Forsaking All Others

by Allison Pittman

  “To Kanesville.”

  “Then even sooner. My parents live about ten miles north of there.”

  “Then perhaps you’ll be there for lunch.”

  “If Papa’s up for it. If he’ll even see me. If he’s even alive.”

  “Now stop.” With his free hand, Colonel Brandon cupped my chin and tilted my face toward him. “You haven’t traveled all this way to let such doubts enter your head now. You will go home, and you will be welcomed with open arms. And I’d give anything to be a part of it.”

  “But duty calls here?”

  “It does.” From the look in his eyes, I couldn’t be sure if he was fulfilling a duty or embracing escape.

  I turned my face away from his touch and looked to the team of horses that stood so patiently in the cool morning.

  “Then I must thank you for bringing me this far. I’ll be grateful—” I turned to him—“really, forever, that God brought me to you.” I meant for those to be my parting words and attempted to take my hand from his arm, but he trapped it, covering it with his.

  “We have the same prayer.”

  “Oh, Colonel Brandon—”

  “Please, can’t you call me Charles?”

  “No,” I said, feeling my own heart break in his eyes.

  There was a great deal of bustling activity at the front of the house as Private Lambert arrived with the man I assumed to be our driver—another soldier with an even younger face. Still, Colonel Brandon pulled me closer, tilting his head toward mine.

  “Surely you know how I feel about you,” he said, stating a fact as plainly as any I knew.

  I responded with another. “I am a married woman.”

  “For how long?”

  “In my husband’s eyes, for eternity. In the eyes of the law, until I choose it to be otherwise. In the eyes of God, for now. Today, and that’s all I am promised.”

  He stepped away. “Forgive me. I must sound like some sort of vulture.”

  “Not at all.” I reached out, tugging at his sleeve. “I wish, sometimes, that it could be different. That we—that I—” But I stopped my speech the same way I had stopped this very thought so many times before. To wish otherwise was to deny the blessings God had given me so far—my daughters and the child I now carried. As kind and caring as Colonel Brandon was, I felt none of the stirring I’d felt the first time I saw Nathan Fox—or the last time, for that matter—and I would not allow myself to wonder if I stirred such thoughts in him.

  “May I write to you, then?” he asked. “While you are with your parents?”

  “Of course.”

  “And will you write to me? I’d like to know—” he fidgeted—“about the baby.”

  “I will.” In fact, I was already looking forward to the first letter.

  “Very well.” In an instant, he was once again the military commander, standing straight with nothing in his posture to indicate he had anything other than soldiering and strategy on his mind. Only his eyes betrayed a softness of spirit, and of all people on the earth, perhaps I alone would recognize that vulnerability. He took my hand for a final time and raised it to his lips, kissing first the back, then turning it over to kiss my palm. His moustache tickled, and the intimacy of the gesture made me want to flinch away, but I did not. Instead, rooted in place, I closed my eyes, concentrating on that place where we touched, and waiting—hoping, actually—for a racing of my pulse. But I felt nothing but safe and steady, even in the face of venturing off alone.

  Chapter 20

  The last time I crossed this river, it had been on a narrow raft of lashed-together logs piloted by a stranger while I stood wrapped in my future husband’s arms. The echo of my father’s voice—calling my name into the darkness—still rings in my ears. When I crossed it again, I stood on a four-hundred-square-foot barge, alongside a sleek carriage and a team of horses, accompanied—guarded—by a boy soldier from the United States Army. I cringe to think of the girl I was on that raft—reckless and thoughtless, leaving her home and family with no promise of a future other than what she wanted to believe. Years later, though, these same traits were bringing me home, and while my innocence might have been gone, my faith was stronger than it had ever been. God himself had been with me for every step in both directions.

  I watched the eastern shore of the Missouri River approach at a maddeningly slow pace. More than once, Private Lambert actually clutched my arm as I was leaning forward in some subconscious attempt to hasten the barge.

  “We were lucky to procure such an early crossing,” I said to Private Lambert when he’d steadied me to my feet for the last time.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he replied. By then he had his hands once again clasped behind his back, and he rocked on his heels.

  “Then a short drive along the coast.”

  “Map makes it look like about four hours.”

  “And I’ll be home.”

  “Yes, ma’am. You will.”

  And in the end, it was just that easy. To think, after eight years of love and loss, of heartache and hope, all that remained of my journey home was little more than a Sunday drive. By the time we disembarked on the eastern shore, the sun was fully up with the promise of a warm day. The soldier appointed to be our driver had orders to stay on the other shore, so it was just Private Lambert and me riding with the black leather top of the carriage folded back.

  “It’s all looking familiar,” I said, though I spoke more from wishful thinking. I was hardly well traveled as a child, and any landscape will change over the course of nearly a decade. How could one stand of trees seem more familiar than another after such an absence? Still, I rode leaning eagerly forward in my seat, waiting for some memory to merge with what I saw before my eyes.

  And then, not long after the sun had crept to its apex, a road.

  “Stop!”

  Private Lambert brought the horses—we drove with just two—to a halt. “Do we turn here, ma’am?”

  I stood, placing my hand on his bony shoulder to steady myself. “No. You see this road to the right? That leads into town.”

  “So, left, ma’am?”

  I shook my head. “Straight ahead. Follow this road, and we should head straight to my father’s farm.”

  Once I sat down, Private Lambert gave the horses a loose slap of the reins. I saw nothing of the path before us because I closed my eyes in prayer.

  Oh, Father, thank you for this journey. For your guiding hand and the forgiveness for my disobedience. Whatever happens now—should my father be ready to receive me—is already in your plan. May he be gracious to me, O Lord. Give me a humble heart and the right words. Restore us to each other, just as—

  “Is this it, ma’am?”

  I kept my eyes closed, knowing what I wished to see upon opening them. A low rock wall extending on either side of a narrow gateway. A wide yard behind it and a loose-stone pathway leading to the front door of a small house with a sloped roof.

  “Ma’am?”

  And it was there. All of it. The house appeared a little more weathered, but the rock wall had been built tenfold what it was when I’d left. There were the barns and a few cattle grazing in the field beyond the yard.

  Tears sprang to my eyes, and my breath came to me in short, shallow gasps.

  “I don’t know that I can get this rig through the gate. Is there another—?”

  “I want to walk,” I said, scrambling to gather myself.

  “Well, hold on, then.” In a flash, Private Lambert was out of the carriage and around to my side, ready to hand me down before I had even gained enough composure to stand. “Are you ready for this?”

  I looked down into his sweet face—such a good and honest boy. Then I realized: he was only three years younger than I and the same age Nathan had been when I agreed to be his wife. How could I not have known there were Private Lamberts in the world?

  “I’m ready.”

  He took my hand and, in the bumbling way we had somehow perfected, lifted me down from th
e carriage. I stood beside it, smoothing my dress and straightening my bonnet while he fetched my bag.

  “Shall I walk you to the door, ma’am?”

  “No.” One less thing to explain.

  “As you wish, but I’ll stay here until you are safely inside.”

  “Very well.” Before he could turn away, I reached up, placing both of my hands on his soft, shaven face and pulling it to me. His second cheek was still burning from my kiss on the first, when I said, “You’re a fine man, Private Lambert.”

  “And you are the . . . well, the bravest woman I know.”

  Smiling, I picked up my bag and walked through my father’s gate. Not ten steps in, the front door opened, and there she was.

  My mother.

  She was smaller than I remembered, and not only because of the distance between us or the few inches I’d grown since leaving. More than a matter of stature, her very presence seemed to have diminished. She held up her hand to shield her eyes, looking so very tired, like she’d been called out of the house at the dawn after a sleepless night rather than a warm spring afternoon. A shadow lurked beneath her skin; her hair had taken on the paleness of gray. She might have lived ten years for every day I’d been gone, but every minute of that time disappeared when her eyes met mine.

  I don’t know who started running first or who said the other’s name or when the satchel I’d lugged across the country became a forgotten mass in the stone path. Her arms were around me, and while I could not recall a time when the two of us had engaged in such an embrace, neither could I imagine what power could ever rip me away from this love.

  We wept and wept, our faces buried in each other’s shoulder, tears soaking each other’s collar, and when we pulled away to look into each other’s eyes, we remained separate for only a matter of seconds before falling once again into a clutching embrace.

  At some point I realized she was saying, “You’re home. . . . You’re home. . . . You’re home. . . .”

  And I said nothing, only accepting the subtle transference of power in which I became the comforter to this woman, for she had now fallen against me, and my body supported the weight of both my child and my mother. Never had I felt more complete. And yet, of course, there was one piece missing.

  “Papa?” I had no idea how to frame my question.

  Mama took my hand. Then, noticing my fingers, she gasped, then stepped back, seeing my pregnancy through a mother’s knowing eyes. “There’s so much—just so much—to tell you . . . and to ask. I don’t know where to start.”

  “Start with Papa,” I urged.

  I knew she didn’t want to. The shadow was back, and she looked for all the world like a creature seeking escape.

  “Please, Mama. I have so much to tell you—both of you.”

  She wiped a tear from her cheek and tugged my hand. “Come inside.”

  Nothing had changed. Not a thing. Same table, same three chairs, same ladder leading up to my old attic bedroom. I might just as well have been coming home from school rather than escaping from another life. The calico curtains might have been a bit more faded and the rag rug worn a bit thinner, but the afternoon sun illuminated the same dancing dust motes of my childhood.

  “Wait here,” Mama said.

  Instinctively I obeyed, though I did have a pang of conscience when I thought about poor Private Lambert at that gate. I took a peek out the door, however, and saw the back of the carriage as it rounded the corner. My satchel had found its way to the front porch.

  “Camilla?”

  I turned.

  “He’d like to see you.”

  I’d never been summoned into my father’s presence without a sense of fear. My earliest memories are of him looming over me, blocking out the sun or casting a shadow across the ceiling as I cowered at his feet. His booming chastisements still echo in my ears; my body still tenses when I recall the occasions—rare as they were—when I was punished with a switch. But it was an altogether different fear that gripped me now. An unfamiliar trepidation that turned Mama’s well-swept floor into swampland with each hesitant step.

  He was in their bedroom. It was, perhaps, the first I’d ever seen him in this room, as he’d been always up before the sun, and I’d often been lulled to sleep by the sound of his puttering on one project or another. This room lacked the light streaming into the rest of the house; heavy curtains—these were new—drawn across the window led me into perpetual night.

  “Arlen, dear?” Mama said. “She’s come home.”

  Had I not seen Mama kneel at the bedside, I might never have known where to find my father. The man who had once been this tower barely made a ripple under the familiar, faded quilt I’d known since childhood. His head—as bald as ever—and his shoulders were propped up against the headboard, but it seemed ages before my eyes adjusted to the light enough for me to make out the features of his face. Then I realized, my eyes were fine, as much as they could be in that shadowed room. It was his face, the very hue of his complexion, that played tricks with my eyes. When my mother told me he was sick, I’d expected to see him pale against the pillow, but I did not—could not—prepare myself for the man I saw.

  It appeared as if, during my absence, some force had come upon him to drain his body of all it ever held. The coarse, sun-touched skin that had stretched across his square jaw and thick neck now hung in parchmentlike folds. And the color—dark yellow, almost to the point of orange, given the darkness.

  “Pa—” The rest of the word caught in my throat. I swallowed it on my way to the other side of the bed, where I knelt, reaching for the hand that sat listless on the bed.

  At my touch he turned to look at me with heavy-lidded eyes. His lips moved, emitting some semblance of my name. Had Mama not announced me, he would not have known me, as his face held no hint of recognition.

  “Yes, Papa.” I brought his hand to my lips, trying not to recoil at the clamminess of the waxy skin.

  He said my name again, more clearly this time, and brought his other hand up to touch my face.

  “I’m here. I’m home.”

  “Tell him,” Mama said.

  I looked at her, questioning, across my father.

  “Tell him,” she repeated.

  Papa hadn’t taken his eyes off me. All those thoughts about what I would do, what I would say if I ever found myself in my father’s presence again balled up in my throat. I closed my eyes, seeing nothing but the man I used to know. The room was silent save for the sound of his labored breath, but I heard his voice, hearkening back to our past. Anger, yes—accusation, even—but beneath it all, love for me. Certainly, somewhere in his heart there had been love. Now more than ever, I needed to believe it because it seemed quite clear that I would never hear him speak the words.

  “I love you, Papa. And I know you love me.”

  “It’s not enough,” Mama said, “to give him peace.”

  I dug in. “I’m here now, hoping that you can forgive me for my disobedience. I was young, and I was stupid and just so, so . . . blind.”

  Papa turned his head, looking pleadingly at his wife.

  “No,” Mama said to me, but she gave me no direction.

  “And I’ve been happy, Papa. Since I left.” Tears now streamed freely down my face, and my lips moved against his hand. “I married a man who—who loves me very much. And I love him. We have two daughters—you have two granddaughters, Melissa and Lottie, and they are so, so beautiful. God has blessed me.”

  Here I stopped, overwhelmed with the effort of seeing only the goodness in my life. Papa was looking at me again, tears pooled in his eyes, and I felt his hand clutch at mine, and I knew.

  “I forgive you, Papa.”

  His grip went slack and he closed his eyes. I looked across at Mama and felt her approval. I suppose I could have listed his transgressions: his anger, his judgment, his coldhearted refusal to read my letters. But how could I have known the extent to which he had tormented himself, blamed himself since that night he hel
d his shotgun and watched his only daughter disappear?

  I said it again. “I forgive you,” and had I not been kneeling, I would have been thrown to the floor by the tide of grace that flowed between us. He could not speak, so I spoke for us both. “And I accept that you forgive me.”

  Minutes later, as I laid my head on the faded quilt next to him, I felt his hand in my hair—a gesture infused with more affection than any I’d received in all my years living under his roof. In my mind’s eye I saw Nathan and our daughters, how they were constantly in his arms, on his lap, how he lavished them with such open, exquisite love. He was their world and their light. Why did I ever think I could take them away from that and bring them here?

  “He wouldn’t let me read your letters,” Mama said, but I lifted my face and hushed her.

  “It’s forgiven,” I whispered. “And now I can tell you everything myself.”

  Chapter 21

  For the rest of that day and into the night, I relived my life from the moment I met Nathan Fox on the pathway to school until the moment I got word that Papa was ill. But for every tale I told, I spared them from another. Mama’s eyes filled with tears as I told her about becoming Nathan’s wife in a ceremony on the banks of the Platte River, but I mentioned nothing about my baptism in those same waters. I shared every step of the journey to Zion without mention of the graves we dug along the way. Mother cringed when I told her about the season of locusts, lifting her little feet off the floor as if she, too, felt them crunching beneath each step, and her eyes filled with wonder when I told her of the miracle of the gulls that came to eat them all.

  Papa dozed in and out, though I held his hand as I brought his granddaughters to life within that room. “Melissa’s birthday is this month. She’ll be seven. And my little Lottie is four and a half.” I struggled with my own tears as I recalled Melissa’s wide, questioning eyes and Lottie’s sweet, bubbling spirit. “Then we had a little boy.”

  Papa’s eyes lit up at that, and he moved his lips to speak.

  “He didn’t live very long. But he was beautiful, and we named him Arlen, after you, Papa.”