Nell frowned, not understanding.
“I went to gather the eggs, and I found them.”
“Found what?”
“The chickens. They’re dead. All of them. The chickens are all dead.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“How dreadful!” June shuddered. “That woman was going to poison Nell!”
Her grandmother shrugged. “That’s what it looked like. Of course, maybe it was something else that killed the chickens, a virus perhaps. But the coincidence was just too great.”
“What did James say? Oh, don’t you wish you’d been hiding behind the door when Nell confronted him.”
“She never saw him again. Why would she? She felt stupid, so damn stupid!” Ellen paused as she ran her fingers over a creamy white square in the quilt. Everything the woman said made sense to Nell, she told June. It explained James’s absences and why he never really told her about himself. She’d been a fool not to press him, of course, but he’d protected her from that masher, so she wasn’t very objective about him. She just believed he was wonderful. And she loved him. Ellen looked off toward the mountains and shook her head. “He was so handsome, so charming, so understanding. She cared as much for him as she had for Buddy. So Nell was devastated. Again.”
“Do you think if that woman hadn’t shown up, James eventually would have told Nell about his wives?”
“Who knows? I think he would have had to.” Or else Nell might have found out on her own, Ellen added. Perhaps he thought that by then, she’d be pregnant and wouldn’t leave him—or couldn’t leave him. Indeed, how could a pregnant woman support herself? It wasn’t as if she could have gone back to her grandparents. What would people in Harveyville have said? Ellen picked up a brittle cottonwood leaf and crushed it in her hand. “After all those years, I still shiver at the thought of what might have happened to her. Nell took the wedding dress and her clothes and the Indian blanket, the one Buddy had given her. She couldn’t leave it behind. And she went back home to Kansas.”
“Did she leave James a letter then?”
“Nell thought about that, but what could she say? Maybe ‘Give my love to your wife—or wives.’ She wrote a note to Betty, however, telling her everything and apologizing for running away like that. She knew that Betty would confront James—she’d relish it, in fact. Betty would get revenge, if that was what Nell was after.
“That wasn’t the only reason she left so abruptly. Nell was afraid that wife would come back. Or maybe one of the other ones would. So she knew she had to leave fast. When she found out the poison didn’t work, Emily might have shot Nell or run her down with a wagon. The woman was demented. And frankly, Nell was a little afraid of James. He certainly wasn’t the man she’d fallen in love with. Who knows what he might have done. He could have been cruel or vindictive. So Nell took her things and was gone by morning. She put her Buck & Betty’s key in an envelope, with the note to Betty, and slid it under the door of the café on her way to the station. Then she took the first train back to Kansas. Nell felt awful about leaving Betty like that, but she knew Betty would understand. While Betty didn’t know James was already married, she had always suspected there was something off about him.”
June asked if James tried to contact Nell after she left.
“I don’t think so.” Nell had asked Betty not to tell him where she’d gone, and she’d never mentioned Harveyville to him, had only said her grandparents lived in Kansas. “Besides, why would he try to get in touch with her? How could he explain what a yellow dog he was?”
“And she never saw him again.”
“No, but she did see Betty.” Ellen smiled to think of what had happened. Nell had returned a long time later. She was in Denver and went by the café, which was still operating. Betty remembered her. It had been years since they’d seen each other, but Betty recognized her right off and asked, “Come for your wages? I didn’t know where to send them.” She told Nell that James had come into the restaurant the morning she left. He asked where she was, and Betty teased him along. Betty had read the letter, so she knew what a bum he was. He asked if she was going to close the café for the wedding. Betty said she hadn’t closed it for his other weddings, so why would she close it for this one? “Number three, is it? Number four? Number seventeen? How many other wives do you have, James?” The blood drained out of his face until it was as white as a dish towel. He left, and he never came back.
The telephone rang inside the ranch house, and Ellen said, “Maybe that’s your grandfather.” She rose quickly, thinking something might be wrong. Ben had grown careless. Perhaps he had fallen or walked in front of a car and been hit. “Is it Wesley?” she called when she heard Maria answer the phone.
“It’s for Miss June. Somebody wants Miss June,” Maria yelled back.
June and her grandmother exchanged glances. “You didn’t tell anyone I was here, did you?” June asked. “I don’t want to talk to Dave.”
Ellen shook her head, then turned to Maria. “Do you know who it is?”
“Some woman.”
“Probably Mother,” June said.
“Most likely,” Ellen said. “I don’t suppose it was too hard for her to figure out that if you disappeared, you might have come here.” She thought of offering to tell Evelyn that June wasn’t up to talking but decided against it. June should fight her own battles.
“I’d better get it over with. She’ll probably chew me out. I guess I deserve it since it was pretty rotten of me to take off like that without talking it over with her. I guess I owe her an explanation, more than what I told the maid, anyway.” June rose and slowly started for the door.
Before June opened the screen, Ellen said, “June.”
The girl stopped.
“Don’t tell them about your grandfather. They know he’s slipping, but they don’t know how bad he’s gotten. There’s no reason for them to worry. I’ll talk it over with them later, after I’ve made some decisions. You concentrate on yourself right now.”
June went inside, and Ellen picked up the quilt and began to stitch. If John knew how things stood, he’d show up and make those decisions for them, and Ellen wouldn’t have that. She’d make them herself, although not just yet, by God. She put aside thoughts of Ben and wondered instead where James was now, whether he had found another wife and how she got along with Emily. Had Emily tried to poison her, too? Maybe she’d been successful and the police had arrested her. Ellen shuddered. Or maybe Emily had poisoned James. It would serve him right. Was he even still alive?
After a few minutes, June came back and sat down quietly, chewing her thumb.
“Your mother?” Ellen asked.
June nodded.
“Was she angry?”
June looked up. “That’s the thing. She wasn’t. She didn’t even sound disappointed. She said I was young and had plenty of time to get married. She didn’t want me to make a mistake that would ruin my life.”
“Evelyn’s a remarkable woman. I’ve always liked your mother. John was lucky to marry her.” Of course, they had wished that John would marry a western woman who would want to live on a ranch. She and Ben had hoped to pass on the spread to John or to his brother or sister one day. All three had married easterners, however, and moved away. You had to want to be a rancher—the work was too hard if you didn’t love it. None of the three children seemed to have ranching blood in them, or maybe they had learned growing up that ranching was just too difficult. Ellen would have to face the reality that one day the spread she and Ben had worked for half a century would go on the market.
“Mom says that Dave’s called half a dozen times. She thinks I ought to talk to him.”
“Will you?”
“I asked her not to tell him where I am. I said I’d call him when I’m ready.”
“If your mother knew you’d come here, perhaps Dave knows, too.”
“Maybe. I hope I’m doing the right thing. It’s such a muddle.” June went to the edge of the porch and looked far
off, at the patches of gold aspen among the green pines. Then she turned and sat down next to her grandmother. “Was Nell ever sorry she didn’t change her mind and marry Buddy?”
“I suspect she was sometimes.”
June laughed. “But I bet she wasn’t sorry she didn’t marry James.”
“No, but still, it took her time to get over him. As I said, she loved him. And being deceived like that, it hurt.”
The two sat there for a long time, until Maria came outside and picked up the dinner tray. It was midafternoon now, and clouds had moved across the sun, and the sky was gray against the purple mountains. Dead leaves blew across the porch as if escaping from a brewing storm. “You want hot chocolate?” Maria asked.
Ellen started to say no, but she changed her mind. What harm would a little more chocolate do? “How nice.” She turned to June. “Maria makes it with Mexican chocolate and a little cinnamon. It’s like liquid velvet, good for a day with fall in the air.”
“That sounds perfectly lovely.”
“Your grandfather and I used to drink it on winter afternoons.”
June studied her grandmother a moment. “I’m sorry he’s gotten worse. I can see it.”
Ellen nodded, not looking at June.
“He was forgetful when Dave and I were here last summer. When did you first notice it?”
Ellen stuck her needle into the quilt. She didn’t know how to answer. Ben’s memory loss could have begun two years before, but she couldn’t be sure. Little Texas had thrown him in the pasture. That had surprised her, because Little Texas was a good horse and Ben was still quite a cowboy. Maybe the horse had been spooked by a snake. Ben couldn’t remember.
“You wrote that Grandpa Ben broke his leg a couple of years ago. You didn’t say anything about a head injury.”
“We didn’t know if there was a head injury at the time. We still don’t.” Ben might have been developing dementia all along, and she hadn’t noticed it. The leg wasn’t badly broken, and it wasn’t the first time Ben had been bucked off a horse and broken a bone. The real problem was that Ben was alone when the accident happened, and nobody thought to search until Wesley came into the house looking for him. Ben was supposed to help the cowhand doctor one of the calves. Ben wasn’t there, so Ellen and Wesley went to the barn and found Little Texas gone.
Even then, Ellen didn’t worry too much, because Ben might have stopped to talk to a neighbor or found a fence that needed to be mended, and he’d let the time get away from him. Still, the two of them saddled up and went looking for Ben. When Ellen saw Little Texas just standing there in the field, she knew something was wrong. Ben was lying on the ground, unconscious. They didn’t know how long he’d been there. Wesley went back to get a wagon, and Ellen sat beside Ben, who finally came around. Maria called an ambulance. Still, it was a long time before they got him to the doctor. Maybe too long.
“So you think maybe he did hit his head?”
Ellen shrugged. “Who knows? When he got out of the hospital, he seemed to be okay. It wasn’t until later that he started to forget. So maybe it wasn’t a head wound at all.”
“He doesn’t forget who you are, does he? That would be terrible.”
“No, he’s not that far gone. Not yet, anyway. I first realized something was wrong the day he called me from town and said he couldn’t remember where he’d parked the truck. So I drove in to get him, and passed him in the truck as he was coming home. He’d found it on his own and didn’t remember calling me. What bothered me was not that he’d forgotten where he’d parked the truck. I mean, it was sort of strange, but anybody could do that. It’s that he forgot he’d forgotten. Does that make sense?”
June laughed a little, then grew sober. “He was fine last night at the airport.”
“Yes.” Ellen nodded.
“But, Granny, when I was in the living room alone with him—you’d gone into the kitchen for something, I think—he asked me who I was. I thought he was joking at first. When I realized he wasn’t, I said, ‘I’m June.’ Then he said, ‘Oh, you’re John’s girl. I forgot.’” She turned away, anguish on her face.
“Oh, honey, I’m sorry. I hoped you being here would perk him up. He was so excited when I told him you were coming. He wanted to show you the newfangled watering system we’ve put in and how the colts have grown since last summer. He said the two of you could ride up to the old line shack and have a picnic. Then this morning, he forgot you were here. You don’t need this when you’ve got your own life to worry about.”
“You don’t need this in your life either, Granny.”
“He is my life.” Ellen was silent then, listening to the sound of cattle bawling a long way away. In time, Maria returned with a tin tray holding Mexican cups with bright green designs on them. She set the tray on the table and waited until the two women sipped the hot beverage. “Good?” she asked, and they nodded. “When does Mr. Ben come back? Does he want supper?”
“He should be here by suppertime, unless he runs into somebody in town,” Ellen said. “You know how he loves to talk. Wesley will call if they’re going to be too late.” She turned to June. “He can still carry on a pretty good conversation about cattle prices and land sales. A lot of people don’t even realize he’s failing. And you know, he’s not always confused. Half the time he’s perfectly normal.”
Maria reached out and touched Ellen’s arm but said nothing.
After Maria left, June sipped the chocolate, which was thick and rich. Then she changed the subject. “Why was Nell so anxious to get married, Granny?”
Ellen sighed, her mind returning to the story she had told. “Things were different back then. A woman had to have a husband. We were raised to think if we weren’t married by the time we were twenty, we were destined to be old maids, and that was a terrible thing. A spinster, well, what could she do? Women didn’t have many opportunities for jobs, not like today with you getting offered one with a bank. In my day, women weren’t offered much of anything. A single woman couldn’t earn enough to be independent. Most of them ended up living in somebody’s upstairs. If they were lucky, they had a room in a relative’s house, but they didn’t want to be there, and the relatives didn’t want them there either. Life didn’t offer much for a single woman. Nell was already twenty-two when she went to New Mexico. The girls she’d gone to school with, they’d all married and had two or three babies.”
“Were you that way, too, Granny?”
“Oh, yes. I didn’t get married until I was even older than that. I thought all the good men were taken.”
“And then you met Grandpa Ben?”
Ellen smiled. “That’s another story. Maybe I’ll tell you that one, too, sometime. There are an awful lot of stories I’d love to pass on if you’d care to listen to them. Most people don’t, you know—want to hear them, that is. When I bring up the past to Maria, she throws up her hands and tells me I’m getting old.” She stopped. “But we’re not talking about me. We were talking about Nell.”
“Couldn’t she have married if she’d been willing to settle for just anybody?”
“Oh, probably. But she didn’t want just anybody, not when she went to Denver. That changed a little after James. She wasn’t quite so particular. She didn’t believe in a knight on a white horse anymore—or even a cowboy on Old Paint.” Ellen smiled at that, looking out at the poplars along the fence line. “After James, I think she lowered her standards,” Ellen continued. “She really wasn’t looking for true love again, just for a decent man. Then she met Wade. She would have married him. But at the last minute, she ran away from him, too—the third time she did that, as I said. He was a good man, and she hurt him. Nell was sorry for that, but in the end, she just couldn’t settle down with him. She always knew she’d made the right decision.”
“Was he another cowboy like Buddy or a salesman like James?” June stirred the thick chocolate in her cup, then drank it down and placed the cup on a weathered wooden table beside her. She straightened the Ind
ian blanket in her chair and settled back, ready for the last of the story.
“Hardly. He was a banker, and he was a lot older. Like I say, he was a decent man. Wade Moran his name was. I think Nell would have died of boredom if she’d married him.”
June grinned. “Tell me.”
“This one isn’t a very long story,” Ellen said.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Nell returned to Harveyville, helping on the farm during the day and lying in her bed at night, shivering, wondering what would have happened if Emily hadn’t showed up. For a time, she feared she might be pregnant. She and James had wanted children, and what did it matter if she conceived two or three weeks before they married? But now, how could she possibly stay with her grandparents if she was expecting a baby? Fortunately for Nell, she discovered, she did not have that concern.
She had loved James, but there were two Jameses—the gentle man who had rescued her and showered her with kindness and the devious one who had proved false. Although Emily had frightened her, Nell was glad, at least, that the woman had kept her from marrying. She could only imagine what would have happened if she’d discovered after the wedding that he had other wives.
Now Nell hated James, hated herself even more for being so naïve. “Two men, I almost married them,” she told her grandmother. “How stupid can I be?”
“Not stupid. Trusting, maybe,” her grandmother replied. “There are good men out there. Truly, Nell. Your grandfather is one.”
“He’s already taken,” Nell replied. She’d turned moody, and it wasn’t fair to take her anger out on her grandmother, who had been so kind. Nell didn’t know what she would have done without her.
“You’ll find a man. I know it,” her grandmother said.
Nell wasn’t so sure. How could she trust a man again? The thought worried her. Would she ever find a husband? Certainly not in Harveyville, where Lane, the boyfriend she had left behind when she went to New Mexico, had married and started a family. None of the single men in town interested her. In fact, they seemed to avoid her as if she were soiled. Did people know she had gone to Denver in search of a husband and failed? Although no one, including her grandparents, knew that she called off the wedding to James because he had other wives—Nell had told her grandmother only that James was not the man she thought he was and had kept silent about Emily—Nell still felt that local folks were staring at her, whispering.
The Patchwork Bride Page 19
