If Wishes Were Kisses: Six Beloved Americana Romances, a Collection (Small Town Swains)

by Pamela Morsi

  In all her imaginings of seeing him again, and she had imagined it more times than she cared to admit, she had always been poised, dignified, well spoken, even witty. She would be standing tall in her gray worsted jacket with the wide pompadour sleeves adding to her presence, her best mignon hat perched upon her perfectly dressed hair. She would titter ever so drolly about their past relationship, denigrating with fine humor the quickly passing passion she had conceived for a gentleman so clearly unsuited to her self assured and independent nature.

  It was to be a sharp contrast to the calf-eyed young girl who had worn her heart on her sleeve from the moment she met him. Who had so openly declared her undying love for him.

  Pru stepped in through the side entrance door to find Mrs. Butts, the hired nurse for Mr. Chavis, sitting comfortably at the kitchen table enjoying a cup of tea.

  The huge, overbearing woman glanced up, perusing Pru's costume with distaste.

  "Don't bring the whole garden in with you," the nurse scolded.

  Prudence gave the woman a frosty glance. She never allowed herself to be talked down to by anyone. Experience had taught her that position, once forfeited, was hard to regain.

  "Is my Aunt Hen upstairs?" she asked loftily.

  The nurse's tone changed to deference immediately.

  "Oh yes, yes, ma'am. She's just giving me a little break from time to time. Your aunt is such a good woman to help."

  Pru nodded, although in truth she knew that it was the nurse who occasionally helped Aunt Hen and not at all the other way around. Since the day Peer Chavis fell ill, Henrietta Pauling had been by his side nearly night and day. It was only her aunt's longstanding reputation that kept the situation from being a scandal. Unmarried women, even ones nearing fifty, did not take on the care of men other than a father or a brother. No neighbor did such a thing, no matter how many years one had lived next door. And certainly a maiden lady would never care for a married man. It simply was not done.

  That unalterable fact was seemingly lost upon Aunt Hen however.

  "I will speak to her a moment, if you please," Prudence told the nurse in a tone that precluded the suggestion of a request.

  'Take your time, ma'am, all the time you want," the nurse assured her.

  Without further reply, Prudence hurried through the doorway to the main hall and up the wide stairway. Her thoughts were not upon the nurse, Aunt Hen, or Peer Chavis. As ever when he was within a reasonable distance, Pru thought about Gidry. It had always been that way, and she berated herself with every step that it still was.

  She should have spoken up more cleverly. She should have been less flustered at seeing him. She could have uttered a glibly pointed witticism. Or offered only a stern and disapproving gaze.

  Glancing down at her dress once more, she shook her head. She should have said anything or been anything other than a dirty ragamuffin in sad gown who'd had offers.

  At the landing she paused at the carved mahogany seat that perched beneath the grand stained glass window. The bright green vines and purple grapes obscured her view, but from the beveled edges of the window she could see him still standing in her garden. Her breath caught in her throat. She would never have believed that he could be more attractive than he had been eight years ago. Then his flirty manners, jet black hair, and dark, flashing eyes had set every young female heart aflutter, including her own. Today he was larger, more muscular, sun-browned and serious. The cowboy garb suited him. It made the beauty of his features more rugged and masculine.

  Deliberately Prudence breathed again; her heart was hammering.

  "No, not again," she vowed to herself quietly.

  It had been pitiful how she'd loved him, yearned for him, longed for him, so hopelessly at nineteen. Allowing herself those feeling again now at twenty seven would be pathetic and hideous. She would not, could not let that happen. Hadn't she humiliated herself enough?

  I certainly had offers!

  She nearly groaned aloud. Why had she allowed such words to come out of her mouth?

  Shaking her head, Pru turned and hurried up the stairs and along the hallway to the front bedroom. With a little tap of announcement she caught her aunt’s attention and brought her into the smaller bedroom.

  Her Aunt looked at her curiously.

  "Gidry is down in the garden," she whispered.

  Aunt Hen nodded. "I saw him a few minutes ago standing in the street just looking at the house, just looking at it as if it were the most beautiful sight he'd ever beheld." The older woman tutted unhappily. "It has been a long exile for him."

  Prudence didn't comment. To her thinking, Gidry could have come home years ago if he'd been willing to swallow his pride. And he should have come home to take up his responsibilities. Once he'd run off with that saloon gal, no one would have ever expected him to marry Pru. But at least he should have…he should could have returned to Chavistown when she had.

  "So he spoke to you," Aunt Hen said. "Well, it’s good to get that over with, I suppose."

  "He thought I was you when he approached me in the garden," she said. "In my work clothes and this big old sunbonnet he couldn't tell us apart."

  Aunt Hen laughed lightly. "That must have been quite a moment for the both of you then."

  Pru didn't find it all that humorous.

  "So what did he say?" Aunt Hen asked. "I'm sure you expected an apology."

  "An apology?" Prudence was genuinely surprised. She had not expected any such thing. Although it was very much like her to insist on the obligations of refined manners. But an apology for not loving her? Somehow that could never be enough.

  "You mean he didn't say anything about you both being too young to know what you wanted?" Aunt Hen suggested. "Or how often he'd regretted his hasty departure, not even taking proper leave of you."

  "No, no we didn't talk about it at all," she said.

  'Just both pretending that nothing happened," Aunt Hen said, shaking her head in disapproval.

  "Nothing did happen," Pru insisted. "We were once engaged, and he broke it off. That was the sum of the incident entirely."

  "Yes," her aunt said nodding. "So I have heard you say. It’s not all that strange that I remember it a bit differently, I suppose."

  Pru felt it necessary to defend herself, defend her actions when seeing him again.

  "That’s all water under the bridge," she insisted. "My youthful infatuation for Gidry Chavis has long since joined paper dolls and ball-and-jacks as remnants of my childhood."

  "Hmmm," was Aunt Hen's only reply. She nodded but somehow still looked skeptical.

  "Gidry is here because he thinks his father needs him," Pru said. "But he won't stay under this roof unless you think that's what his father wishes."

  "Is that why he didn't come straight up to the front door?" Aunt Hen asked.

  "He is apparently unsure of his welcome."

  The older woman nodded and headed toward the larger bedroom and the man lying in the bed. She walked to his side and began gently to stroke the creases upon his forehead.

  "Your son is home, Peer," she said. "You told the boy not to come into the house, and he hasn't."

  The man's dark eyes, sunk deep in his head, looked up at her expressively. He appeared momentarily stunned and then irritated. He raised his right arm slightly as if grasping for something. Aunt Hen took his hand.

  "He's downstairs in my garden, but he won't come up unless you invite him back into your house." A strange guttural noise came out of the old man's throat. It could not be called language or even gibberish. It was sound merely. Peer Chavis retained the ability to make sound, but the effort required to do so exhausted him completely.

  Aunt Hen patted his hand and urged him to quiet. She looked at him a long moment before she spoke again.

  "It's been a long parting," she told the old man. "Harsh words on both sides no doubt. But that doesn't matter anymore, does it? One thing about losing your health, you find out what really matters."

  The old
man swallowed visibly, a trail of tears beginning to seep out of both eyes, clouding his vision as he tried to form the words.

  "Tell Gidry to come on up," Aunt Hen told Pru, swiping the wetness from his cheeks with her thumb. "Tell him that his father wants to see him."

  Chapter Five

  Home was a paltry and inadequate word Gidry decided, as he silently walked through the rooms of his childhood. It was all so familiar, and yet he felt so removed from it. These walls, the stairs, the banister, the doorway, were as known to him as the back of his own hand. And yet they were not as he had remembered them. Because he was not as he remembered himself.

  But if he were changed, his father was much more so. The afternoon sun slanted in from the south windows, illuminating the massive canopy shrouded sickbed of Peer Chavis. The strong, determined, opinionated man who for twenty-one years had ruled his life and to whom Gidry had railed against lay thin and gaunt and pale upon the bedsheets.

  "Papa, I'm home," he said quietly.

  The old man gazed up at him in silence.

  Gidry turned to Aunt Hen, standing on the far side of the bed.

  "Can he hear me?" he asked her.

  She nodded. "Long as you don't whisper," she answered.

  "It's Gidry, Papa," he repeated. "I'm home."

  The old man's dark eyes were neither cloudy or vacant. He was there. Gidry saw at once that his father's mind was still sharp. Peer recognized his son. Whether he was pleased about it was not readily discernible.

  He swallowed determinedly. He'd been given this opportunity, and he was not going to let it pass by.

  "I'm home, Papa," Gidry said. "I'm home to say I'm sorry. I'm sorry about everything."

  There was a long silence as he stared at the broken old man on the bed before him, waiting.

  "He can't answer you," Aunt Hen said quietly. "He hasn't been able to make a word understood since the day he collapsed at the gin."

  "Does the doctor say if he'll be able to speak again?"

  "Doc says with apoplexy if they are not talking by the third day, they never will."

  Gidry was startled. Surely it could not be true. He needed to talk with this man who shared his heritage as well as his temper. There was so much he needed to say, so much that he needed to ask. He looked back at the pale version of the vital father he had known once more. The old man's countenance was grim and accepting.

  "He can't move anything on his left side," Aunt Hen explained. "He can't count on words or gestures to express his feelings anymore, so he has to rely upon his eyes."

  Gidry felt the sting of tears in his own, but he blinked them back.

  'There was so much that I wanted to say," he told her.

  "You can say whatever you want," she replied. "He understands every word. I talk to him all day. Just because he can't reply doesn't mean he's not enjoying the conversation."

  She smiled down at the old man and gently stroked his forehead. "When he gets tired of listening, he'll just doze on off. I swear, it's about the rudest thing I ever saw."

  Her teasing eased the tension of the moment, and Gidry was actually able to smile.

  "I'll leave you two to make your peace and catch up on the latest news," she said. "I'll be down in the kitchen sorting through the dirty linens if you need me. The laundress comes tomorrow."

  Gidry nodded.

  "What if he ... ?"

  "I'll be right downstairs," Aunt Hen said. "If you need me, just give a holler."

  "Thank you, Aunt Hen," he said.

  The old woman smiled at him.

  "Welcome home, Gidry," she said as she closed the door soundlessly behind her.

  Gidry followed his father's eyes as he watched her go. The old man obviously needed Aunt Hen as a buffer as much as he did himself.

  "Aunt Hen's a fine old gal," Gidry said. "When I was a boy I used to wish that you'd married her."

  The expression on his father's face was a strangely curious one.

  Gidry shrugged.

  "I was a kid. I pretended that she was my real mother and that the woman from Alabama in the photograph was just a made up story."

  Gidry chuckled lightly. "I suppose I was thinking more of what I'd want in a mother than what you'd want in a wife," he explained. "After meeting Mama, it seems pretty clear that Aunt Hen just would not have been your type. And she's always been perfectly content with her spinster status. A man can't really change a thing like that."

  The silence seemed to speak for itself.

  "There are a lot of things that just can't be changed," Gidry admitted quietly. "I wish I could have been a better son to you. I wish we had not parted with such rancor. But I learned a lot, Papa. I learned a lot on my own. I also discovered the truth in so much that you taught me."

  The words were out, and Gidry didn't regret them. He was alone with his father. Alone, in the silence of the dimly lit sickroom. There was so much that he wanted to say. So much that he wanted to account for. But he had no idea where to begin.

  He'd said he was sorry, but it seemed so paltry against what he'd done. At that moment he realized with perfect clarity the enormity of his crime. He had scandalized a town. He had hurt Prudence Belmont. But even more than those things, he had stolen the years of his father and himself together. The years when they might have been men of mutual respect. The years when he might have acquired the wisdom that the old man had learned alone. As cruelly and as thoughtlessly as any robber he had stolen those things. Both from his father and from himself.

  "I'm sorry," Gidry said again. "I've wasted so much time."

  He stood unsure and uncomfortable. "I suppose Aunt Hen would say, 'No use fretting about the past. Best to make the best of what you have.' Aunt Hen always knows what to say to us. Even when neither of us knew what to say to each other."

  Gidry pulled a chair up next to the bed.

  "I want to sit here with you, Papa," he said. "I'm sorry you can't talk to me, but I'd be pleased just to look at you again."

  Gidry did not immediately avail himself of the chair. It seemed almost disrespectful to sit in his father's presence without the old man's leave to do so. Silently he marveled at his own thoughts. His father had never been such a stickler for form. And Gidry had never been the type of son who adhered to such deference.

  "I... I believe I'll stand," he said simply. He couldn't truly offer an explanation, so he didn't bother to do so.

  He had no idea what he would say to his father. A one sided conversation with a man he hadn't seen in eight years would be difficult for anyone. But when the man was a father he now respected but had long ago reviled, it was an even more complicated task.

  Gidry looked down into the face of the broken man in the bed.

  "I should never have stayed away so long," he said.

  His father's fine blue eyes gazed at him for long moments as if studying the familiarity of his son and assessing the changes in him. He knew he looked different. Hard times and heartache don't just age a person, they alter him, too. Gidry was much altered. But a quick glance in a mirror revealed him more like his father with each passing day.

  Could his father see that? Did he recognize himself in his son? Gidry felt uncomfortable within the scrutiny, but he steeled himself against stepping away. He owed his father so much, surely he could stand for inspection. He did avert his eyes, which had become inexplicably moist.

  Peer reached forward and took the arm of Gidry's coat. He was almost smiling as he fingered the long leather fringes along the seam.

  'They wave with every move and the slightest breeze," he explained to his father. "It keeps the flies off me."

  The old man continued to look at him.

  "Flies are hell on earth among a cattle herd," Gidry said, and then added quietly, "I'm a cowboy, Papa. I've been making my living as a cowboy."

  That seemed to amuse his father. Gidry shouldn't have been surprised, he realized. Cowboys, lonely and lonesome on the range, had made a tradition of telling stories around t
he campfire to amuse themselves. Many stories were based on actual events and true happenings on the range. But as often as not they were wild-eyed lies told straight-faced to the deception of none and the amusement of all.

  The cowboys had gotten so good at tall tales, that Eastern dandies had taken up the idea and had begun to write stories of their own based on tales told around the campfire. The dime novels of his grandfather's day were long past, still the cowboy stories were told in pulp magazines and comic strips. People found them endlessly entertaining. And Gidry knew himself to be better at storytelling than most.

  "Yes, I'm a cowboy," Gidry said. "I can throw a rope on a steer at full gallop and turn a herd into the wind in the middle of a snowstorm." He chuckled lightly and spoke more softly, as if betraying a confidence. "And I've had days to sit so long in the saddle that a chair could not be found to conform to my backside."

  There was telling laughter in his father's eyes.

  Moving closer to the old man's side, Gidry gave a wide grin. "Did you ever hear how the bald face maverick saved the Republic of Texas?"

  The old man's eyes gleamed with delight and interest as Gidry launched into his story.

  It was a pleasant diversion, entertaining his father with trail talk and cowboy lore. It had lightened those first moments between them and made their reunion easier to bear.

  Gidry had come back to see his father, to help out until the old man was back on his feet, and to get the cotton ginned. He saw now, as he gazed down into his father's now sleeping countenance that he would

  not be returning to ranch life. Not soon. Perhaps not ever.

  Walking to the window, Gidry stared out into the darkness. How many nights from how many lonely distant places had he imagined this view? Perhaps a thousand would not be an overstatement. Chavistown was his home, his heritage, his people. How easily he had cast it away. How difficult it was to recapture.

  Peer Chavis needed him. So Gidry was back. He was back, and would run the business and more than likely the town as well as his father always had. From the moment he'd been mustered out of the Army of the Confederacy, when Peer had been younger than Gidry was now, his father had managed to run everything. He managed to build a community from the ashes of war. With such an example, how could a man fail?