Divided Heart
Page 7
Zachariah rubbed his jaw. “So that’s why.”
“Why what?”
“Why he claimed there was a problem with the Reverend.”
“What kind of problem?” Hattie asked. “Like the Reverend stepping on my foot?”
Normally Zachariah would have chuckled at that, but the furrows in his brow deepened as he watched the unsettled dust Nate’s horse had left behind. “He claimed the Reverend was a crack shot, a deadeye. I’m afraid Nate’s jealous, and I’m worried about you, Hattie.”
“Nate’s watched me flirt with men for years. He didn’t do a thing about it then, and he’ll not do a thing about it now.” Marrying her would have stopped it. “He hasn’t got a jealous bone in his body. Not for me, anyway.” Not like he’d once had for Lillian.
“Do you know where the Reverend might be?” Zachariah asked.
“He’s over at Kate’s. Why are you asking me all these questions? Nate’s gone—isn’t he?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then where’s he heading in such a hurry?”
“The Powell ranch.” He looked squarely at her. “He doesn’t know.”
“Doesn’t know? After all this time? Where’s he been? In China?”
“I reckon he’s got business to tend to, so he’ll be around a mite longer.”
“How much of a mite longer?”
Zachariah looked down the street as though it were just a matter of time before Nate would disturb the town as much as he’d kicked up the still floating dust. “I don’t know. But even another minute is longer than I’d like.”
~*~
The horse’s hoofs chopped up the dirt as Nate hightailed to the Powell Ranch. Nate had stumbled out of the telegraph office and into the livery where he bought a horse for twice its worth, because he didn’t have time to haggle.
From afar, the Powell property looked abandoned. The cattle that had once grazed there were missing, and the grass had overtaken it. He didn’t bother to take the road that led to the house. He jumped the horse over a sagging fence. The moment he reached the house, he leaped off the horse and ran to a once-grand entry, a door now scarred with chipped paint. He banged on it. “Open up!”
It should have been a servant who answered.
“Nate?”
His mother answered the door, a grayish cast to her once-fair Irish skin, and the way she fell into his arms and cried like a broken woman proved Zachariah had been right.
Marcus Powell, Nate’s father, had died.
“He’s been gone a year now.” Nate’s mother dabbed at her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief.
Nate sat across from his mother in the parlor holding her hand as she tearfully summarized the struggle. An unusually hard winter took its toll on the cattle. Snow wasn’t a stranger to Ramsden, but a blizzard hard enough to kill most of the herd was a fluke. But the greatest fluke was in the irony that Marcus had enclosed his entire property with barbed wire to keep free-grazing cattle off his land, and that was the catalyst that destroyed his business. When the blizzards hit, his own cattle couldn’t migrate south to escape the bitter cold, and so they froze to death. And then the failure of the business took its toll on Marcus.
Nate’s mother still wore her widow’s dress. Blond haired, fair skinned, slight of frame, her bones must have been made of steel because of her resiliency. But she’d lost weight and there was a pallor in her once-rosy cheeks. She’d been able to sell some of her possessions, and though she lived as meagerly as bare necessities allowed—and the looseness of her dress attested it was too meagerly—the remaining money she’d kept locked in the safe probably wasn’t enough for even the poorest outlaw to bother to steal.
“I had to let go of all the help, including the house workers, and now I can’t keep up with things. The house needs painting, the wallpaper is peeling, and some of the drawers have gone crooked. Our home was so lovely. I can’t bear to see it this way.” She paused to look at the bare walls where shadows of a grandfather clock, a rosewood wall table, and the fine carvings of a giltwood mirror had been etched into the memory of the house. “Marcus had said you were staying with Aunt Sarah, and I wrote you several times. Why didn’t you write back, Nate? Didn’t you get my letters?” Her eyes began to mist again.
He sat on the settee and held her to his shoulder, feeling her bones beneath the dress and the jar of her deep sobs. It was only because he’d wanted nothing to do with his father that he’d thrown her letters out. Marcus hadn’t told her where Nate had really been.
“Nate?”
She roused him from that dungeon of a place back to the sunny parlor of the Powell ranch. “Yes, Mother?”
“Would you like to visit his grave?”
“How about the note on the ranch, Mother? Have you gotten any letters from the bank?”
“Several. I put them in the desk drawer.” She went into Marcus’s office and returned with a stack of letters. “I don’t know what the bank wants. I’m sure the note has been paid.” She handed the letters to Nate. “Marcus did the books after you left, and he boasted to me about how well the business was doing. So I assumed he paid off the note. He hadn’t borrowed that much.”
Nate’s recollections of when he’d done the books agreed with what she was saying. Marcus had only borrowed five thousand dollars. With a frown, Nate slid the letter from the top envelope and started reading. Then he skimmed through another and sifted through the rest, scanning the subject line. The sun flooding the room gave way to a chill. “Mother, did you respond to any of these?”
“No,” she said. “I didn’t understand them. The words Mr. Tilly used were so large. I was too embarrassed to ask him what they meant, because I was afraid he would think I was a stupid woman.”
“Don’t call yourself stupid, Mother.” Nate’s face grew hot. Although it was common practice to send a perplexing letter riddled with legal and accounting jargon to a lay person, and he’d been guilty of sending them himself, he’d just never seen one of these letters from this perspective where his own dear mother was a casualty. Because Nate knew what Tilly was really after.
“But you understand the letters,” his mother said, her voice now feeble with concern.
His face must have flushed with anger.
“What do they say?” she asked.
Her ashen skin, her reddened eyes, she’d had enough grief for today, and so he took in a breath of feigned lightness. “They say that when your son arrives for a visit, he should take you to town for a nice dinner and then, if you don’t mind some company, he should sleep in his childhood bed, because he’s as tired as Rip Van Winkle. Tomorrow I’ll buy some food, and together we’ll cook up a dinner we’ll never forget.”
She smiled, and as he kissed her on the forehead, he stared at the shadows on the wall of what she’d once had. Because what the letters said was that her embarrassment may have cost her everything.
13
The next morning, Hattie again loaded her pies onto the wagon after the same old fight with another killer chicken. But when she climbed onto the bench for the same old ride and picked up the reins and saw the gashes on her arms, something about them seemed new. Since Nate had come back, they reminded her of what really hurt.
The many proposals she’d refused from other men. The scowls she’d once gotten from pious women. The many times Boss’s belt buckle cracked on her flesh. All in the hopes of hearing Nate ask her to marry him, only for him to ask another woman. Lillian.
If only Nate loved me half as much as I loved him. She rolled down her sleeves. “Giddy-up, Nellie.”
Nellie clomped along for another long, bumpy ride where Hattie had nothing to do but think about her heartache. Why could she get so many men infatuated with her, but not one special man to fall in love with her? Because she was unlucky in love. Cursed in matters of the heart.
~*~
“My pa,” Hattie said to her mother as Hattie pinned some socks on the clothesline. “Did he force himself on you?”
“No, he didn’t force himself on me,” she said, still scrubbing that collar.
Hattie picked up a washed shirt and whipped out some of the wrinkles. Why was it always men’s dirty clothes they laundered? “Did you at least love him?”
“Don’t make no never mind now, does it?”
Hattie clipped the shoulders of the shirt to the line. “It does to me.”
Ever since she could remember, her mother had been scrubbing on that scrub board like the dirt would never come out. For the first time, her mother stopped scrubbing before the shirt was done. She peered into a washtub of murky water. “Yes, I loved him. I loved him like I loved no other.” With earnest eyes set in her dark face, she looked up at Hattie. “You listen up, and you listen up good. You can love a man until your heart is so full of him that it feels like it’s going to burst. You can even give him everything a woman can give a man. But if he’s got something else in his heart, eventually it’s going to shove you right out.”
“What are you saying, Ma?”
“I’m saying that Powell boy you been filling your heart with is going to hurt you, and he’s going to hurt you bad.”
Hattie put her hands on her hips. “That ain’t true.”
“Ain’t true, huh?” She snorted a laugh. “Only thing ‘true’ to those Powells is stock. He ain’t never going to lower his high and mighty name to marry someone like you.” She went back to scrubbing. “You keep putting your hopes in that Powell boy, and he’s going to hurt you just as bad as your pa hurt me.”
Hattie stopped the wagon in front of Kate’s Eatery where she unloaded her pies and settled her payment. When she walked out of the eatery to head back home, she spotted the man who’d hurt her as much as her pa had hurt her ma.
~*~
Nate was just stepping off his horse when he saw Hattie coming out of Kate’s Eatery on the other side of the street. He soaked in her slender profile and the poise with which she walked. She was a rare black swan that even a faded calico dress with frayed eyelet trim couldn’t diminish. He imagined her in the clothes her beauty deserved, a dress draped with layers of silk and lavished with embroidery and holding a parasol with gloved hands. The black hair so plainly pulled back should be swept up and crowned with a hat adorned with bird of paradise feathers. With that image of her in mind, he smiled and tipped his hat to her.
But instead of gracing him with a nod, she stabbed him with a glare. Then she got a bucket from the wagon and filled it with water, which she brought to her old mare. As the horse drank, Hattie patted and smiled at it. If only she’d give Nate even that.
You may hate me, Hattie, but I’ll never stop loving you. There was nothing he could do to repair the damage he’d done to her in the past, but he’d do his best to protect her future. He’d find a way to learn the whole truth about the Reverend and expose him.
Meanwhile, Nate had another problem to fix.
The bank was a new business in town and the banker someone Nate had never seen before. Tilly was an elfin man who worked behind a bench too tall for him in a corner of a building that could hardly be called a bank. The only item that remotely resembled anything from a banking institution was a fine mahogany plaque inscribed with the name “Mr. Franklin Hubert Tilly.” The name was bigger than the man.
“Mrs. Powell failed to apprise me that she had any living relatives, Mr. Powell, including a son,” Tilly explained after Nate introduced himself. “Discerning she was a widow with no viable means, I altruistically intervened on her behalf by amending the note with an option which enabled her to remain on the property. Seeing you failed to intercede during the time allotted…” He cast an accusing glance at Nate and then folded his hands on a book splayed in front of him. Then he tilted his head back, looking down his nose and through his eyeglasses at Nate, and grinned like a tricky leprechaun. “I did my charitable duty. You do understand…”
“Yes, Mr. Tilly,” Nate said. “I do understand.”
Tilly glanced at the door Nate had left slightly ajar. “Then if you’ll make certain to close the door on your way out...” He dismissed Nate by looking down at the book in front of him.
But Nate wasn’t ready to leave. “I understand your kind of charity,” Nate said. “It’s the kind that preys on a widow’s misfortune by exploiting her dignity in order to misappropriate her equity.”
Tilly’s gaze snapped back to Nate. “Your suspicions are incongruous, Mr. Powell, since she’s inhabited the residence hitherto without expenditure.” Having shown how long his horns were by showing how long his words were, the man arched his brow with the final say.
His ten-dollar words may have stumped other customers into submission, but Nate had a set of his own with which to lock horns.
“My accusations are apposite because the interest you mandated on my mother’s so-called ‘expenditures’ has been exponentially excessive.” He pounded onto the bench the stack of letters, seasoned with long words his mother had gotten from Tilly.
“Only because of her dereliction of payment,” Tilly defended. “By rewriting, I’ve allowed her to stay in her house.”
“At a rate of almost five times that of the conventional interest?”
Tilly fell quiet. “I admit the option was a bit…unconventional.”
“Unconventional? Might we say that the only ‘charity’ here is that of the donations being funneled into your stockholders’ pockets?” Nate looked down at the book where that information would be written. Tilly closed it, which made Nate suspect. “Or might that extra interest be going into your pockets?”
Tilly’s face paled.
“When did you plan to evict her from her home? In nine months when the equity runs out at these outrageous payments? At which time you can sell the ranch for half its worth and still make over two thousand dollars in, shall I say, ‘unrecorded interest’?”
Tilly started stammering. “Mr. Powell, I-I—”
“In case you’re wondering,” Nate said, “I’m a vice president at The Massachusetts National Bank. Now, are you willing to discuss another option for my mother, or shall I pursue this with the authorities?”
Tilly gulped. “I’m willing to discuss another option.”
~*~
The moment Hattie heard Nate say “Good day” to Tilly, she retreated from the cracked-open door of the bank. She didn’t know why she’d listened in on their conversation other than she didn’t like Tilly. No one in town did. A person practically had to put up his soul as collateral to get a loan from him. She knew because she’d tried to get a small loan to buy another cook stove for her business. She climbed onto her wagon and yielded a grin. If anyone could put Tilly in his place, it was Nate. She’d always admired him for his intelligence.
Just then, Nate mounted his horse and spotted her looking at him—and worse, smiling at him.
She dropped her smile and snapped the reins. “Giddy-up, Nellie.”
~*~
Hattie rode away in her wagon.
If you could stand behind my eyes for just a moment, you’d understand how much I love you. Despite what everything looked like—the unaccounted years Nate had been away—she’d know how much he’d always loved her.
Because she’d know why.
As he watched her disappear, he recalled what his heart never forgot.
“Get me a whiskey,” a stranger demanded of the bartender.
Nate thought the customer already had too many, and he didn’t like the way the man was eyeing Hattie. In that old, smoky saloon packed with grubby men, she stood out like a ruby in a crate of coal.
“I haven’t seen you put a penny down,” t
he bartender said to the stranger. “Pay up first.”
“Not until you set some real whiskey in front of me.”
“I just gave you one,” the bartender said. “What do you think that was?”
“It tasted like water out of the horse trough.” The man pulled out a gun, and the place went quiet. “Now get me some real whiskey.”
Judging by the man’s unsteadiness, the whisky was real. Judging by the man’s size, he probably thought he could get free drinks. But no man was too big and tough to handle for hard-as-nails Hattie Brown. In no time, she was by the stranger’s side and whispering in his ear.
Nate stood up. If the gun turned in her direction, he would draw the stranger’s attention and take the bullet if he had to.
But Hattie had things under control. She always had things under control.
The stranger grinned, liking whatever magic she was pouring into his ear. She placed her hand on his shoulder and slid it down his arm. A blink of an eye later, the gun was in Hattie’s hand, aimed between the stranger’s eyes. “Get out of here,” she growled.
The man looked at those wildcat eyes, sobered up, and then walked out the door.
Later that same night, it was Nate she had to control. He’d gotten himself drunk and started to relive the worst day of his life. The day he’d failed to save his younger sister from the fire that killed her.
“I’m sorry, Sally. I’m sorry.”
Just when he’d started to make a crying fool of himself, Hattie said to him in her soothing voice, “Why don’t you lie down for a spell, Nate?”
She led him stumbling up the stairs to her bedroom. Just as he’d done many nights before, he spent the whole night in her bed, while she spent it sitting in a chair beside him, stroking his sweat-dampened hair from his forehead with her soft touch—and keeping him from getting up and killing Zachariah.
A rickety sound interrupted Nate from his thoughts.
A stagecoach was coming down the road.
Zachariah stepped out of the sheriff’s office onto the walk where he stood with his arms akimbo. Stagecoaches had always been a rare sight because Ramsden was a throughway to nowhere and a destination to nothing.