Gunsmoke and Gingham

by Kirsten Osbourne

  “Where’d the money come from? I want nothing from your father!”

  She laughed. “Papa hasn’t given me a cent in five years. Every dime I have is something I labored for. I had few expenses working and living as I did, so I saved everything I could. I thought you’d be happy that I had a nest egg of my own. Besides, no one would have known that you didn’t give me the money to spend before we went to town!”

  He sighed. It was his pride talking, and he knew it. “I’m sorry. I really didn’t think your motives were good, but maybe I should be looking at myself for my motives instead of looking at you. Will you forgive me?”

  Mary thought long and hard about her answer. “I will. I wish you’d not judge everything I say and do so harshly though.”

  He frowned. She was right, and he knew it. He’d mailed the letter to his brother, and hopefully they’d have a response within a few weeks. He didn’t want to hold her at arm’s length. What he wanted was to get down on his knees and beg her to forgive his treatment of her, but he couldn’t. Not yet. “I’ll try. I once trusted you more than anyone else alive. Finding out you were alive—it’s been a blow. I know that sounds terrible, but it’s like half my life has been a lie. I couldn’t close my eyes without seeing you. You’ve haunted me for five years, Mary.”

  She took a deep breath, choosing her words carefully. “Just like you’ve haunted me. Every moment of every day. We were deceived together, William. I promise you that.”

  He eyed her for a moment, wanting with everything inside him to believe her. “I pray you’re telling me the truth. I want to believe you.”

  “Then believe me. Your answer won’t be any different when that letter comes back.”

  He sighed. “If I give you my heart again, and that letter says you’re lying to me, I think it will destroy me. No, I’m going to wait until the letter comes.”

  She nodded, staring straight ahead. It was hard for her to believe he could choose to take the word of someone else over hers, but she’d get over it. Eventually.

  William carried in her purchases, even taking some of them down to the cellar, and she put everything away. She was excited to get started—on the cooking and the cleaning and sewing. Soon he would no longer recognize his house. There wouldn’t be a corner where she hadn’t left her mark.

  She heated up the stew for lunch while he changed into his old work clothes, and they ate together in silence. Her mind was on the things she had to accomplish to allow herself to start sewing the curtains.

  As soon as he was gone, she got to work. She started by making bread for the next couple of days, and then she cleaned. Each room on the first floor was cleaned, but she decided to have the bottom floor exactly how she wanted it before she started to work on the upstairs. They wouldn’t go up there often, not until they had children, so why bother to start now?

  When she was too tired to do anything else, she sat down and carefully cut the fabric she purchased for the curtains. Supper was in the oven, and fresh bread was cooling on the counter.

  The first thing William saw when he stepped into her house at the end of the day was her sitting at the table, sewing frantically. He was tired. He’d barely slept with her beside him the night before, his thoughts constantly going to what he wanted to be doing with her. Before her arrival, he’d have gotten up and done some work, but he’d laid there awake all night, torturing himself instead.

  When the smell of the fresh baked bread hit his nose, his knees buckled. He couldn’t bake, of course, so he’d purchased loaves of bread in town when he could. Usually he’d made do with crackers.

  He walked to the sink and washed his hands, cutting himself a slice, and slathering it thick with butter. It was the last of the butter, and he probably should have bought some. He turned and looked at her as he bit down into the unexpected treat. If they weren’t already married, he’d have proposed to her then and there.

  “I guess I’m going to have to go into town for more butter. If you can bake bread like this, I’ll be going through it fast.”

  She shook her head. “No, I purchased a small churn. It was in one of the boxes you carried in. I’ll make butter.”

  He cut himself another piece of the bread, gobbling it up as fast as the first. “Have you churned butter before?” He couldn’t imagine the girl he’d known doing manual labor, but she obviously knew what she was doing. The house was cleaner than he’d ever had it.

  She nodded. “The butter sold in my father’s store was made by Mrs. Johnson and me. Elizabeth thought we should buy it, but I’ve always preferred the taste of fresh. So I converted her household.”

  “You never quit surprising me, Mary Brown.”

  “My name is Mary Jones now, thank you very much.” She scooped up her sewing and carried it into the parlor. “Supper’s ready. I’ll set the table. I wasn’t sure what time you’d be in for the night.”

  “I still need to milk the cows and collect the eggs. I wanted to make sure you knew I’d be ready to eat in about half an hour.”

  She nodded. “Sounds good. I’ll have the table set and everything served.” She walked over to the counter and washed her hands. He watched her as she was drying them, his hand going out to stroke her cheek. She paused, her eyes meeting his and her stomach fluttering.

  He realized he was torturing himself for no reason. Even if it turned out she was lying to him, she was there and his wife. He had every right in the world to kiss her. He stepped closer to her, his head dipping and his lips pressing against hers.

  Mary wrapped her arms around his neck, kissing him back for all she was worth. She’d been waiting for this moment since she was a fourteen-year-old girl in a schoolyard in Massachusetts. She was going to make the most of it.

  After a moment, he lifted his head, staring into her eyes. “You were too tired for my…attentions last night.” His hand stroked her cheek in a way she remembered from long ago. “Are you still too tired?”

  Her eyes widened. “Is that why you didn’t…” She trailed off at the end, unable to put her thoughts into words. “I thought you couldn’t stand to touch me.”

  He shook his head emphatically. “It would be better for my peace of mind if that were true, but it’s not. I was awake all night thinking of touching you…thinking of all the things I had a right to do to you…but knowing you were too tired.”

  “And now tonight you’ll be too tired, so I’ll lay awake all night, thinking about all the things you could do to me, and then tomorrow night, I’ll be too tired, and you’ll lay awake all night…”

  He let out a bark of laughter. “Of all the things I’ve missed about you, I think your sense of humor was at the very top of the list. I needed to laugh again, and I wasn’t sure if it was even possible without you.”

  She smiled at him, realizing that she hadn’t felt like laughing in years either, but now that he was in front of her, her sense of humor was returning. “I’ve missed you every day since you left me. Don’t ever leave me alone again.”

  His arms folded around her and he held her close. “I don’t know if I could.” But he knew things would be different if he didn’t get the response he wanted to his letter.

  She settled her head against his shoulder, loving the feel of his arms around her. “If you’re not too tired to touch me tonight, I’d like to be touched.”

  He smiled a little. “I have a feeling I’m not going to be too tired.” He leaned down and dropped another kiss on her lips. “I’m going to go and finish my chores. Get supper on the table. I’ll be back.”

  She leaned against the counter as she watched him go. “I’ll be waiting.” For the first time since her marriage, she felt positive about their future. He was softening without the proof. The smile never left her face as she set the table and served the meal.

  Chapter 8

  After the supper dishes were done, Mary joined William in the parlor where he was reading a book. She looked at the title and shook her head with a laugh. He was reading a book
about farming. “You and your non-fiction books. I’ve never understood why anyone would read them.” She sank down onto the sofa beside him and plucked her sewing from the basket where she’d placed it before supper.

  “Are you still re-reading Heidi over and over?”

  She nodded. “I am. It makes me feel close to my mama. We made some really special memories reading that book together.”

  “What are you making?” he asked, nodding down at the fabric in her hands. “The colors are pretty.”

  She smiled. “I like them. I’m making curtains, and I’ll make a matching tablecloth for the kitchen. I think it’ll look nice.”

  He reached down and pulled something out from under the sofa. “I got this for you today. I thought you could do something with it.”

  She took the box and opened it, a smile lighting up her face. “It’s the most beautiful vase I’ve ever seen.” She jumped up to run into the kitchen, filled the vase with water, and put the flowers she’d picked the day before into it. When it was in the center of the table she smiled happily, hurrying back to him. “Thank you so much.”

  He pulled her back onto the sofa with him, kissing her softly. “I know how much you love flowers, so I thought it would be nice for you to have something to put them in. It looks better than the glass, doesn’t it?”

  She smiled contentedly, leaning her head on his shoulder. “You’ve always known me better than anyone.”

  “Even when I was sticking toads down the back of your dress? I can still hear you. ‘Girls kiss frogs not toads!’ And then you invited me to kiss the toad myself.”

  “And you tried to kiss me and I kicked you.” She snuggled a bit closer to him.

  “I always thought I would be the one to kiss you first, but you surprised me that day and kissed me.” He kissed the top of her head, his face soft as he thought about all the memories they had together.

  “Technically, you kissed me first when you kissed my cheek the first day you walked me home from school.” Mary sighed. Why did touching him feel so right? She’d tried to convince herself that she could let any man touch her once they were married, but she knew now it wasn’t true. She may have been able to tolerate it, but there was only one man who could make her blood sing.

  She found that she was looking forward to consummating her marriage, something she had been dreading since she’d responded to his letter. How could she dread anything when it would happen with William? He belonged to her in a way no other man ever could.

  “Do you want children?” she asked.

  He nodded. “That’s why I was willing to marry someone other than you. I didn’t want to give up the idea of having children.”

  “And that’s why I responded to your advertisement. I can’t imagine having children with anyone but you.” She shook her head. “Elizabeth has suggested a few times over the years that I respond to one of the letters for a mail order bride, but I never felt like I could. She knew I was ready by watching me with her little boy—Benjamin. He’s a beautiful little thing.”

  “You’ve not really been around children, have you? I mean I don’t know about the last five years, but I don’t think you even knew what happened in diapers back when I knew you.”

  She made a face. “I knew…sort of. I became Benjamin’s nurse because I took one look at him and fell in love. Elizabeth offered to find someone to take my place as cook and me to take over the baby at that point. There was just something about holding that tiny little person that I knew was right for me.” She shook her head. “When I responded to your letter, I didn’t know it was you. I thought it strange that I would end up with Jones for my last name, when I’d spent so long expecting it to be my name, but I felt like I was cheating on your memory. I was never able to cry for you.”

  He tilted his head to one side. “I know you were never much of a crier. All the girls in school seemed to cry at the drop of a hat, but you didn’t. It seems odd that you wouldn’t cry when you thought I was dead, though.”

  “The pain was so much. Elizabeth told me about a year ago that she worried about me from the moment she saw me in the train station. She knew that there was something so terribly wrong, my world was crashing down around me. I felt so sad I couldn’t cry. I didn’t cry until I set eyes on you instead.” She shook her head. “I cried until Papa told me you’d died. I swear, I’d cry myself to sleep every night for missing you. And then you didn’t write. It took so long to get that first letter. I was sure you’d forgotten me.”

  He smiled, stroking her cheek. “I sent a letter every day from the train. You didn’t get them?” With every word, he believed her story more. With every moment they spent together, he knew he was never going to let her go. He could find out she’d gone on a killing rampage and murdered a hundred people, and that might change his mind, but he didn’t think anything less could.

  She shook her head. “I went to the postmistress in town every day!” She sighed. “Papa probably had her holding my letters. The day that I actually got a letter, I was there when the train came in and saw my name on one of them. I bet that’s why I was allowed to have it.”

  “I wonder if he was planning to ‘kill me’ all along.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know.” She wished she could understand what had happened all those years before, because she knew it would help her move on. “We may never know.”

  He ran his hand through his hair, frustrated. “I wish there was a faster way to get an answer.”

  “I do too. But I’m going to ask you one question, so you can think on it. Do you really think I’d have insisted we marry when I saw you at the train station if I’d been part of the deception?” She kissed his cheek. “You think on that, while I go get ready for bed. Can I have five minutes?”

  William watched her leave the room, his eyes bleak. What she said made sense to him, but that meant his mother had been part of the whole ruse. Why would she do that to him? He hoped his brother wrote back quickly, and he had some answers.

  Mary continued her work to transform the house. Every day she would make a little change that thrilled William. As soon as the earth was plowed for her kitchen garden, she borrowed one of his almanacs and got her garden in. She’d spend an hour every morning puttering in the garden and an hour on her “improvement projects.”

  One of William’s favorite things about having her there was her cooking. Every day he would come home to wonderful smells filling the air. There was always fresh bread available and usually she made a dessert. It was the life he’d always imagined having with her.

  The only thing that kept Mary from being completely happy was knowing that he didn’t completely trust her. She knew he was still waiting for a letter from his brother that would explain what he knew to have happened five years prior, but she wanted him to believe her without the letter, and she had no idea how to make that happen.

  She’d been in South Dakota for three weeks before she ventured upstairs to see what she could do to make it more livable. Eventually their children would live up there, and she wanted her house to be perfect for them.

  She used one of the bedrooms there to store her trunk from Massachusetts, and she left all the letters she’d written to him buried at the bottom of it. When she’d first learned of his “death,” she’d written to him daily, and then weekly. She’d written a last “goodbye” letter to him as she’d responded to the letter to agree to be a mail order bride. She knew that once she’d married, there would be no way she could keep up her letter writing to her dead fiancé.

  While up there, she measured the windows for curtains and decided she would make a new quilt for each of the beds, but that would be a good winter-time pursuit for her. Hopefully by the time snow fell, she’d be expecting her first child, and she would need to have something to occupy her hands and her mind.

  William came home unexpectedly early looking for Mary. He saw the door leading to the upstairs open and sought her out. He found her sitting on one of the beds upstairs,
a piece of paper beside her. “What are you doing up here?”

  “I wanted my trunk out of our way, so I dragged it up here,” she said, getting to her feet to embrace him. She couldn’t stop touching him when he was close. Knowing he was there made her heart happy.

  “I would have brought it up for you!” He shook his head. “You are not the Mary Brown I knew when we were growing up. She would have happily left the heavy lifting to me.”

  “But if I’d left it for you, I couldn’t have described how ridiculous I was, bringing it up here one stair at a time. I was about ten stairs up when I dropped it, and it slid all the way back to the bottom, and I had to start all over again. It took me a good thirty minutes to get it up here.”

  He laughed at her description, knowing she was making it more humorous to make him smile. He glanced over at the mostly empty trunk. “What are those?” he asked, frowning into it. There were sheets and sheets of paper there, spread over the bottom.

  She closed the trunk. “Just letters. No big deal.” Smiling up at him, she brought up one of his favorite topics. “I made a pot roast for supper. I’m going to make potatoes…and…I baked a cake. I bet you thought I forgot your birthday!”

  “You’re always taking care of me,” he said, letting himself be distracted from the letters…for now.

  “Just like you’re always taking care of me.” She looked out the window. “It doesn’t look late enough for you to be home yet.”

  He shrugged. “I figured I’d worked hard enough that I deserved a few hours off with my bride.”

  She picked up the paper and pencil she’d scribbled her measurements onto, and pulled him out of the room by his hand. “I’ll start the curtains for the upstairs another day then.”

  “You’ve already completely transformed half of the house. You’re not done yet?”

  She shook her head. “There’s another half of the house to be transformed, you see.” Heading down the stairs, she went straight to the kitchen and set her paper on the counter, so she wouldn’t lose it. “Are you hungry? I can finish making supper early.”