Titans

by Leila Meacham

  Samantha consulted her lapel watch. There was enough time if she hurried, she said. She had to get the ferry back to Gainesville in time to catch the two o’clock train. With an eye on the clock, together they scoured the records of names and details of girls born in late March 1880. They discovered four, but Eleanor could account for each of them. One had died and three still lived in the county. “Now, here’s a name I recognize,” she said, pointing to the signature of Bridget Mahoney that appeared in the birth records of the dates in question. “Bridget was Dad’s midwife. Wherever Dad went, she went. She was indispensable to him. If Dad delivered you, she would have been there.”

  Samantha’s heart lifted, but Eleanor’s face fell. “Unfortunately,” she said, “Bridget moved to San Francisco with her husband during the Gold Rush around 1889.”

  “Do you know where I can write to her?” Samantha asked.

  “I’m afraid I don’t, but leave me an address, and if I come across it, I’ll mail it to you.”

  It was time to go. Hastily, out of courtesy for Eleanor’s efforts but certain it was a lost cause, Samantha wrote down her mother’s address in Fort Worth. The women hugged in saying good-bye. “Honey lamb,” the older woman said, “if I may offer a piece of advice. If you’re happy where you are, there are no greener pastures.”

  “I agree,” Samantha said. She felt a strange peace and relief, as if she’d closed a book on a conclusive and satisfying ending. She’d done all she could do. She could go home now. There was no more to the story.

  “Neal, for goodness’ sakes! You’re going to wear out the soles of your boots if you don’t stop pacing. You’ve been at it now ever since we got here,” Estelle said, speaking from a bench on the platform of the train depot. “I’m usually the worry wart.”

  Neal made no comment and peered beyond the station lights in the dark direction the train would arrive from Gainesville. The Katy was due any minute—finally! Samantha’s face would tell the full story. The minute she set foot on the deboarding steps and her gaze lit upon him, Neal would know if he was to be consigned to heaven or hell. He had wrestled with the decision of whether to prepare Estelle for the darkest day of her life, but he chose to wait. He’d obeyed a personal rule that many times had served him well: Never show your hand until the other fellow lays down his cards. Sometimes you could get away with a bluff, but this time Neal doubted he’d be so lucky.

  The train rushed into the station, whistle blowing and steam rolling, and Estelle, searching the compartment windows, joined Neal with the others awaiting the opening of the doors. Neal tasted something vile rising from the nether regions of his stomach. “There they are!” Estelle cried, spotting the golden roll of Samantha’s hair under the brim of her spring hat. Samantha caught Estelle’s wave and returned it through the glass, and Neal’s heart fell. Her face did indeed express it all. Despair, heartsickness, disappointment written all over it. Neal waited until Estelle had embraced and released her, Samantha’s glance at him over her shoulder flashing dismay.

  “Hello, daughter,” he said quietly when it was his turn, hardly able to speak for the grief swelling in his throat.

  Samantha said in a voice mournful as a funeral dirge, “I’m sorry, Daddy, but the farm was sold by the time we got there.”

  Neal opened his mouth, but no sound came.

  “Now, Neal, keep your temper,” Estelle said, patting his shoulder. “It’s not Samantha’s fault that somebody else bought the place.”

  “The seller didn’t even show up,” Samantha said, “but I made sure the property had been sold. I spoke to a field hand who works for the Barrows, and he confirmed it.”

  Neal continued to stare speechless at Samantha, mired in an undertow of disbelief. Finally, he spoke. “You… never met the owner?”

  “Didn’t have the decency to even meet us,” Mildred put in flatly.

  “I’m sorry, Daddy,” Samantha said again. “I can see how disappointed you are.”

  “You have no idea,” Neal said huskily and drew her into a rough embrace.

  Nathan

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  In his office, Trevor Waverling stared at the notice in the week-old classified section of the Dallas Herald. Good Lord, it couldn’t be. The farm advertised for sale was the Barrows place and Millicent was the seller. “What’s your biggest dream?” he’d asked Nathan during one of their getting-to-know-each-other drives to the plant. Without hesitation, his son had answered, “Someday to buy my mother’s farm.” Trevor lifted his gaze from the paper. Damn the woman! What other ways remained for Millicent Holloway to break her son’s heart?

  He rotated his chair toward the window where he could see his personal swath of the Trinity River reflected in the April sun. The paper was dated April second—a day after April Fool’s Day. No practical joke here. Trevor wished it were. Should he let the boy see it? Each week, to get a view of what was out there, Trevor pored over the classified ads from landowners wishing to lease their property for oil exploration. He’d jot down the details in the records he was compiling, keep an eye out for what leases disappeared after a few weeks and which ones stayed in the FOR SALE column. The information gave him an idea of the location of the most intense oil interest. Mainly, the advertisements were submitted by farmers from the Oklahoma Territory hoping to get rich because of the oil boom going on there, but petroleum speculators were now taking a look at land in Montague and Gainesville Counties. Had the Barrows farm already been snapped up or leased to drill for oil and gas? Which offer would likely appeal to Millicent? She’d get more money up front if she sold it as a farm, but she might choose to lease her acreage for far less with the hope of bigger money if petroleum was found. Trevor had a feeling that she’d go for the bird in hand.

  May Millicent Holloway burn in hell for what she’d done to Nathan! The boy had told him of her plans to sell the farm in order to grease her other son’s start in life (Trevor’s word, not Nathan’s) and to finance her daughter’s entry into society when they moved into Gainesville. Society? In Gainesville, Texas, for God’s sake! Nathan didn’t know she’d put up her place for sale the minute he stepped foot out the door. Well, his mother’s loss was his father’s gain.

  Trevor swiveled back to his desk and reflected on the rarity of the boy who had slipped quietly with his dog into their lives. There was no noise about Nathan. You could almost forget he was there until he wasn’t, and then the void shouted, as when he’d gone back to the farm for a few days. His daughter had been bereft.

  Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again, she’d recited over and over, running despairingly about the house with her hands pressed to her head. Trevor had tried to soothe her. It’s all right, honey, he’d said at least a hundred times. Nathan will be back.

  But off she would go wailing again. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again… The rhyme ran through Trevor’s head all through the days the boy was gone, and his heart wrung for his daughter. She thought of her father as the king. She believed him all-powerful. What would happen to Rebecca if Nathan remained at the farm and the king couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again?

  Trevor felt he should have been jealous of his mother’s growing affection for Nathan, but he wasn’t. He was overjoyed. Things were working out better than he could have hoped. She had her grandson—a future heir—and his father was building a relationship with him. Trevor Waverling didn’t have to worry about proving his innocence in his brother’s death to her any longer. Mavis Waverling would never sell the company now. But aside from that, it was good to see her old, pretty face relaxed, at peace, contented now in the evenings. Before Nathan, he rarely saw her smile, and he hadn’t heard her laughter in years.

  Before Nathan. Trevor identified the former period in their lives in those terms. Before Nathan, he met people for supper or went to the gym or to his clu
b most evenings following work, but after Nathan, he began going home with the boy to show his mother he was making an effort. Now they were quite a family group in the parlor after supper—he and his mother and son and daughter, the dog and cat. Another maid had been hired to give Lenora a hand with the extra mouth to feed—two, counting the German shepherd—and so Lenora was happier, too.

  The boy was turning out to be an impressively quick learner. Trevor had put him under the wing of Jamie Foster, his foreman, who reported, “Your kid don’t need to be told twice ’bout nothin’.” Coming from taciturn Jamie, that statement spoke volumes and put the stamp of approval on him. Nathan had yet to be assigned a specific job. It was more important in these early days for him to become acquainted with the factory’s workings and infrastructure as well as the business transactions of the company. Surface grinders and auger drill bits, metal-cutting machinery, and other engineering tools were miles beyond the farm implements of Nathan’s experience, and the boy was finding there was a lot more to a company’s books than a farmer’s expense ledger.

  To explain Nathan’s heretofore unknown existence when introducing him, Trevor had come around to a clap on the boy’s shoulder and a quote from the parable of the Prodigal Son. “This is my son who was once lost but now is found,” he’d say and leave it at that. Brows were raised, glances exchanged, but Trevor’s friends, colleagues, and employees knew his reputation for consorting with women and took Nathan as an oh-oh that happened. Which was exactly what he was. All shook hands and welcomed him graciously, if some could not resist a few winks at Trevor behind the boy’s back, and some treated him with exaggerated courtesy like the kind shown a man missing a limb one took pains not to notice.

  Within a week of their acquaintance, Trevor had decided upon the eventual right position for Nathan. The boy would chafe at working full-time in a factory. He’d fare worse learning the ropes of Waverling Tools behind a desk. The boy belonged on the land under the open skies. He’d make of Nathan a representative of the company to seek out and execute oil leases when the time came to drill its own wells. Landmen, they were called. There was no other formal name for them. The profession was as new as the petroleum industry and required no special education other than experience, but acquiring that took some time and doing. It was the geologist’s task to find the right conditions where oil and gas could be found, but it was the landman’s job to negotiate leasing terms for the mineral rights from the property owner. Along with that skill, which called mainly for handling people well, the landman had to know how to comprehend and write contracts and research public and private records to prove title and ownership status. Those sorts of things Nathan could learn, and Trevor had no doubt of the boy’s ability to handle people. He did it simply—by being himself.

  Trevor leaned back in his chair, considering. Should he tell Nathan about the ad? Was it better for him to learn the truth now rather than later? The news, coupled with the other sins of his mother against him, would wound him even more deeply, not that he’d show or express it. Other boys might stomp about and curse their mother, but not Nathan. Millicent, for better or worse, was the woman who had given him birth. Nathan would put his respect for that above his rage.

  Now was the time, not later, Trevor decided. He’d promised Nathan that he’d put all his cards on the table when dealing with him. Lie to me one time or keep one card up your sleeve, and I’m gone, Nathan had said. Zak and I will hit the road to California.

  At the time of the threat, the warning had no more impact than the bounce of a paper ball off his chest, but the last thirteen days had changed things, and now the thought of the boy leaving had the force of a well-landed right hook to his solar plexus. Trevor pulled a cord that rang a bell in his secretary’s office. When she arrived, he said, “Jeanne, find Nathan and send him to me. He left before I did this morning, so he must be in the plant.”

  “Yes sir, he’s here. Last I saw him, he was with Jamie when I took over the bill of lading for the latest shipment to England.”

  Trevor’s eyebrows rose. Jeanne, hand-carry a B/L to his plant foreman when ordinarily she’d expect Jamie to pick it up at her desk? She fetched and carried for no man but her boss, she was pleased to say. But Trevor knew what was behind her sudden initiative. His secretary, young and single, had an eye for Nathan, but it would do her no good. His grandmother had other plans for the boss’s son in the romance department. When Jeanne left, Agatha Beardsley, his longtime receptionist who had also warmed to Nathan, poked her head in. “You have two men here to see you, Mr. Waverling.”

  “Who?”

  “The geologist, Todd Baker, and”—Miss Beardsley consulted her notepad—“a Daniel Lane. He says he’s an ironmonger who presently works for a smithy in Fort Worth. He’s come in answer to our want ad.”

  “Give them both some coffee and tell them to wait. I need to see Nathan.”

  Nathan appeared five minutes later, and Trevor thought as he walked in that he’d never seen a member of his gender so ill at ease in a business suit but so comfortable in his own skin. The observation confirmed his decision to put him in the field rather than behind a desk.

  “You called for me?” Nathan asked.

  Trevor didn’t know how he avoided it, but once he’d disabused Nathan from calling him Mr. Waverling, the boy had never addressed him by any other name, paternal or otherwise, nor asked him what he wished to be called. He figured time would decide his son’s handle for him. “You need to see this,” Trevor said, pushing the classified section of the Dallas Herald across his desk with a finger pointed at the advertisement. “Is that the farm I think it is?”

  Nathan read without comment. Only a tightening of his jaw gave away his inner reaction. “I see she wasted no time,” he said finally.

  “I’m sorry, Nathan.”

  “Me, too,” Nathan said. “Anything else?”

  Trevor wanted to say something to offer sympathy, but Nathan had shut him out. The boy’s self-containment threw up a wall that made it impossible to comfort him. Further commiseration would be intrusive. Trevor felt a twitch of resentment, then recognized the feeling as a father’s frustration with his inability to help his son. “Yes, there is,” he said. “Step into the reception room and send Todd to me, will you?”

  “All right.”

  Trevor swiveled back to the window, somewhat let down but buoyed, too. Another nail in Millicent’s coffin. Another road closed to Gainesville, Texas. That was good.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  There’s a good lad, Zak! There’s a good lad!” Benjy sang out as the German shepherd bounded toward him to return a stick in his mouth the Irishman had thrown. It was noon, playtime for Zak while the plant workers brought out the contents of their metal “carryalls” to eat under the trees and enjoy the dog’s romp in the fresh air and sun of the cool April day. Nathan was among them. Lenora always sent him off with a full lunch tin. Whether he partook of its thick sandwiches or not depended on whether Trevor invited him to join him for a luncheon business meeting. The generous slices of meat and bread did not go to waste. Benjy made thorough work of them along with his own fare, which he made for himself in the small kitchen of his apartment above the Waverlings’ carriage house. Nathan had never seen anyone enjoy food as much as Benjy. The calories bypassed his thin arms and legs and long, skinny feet and headed straight to his expansive stomach that had the appearance of a perfectly round ball under his snug waistcoat. His inordinate relish for food—gluttony, Benjy didn’t mind calling it—came from the tales he’d heard of family members starving to death during the potato famine in Ireland. “The power of the imagination is great, me boy,” he’d say to Nathan. “Me mind conjures up pictures of the poor souls who wasted away, and me feels it’s me duty to eat for them.”

  Played out, both dog and Irishman dropped next to Nathan by the cloth he’d spread on the new grass for their meal. The chance to expend his energy was a treat for Zak, which he enjoyed three days a week when he ac
companied Nathan and Trevor in the carriage to work and spent the day with his master in the plant and office. On the other days, the German shepherd had to stay home, restricted to the small fenced backyard of the town house when let out of doors. Those days, because Trevor sometimes required the use of the carriage beyond normal working hours, Nathan rode his horse to the plant. When he’d first come to live in the town house, he’d wondered about transportation. Was he to ride in the carriage with his father to Waverling Tools each day? Nathan thought that might be a strain for both of them. Apparently, Trevor Waverling had thought so, too. The day after Nathan returned to Dallas from the farm, his father had taken him to a horse auction.

  “Pick your choice, and I’ll make a bid,” he’d said. “You’ll need your own mount while you’re here.”

  While you’re here. Did that mean he was on probation? Well, so was Trevor Waverling, for that matter, Nathan decided. Not so his sister and grandmother. They passed muster in every way. He would miss them if he had to leave, as he missed his whole family back in Gainesville, but so far he’d not felt the urge to sling his knapsack over his shoulder and hit the road to California with Zak if things soured. The only drawback was Zak’s confinement, but his dog seemed happy enough to stay behind with the adoring attention of Rebecca and the dubious companionship of Scat, and nobody, not even Lenora, seemed to mind the hairs he shed, a relief to Nathan. They had been a constant complaint of his mother’s. Nathan didn’t have to worry that the long fibers of his dog’s coat on the carriage leather might end up on his father’s dark suits, either. Nathan trained him to occupy only one corner of the seat, and Benjy took care to wipe the spot clean on the days Zak rode with them to work.

  “You’ve got yourself a mannerly mutt there, Nathan,” his father said, commenting on Zak’s seemingly good sense to know not to shake himself in the coach.