Titans

by Leila Meacham

  “He has no reason to stay,” Nathan called back without slowing down.

  Randolph and Lily were huddled in a bed of straw under a horse blanket. They had taken turns drinking from the milk bucket. “Coast is clear for you two,” he said before his voice broke.

  Lily threw off the blanket and rushed toward him. “Nathan, what’s wrong? Who is the man in the house?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Why is he here?” Randolph asked.

  “He came on a family matter,” Nathan said.

  Lily peered uneasily into his face. “What’s he done to you?”

  “He… broke something that can’t be fixed.”

  Only then did Nathan realize he still held the stranger’s business card. He gazed at it, the name Trevor Waldo Waverling like a hot brand searing his eyeballs. Only then did the knowledge that he was not a Holloway fully hit him. It drove through him with such force he grasped the lodgepole to keep from keeling over. Tears cloaked his eyes. His windpipe closed. He was a Waverling. The blood of the man who had looked after him tenderly since he was born, who had taught him to walk, read, ride, farm, the man he loved and believed he took after, did not pump through his veins.

  “Oh, my God! Are you crying?” Randolph squealed.

  Lily touched his arm and asked in a plaintive key, “Nathan, what is it?”

  “Leave him be, and you children go to the house. Your supper is waiting,” Leon ordered from the doorway.

  Randolph let out a huff of relief. “Finally,” he said. “Do we have to bring the milk?”

  “If you want any with your supper.”

  With a sigh of being put upon, Randolph grabbed the handle of the bucket, but Lily stood on tiptoe and kissed her big brother’s ear. “It will be all right,” she murmured softly and hurried to follow Randolph from the barn.

  Chapter Five

  But it would not be all right. Never again, Nathan knew. Leon shuffled toward him, shoulders hunched in his farmer’s jacket, his hands plunged into the pockets of his overalls. “I wish I knew the words to say,” he said. From outside came the clop of horses and the squeak of carriage wheels pulling away. The man had come by coach expecting to stow him and his things in it for the return trip, Nathan reckoned. Otherwise, he’d have arrived by train.

  Nathan shrugged and brushed at his eyes. “This has to be as hard on you as on me.”

  Leon turned over a couple of buckets and set them on the barn floor. “In that I’ve lost a son as you have a father? Neither is true, Nathan. You’ve got to believe that. Kinship is not a matter of blood but of feelin’s. You’re my son. You always have been, and you always will be. And I’ll be forever your father. Nothin’ on God’s green earth—no other man’s claim—can undo that.” Once more, Leon pulled out the handkerchief stored in the pocket of his overalls. He blew into it, his eyes watering again.

  “Still…” Nathan said, accepting the seat Leon offered. “The truth changes things, doesn’t it?”

  Leon sat down on the other bucket. Zak took a vigilant stand between them. “Only things, not feelin’s.”

  Nathan handed Leon the business card. “What kind of business is he in?”

  Leon read aloud, “WAVERLING TOOLS. He told us his company primarily makes drillin’ machinery for water and salt wells.”

  “As if I would know or care anything about that.”

  “He told us he’d been married twice, is divorced, and has one child, a retarded daughter named Rebecca, aged twelve. She lives with his mother—your grandmother. He’s forty-six.”

  “Do you believe he raped Mother?”

  Leon returned the card and leaned on a hip to push the handkerchief back into his pocket. “I believe your mother believes it. I’ve never known for sure. She was the belle of Gainesville as well as Denton in her youth. As the beautiful only child of well-to-do parents and the darlin’ of your mother’s childless, rich godmother, she was spoiled to the core and grew up thinkin’ the world was hers for the asking, like she’s gotten Lily to believin’. I fell in love with her in the fourth grade when she enrolled in school, the prettiest little thing you ever saw. I carried her books. Made sure no one bothered her. I was like her big brother. She could tell me anything and did. I went to work for her folks on this farm when I was eighteen. I watched as the boys made a beeline to her door durin’ her midschool years, and they followed her here after her time in finishin’ school, but she kept ’em all danglin’ until Trevor Waverling showed up in town. He must have been around twenty-five.”

  Nathan had never heard any of this story before. “What brought him to Gainesville?”

  “His aunt. She died and left him a saddle and tack shop she’d inherited from her husband. Trevor had no interest in runnin’ a business in a small town like Gainesville, so he hung around until he sold it.”

  “And that’s when he met Mother.”

  Leon got up and struck a match to the barn lantern. “Yep. I saw him only two, three times. He was a handsome devil. I heard the ladies were wild for him, but he had his sights set on your mother, at least accordin’ to the way she tells it. He squired her about until the shop was sold, then vamoosed, leavin’ her pregnant. Her daddy came to me. No decent man would have her, he said.” Leon’s attempt at a wry grin failed as he sat back down on the bucket. “That’s what the man actually said to me.”

  Nathan had not liked his mother’s father. Liam Barrows had no time for his first grandson and brushed him off like a pesky fly, but Nathan mainly disliked his grandfather because he treated his son-in-law like hired help. Today’s disclosures had revealed the cause of the man’s disaffection. He had died when Nathan was ten, succeeded by his grandmother who lived only a year afterward. The farm had then gone to his mother.

  “Do you know if he was telling the truth when he said he didn’t know that Mother was pregnant with me?” Nathan asked.

  Leon plucked a piece of straw from a bale of hay and stuck it in his mouth. “Yeah, that part I believe. I’m not sayin’ he’d have done anything about it, but I’m sure he didn’t know.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because your mother didn’t know, not until Trevor had been gone for two months.”

  “So the reason she hates him is because he didn’t marry her, baby or not?”

  “That’s the way I see it.”

  “Fancy a woman hating a man all these years when she has the best husband alive and three good kids.”

  “Trevor Waverling was the only man your mother couldn’t have. She’s never gotten over the insult. It’s my view he wouldn’t have had to rape her. Because of him, she was forced to marry a man beneath her and become a farmer’s wife, a far cry from the life she’d expected to have, and she’s never forgiven him for it.”

  And gave birth to a son she didn’t want, Nathan thought. So much was making sense now. It explained why his mother never looked directly at him but spoke to him from her profile. He gazed up at the open barn window where the first star of the evening had appeared. He could hardly stand the pain of admitting it, but he agreed with his father’s view. He was not the child of rape, but he might as well have been for all the chance he’d had of winning his mother’s love. “Wonder why the man has shown up now,” Nathan said.

  Leon chewed on the straw. “Could be it’s like what he said. He wants an heir.”

  Nathan drew his jacket tighter around him. “Well, he’s shown up twenty years too late, but I have a feeling there’s more to his motive than that. Something else brought him here.”

  “Then why don’t you go find out what it is?” Leon said.

  Nathan looked at him in surprise. “Why should I? I have no interest in knowing the man. Like you said, you’re my father. What do I need him for?”

  Leon shifted his weight and looked uncomfortable, sure signs to Nathan that something was on his mind he was reluctant to talk about. He felt another level of unease. “What is it, Dad?”

  Leon spit out the chewed stra
w. “Well, you might as well hear all of it, son. Take the blows all at once. The healin’ starts faster that way.”

  “What are you talking about, Dad?”

  “The farm, Nathan. It ain’t comin’ to you—or to me, but I married your mother knowin’ that. The place is willed to Randolph and Lily.”

  Nathan hopped up from the bucket. “What? Why? They don’t know piddling about farming. They hate the place. They’ll only sell it!”

  “I know that. You know that. Millicent knows that, but it don’t matter.”

  Nathan plopped down again, too stunned to stand. “How could she, Dad? How could she? She knows how much I love the farm, that I live for it, that I’d be like a fish out of water anyplace else.”

  “It don’t matter, son. I wish I could say it did, she bein’ your mother and all, but your feelin’s for the farm don’t matter a drop of spit to her, not when it comes to makin’ sure Randolph and Lily are taken care of financially, and that’s why…” Leon pulled in his lip.

  A shiver ran over Nathan’s flesh. “That’s why what, Dad?”

  “Your mother is puttin’ the farm up for sale. She wants it sold and a house bought in Gainesville ’fore Randolph leaves for college.”

  “God!” Nathan jumped up again, incredulous. He dragged his hand through his hair. “What will happen to you if she sells it?”

  “She says I can go to work for the new owners or come live with her in town.”

  Nathan reeled. He could almost feel the ground move under his feet. His steady, certain world had suddenly collapsed, and everything he believed, trusted, loved, lay shattered around him like the aftermath of a tornado. He pressed his palms to the sides of his head. “She doesn’t care a whit for us, does she?”

  Leon answered with a mirthless chuckle. “Oh, Millicent cares for us, son. It’s just that she cares more for Randolph and Lily. It don’t matter about me. Let’s talk about you—this opportunity that’s landed in your lap.”

  Chapter Six

  Opportunity?”

  “The one Trevor Waverling is offerin’,” Leon said. “I’d like you to take it since there’s no future here for you. You’ve got to realize that, too.” As if on cue, Daisy let out a deep, melancholic bellow, and the two plow horses pricked their ears and turned their heads toward them over their stall doors. “Today you’ve had to take some mighty strong doses of the truth, son—too many for a boy to have to swallow on his twentieth birthday, but the facts are what they are.”

  Nathan sat down again, feeling drained. “How long have you known Mother didn’t intend for me to have the farm?”

  “I didn’t know until I found a copy of her will a few weeks ago. Up until then, since the farm had been in her family for several generations, I assumed she meant to leave it to the three of you. You’d run it and share the profits with your brother and sister.”

  “My half brother and sister,” Nathan corrected him, for the first time realizing he and his siblings did not share full family blood. Was it any wonder, then, that he had never felt entirely kin to them?

  “I confronted Millicent about the will,” Leon continued. “We had a terrible argument. She had the decency to look red-faced about it but said that originally she’d intended that nothing would change until her death unless a financial need arose. That’s when I learned she planned to sell the farm.”

  “Did you ask her where that would leave me?”

  Leon stroked his knee as he always did when considering how to go about imparting unpleasant news, misery sunk deep into the age lines of his weathered face. “I did. She said that if the sale had to come before her death, with your reputation, you could find work on a farm anywhere. They’d be glad to have you, probably make you manager.”

  Nathan felt compelled to move around to digest this information without choking on it. He went over to pat Daisy. Nearly every truth he knew, most of the knowledge and wisdom he’d gained, had come by paying attention to nature. At the moment, he remembered the clear blue stream he’d loved as a child. Butterflies and hummingbirds had played there. Eventually, the stream had dried up and left a depression in the sand. He recalled standing on its dry lip sad to his toes wondering how the most beautiful and essential things on earth could simply disappear. Like now. Only this morning, he’d gone off to the south pasture thinking what a lucky fellow he was to be doing what he loved to do on the land he loved and to have such a fine family and home waiting for him at the end of the day. In less than twelve hours, it had all vanished quick as morning mist before the rising sun.

  He returned to the bucket and sat down again. “When were you going to tell me?” he asked.

  “Soon’s I could figure out how to go about it and to make other arrangements. I wadn’t about to keep another secret from you.”

  “What other secret?” Nathan’s ears perked for another shoe about to fall.

  Leon reddened to the part in his sandy, thinning hair. “Aw, forget I said that. It don’t pertain to you, so don’t pester me about it.”

  Nathan didn’t believe him. If the secret didn’t pertain to him, why say he’d kept it from him? “What other arrangements?” he asked, convinced that whatever his father had almost let slip did relate to him, but he could worm it out of him another time.

  “I’ve laid some money by, money your mother don’t know about, money I saved for you. Old Man Sawyer plans to sell his spread one of these years, and I was thinkin’ I’d have a word with him to say I’d be interested in puttin’ a down payment on the place when the time came. I got good standin’ at the bank, and I could borrow the rest. You and I could go on like we always had, only we’d have our own place. Your mother could come with us if she liked. Otherwise…” Leon shrugged. “That’d be up to her. It was the best I could do, son.”

  Nathan shook his head, the image of the dried-up stream reappearing. “So why don’t we just go on with those plans?” he asked. “I’ve saved some money from my wages as well.”

  Leon leaned toward him. “ ’Cause you’ve got a bird in hand right now, Nathan. We don’t know what tomorrow will bring. You’ve just learned that you can be sure of nothin’. For two weeks, hopin’ for a miracle, I’ve sat on your mother’s intention to sell the place. I thought it might be she’d listen to her conscience and change her mind. I had no idea that the miracle would appear in the form of Trevor Waverling.”

  “I don’t like him,” Nathan said.

  “That’s no reason not to hear him out, son, to go see what he’s offerin’. He’s right, you know. You’ve never known any place but here.”

  “All I’ve ever wanted to know.”

  “Then, by God”—Leon whooped and slapped his knee—“go make sure this is the only place you ever want to know. Prove to yourself that you’re not cut out for any other business but farmin’. Learn firsthand that you want nothin’ to do with Trevor Waverling, but take it from me, son, if you don’t find out now, a time will come when you’ll regret not knowin’ what else is out there.”

  Nathan nodded. “Like Mother,” he said.

  “She thinks about it ever’ day.”

  Nathan looked again at the card. “If I go and hear him out and don’t like what I hear, will you still be willing to put a down payment on Mr. Sawyer’s land?”

  “It’s a promise, son.”

  Nathan stuck out his hand. “You’ll always be my father, Dad. I could have asked for no finer or better.”

  Leon clasped it. “Or me a finer or better son.”

  In their bedroom as he undressed, Leon said, “I told Nathan about your will, Millicent. He had a right to know.”

  At her dressing table, his wife glanced at him sharply in the mirror. “You felt the need to do that, did you? I suppose now he hates me sure enough.”

  “He don’t hate you, Millie girl. The boy don’t have that in him, but I wouldn’t expect him to feel the same for you again. The best you can hope for is that he don’t realize he owes you nothin’.”

  Millicent�
�s mouth twisted. “I suppose you’ll make sure he does.”

  “No,” Leon said, removing his boots. “You know me better than that, but I sure as hell won’t block his vision like I’ve always done. I wouldn’t worry about Nathan tellin’ anybody what he’s learned today, not even Lily and Randolph. He’s as ashamed as you are. I assume you’re not goin’ to let them know Nathan is their half brother?”

  “Certainly not. What good would come of it?”

  Leon smirked. “Right. Now that it’s open, you goin’ to let the final cat out of the bag to Nathan?”

  Millicent whirled from the mirror. She was wearing her night chemise, a long white garment with lace at the throat and ends of the sleeves. Her hair had been brushed from its daytime bun and hung in a lustrous mass about her shoulders. Not a thread of gray dulled its strawberry-blond sheen. At forty-one, Millicent Barrows was still the most beautiful woman Leon had ever seen, and her beauty could still grab him by the throat.

  “Absolutely not, and don’t you even think of telling him, Leon Holloway. You promised me. It’s bad enough Nathan now knows you are not his father. He would have no reason to keep his silence if he learned we’d given away his twin sister. You’ve got to think what the scandal would do to Lily’s chances of marrying well and Randolph’s future as a lawyer if that secret got out.”

  “Well, you can certainly speak from experience on both those subjects, can’t you?” Leon said, baring his teeth. “But to be clear. You gave the boy’s sister away, Millicent. I can’t let you shade the truth about that.”

  Millicent waved away the distinction, but she looked worried. “You promised me you would always keep our secret, Leon. I’m going to hold you to that promise to my dying day. You’ve never gone back on your word, and my feelings for you would alter completely if you ever did. I’m assuming my feelings for you still matter?”