Weeping Angel

by Stef Ann Holm

  “When the novelty wears off, I’m sure they won’t come anymore.” Amelia looked him straight in the eyes, and he felt the afternoon sunlight pouring over his back. “You wouldn’t have to be concerned over this if I had the piano in my home.”

  “If you had the piano in your home, you wouldn’t be talking to me, now would you, Miss Marshall?” He took a step closer to her. “And I rather like talking to you.”

  “Since we are talking,” she noted in a cool, impersonal tone, “I’ve been thinking about what transpired between us yesterday.”

  “So have I.”

  Her eyes brightened. “You have?”

  He nodded.

  After a moment’s pause, she sobered and cleared her throat. “It has to be said, what happened between us must never be repeated. I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong impression of me. Just because I’m accepting your hospitality doesn’t mean you can take liberties on my person, Mr. Brody. I won’t allow it. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Crystal. It won’t happen again.”

  She seemed surprised, and a little disappointed, by his reply. “W-Well, then . . .” she stammered, making a move to leave. “I’ll be going now.”

  He stopped her with a hastily put together question. “When are your eager students going to play something that doesn’t sound like scratches on a chalkboard?”

  She cracked a slight smile, as if gaining some satisfaction that the poor skills of her pupils bothered him. “Don’t you like their diatonic scales in solmization?”

  “About as much as I like popguns shot at me. Kids aren’t my favorite thing in life.”

  Her expression grew subtly serious. “You dislike children?”

  “I have no feelings either way. They remind me I was little once.”

  “We all were.”

  “Yeah, but my childhood was fleeting.”

  “How very awful for you,” she said softly. “What happened?”

  He was uncomfortable with the sympathy in her tone and mad that he’d allowed her to maneuver their conversation onto a topic he’d only discussed with Pap. And that had been hard enough. The moods were rare that he spoke about the orphanage and Harry.

  “There are some subjects, Miss Marshall,” Frank said, his palm on the door’s frosted glass, “that are better left undiscussed.”

  He pushed the door in and damned himself for bringing up old memories—however elusive. He recognized the fact that, for whatever reason, Amelia Marshall could bring his childhood memories to surface. A very dangerous feat to a man who prided himself on not needing anyone.

  What he did need, however, was to concentrate on the do-si-do girls. The upright piano wasn’t enough. Charley had said he’d been able to pack the place when his girl had been dancing to a banjo and harmonica. First thing tomorrow, Frank would send an open telegram to several papers advertising for saloon girls. He disregarded Pap’s warning about the town women not going for the idea. He’d been doing what he wanted to up until this point, and no one had slung any fire and brimstone at him.

  He had nothing to lose and everything to gain.

  Chapter

  9

  Amelia sat at the table in her formal dining room, hands clasped on her lap, and a hot dinner of one pork chop, boiled red potatoes, and garden peas in front of her. She’d put a fresh-cut bouquet of fragrant pink peonies in the center of the table with two paraffin candles in glass candlesticks.

  The pendulum on the black walnut regulator moved to and fro, counting out the seconds. When the striker hit the gong bell five times, she withdrew her flatware from her damask napkin. She aligned the knife to the right of her anemone-patterned semi-porcelain ware, the fork to the left. Opening the bleached linen square, she smoothed the napkin on her lap, picked up her fork, and began to eat her meal.

  Alone.

  Amelia didn’t care for Saturday evenings. The unmarried ladies fortunate enough to have gentlemen callers were taken on sunset picnics or to a restaurant dinner at the Chuckwagon. The men at Reed’s sawmill never came to call on her; men didn’t ask her if she wanted to go on a twilight buggy ride, or to have One-Eye Otis slice her a piece of vinegar pie. Instead, she had a pork chop on Saturday nights and ate in unaccompanied silence.

  At least on Sundays she felt included. For the past two years since her aunt Clara had died, she’d eaten her Sunday suppers with Narcissa and Cincinatus. The couple had been the first Idahoans she and her aunt had met upon reaching Boise.

  Amelia and her mother’s sister, Clara Davenport, were newly arrived from Denver, and her aunt had been uncertain where they would settle. She’d decided to make the capital city their roosting spot while she studied prospective areas within the state to relocate. They’d met the Dodges in a Boise dining room; Cincinatus and Narcissa spoke of a small town to the north called Weeping Angel, that would be celebrating its founding on the Fourth of July. The couple had lived there for a year and had told her aunt it was still quiet, quaint, and had a reverend who could preach a mean streak.

  Aunt Clara said that was just the type of town Amelia’s mother had wanted for Amelia.

  So Amelia and Aunt Clara had come to Weeping Angel and stayed at the Oak Tree Hotel while a house could be built for them on Inspiration Lane. Aunt Clara thought the street name befitting a home for her sister’s only child.

  Amelia pushed her peas around on her plate, thinking about her mother. Ida Marshall had died six years ago and had been a staunch Methodist. A singing Methodist—that denomination of pious people prone to vocalizing their way through the gospel. Amelia couldn’t remember her father. He’d died when she was five and they lived on their farm in Lone Rock, Wisconsin. The details of his face had faded, and with no pictures of him, she wouldn’t have known him if she passed him by in heaven.

  Lifting a glass of milk to her lips, Amelia drank. The clock kept its steady beat; somewhere in the rafters, the house creaked.

  Amelia reflected her childhood hadn’t been really sad after her father died. From the farm they’d moved to Larimer Street in Denver to live with Aunt Clara and the two elderly ladies, the Wooten sisters, her aunt cared for.

  Smiling in recollection, Amelia set her glass down. She’d liked the Wooten sisters, Cille and Cea, after she’d gotten used to them. They’d smelled like thyme and mint, glycerin, and rose vinegar. Amelia was given the task of making the sisters’ beds each morning, and the toilet bouquet of old ladies lingered on the bedclothes. As she grew older, kitchen duties were added to Amelia’s chores.

  Although Amelia and her mother weren’t well off, Amelia couldn’t remember ever lacking for anything throughout her adolescence. The Wootens lived comfortably and shared their monetary security with those who resided in the house. Not through cash compensation—for Amelia and her mother were never paid—but by their prosperous surroundings.

  Though Baptists, the Wootens loved singing and music as much as Ida Marshall. The sisters insisted Amelia take lessons, and for the next ten years, every Wednesday Miss Lovejoy came to instruct Amelia promptly at three o’clock—to the delight of Cille and Cea, who on those Wednesdays took their tea with musical accompaniment. It was only after Amelia’s mother fell ill with chronic bronchitis, that Miss Lovejoy stopped coming, fearful of Amelia’s mother’s disease.

  Sighing, Amelia took up her knife. The sisters both died in their seventies within two months of each other during the spring of 1890. Their house and their holdings had gone to Aunt Clara and, in an indirect way, to Amelia. For it was the Wooten money that built the very house she lived in now. It was the Wooten money that had kept her sheltered and financially secure after Aunt Clara passed on.

  But it was the same Wooten money that was running out.

  As Amelia put a small piece of meat into her mouth, she almost wished she could go back to her childhood when worries were not as pressing, when the worst thing to happen to her was Horace Button teasing her in primary school because she lived with smelly old ladies.

  Tho
ughtfully setting her fork down, words came into Amelia’s head. My childhood was fleeting. That’s what Frank had said to her.

  There are some subjects, Miss Marshall, that are better left undiscussed.

  Despite all her trials and tribulations, she could look back with a semblance of fondness and talk about her growing-up years.

  What had happened to Frank Brody when he was little? She couldn’t picture him helpless or vulnerable. Or sad. He always seemed so casual. So disarming.

  The chaste kiss he’d given her had stuck in her mind. She’d been uncertain how to conduct herself when in his company next, and decided to be cool and disciplined, yet approachable—the perfect definition of a teacher. He’d acted as if nothing intimate had transpired between them when he spoke to her about Mrs. Reed. It was only after she’d censured him on his behavior that he acknowledged the kiss at all. She should have been relieved he’d agreed with her.

  But she still thought of the kiss often, putting more into it than she should have. She was acting foolish, she knew. No matter how fleeting, his mouth had brushed hers. She couldn’t make that go away, no matter how sternly she willed herself to put it out of her head. . . . Well, it wouldn’t occur again, so she needn’t bother herself over foolish reactions to him. She was being silly and out of character. She knew better.

  My childhood was fleeting.

  Why did his words keep coming back to haunt her?

  Suddenly, Amelia wasn’t hungry anymore. She pushed her plate away and stood. She didn’t want to feel sorry for Frank Brody. It was a lot less complicated to feel sorry for herself. And right now, she could find a major reason to be morose: the chicken pox.

  It had struck the second day of her lessons, hitting Elroy Parks smack on the neck and hairline. Had he not worn his hair slicked back with his father’s brilliantine mustache oil that day, she might not have noticed the scattering of red dots on his forehead and behind his ears.

  Taking her plate into the kitchen and setting it in the sink, Amelia knew the chicken pox never struck once. Soon most every student she had who had not had the chicken pox yet would get it. And quarantined students meant no students. No students meant no money.

  Would her troubles never end?

  Leaving the dishes, Amelia went to the back door and put her palm on the screen. The evening was lovely; the summer smells of grass and gardens and flowers drifted to the porch. The distant croaks and chirps of frogs and crickets sounded tranquil. A faraway coupling of laughter came from Divine Street . . . no doubt just outside the Chuckwagon.

  Letting her hand trail the mesh, Amelia wondered . . . did anyone else notice these things, alone, and feel even more excluded than ever?

  * * *

  Frank lay on his bed, the much-worn copy of A Tale of Two Cities draped facedown over his bare abdomen. He’d left the door to his room open, and a light summer breeze stirred the warm air scented with his snuffed cheroot. He took a slow swallow of cognac, then set the near-empty beer mug on top of the dresser next to his bedstead. He’d closed the Moon Rock hours ago and sleep still eluded him. Sometimes he was plagued with fits of insomnia that lasted weeks. Mostly, the sleepless bouts came on him for no apparent reason. But tonight he figured he was suffering from wakefulness because his saloon had been raided by kids all week.

  Kids made him think of his brother Harry. And the home.

  Turning onto his side, Frank slid the Dickens story closed and ran his hand across the scarred leather top. He’d had the book for eleven years. His parents’ theatrical troupe, the Merry Tramps, had been performing at the Vioget Theater in Frisco when he’d found the discarded volume in the alley behind the dockside playhouse. He hadn’t been able to read the book then. It was many years later, when he and Harry were in the orphanage, that he’d been taught to read by the sisters.

  Frank closed his eyes, not wanting to relive the pain of that wintry day in 1877, but could no more shut it out than he could open the window to his heart. At the age of nine, he’d been institutionalized because his parents didn’t want him anymore. He and his little brother had been abandoned at St. John’s Catholic Orphanage for Boys.

  The first year was hell. The inmates were ruffians of sorts by day, but at night wept openly in their beds. Their sobs frightened Harry who . . . Frank took in a steady deep breath until he felt his lungs burn with the need for release . . . Harry who never was, or had the capabilities of being, like other boys.

  Frank exhaled, his chest tight with pain. Blinking his eyes open, he refused to think about the past. He could not dwell on what had been or could never be.

  Harry was dead.

  If there was one thing he truly wanted to believe from his religious upbringing, it was that Harry was in a better place. A place where he couldn’t suffer, a place where Jack and Charlotte Brody couldn’t touch him.

  Frank sat up and brought his feet onto the hardwood floor. He ran his hands through his hair and rubbed the tension at the back of his neck. Flipping the lid on a box of Old Virginias, he took up another cheroot. He pulled the band, snipped the tip, and brought the end to his lips. Lighting the thin cigar, he stood and walked to the doorway. He put his hands on the frame above his head and stared into the back alley.

  It was darker than pitch outside, without a sliver of moonshine to cast even the slightest shadows. Frank puffed on his cheroot and thought of all the other places he could be now. His mind wandered to the open desert and freedom. Endless space dusted with sage; cantinas with fine women worth their weight in gold. He knew just the place down south where to buy good horseflesh. And then there was that stream north of the Rio Grande where the rainbow trout bit on his flies like they were prime rib to a lumberjack. He could see—

  Frank shook his head. Damn, he was thinking about leaving again. Why couldn’t he stay and be happy here? Pap had settled in. Frank doubted he could convince his friend to come with him this time. Pap was taken with Weeping Angel and Miss Marshall. He’d settled into the men’s dormitory on Gopher Road as if he’d lived there all his life; and he was making plans to move into Amelia Marshall’s house by summer’s end as her husband.

  Unhooking the latch on the screen, Frank stepped outside. He put his hands on the split railing and hopped up to sit on the round post. The wood was smooth. His butt had worn away any splinters from many sleepless nights on this, his favorite do-nothing-in-the-middle-of-the-night spot.

  Frank pulled in smoke from the cheroot, exhaling it in a slow, steady stream of gray. Then the cold hard truth hit him in the gut—even though he’d known it all along.

  Pap really was planning on asking the piano teacher to set up housekeeping with him. Pap O’Cleary, confirmed bachelor and a man more in a saddle than not, wanted to hook himself up with a wife and stay put.

  Resting his bare feet on the second railing, Frank had to admit there were worse things to want out of life if you were the sort of man who wanted a family. But he wasn’t because he didn’t know the meaning of the word.

  * * *

  “Walter and Warren can’t come today, Miss Marshall,” Daniel Beamguard informed Amelia as he rolled a large hoop across the floor. “They’ve got the chicken pox.”

  Amelia sat on the piano stool in the Moon Rock Saloon, having just finished instructing Jakey Spivey, when the mercantile owner’s son came in to broadcast the news. News she didn’t find surprising. Though the loss of her wage would be double given both boys were under the weather, giving up the dollar was easier knowing she wouldn’t have to deal with Walter and Warren for the next two weeks. The Reed twins weren’t exactly prize pupils.

  Jakey rolled his sheet music down his thighs into a tight cylinder; she’d never be able to uncurl it next week, even if she brought her iron with her.

  Amelia allowed Jakey to ruin his Excelsior Juvenile Collection, knowing her energies were wasted on a ten-year-old boy when it came to prudent advice concerning the care of sheet music. Instead, she stopped her metronome and turned to Daniel. “Thank yo
u for telling me about Walter and Warren.”

  “Sure, Miss Marshall.”

  “Oh, and, Daniel, have you ever had the chicken pox?”

  “Yep. When I was six.” The boy steered his toy with a short stick by pushing its flat end on the inside of the hoop to make the hoop go around. He circled a table with ease, then stopped by Jakey to fit his flannel cap more securely over his hair. “Ma’s making me practice on our defective piano, Miss Marshall, since we’re the only ones in town who’s got a piano besides Mr. Brody.”

  Amelia pictured the old upright in the Beamguard home. It had barely survived the Wells Fargo, having made the trip before the railroad had been put in. The notes were horribly out of tune and missing several strings in the middle C octave. Since there was no piano repairman in town to tune and restore the instrument, it remained in the condition it first arrived in: Awful.

  “Ma says we’re rich because we own the mercantile,” Daniel stated. “The Dodges are rich. How come they don’t have a piano, Miss Marshall?”

  Amelia tucked her folded piano scarf into her bag. “Mrs. Dodge says she’s not musically inclined.”

  “Oh,” Daniel replied, but the inflection in his tone told Amelia he wasn’t quite certain what “musically inclined” meant. He shrugged. “We may be rich, but that dumb mercantile doesn’t even carry real Spalding baseball bats.” Daniel balanced his oversize hoop, then propelled it toward the bar. “Hey, Mr. Brody. When are you going to let me hit off your bat, huh?”

  Amelia glanced at Frank who’d laid out tiny drab feathers on the counter and was sorting them. He’d been there for the past hour rummaging through his tackle box. “Kid, I haven’t got the time today.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  Looking up, Frank frowned. “Tomorrow’s no good either.”

  “Can I borrow it, then? Jakey can throw some balls at me.” The hoop got away from Daniel and crashed into the front of the bar; wobbling, the round piece of wood spiraled to a stop. “I’d be real careful, I promise. I wouldn’t break it. I can’t hit that hard. Well, I can hit pretty hard, but not hard like you. Have you ever broke a bat, Mr. Brody?”