Betsy watched her. Eddie always said she didn’t want children, but if anyone could convince her otherwise, it would be her beautiful baby. Now if she just had her baby son here, the odds against Eddie’s resolution would be overwhelming.
The instant of amusement faded. If Caleb were here he would find this big, elaborate house strange and confusing.
She stopped, her train of thought derailed. Caleb wouldn’t know this house, Crockett Street, or Forrest’s elegant store. Everything had changed.
Practically everything. All he knew would be gone.
Only the dearest place in the world to him would still be here. Everything changed, but the land itself remained.
Without explanation, she dashed from the kitchen, through the breezeway and into the house, calling to Forrest as she ran.
“Grandpapa! Grandpapa!” she yelled, coming to a stop in front of the chair where Forrest had jerked awake. “What happened to Caleb’s farm?”
He was an aging man, he had to orient himself, but it didn’t take long. “It’s still in the family. He loved that farm so I couldn’t sell it and Doc insisted we hang on to it. We paid the taxes every year.” He shook his head. “Haven’t been out there for years.”
Betsy gave an excited little hop, then ran on to the other side of the house to where her parents were working. “Mama, Papa,” she called into the room, but they were back in the interior offices. “Tell them Betsy and Eddie are going out in the buggy,” she told the startled looking patients waiting for their turn with one or another of the doctors.
She grabbed a blanket for the baby and ran back out to the kitchen where Eddie still sat with the baby, awaiting her return.
“Come on,” she said. “You’ll have to drive the team while I hold the baby.”
By the time Eddie gathered what she thought they would need for Emilee including a generous supply of extra diapers, they found Forrest had already hitched up the team and the buggy stood waiting.
They climbed on board and Eddie took the reins in her hands. “Good luck,” Forrest called.
“Where are we headed?” Eddie asked as they moved down the street.
“To find Caleb,” Betsy said jubilantly. “To find Caleb and our baby.”
Everything was so different. More people, many of them moving in from the deep south after the war, had set up farmsteads and raised children. Areas that had been unsettled when she drove through them back in the past, were now occupied by busy farms that supported nearby Lavender with their produce.
Betsy and Eddie waved at familiar figures as they went by and occasionally stopped to show off the baby when the neighbors were particular friends.
Betsy didn’t want to stop. She wanted to keep going and learn if her instincts were right and she would find Caleb out at his old farm. Bless Forrest for hanging on to it out of sentiment. Bless Doc who had to have known that if she and Caleb were ever to meet again that would be the place where it would happen.
It was a long ride, occasionally they took the wrong road and Eddie had to turn the buggy around and retrace their tracks in the right direction. The roads were modest these days, but back then they’d been more like trails and finally they were bouncing along the last familiar miles. Most of this part of the county hadn’t been broken into farms as the timber became more valuable to the community. Tall trees towered along each side of the road, a storehouse of energy and structures for the people of Lavender, a crop they would reap only cautiously.
Betsy glanced at Eddie gratefully. Most anyone else would have demanded an explanation before going on this long trek, but she and Eddie had traveled some extraordinary miles together, some of them in a self-propelled auto that sped across the much-changed southern plains of 21st century Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico.
Eddie would stick with her until her hopes were fulfilled or dashed.
Finally they turned in at the spot where Betsy remembered the cabin as being located. The sun shone brightly on the road, but as they pulled under the shelter of thickly grown trees, they were covered in shade.
The baby, fussy after the long drive, began to cry and Betsy started to hum a familiar tune from a time in the far future, something about a magic dragon, hardly knowing the words she sang.
Eddie drew the buggy to a halt beside the place where a tall, handsome man with a cane in one hand and a baby in the other stood waiting.
She took Emilee from her sister, afraid Betsy might stumble and fall getting down from the buggy, and watched as she ran toward the man and the baby boy, shouting, “Oh, I knew you would be here! I knew you would be here waiting for me!”
Epilogue
Overwhelmed, even embarrassed to be gifted with such bounty, Caleb insisted on thanking each family as they departed in their buggies, wagons, or on horseback from the site of the cabin they’d all gathered to build in one day from logs cut from the nearby woods.
It was just a little two-room cabin, better built than the one he’d made himself in the past, and he’d add the sheds and fences and other outdoor buildings they would need over the years ahead. By next summer he hoped to build on another bedroom for the twins, his son and daughter.
He looked at them now, the two unlike children who were with their mother on the spreading of quilts where they’d eating their outdoor dinner from food cooked and brought by women from Lavender and all the farms around. It had been a huge gathering, but the last wagon had gone, and now only family and the very closest friends remained to celebrate their new home with Betsy and Caleb.
When, leaning on his cane, he came to join them, nodding at the brother-in-law with whom he’d just begun to get acquainted as he sat down between Betsy and Eddie, listening as Eddie recited history to the others. He took tiny Emilee, still extra small at six weeks of age, but bright-eyed and observing of all that went on around her.
Her twin, who kept crawling out of his mother’s reach trying to get to the nearby grassy surface beyond the quilts, chortled happily at sight of his papa.
They had been the subject of exclamations all day long as even the residents of this time-locked community remarked on the difference in their growth with Ben coming from the faster moving time of the past and Emilee from slow-moving Lavender.
Eddie was just finishing the recitation that her retentive brain had stored. “And the last battle of the Civil War was actually fought after Lee’s surrender and is sometimes considered a post-war event.” Eddie smiled. “It was the battle of Palmito Ranch on the banks of the Rio Grande River near Brownsville, Texas.”
Caleb took his wife’s hand, squeezing it hard as he looked into her bright blue eyes. “Those times are long past now,” he said, “and everybody’s more or less getting along.”
“At least in Lavender,” Betsy said, looking across to Miranda.
Miranda nodded. “In Lavender,” she agreed.
The End
Books for Young Adults
The Time Keeper
Child of Tomorrow
When Dreamers Cease to Dream
Finding Endymion
Royal Blood
Anne and Jay
Julie’s Magic Moment
Out of the Blue
A Love LikeThis
Mirror Image
Someone New
Lucky at Love
Books for Younger Readers
The Second Jeep Harris
The Cereal Box Adventures
Flight into the Unknown
The Great Gradepoint Mystery
Piglet is not a Pig
Mouse is Missing
Fantasy Romances
The House Near the River
The Ghost and Miss Hallam
Letters From Another Town
Leaving Lavender
By the Bay
Nightmare Kingdom
Romances
The Romantic and the Realist
Something Special
For Every Season
A Promise Once Made
A Man
of Character
Lavender Blue: A Time Travel Romance (Lavender, Texas Series) Page 18
