Petticoat Ranch

by Mary Connealy

  “Just like always, Ma. I’ll only stay out a minute. I promise.” Sally acted like it was Christmas. Then Sophie remembered their scanty Christmas and knew this was easily bigger.

  “All right, just for a minute. You girls can run on out while I get changed out of my nightgown.”

  The girls dashed off, and Sophie quickly discarded her cold, muddy flannel and pulled on a dry calico. She rushed after the girls, not wanting them alone for a second longer than necessary, even with an unconscious stranger. Beth knelt beside him, holding a damp cloth on the cut on his forehead. Her second born, who had an unusual love for all living creatures, was caring for the injured man as well as anyone could.

  “Has he shown any signs of waking?” Sophie asked.

  “Nope. He’s been knocked witless. Out cold as a carp.”

  Sophie knelt on the other side of him and let Sally get in close to have her look. It took Sally about ten seconds to figure out nothing was going on.

  “We may as well clean him up a bit.” Sophie took a clean cloth from the stack Beth had brought and soaked it in the now-cool water. “It’s chilly out here, but there’s nothing for it but to bundle him up. We can’t risk a fire in the shed with this dry prairie grass, and until he can walk, we can’t get him in the house.”

  She wished she’d thought to put more water on to heat. She began bathing his face, the mud now almost dry and beginning to cake and fall off. It only took her a few seconds to clean away the grime. While she turned to rinse out the cloth, first one, then another, then the third of her girls gasped out loud.

  Sophie became instantly more alert. Had the night riders doubled back on foot? She looked into the darkness for trouble, but the trouble wasn’t out there. It was right here under the dirt.

  Mandy said incredulously, “It. . .it can’t be.”

  “What can’t be?” Sophie turned her attention sharply to Mandy, still trying to find the danger.

  “But it is!” Beth cried out. “It is, isn’t it, Ma?”

  Sophie realized both girls were staring in stunned fascination at the wounded man. Sophie turned to follow their gaze, but before she could look, Sally started to cry.

  Sophie put her arm around her daughter but saw where she was staring. She turned to see what her girls were seeing.

  “It can’t be.” Beth’s voice broke. “But it is.”

  It was.

  “It’s Pa,” Sally spoke through shuddering tears.

  The husband Sophie had personally cut down out of a tree. Had personally released from the noose around his broken neck. Had personally buried on a rise overlooking the ranch they’d worked on so hard.

  The husband whose death had etched her heart with hate and made her long, only moments ago, to commit cold-blooded murder. He was lying here unconscious, as men sought him to kill him all over again.

  After what seemed like hours of stunned silence, Sophie leaned closer to the man.

  Cliff.

  “It isn’t possible.” She scrubbed more quickly at his face as if, when enough dirt was removed, the truth would be revealed.

  “But it is, Ma. This is Pa,” Sally said firmly.

  Sophie considered herself to be broad-shouldered and levelheaded. She took what life handed to her, and with fervent prayers to her Maker for help, she made do with what she had. She wasn’t a woman given to fancy. She stared at the man in front of her and knew it was Cliff. She thought back to that awful night two years ago and knew she’d buried Cliff. Those two absolutes clashed inside her brain and nothing that made any sense emerged. She stared and she washed and she tried to make the impossible fit into her sensible head.

  Beth started crying next. She lifted the hand of the man who lay before her. “Pa?” She spoke so softly, it had the reverence of a prayer.

  Mandy added her tears in next. “I c–can see it’s him, but I saw you bury him. We all helped wr–wrap him”—Mandy’s face crumpled—“in the quilt. How can this be, Ma?”

  Sophie noticed several things about the man. He was more muscular than Cliff. He had an ugly round scar high up on one shoulder that could be nothing else but an old bullet wound. He had three slashing cuts on his right arm that were scarred but looked pink and fairly new. Cliff had none of these things. But that proved nothing. A man could build a lot of muscle in two years. And he could get himself shot and stabbed. Sophie remembered that sense of familiarity when she’d been bathing and doctoring his chest. The reason it had seemed familiar was, despite the bigger muscles, the man had hair on his chest the exact color, texture, and thickness of Cliff Edwards’s.

  With a sudden start, she thought of Cliff ’s birthmark on his right shoulder blade. “Help me roll him over. Your pa had a mole.” All three girls added their strength, and they lifted the heavily muscled man a bit.

  What they saw was an exit wound from the bullet. In the exact spot where Cliff had a large black mole, nearly an inch across. Or was it the exact spot? The wound was close enough that she couldn’t be sure.

  “Let him lie back, girls.” Sophie sank from her knees to sit fully on the shed floor. Feeling boneless from the shock, she almost sank all the way down. The girls were all crying softly, and with a start, she realized she was, too.

  She shook her head to clear away the fog, and then she gathered her senses. “I know one thing.” The girls tore their eyes away from where they drank in the sight of their father and looked at her. “Your father is dead.”

  Sally shook her head. Sally had always been Daddy’s girl, more than the rest of them. He’d left when Sally was too young to remember him, but in his absence, he’d grown into a heroic figure in her mind. And he’d only been back a few short months when he’d died—just long enough to get that longed-for son to growing in Sophie’s belly, the one that turned out to be another girl.

  Sophie had tried to help Sally see Cliff as he was, without harming her little girl’s love for her father. But Sally had never been able to protect her heart from Cliff ’s small cruelties. She’d believed her pa’s criticisms were just and tried harder than ever to win his love. She had been the one to be the tomboy. To be the son they’d never had. She’d carved out a special place in her pa’s heart by tagging along with him everywhere for the little time they’d had together after the war. And it was no small trick to carve out a place in Cliff ’s heart. He wasn’t a demonstrative man. He was a decent, honest man, but he was given to dark moods and sarcasm. Now, Sally had her pa back. She wasn’t giving him up easily.

  “It’s him, Ma. We know our own pa!”

  “It’s. . .it’s. . .” Sophie struggled to let go of the wild surge of hope that was building in her. Although their marriage hadn’t been perfect, she’d loved her husband, at least to the extent he would allow it. But she couldn’t build her life on a fantasy. “I’ve heard it said that for each of us, somewhere in the world, there is a double. Now, I’ve never put much stock in that myself, just because I’ve never seen any evidence of it. I’ve never seen two people who looked exactly like each other, except sometimes brothers or sisters come close, or a parent and child. But maybe it’s true. Maybe—no, definitely—your pa has a double. Because here he is.”

  “Did Pa have a brother?” Mandy, the analyzer, asked.

  “No. He was an only child and his pa died when he was little. His ma had passed on several months before I met him. He told me there was no one. Not even cousins. No, this man can’t be a relative. At least not a close one. That’s one of the reasons we ended up here after Pa died. With my folks gone, we have no family on either side to help us.”

  “So you think this man looks like Pa, even down to that birthmark?” Sally began chewing on her bottom lip.

  “Now, Sally, honey, we don’t know if there’s a birthmark under that scar.”

  “It was right there, Ma, I remember,” Sally insisted.

  “Do you really think it’s possible two men could look this much alike?” Beth asked skeptically.

  Sophie was skeptical her
self. But she also knew who she’d cut down out of that tree. “There can be no other explanation, girls.” Sophie said quietly to her weeping daughters, “Look at me.”

  One by one they tore their hungry eyes away from a dream that all children who have lost a parent carry with them. They looked at her and waited.

  “I don’t know who this man is,” Sophie said. “But I know who he is not. He’s not your pa. Your pa is dead.”

  Mandy and Beth nodded. They knew it, too. They’d seen it with their own eyes. Only Sally wouldn’t give up the dream.

  They all turned back to look at him again. As they did, his eyes fluttered open.

  Sally began sobbing and leaned over him. “He’s alive!”

  T H R E E

  He was dead.

  That was the only possibility. He was dead, and he must have been good, because he was in heaven being ministered to by angels. They floated around his head. They cried for him as if his death were a sad thing, which made him feel like his life must have been one worth living. They touched him, held his hand, leaned against his legs, and knelt and bowed over him. And every one of them had her blue eyes riveted on his face, as if he held the answers to all the world’s problems.

  He’d never known there could be such love for him. He’d never seen so many blue, blue eyes. The closest one caressed his head with a gentleness that almost broke his heart, it was so sweet. He sighed under the loveliness of heaven.

  The angel who touched him spoke, but he was having trouble making sense of what she said. His mind seemed to be groggy, not working much at all. He thought a man should listen carefully when an angel spoke, so he tried his best to pay strict attention. Finally, after she’d repeated it several times and stroked his cheek as if to coax an answer out of him, it made sense.

  She said, “Who are you?”

  Shouldn’t an angel know the answer to that?

  The nearest angel was also the biggest. He looked from one angel to the others. They seemed to come in all sizes. One of them was crying hard, broken sobs that stabbed into his heart, as he wondered if he was the cause of her unhappiness. He couldn’t remember the angel’s question, and instead of answering her, he said to the one who wept so, the littlest one, “Don’t cry, little angel.”

  He reached a hand up to comfort her. A spasm of pain cut across his chest. He cringed, as his head spun and his stomach lurched with nausea. He thought he might be sick all over his glorious angels.

  Funny, he wouldn’t have expected there to be pain in heaven.

  Even with the agony, he reached for that one brokenhearted angel, to try and make amends with her. Then he saw his muddy hands and knew he didn’t dare touch her.

  Funny, he wouldn’t have expected there to be dirt in heaven.

  He dropped his hand, but the little one grabbed it. “Pa? It’s you, isn’t it? Tell them it’s you. No one believes it, but I know it’s you.”

  Pa? He didn’t understand. He knew she was talking to him. She was clasping his filthy hand to her chest, as if it were the greatest of treasures. He looked at that one little blond angel and wished he could be her pa.

  Maybe that was it. Maybe this was his lot for eternity. That sounded very good to him. Tears of gratitude for God’s goodness cut across his eyes. He held that little hand firmly, until darkness caught hold of his mind and pulled him under.

  Sally almost flung herself down on top of him. Sophie grabbed her.

  “It’s him! Did you see the way he recognized me? Oh, Ma! Ma, he called me a little angel!” Sally looked up at Sophie. Sally’s joy was so precious, Sophie wanted to say whatever Sally wanted to hear.

  Suddenly, Sally gasped aloud. “If there is a double, then why not the other one, Ma? Why couldn’t we have cut the double down out of the tree?”

  Sophie ran her hand gently down Sally’s uncombed white curls. “They took him from right in front of me, Sally sweetheart. I was there. He was in the yard, just walking away from the house after supper. You remember how it was. You were there. I was standing in the door, watching him go.”

  They’d come charging in and surrounded Cliff. One of them, Judd she now knew, shouted that they’d tracked a horse thief to this property— right to this yard. Then they dragged him away before Sophie could so much as speak a word in his defense and tell them Cliff had been with her all day.

  They’d galloped off, and Sophie had run after them, screaming. They hadn’t even acknowledged her existence. When they’d left her hopelessly behind, she’d dashed back to the corral and caught a horse. She was good at it, having done largely for herself during the war years. She’d been riding after them within minutes. And she’d caught them just as they rode away laughing and sharing a whiskey bottle—leaving Cliff swaying in the wind.

  She’d raced to the tree, thinking she might be in time to save him. But Cliff ’s face was a horrible, lifeless gray. His blue eyes gaped open, staring straight ahead at nothing. His neck was bent at an unnatural angle. All that had been left to do was cut him down and carry him home.

  Sophie had gone for the sheriff, but he’d begun questioning her about the horses on the Edwards’s property, as if he suspected the vigilantes might have been within their rights to hang Cliff. The sheriff had gone back to town without offering to so much as chase after Cliff’s killers.

  Sophie, beyond grief, with the fight battered out of her body, simply dug a hole next to the grave they’d dug for their baby boy. Late in the evening Parson Roscoe showed up with several townsfolk. The parson tried to comfort her, but Sophie couldn’t even respond to his Christian faith. She was afraid if she accepted even a moment of comfort, she’d begin crying and never stop.

  Others came out to pay their respects, but except for the parson, none of them were really friends. On top of Mosqueros’s aversion to the Edwards’s Yankee affiliation, Cliff had a knack for alienating people. There’d been a short ceremony, and Sophie had bitterly refused all help filling in the hole.

  She’d also turned down four marriage proposals. Sophie was mortified her girls had witnessed the crude men trying to convince her to marry them over the fresh-turned earth of her husband’s grave. The parson had ordered them off her land. The next day, Royce Badje, the banker, had ridden out to the ranch to notify her that when the next loan payment came due, he’d expect the full amount left on the loan.

  Sophie had cattle to sell and a large part of the principal of the loan paid down. Mr. Badje said once the man of the household was dead, the woman was a poor risk. She’d either have to pay her loan in full or sell.

  Sophie countered by pointing out she’d kept things going while Cliff was away fighting the war.

  “Cliff was at Gettysburg, wasn’t he?” Mr. Badje asked coldly. The banker’s sons had died at Gettysburg, fighting for the Confederacy.

  Sophie didn’t answer. They both knew. Mr. Badje had given her thirty days to pay up or vacate the property.

  While she was still shaking with anger, the banker proposed marriage. He offered to let her keep the ranch for their home, if she said yes. She’d said no. Then Mr. Badje asked how many years until Mandy was of marrying age.

  Sophie’s skin was crawling by the time he left.

  The man stirred beside her and brought her thoughts back to the present, but he remained unconscious.

  All three of the girls leaned forward, as if they were hanging on every breath that passed through his lips. Sophie studied his relaxed features, willing his eyes to open again, so he could answer some questions. A sudden fierce gust of wind rattled the shed, reminding Sophie of where they were and how late it was. She needed to get the girls away from him anyway, before they could fall more completely into the dream of getting their father back.

  She studied her daughters, grim and mourning in a dark night split by lightning and shaken by thunder. She saw them as she hadn’t seen them in a long while. They were tough as shoe leather, she knew that, but tonight, for the first time, she saw they were gaunt. She had waged a battle t
o survive on wild game and sparse greens.

  Tonight, for the first time, she saw that she was losing that battle. Her girls were being hurt by this lean, hard life. She had to do something. She couldn’t go on hiding, afraid of the hostile, hungry-eyed townspeople. Something had to change. But change took thought and planning. She didn’t have time for either right now. She never had time for either.

  “Girls, we have to get some sleep. And we can’t leave Laura alone any longer.”

  Her girls each had a look of Hectorish stubbornness. Sophie understood, but they still had to put one foot in front of the other. And that started with sleep. She judged the situation and decided now wasn’t the time for patience and kindness. She started issuing orders. “Amanda and Elizabeth, you go back to the house for now.”

  “No, Ma, we want to stay,” Mandy protested.

  Beth stormed, “It’s not fair that Sally gets to help first.”

  Sophie hardened her heart to their pleading. They had to get through the next day without being exhausted. “Sally didn’t go down into the creek. She’s not soaking wet and shivering.” That was true, but it wasn’t the real reason. Sophie knew she would never pry Sally from this man’s side.

  She didn’t waste her time trying to be reasonable. “Do as you’re told. Get some sleep. Sally and I will sit up with him and keep him warm as best we can. You’ll have to spell us later, so try and rest. Laura will wake up just as usual at dawn, and someone’s going to need to have the gumption to take care of her. I’ll send Sally in later to wake you, Mandy. Then Beth will have a turn.”

  In the intermittent lightning, Mandy and Beth looked stubborn-still, but the chance at keeping vigil later placated them somewhat. Sophie saw the dark circles under their eyes from the strain of this night, and she knew they’d sleep if they’d only lay their heads down. She didn’t think Sally would. She’d just lie in the house and spin pipe dreams and hope.