by Pamela Morsi
Gidry chuckled lightly. "At least that’s what Papa told me when he had it put in. I must have been five or six at the time."
"It was done by the same workmen who did the window at church, wasn't it?"
Gidry nodded. Papa contracted the glaziers and had liked their work on the Good Shepherd so well, he asked them to come to our house to do a flower garden in spring bloom."
"Where does Aunt Hen fit in?" Pru asked.
He gazed at the window, smiling as if recalling the memory. "Papa told me that Aunt Hen shared her garden with us. We could view it all day. But at night her garden was as dark as the rest of the world. So we were putting a garden in a window and that with the light shining behind it, we could share it with Aunt Hen all the night long."
Pru felt a wave of tenderness for Gidry as he told the story. She mentally resisted the emotion, determined to keep her feelings neutral. Not an easy task seated beside his handsome, smiling visage, within sight of his long legs, muscled and male, stretched out before him beneath tight fitting denim trousers. Could any woman remain indifferent to that?
"I hadn't thought about that in years," he said, shaking his head. "I think I'd forgotten it completely until just now."
"It seems a rather strange gift for a neighbor," Pru said. 'The sight from a window."
Gidry shrugged in agreement. "Maybe Papa just made the story up. Parents have been known to do that from time to time," he said. "They make up a simple story when the true one is too hard to explain."
"It's hard to imagine your father, serious and venerable Peer Chavis, making up silly stories for his son," she said.
"Then you don't know Papa all that well," he told her. "He loves tall tales. I sit at night and entertain him with the most outrageous cowboy lies you've ever heard. He just loves it."
Pru nodded slowly, thoughtfully. "It is strange that I've known him so long and yet I don't really know him that much at all. I feel the same way about Aunt Hen sometimes."
"Really?" Gidry shook his head. "Maybe it’s because they lived so much of their lives without us. So much happened to them before we were ever born, so much we will never know."
"Perhaps you are right," Pru agreed. "The other day Aunt Hen was talking about the war and the choices she made in her life. I'd never thought of the war as having affected her at all."
"I know it affected my father," Gidry said. "He was just past twenty when he'd run off to join the Confederacy. Papa always felt that the war stole away his youth, his family, and his fortune. It must have been a terrible time."
"We have been so lucky to grow up in peaceful times," Pru said.
He nodded. "As long as those nasty, scrapping Europeans are confined to their own shores, it appears that for the western hemisphere, at least, permanent peace is almost guaranteed."
"But for Aunt Hen and your father," Pru said, "it was very different. Apparently the entire country was being torn apart, brothers fighting brothers, and young men left their homes and families to defend the causes they'd hardly heard of and could only begin to understand."
"The Chavis family supported the South in principle," Gidry told her. "But at rather a bit of distance, I think. Since the Republic of Texas had joined the Union voluntarily and as an autonomous government, Texas retained the right to leave that union at will. So the fight for Southern secession was really not our fight."
"What about slavery?" she asked.
Gidry shook his head sorrowfully. "What a thing for a man to give his life defending."
Pru agreed.
"Papa could have, probably should have, stayed home and attended to his family's business," Gidry said. "Sometimes I wonder why he didn't. Do you think he was a hot tempered, hardheaded young adventurer like me?" His grin was mesmerizing.
"I suppose it’s possible," she said. 'They do say the apple doesn't fall far from the tree."
"I suspect it would have been hard for me to be content to grow cotton when there were battles to be won and glory to be achieved," he said more seriously.
"He certainly looked glorious," Pru said. "I've seen the photograph downstairs, with him in his dress uniform of gray, a cockade in his hat and a saber at his side."
Gidry laughed. "He certainly did look rakish and devil-may-care," he agreed. 'The war must have changed him. Or maybe it was his marriage. He arrived back in Chavistown with his new bride and a new baby on the way, and there was no one at the station to meet him. Cholera had killed his whole family. He said once that vagrants had taken his house and weeds had taken his cotton."
"It must have been awful for him," Pru said.
"He just began again, clawing a life for himself and his own from the dirt that had been his family's for years. He succeeded, but I guess it wasn't soon enough. Mama was unused to hardship, I suppose, or simply lonesome for things familiar. She went home for a visit and never came back."
It was not easy to lose the woman who gave birth to you. Pru knew that from her own experience. No amount of caring people around you could ever truly make up for it. Their shared motherlessness had been
one of the first ties to bind their friendship.
"I know you missed her," Pru said finally in a whisper.
Gidry thought about it a moment before he answered. "I missed not having a mother," he said. 'That couldn't be helped. But Papa tried his best, and I had Aunt Hen and I had you."
"Me?"
Pru was startled to be included as if she were one of his parents.
"Well... yes, of course . .. you were there and you loved me. I... I needed someone to love me."
Pru felt her face flush with color and her anger rise to the surface just as rapidly. "I had a girlish infatuation for you," she told him firmly.
"I meant that you loved me as a friend," Gidry assured her quickly. "You loved me as a friend. And I loved you. I loved you the same way."
Abruptly she rose to her feet.
"Is that why you asked me to marry you? Because you loved me as a friend?" she asked. Her voice had risen perceptibly.
"I... I knew it was what you wanted," he answered. "It was what you wanted. It was what my father wanted. It... it just wasn't what I wanted."
"And as we all know," Pru snapped furiously. "Gidry Chavis always gets what he wants."
"Pru..."
"We were friends, you say," she countered. "Yes, we were friends. As much friends as two people could be when one of them wore her heart on her sleeve for all the world to see."
“You were my good friend," Gidry told her. "My childhood sweetheart. And you would have made a good wife to me. I know that, Pru. I'm willing to admit that. But I had grandiose visions and I was grownup. Twenty-one years old, and you seemed merely a girl."
"I was the girl that you had promised to marry," she pointed out.
"Pru, I have nothing to say for my behavior except that I am sorry," he told her. "I have tried to apologize ..."
"I don't want your apologies!" she shouted.
'Then what do you want?" he asked her.
She wasn't given a chance to reply as Aunt Hen called out to them from the gate.
"What on earth is all the shouting about?"
Without another word, Pru fled to the house, through the back door, and into the kitchen.
Chapter Thirteen
"The truth is I think I can remember enough about cotton ginning to keep the town on the right track," Gidry told Peer Chavis as he paced the narrow floorboards at the foot of his father's bed. "But I don't know one thing about crime or thieves or how to make a town safe from burglary."
Gidry was still disconcerted from his visit with Prudence. He knew that he'd not done as well as he'd hoped. He knew their relationship could never be what it once was. Eight years ago she had been in love with him. Of course, she no longer felt that. But she had been a dear friend and happy confidante as well as his sweetheart. As a young man he had shared every thought and dream with her. He wanted it to be that way once more. To be able to talk to her about
what he was thinking, what he was planning.
Clearly, Miss Belmont was not interested in anything that he had to say. She wanted to have a merely casual acquaintance. As casual as could be had in a town of five thousand.
Unable to share his thoughts with her, he had chosen to share them with his father.
"I don't think hiring a lawman with a fancy reputation would quite suit Chavistown," he continued. "Yet I can't imagine what more we can do on our own."
He stopped pacing long enough to put his hands in his pockets and stare out the window. There had to be an answer somewhere. He tried to think about what he knew.
"On the trail drive we would take watches at night," he said. "While some slept, others would ride the perimeter and keep an eye on the herd. There was always danger of wolves or coyotes getting a calf, rustlers stealing from us, or bad weather spooking the cattle. But a couple of men could alert us all."
His brow furrowed thoughtfully as he turned to his father.
"We could put volunteers on the watch," he said. "Have someone on every street to do citizens' patrol."
Gidry shrugged. "Of course a smart criminal would just wait until the watchman had passed and then do his thieving."
He shook his head. "I don't know how smart these fellows are. Why in the blazing devil would somebody rob a livery stable and not take horses? Who would steal a dead man's wooden leg or an old photogram of somebody's relative?"
Gidry stood thoughtful, curious, lost in speculation for a long moment. Then as if recalling where he was, he glanced at his father once more. The old man lay, as he always did, thin and pale, his sharp eyes watching his son.
"I don't know why I'm boring you with this," Gidry told him. "If you ever knew anything about fighting crime, you undoubtedly forgot about it during the last forty crime-free years in Chavistown."
He dragged a chair up next to his father's bed and seated himself, crossing one booted foot over his knee. His father's hand moved forward on the bedcovers and Gidry spontaneously clasped it in his own. It was an old hand, withered by age and use. It was the hand that had cuddled him close as a baby. It was also the hand that had struck him on the night he'd left home. Gidry grasped it tightly as if willing his own strength to flow into his father.
He looked up into the old man's eyes, so much like his own.
You're going to get better. He told the old man silently. You are going to walk again and talk again and be my father as you once were again.
More time. I wish we had more time.
The words were a prayer on Gidry's heart. When he actually spoke his tone was lighter, deliberately causal.
"No, Papa, I bet you can't tell me a thing about fighting crime in Chavistown. If you want to learn about the ways of lawless badmen," he said in the understated dramatic tone that he used for storytelling, "you need to take a tour of the Pecos."
His father's eyes brightened immediately, recognizing the tone as the one Gidry used for his tall tales.
"An old cowboy I met, who swears he was there at the time, related to me a story of the James boys. You've heard of the James boys of Missouri? As wild and wicked a gang of thieves as ever existed. This is a true accounting of a robbery they made, the full story of which is rarely heard. Rarely heard because it was not a tale that Jesse and Frank would want placed in their legend. And rarely heard 'cause the railroad men are not shown in the light of great intelligence themselves. You see on this night, this rainy moonless, west Texas night, the James boys made the mistake of robbing the same train twice."
As Gidry repeated the timeworn piece of Wild West fiction, he watched his father's face. In the very short time since his son had been back in town it was clear that Peer had grown attentive and anxious for the stories that Gidry would tell. It was almost as if the old man wanted to experience what his son had experienced, to know for himself the unrelenting boredom of the cattle trail. To escape from the confines of his sickbed and live the wild and colorful cowboy lies related around the campfire.
Gidry wanted to escape as well. He wanted to escape the truth about himself and about what he had done to Prudence Belmont.
He had tried to apologize, to explain, to make her understand. But he truly didn't know how and was not even certain that he should.
He had promised to make Pru his wife. He had wanted to make her his wife. Of all the upright, decent women in the world, there was none other that he'd rather have to share his life. But then he had discovered that not all women were upright and decent. And not all of them expected an offer of marriage.
It was natural that a young fellow, soon to marry, should sow his share of wild oats. If he was to settle upon one woman for life, at least he should have in mind what some other women were like. And how could a man teach his wife the facts of life when he himself had little knowledge of them? The nature of these discussions with other men his own age had led him to seek out sexual experiences with women whose reputations were no better than they should be.
His father had discovered his unsavory liaisons and had ordered that they cease. Prudence was a clean, decent girl. Gidry's behavior, unchecked, would likely bring her heartbreak, if not disease.
But it was not so easy. Once having tasted forbidden fruit, visiting with sweet, innocent Pru had become increasingly tedious. She had been his best friend and his betrothed. But he certainly could not share with her his new knowledge. It had been unthinkable back then. It was unmentionable even now.
He'd gone to her that night, that last night of their engagement, in the privacy of the flower garden. She had accepted his advances with stoic assent. She sighed beneath his callous caress as if his touch was true tenderness. And she had sparked to a sensuous passion as surprisingly powerful as his own. She'd made no protest when he dared beyond decency to hold her ample young breasts in his hands. When he'd flicked his tongue across one thickened raised nipple, she'd gasped in shock, but she hadn't jerked away from him.
Gidry had kissed her and caressed her and wanted her that night. But he hadn't wanted the commitment that taking her innocence would have meant. He had wanted to be young and careless and foolish. He had wanted to keep company with flashy females dressed in bright red spangles.
So he had spurned the only woman who'd ever loved him. Then he'd left a note. He couldn't recall what he had said, but it spoke nothing of the guilt he felt or the injustice of what he'd done. He'd dismissed her feelings as if they had no value. And he had walked away.
There is no one quite as difficult to deal with as the person whom one has genuinely wronged. And he had genuinely wronged Prudence Belmont.
Gidry ended the Wild West story he was telling his father with the chagrin of the James boys and a fine joke on the railroad conductor. Peer Chavis settled more contently into his pillow and lowered his eyelids, allowing sleep to overtake him.
Gidry put out the lamp at his father's bedside and sat in the darkness, gazing at the man's face in the moonlight. He was thinking, wondering, regretting.
He stared down into the dark, silent garden where he had thrown away her love as worthless. He hated the young man who had done that to his Pru. He hated the man that he once had been. He could not even console himself that he had honorably spared her deflowering. If he had taken her virginity, then he would have married her. He was not, nor ever had been, as much a cad as that.
He'd run straight from her arms to the noise and smoke of the Red Slipper. There he’d drunk a jug of corn liquor before facing his father. The girl in the red-spangled dress was heading south on the night train to San Antone.
"Save me a seat," he'd said, slapping her playfully on the backside. "My very favorite seat."
After eight years Gidry still felt shame at his behavior. Much shame and stupidity as well. His interest in the red-spangled dress had faded by the weekend. And he'd learned all too quickly that there were a dozen women just like her in every Texas town.
In eight long years he had yet to meet another woman like Prudence Belm
ont.
His attention was captured by a trickle of light seeping out around the old warped doorway to Aunt Hen's milk shed.
Gidry raised an eyebrow. Was she out there again tonight?
Who was the man? And why did he meet her in secret?
Because he was a married man, seemed the most likely answer. It would only be a married man who would sneak to her place at night and wait in a milk shed. An old milk shed would not be Gidry's idea of a romantic hideaway.
A single man would have courted her openly. He would have walked her to church, sat upon her porch, taken her for a discreet promenade in the park on Saturday. A single man would have most likely married her before expecting to sample her favors.
No, most likely it was a married man. A married man bored with his middle-aged wife and sick of the sound of his squabbling youngsters. He might find Pru's more mature years a great preference over the simpering expectations of a young miss. And Gidry could well imagine that the fellow had been pleasantly surprised at the sober spinster's very passionate nature. A married man could not be held to soft words or promises. A woman went into such a liaison knowing full well that the alliance had no future. Divorce might be legal in Texas, but upstanding people did not engage in it. Even his own parents, separated for twenty-five years, had to his knowledge never given a serious thought to severing their vows permanently.
It was a married man who was secretly meeting Prudence. And if the two were caught, the man's wife might never quite forgive him, but the community would. It was always the woman who was held completely to blame. Prudence had no male relatives. She had no father or brothers to protect her from worthless adulterers who would prey upon her lovestruck nature. She had no one to exact revenge if the illicit romance became the whisper of scandalmongers.
Gidry watched and watched. He watched for what seemed a lifetime. He squared his jaw and slapped a clenched fist into his palm. If he heard one bragging whisper from her no-account lover, he'd personally break the man's neck.
The door to the milk shed opened. Prudence held the lantern in her grasp and he could see her clearly in the doorway. Even at this distance, he could see that she was neatly dressed with every hair in place.
