“You will go back there if you can,” Eddie finally said when the creek was in sight.
Betsy nodded. “It doesn’t seem to be a matter of deciding to go back. It catches me like a mouse in a trap and I’m suddenly there. And then one day it happens in reverse and I’m back here. What kind of life is that, Eddie?”
Eddie smiled. “Your life, Betsy.”
Betsy brought the team to a halt. The moment they both dreaded was here. They said goodbye each time, not knowing if they’d ever see each other again.
But that’s the way life is, she realized with a certain sense of surprise. You never know from one minute to the next, but we just can’t bear to be too aware of that.
They left the buggy and horses and strolled unhurriedly forward, reaching out to clasp hands as they knew they were reaching the edge. They stepped across and there was her brother-in-law and his big dog, looking as if they might have been waiting all night.
Betsy blinked, adjusting to the rushing motorway full of vehicles that roared past them and at the tall towers of a not too distant city. It was always almost too much of a shock to step from quiet Lavender into this busy modern world where Eddie and Zan made their home.
Eddie ran eagerly to her husband, hugging him and then the dog, returning to linger in Zan’s arms. He smiled over her head at Betsy.
Betsy went over to give him a kiss on the cheek, than patted the dog, saying, “Good to see you, Einstein, old boy.” The dog waggled happily.
They spent a few minutes talking over the roar of passing autos, Zan mentioned that he’d been driving out here morning after morning lately in hopes of finding Eddie ready to go home. Betsy, knowing Zan was never fully himself away from his wife, thanked him solemnly for lending her to the family for a time.
She and Eddie both lingered over the goodbye with a sense of possible finality. If Betsy ended up staying back in that Lavender in the past, Eddie would have no way home. This would truly be a last goodbye.
Guerilla fighters invaded Lavender one November day. Lavinia, who had gone to take tea with a friend, was on her way home when they rode past her, about a dozen rough-clad men on horseback, whooping and yelling and demanding liquor and women.
One of them dared speak to her. “Now here’s a pretty darling,” he said, reaching down to pull her up on his horse. She beat her fists against his arm, trying to pull free, but he followed his fellows into the center of town, still holding on to the struggling Lavinia.
Caleb, just coming out of the store, salt and thread in his hands, dropped his purchases and his cane when he saw the grizzled intruder jump down from his horse, Lavinia fighting fiercely in his arms while his compatriots urged him onward with curses and laughter.
Caleb had heard stories of men like these, but these were the first to come to Lavender. They roamed, bands of ruffians some from the south, some from the north, but in his measured opinion more out for themselves and a rowdy good time than anything else.
They were lawless, desperate men not beyond any evil and any community feared their coming. Now they were in Lavender.
All these thoughts barely had time to flee through his mind as he launched himself at the man who held on to Lavinia. He might have the ability to walk or run the way he used to, but he had grown up fighting for himself and now he managed to yank the screaming Lavinia free and knock her oppressor to the ground.
His arms and shoulders strong with the muscles of a man who worked hard for his living, he threw himself on the half-drunken raider and began to pummel. The other invading men seemed to think the whole thing was a tremendous joke and as the old men from the checkers table poured out of the store, they called to the man, jibing him for letting a cripple seize advantage of him.
The term only enraged Caleb further. “Run home! Run!” he yelled to Lavinia even as he concentrated on give the raider the beating of his life.
Finally they pulled him off the half-conscious man and he stood, his nose bleeding, wavering on his uncertain legs until a small boy approached, handing him his cane.
“You shouldn’t oughta done that,” the child defied the circle of raiders. “Caleb was a soldier ‘til he was hurt. He’s a Johnny Reb.”
The laughter died away. “Guess we’re on the same side then,” the tall man who seemed to be their leader said a little apologetically. “But anyway, old son, you went after him, not the other way around.”
Still shaking with rage, Caleb watched as water was poured over the downed man’s face and he sat up, sputtering and groaning, all of the fight drained out of him.
“We’re not on the same side,” he challenged. “I wouldn’t go dragging innocent young women along the street and treating them like . . . like . . .” He found he was too angry to go on.
“Miz Stephens is a soldiers wife,” his small champion filled in. “You shouldn’t treat her that way when Major Forrest is away fighting in the war.”
Caleb looked around and was relieved to see that Lavinia had followed his shouted advice. She was no longer in sight.
One of the old men, Hap Myers who used to be mayor, stepped up, tugging at his beard. “What are you men doing in our town? The war’s not here.”
“Sure it is,” the raider said, smiling challengingly. “There’s traitors everywhere. We got a list.”
Hap handed Caleb a handkerchief and he rubbed blood from his face. “A list?” He frowned. “What kind of list.”
“A list of men to be hanged,” the raider said grimly. “And it’s our job to see to it.”
Chapter Fourteen
Both Susan and Dottie were engaged. Susan was two years younger than Betsy. Dottie was much younger. Betsy told herself she didn’t envy their happiness; she only wished she had some of her own.
She was lucky to have a career of sorts as a storyteller and a loving family that provided her a home. But the time was long past when she should have stepped out on her own like Eddie, who had work and a husband, and could have children if she wished.
Eddie led an adventurous life, but that wasn’t what Betsy wanted. She wanted everyday peace, family meals, rocking babies, a husband who told her he loved her.
Trouble was it couldn’t be just any husband. Caleb had spoiled the rest of them for her. She couldn’t imagine any other man in the home she dreamed about. He had to be Caleb Carr.
She thought about that as she washed the dinner dishes, then made a couple of cinnamon sprinkled and butter-dotted apple pies for supper. They were having company, Dottie was bringing her intended home to get better acquainted with her grandmother and the rest of the family. Betsy had volunteered to cook the meal herself, feeling that Dottie should be relieved of that responsibility for once.
She already had a hearty stew steaming on the cookstove, perfect for the kind of cool, rainy evenings they were having lately. She’d make cornbread and would serve some of Mrs. Myers homemade pickles, a simple supper, but satisfying.
When Sylvie came in after school to help herself to molasses cookies and a glass of milk, she unexpectedly asked, “Are you happy, Betsy?”
“That’s a deep philosophical question to ask right out of the clear blue,” Betsy countered, grinning at the serious face of the girl who looked more like her mother as she got older.
“We were just talking, my friends and me, about what we wanted to do when we grew up. I said I wanted to be like you, but they said you were an old maid.”
That hurt! If she were back—or rather forward—in the time in which she’d been born, nobody would apply such terms to her. She would be a career woman, independent and free to choose her own life. She supposed her stories would be on paper, or more likely digitalized, and maybe she’d make a fortune instead of just a living.
She wasn’t even tempted, having seen enough of that world where Zan and Eddie lived. It might be right for them, but for her Lavender was enough.
Almost enough. She was too old to still be a daughter living in her parents’ home. She resolved to talk to Grandpa
pa about letting her move into the little house on the west side that he owned. As far as she knew, it hadn’t been rented since Zan and Eddie moved out.
Somehow it wasn’t a particularly intriguing idea. It was a trifle sad to think of living all by herself in that little house.
She left the pies to bake and the stew to simmer and stepped outside. When she was working in the kitchen, she could almost feel them moving around her in that other time. For the last few days, she’d been feeling a building anxiety, almost as though something were terribly wrong and she needed to hurry back.
But she didn’t know how to do that. Since Eddie had left, she’d stepped across that vital threshold many unnecessary times and gone nowhere special. What was the use of being a time traveler, the only person in Lavender who could walk out of the community or back into it at will, if she had no control over when she could go see the man she loved?
She would do something about it. She would not allow events to simply sweep her along in this way.
Watching her little sister drink the last of her milk, then say, “I don’t like to think of you being sad, Betsy. You don’t seem sad, at least not very often?”
She bent to drop a kiss on the top of the younger girl’s head. “I’m not. I refuse to be. If something’s wrong, then I try to fix it.”
“Have you just never met a boy you fell for?” Sylvie asked shyly.
“Oh, when I was your age, I kept falling all over the place. I was constantly in love, that’s how I kept getting engaged. Three times,” she added with considerable satisfaction. At least when she was a creepy old lady, scolding her grandnieces and nephews from her rocking chair, nobody could say that no man had ever asked her to marry him.
“Three times!” Sylvia exclaimed.
“Fraid so. Then I discovered I didn’t know what being in love meant and decided to wait until I did.”
“And it just never happened,” Sylvie concluded sadly, washing out her glass and wiping the cookie crumbs from the table. She departed slowly from the kitchen, her small feet dragging as though she shared her sister’s sadness.
Betsy watched her go with a grin on her face, then took off her apron and prepared for action.
She tried walking back and forth across the threshold several times without results, then sank into a chair at the kitchen table. The scent of cooking apples mixed with delicious spices dominated the smell of the simmering stew, but she refused to allow either to divert her mind from the matter at hand.
How was it that she could cross easily into the future, but only sporadically into the past where Caleb lived? What did she do differently?
Finally she shook her head. She didn’t know the answer, couldn’t figure it out. She checked the pies and found them done, the juice beginning to bronze on top of the lattice crust. Taking them one at a time from the oven and placing them to cool, she checked the stew and found it bubbling slowly so that it was safe to leave for supper.
Then she tried again and, unfathomably, found herself in the old cookshack. It was winter and she could see snow on the ground through the little window, Hetty was hunched at the fireplace stirring something savory over the fire.
“Looks like you made stew too,” she said, then realized as Hetty jumped that her voice must be startling in the silence.
Hetty looked up and smiled. She wasn’t the kind of person who went around hugging everybody, but her slow smile spoke volumes of her joy at seeing the other woman. “Betsy! So glad to have you back.” She glanced at the fireplace. “No, it’s only a vegetable soup. We’re short on supplies these days.”
Betsy went over to give the hug herself. “You never seem surprised to see me.”
“Not much surprises me, child. Especially not since Tyler Stephens became my friend. That man lives in the world of surprises. Everybody doing fine where you came from?”
Betsy nodded. Hetty’s question was not very specific, but she had a feeling that she wouldn’t be too surprised either at knowing when Betsy had come from. “And how is everyone here?” she asked, feeling a frisson of fear for Caleb.
Hetty’s expression dropped into sadness and she turned away to stir her soup with a large wooden spoon. “Reckon we haven’t quite got used to losing Lavinia, even though it’s been months now.
Losing Lavinia! But that couldn’t be. Forrest’s wife, Eddie’s grandmother, died in the influenza epidemic years from now. It was an oft told family story.
“Lavinia’s gone?” she asked in numb disbelief.
Hetty nodded. “She passed last November. They said it was pneumonia, but I reckon it was just giving up, what with those awful raiders in town and Forrest a prisoner and being short on rations too. The world these days was just too confusing for that girl and she just up and left it.”
This couldn’t be. Shocked as she was at the loss of Lavinia, Betsy couldn’t help but being overwhelmed by the fear rising within her. Lavinia hadn’t been supposed to die. She was part of the future.
Did that mean that Hetty, Doc and even Evan were at risk as well? She no longer felt safe in the promises of the future. Something had changed! Remembering the light-hearted girl she’d met on her visit here, Betsy was devastated.
The term used wouldn’t have particularly offended Caleb, he was accustomed to it as part of everyday speech. It was the way it was said that made him mad as fire.
Like Hetty was something lowdown and different from her white neighbors. Hadn’t Hetty come to them, bringing her little daughter, when Lavinia got so sick? Hadn’t she been there when Lavinia died and poor little Evan was left with only his daddy in a faraway prison, his grandpapa and Caleb himself?
The little boy had needed a woman’s capable hands and tender voice and Hetty had provided both, moving in to stay in Lavinia’s room to look after Evan and her own little Miranda.
Stunned with grief as the household had been, Caleb reckoned they wouldn’t have survived without Hetty. She’d proved to be the best friend they had.
And now Bolter Jackson had just called her an insulting name, speaking not to Caleb but to the men sitting around the checker board, and laughing as he said it.
“Damn woman keeps my people all riled up, thinking they’re too good to do their work. Nothing I hate like an uppity woman like that.”
Caleb wanted to knock him down. But he was a grown man now, not a little orphaned boy. Best thing was to speak his mind right out loud just as though he had equal rights with old Bolter.
“Hetty’s a fine woman,” he said, “and good to those in need as I should ought to know. The way I’ve got it figured, Bolter, you’ve got a way to climb before you’re anywhere near her for classiness.”
Bolter’s red face got even redder. Both of his sons were with him, Mitchell, an overgrown seventeen and old enough to be in the army; and young Herbert, who was eleven or twelve.
“My pa don’t have to listen to loud mouths like you,” Mitchell blustered. “You no-count white trash.”
Caleb saw by the stirrings around him that popular sentiment was with Bolter. Most of these folks were southern sympathizers and felt that when you stood up for the slaves, you were tarring yourself with the same brush.
A couple of years ago, he wouldn’t have been smart enough but to feel the same. “Reckon I got a right to say what I like,” he said in a deceptively mild voice. “I’m a man who has stood up for his home country and proved where his loyalties lie. And if I say Hetty is one of the best women I know, black or white, you don’t have any call to object.”
The contempt in that one word ‘you’ deepened the red in Bolter’s face and made his older son growl and advance threateningly on Caleb.
But the mood had changed. Most of the men around the table were old and feeble, but their sons and grandsons had gone off to fight, some of them had died and others, like Caleb, had been lamed for life. They sure as hell didn’t approve of the way Bolter had bought his way out of fighting for the cause he professed to espouse.
The boy
might not know what was going on, but Bolter was too savvy not to catch the whiff of public opinion. He grabbed his son by the arm and urged, “Come on, boys, we’ve got better things to do then standing here arguing with riff-raft like this.”
He stalked out with heavy footsteps, his older son accompanying him, but young Herbert hesitated.
“I just want you to know, Mr. Carr, that you’re right about Hetty. She and Doc saved my best friend’s little brother when he was so sick a few months back.”
“Herb!” his dad bellowed from outside and the boy took off running.
Caleb stared after him. That meant Bolter Jackson’s youngest son’s best friend was the boy who had come seeking Doc’s help that night when they’d crept through darkness to Bolter’s slave quarters.
His amusement faded only as he thought that Bolter would probably cure him of such improper friendships by the time he’d grown as tall as Mitchell.
He walked home slowly, leaning on the cane that became more necessary as he tired. He hadn’t bought what he’d gone to the store to get, couldn’t even remember what he’d had in mind in the first place.
Maybe he’d just gone to get out of the house. He missed his own little place in the country. Last time he’d been out there the fields were overgrown with small trees and the cabin looked weather-worn. He couldn’t go back when Doc needed him and Evan still pleaded for his mama most evenings.
He had kept the summer kitchen going, mostly because he felt closer to Betsy that way, but also because without the fireplace, the little lean-to where he slept was freezing cold on these winter nights. January always seemed to be the coldest month of the year.
Doc kept urging him to move into the spare bedroom, but he was saving that for Betsy. Anyway, it felt more like having a place of his own when he could sleep in the lean-to, which had been his bedroom when he was a boy before Forrest added on to the house.
Lavender Blue: A Time Travel Romance (Lavender, Texas Series) Page 10
