drawers. “You always sneak up on a man when he’s shaving, Mrs. Taylor?”

  “I didn’t see you,” she said simply. “I was just getting water.”

  “Well, don’t drink it, or the stuff’s liable to give you typhoid or cholera.”

  “If I use it for cooking or drinking, I boil it. But you’re a long way from Georgia, sir.”

  “I’m headed for San Francisco.”

  “Oh.” Surprised, she couldn’t help asking, “What about your family? Are they with you?”

  “No. They’re already out there.”

  “So you’re going to join them,” she said, nodding.

  Instead of answering, he said, “I heard about Jesse. I’m sorry.”

  “So am I.I want to believe I’m in a nightmare, and when I wake up, he’ll be here. But I know he won’t.”

  “Yeah.”

  She sucked in her breath and let it out slowly. “I’m surprised you took the northern route this time of year.”

  “Yeah, well, I thought it’d be easier than crossing the desert.”

  “So you’re going to cross mountains.”

  “Or die trying, I guess. With Jesse gone, what are you going to do now?”

  “Stay with the railroad until after the baby comes. I know they don’t want me, but there’s nowhere else to go.”

  “What about Salisbury? You could go back there, you know.”

  “To what, Dr. Hardin? We sold the farm to come out here.”

  “I know, but you need your people at a time like this,” he said gently. “You can’t raise that baby alone in a damned tent.”

  “You know, I get real tired of hearing that,” she responded dryly. “I don’t have any people anywhere.”

  “Yes, but surely—”

  “Without Jesse, Danny, or my house, there’s nothing back there for me, so I’ve got to stay whether I want to or not.”

  “You’ve got no man to take care of you,” he reminded her.

  “Is that what you all think I need?” she demanded, her voice rising. “Well, let me tell you something—I’ve been more or less alone all my life, and I’ve managed to survive. As long as I can keep a roof over my head, I’ll make it here or anywhere else.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll do what I have to. Look, I’m sorry I interrupted your daily ablutions, but I’ve got to fill this bucket and get back, or I won’t get done today.” With that, she walked to the riverbank.

  “You can’t be serious, Mrs. Taylor!” he called after her. “You can’t like living out here!”

  She swung around to face him again. “Like it? I hate it! I hate everything about it, but the Almighty didn’t give me a choice when He took Jesse, so I’m just stuck here.”

  “Look, if it’s money you need—”

  “I’m not a charity case, Dr. Hardin,” she declared stiffly. “I’ll get by on my own.”

  “You’re too damned stubborn for your own good—you know that, don’t you? Listen—let the railroad pay your way back to North Carolina. I’ve got a little money I can loan you, if you think you have to pay me back. Take it and go live with one of your friends until after the baby’s born and you can get on your feet,”

  “Friends!” she spat out disgustedly. “The only one who’d have me is poor old Silas, and the last thing he needs is a woman with a baby. The rest of ‘em’s looked down on me as long as I can remember, and I’m not about to give ‘em the satisfaction of doing it again, sir. I may be poor, but I’ve got my pride left. Now, if you’ll excuse me again, I’ve got to get busy.”

  If her belly hadn’t been so big, she’d have flounced down that riverbank, but as it was she was just awkward and ungainly as she negotiated her way to the water. Watching her, Spence sighed. “You know, Jesse wouldn’t want you living like this!” he yelled.

  She stopped again, but didn’t look back. “Jesse’s gone,” she said evenly. “And if he didn’t care when he was alive, why would he care now? He left me in this fix, and it’s up to me to make the best of it.” Bending over, she filled the bucket, then straightened her tired back. Struggling up the bank, she saw Spencer Hardin pulling on his clothes, and she felt guilty for what she’d said to him.

  “I guess it’s my turn to be sorry,” she admitted as he turned around, buttoning his shirt. “I’m just tired of everybody telling me to do something I can’t. I just have to work things out for myself.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But it’s good to hear another Southerner. I get homesick for that, you know.”

  “I didn’t mean to bully my way into your business.”

  “No, I expect Mr. Russell asked you to, didn’t he?”

  “No. I just sort of blundered into that on my own.”

  “He doesn’t want me here. He thinks I’ll be a nuisance, but I don’t aim to be. All I want is a place to stay until after Jesse Daniel’s born and I can get him to where I can travel. Then I don’t know where I’ll go, but I’ve got the winter to decide.”

  He walked over to where she stood and reached for the bucket. “You shouldn’t be carrying things this heavy. There must be somebody around who’d do it for you.”

  “I’m not about to give the men around here any encouragement,” she murmured as he took it. “And they sure don’t need much, either.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “No, you haven’t,” she countered, falling into step beside him. “Jesse wasn’t in the ground a day before they started coming around. You haven’t heard anything until you’ve listened to somebody telling a grieving widow with a big stomach what she needs is another man in her bed to make her feel better. And he was serious enough that he slicked his hair back with grease, thinking it’d make him handsome, when he hadn’t had a bath in six months.”

  “Good God.”

  “I guess he figured he could save the money he was spending at the hog ranch by marrying me. And that was just the first fellow. You’d think they’d know if a woman was crying, she wasn’t interested in romance, but they didn’t.”

  “They don’t see too many good-looking women out here, I’m told.”

  “And then there was the fellow from the hog ranch,” she went on. “He came visiting to tell me if I needed any money, he could fix me right up as soon as the baby was born. Said I could make more’n a hundred dollars on payday, and that was with him keeping half of what I brought in. He figured I could get five dollars.” She looked up at him, fixing him with those golden brown eyes. “I don’t understand how a woman could do that for money—I just don’t.”

  “No.”

  “And he wasn’t about to take no for an answer until I racked Jesse’s shotgun and pointed it at him. It was like he was talking about a piece of meat instead of a person.”

  “T
hat ought to tell you you can’t stay here.”

  “That’s what Mr. Russell said when I told him I couldn’t go back to Salisbury. I guess he thinks I can just build myself a house on somebody else’s land.” She stopped in front of a wagon. “Thanks. I can take the bucket now.”

  “Where’s your tent?”

  “I took it down. Everything I own is in this wagon, Dr. Hardin, and I’m not about to give any of it up.”

  “You’re living in here?” he asked incredulously.

  “It sits off the ground, which makes it easier for me to defend myself from both kinds of varmints, be they animal or human. Anybody wanting to crawl in with me will have to climb up, and when I hear him coming, I’ll have a double load of buckshot ready.” She looked up at the tattered canvas cover for a moment, wrinkling her nose at it. “If Jesse’d lived, Mr. Russell had a cabin over by Fort McPherson he was going to let us have for the winter.” Forcing a smile, she turned back to Spence. “ ‘The best-laid schemes ο’ mice and men gang aft agley,’ ” she said huskily.

  “I don’t guess Robert Burns had any better life than I have.”

  As soon as she’d climbed inside the wagon, Spence went looking for William Russell, and he found him shouting at a Chinese worker who couldn’t understand him. The poor fellow just stood there, smiling and bowing, while his boss hurled epithets at him.

  “Goddamn Chinks,” Russell muttered, throwing up his hands. “I’d sooner have a passel of Negroes working for me. All right—get the hell out of here,” he decided, waving the man away. Seeing Spence, he shook his head. “They send me any more of these yellow boys, and I’m apt to kill somebody over it.”

  “I’d like to speak with you about Mrs. Taylor,” Spence told him.

  “You and damned near every other man in camp—the woman’s a curse, that’s what she is. I’m supposed to be laying track clear to Laramie, and I’m too far behind for ‘em to be making eyes at the Widow Taylor. So unless you’ve got a notion of how I can get her out of here, I don’t have time to talk.”

  “There’s nothing for her back in Carolina. They sold her place to pay for the trip out here. Besides, it’s too late for her to travel that far.”

  “That doesn’t help me, does it?” Russell retorted. “I got no room for anybody that don’t work and no time to spend keeping the men from pestering her.”

  Spence realized he’d caught the man at a bad time, but he couldn’t wait for a better one. “What about the place out by McPherson?”

  “Hell, the army don’t want her either. Those soldier boys’d be as bad as mine, and morale’s worse there than here. At least we pay decent wages, which is more than can be said for the U.S. government.”

  “What about the cabin you promised Jesse?”

  “I told him the place’s a shack, but he said once the work slowed for winter, he could fix it up enough for ‘em to get through to spring in it. It’s about a quarter mile from where we’ll be making winter camp.”

  “It’d be better than a tent, wouldn’t it?” Spence persisted.

  “And how the hell am I supposed to make it habitable? Taylor was going to do that, but he’s dead now.” Russell paused to rub a day’s growth of beard while he pondered the matter, then nodded. “Least she wouldn’t be underfoot. Think you could get her to take it?”

  “I can try.”

  Warming to the idea, the foreman said, “Tell her I got a couple of Chinese fellows I can spare to nail it up some. Surely to God they know how to use a hammer.”

  “Thanks.” As he walked away, Spence felt as if he’d settled the debt he owed to Laura and Jesse Taylor.

  Near Fort Kearney: September 15, 1865

  Spence leaned forward, scanning the horizon, thinking he had to be insane to involve himself in Laura Taylor’s business. He hardly knew the woman, and he already had more than enough problems of his own. The obligation he’d felt he owed her husband last night had faded in the clear light of dawn. But he was committed to getting her as far as McPherson, he reminded himself, and he’d do it. After that, she was on her own.

  Still, he chafed restively at the slow pace, knowing he had a thousand miles of rugged, inhospitable territory between him and San Francisco. He was just going to lose two or three days he couldn’t afford, but it couldn’t be helped.

  Even if he could get Dolly and the old mule to run, he suspected the rickety wagon would shake itself apart and strand him out here with no help in sight. It already squeaked, creaked, groaned, and shimmied as the iron-clad wooden wheels ground into the muddy ruts of the Platte Road. The damned thing was just plain overloaded, but the stubborn woman beside him had refused to leave any of her furniture behind, he recalled resentfully. And it didn’t help his temper any that most of the stuff was damned near worthless.

  The way his luck was running, an axle was going to break somewhere between Forts Kearney and McPherson, anyway, and they’d be sitting ducks for any war party that happened along. And while three guns and two half-empty boxes of ammunition were plenty for a running chase, they wouldn’t be enough if he had to make a stand. His gaze sought the uneven rumps of the mismatched team for a moment. The five or so miles into Fort Kearney felt like a hundred already, and they’d have another eighty or ninety miles after that before he could abandon the silent woman or her wagon.

  She hadn’t said much since they’d left camp almost an hour earlier. Every attempt he had made at conversation had died in short answers, until he’d given up on expecting much company out of her. She was probably still mad about that little tiff he’d had with her over the junk in back. And damned if he hadn’t seen better in slave cabins.

  At least Laura Taylor wasn’t like Liddy, he decided charitably. Liddy wouldn’t have been stoic at all about the discomforts of a journey like this. By now, Liddy would have already filled his ears with a myriad of complaints, real and imagined. Her back was tired from the constant jostling. The rain had encouraged a late batch of mosquitoes. The sun was burning her skin. Her head ached miserably. The whole of Nebraska was godforsaken and unbearable. She sure hadn’t been a woman to travel much beyond Crawford County, he knew that much. It made him wonder how much grief she’d given Ross on the way to California.

  Looking back now, he had to wonder if he would have married her had he had more time to get to know her—if he’d been too bedazzled by all that beauty to realize what he was getting. He didn’t even know if he’d ever really loved her. One thing was for damned sure—it had been she who’d wanted to get married before he left for the war, then she’d left him before he could even get home from it.

  Casting a sidewise glance at the Taylor woman, he couldn’t help seeing the contrast between her and Lydia. Unlike Liddy, she wasn’t always posturing, fiddling with her gloves, the tilt of her bonnet, the drape of her skirt. Lydia had always been so aware of how she looked, of how pretty she was, and she’d wanted every man she ever met to know it. She’d known how to cock her head just so, flash those dark eyes, and smile at him, until she had him making a fool of himself. And he’d sure been easy to lead, he realized now. Instead of being a treasure, the glittering beauty had turned into fool’s gold at the first inconvenience.

  Laura Taylor, on the other hand, seemed pretty unconscious of her looks, as if she didn’t realize how pretty she was. With half the damned railroad camp hanging after her, she was sure it was because they were just plain hungry for a woman, not because they’d never seen anything like her.

  She was hanging on to the board under her with no thought given to the horror of freckles on that straight little nose of hers. She had no bonnet, no gloves, no jewelry, except a narrow gold wedding band, and certainly no fancy clothes. Her shoes were plain black with serviceable soles and laces instead of little jet buttons. But with the sun shilling down on it, that brown hair had red and gold in it.

  His gaze dropped lower, to her rounded abdomen, to the callused hand gripping that seat. She’d known hardship, disappoi
ntment, and loss, but she’d clung to her pride, and he had to admire her for it. There weren’t many women who could face what the future held for her. Widowhood. Poverty. Isolation. A child to rear alone. God, he wouldn’t want to walk in her shoes for a minute.

  He had to wonder if Jesse Taylor had even realized what he’d had. The man sure hadn’t given much thought to her comfort when he’d brought her out here, then left her alone for weeks without another decent female for company. But that was the way things went, he supposed. A man tended to take the good things that came his way for granted, while he cursed the bad.

  For Spence, whatever joy Lydia had given him had turned to bitter gall, and her betrayal had left him with a festering sore that wouldn’t heal. And the more he picked at it, the worse it got. Thad Bingham had once told him that hate feeds on its host’s guts until it kills him. He hadn’t understood what his stepfather had meant back then, but he knew now. Only before it killed him, it was going to take Ross and Lydia, too.

  “I see something over there.”

  Laura Taylor had said it so calmly that he wasn’t sure he’d heard her right, but the tense hand gripping his arm was real. Pulled from his morose thoughts, he looked around.

  “Where?”

  “I thought I saw movement behind those trees ahead.”

  “Probably leaves blowing in the wind,” Nonetheless, he drew the Colt and handed it to her before he retrieved the Sharps under the seat. As he straightened up, he realized there was no wind, not even a faint breeze, and he felt his skin crawl. Staring hard, he thought he could make out a lone rider.

  “You’ve got good eyes,” he murmured, his finger closing around the trigger. “I’m not sure I see anything.”

  “Out here you have to.” Turning around on the seat, she looked back. ‘There’s not many, but they could be scouts for a war party. Mr. Russell says sometimes they fool you and there’ll be a whole passel of ‘em over the next hill.”

  “Yeah. And we couldn’t make a quick getaway if we had to.”