by Pamela Morsi
Gidry's arm slipped easily around her waist and he looked down into her eyes smiling warmly.
All of it, all of the past came crashing back on her in a wave of nausea. She could see herself as she once was, craving the merest crumbs of his attention, pathetic in her need for the least of his regard. She remembered with vivid clarity the hastily written note saying merely goodbye, as well as the public pity when his hasty departure was made known.
The band struck up a new tune, this one a lively polka. Gidry led her away from the noise and lights of the dance.
In the darkened shade of the cottonwood trees on the far side of the church, he took her hand into his own. He brought it up to his mouth and laid a gentle kiss at the pulse point on the inside of her wrist.
“I’m sure a more wily fellow than I would have dragged you into the shadows to vie for another sampling of your sweet lips," he said. "I want that as well, but first I want to say my piece. Shall I go down on one knee? Would that help? Miss Prudence, would you do me the great honor of being my wife, for better, worse, sickness and health, all of that?"
"Stop it!" she said. "Don't joke with me this way."
"I am not, I would not joke with you, Pru," he assured her. "I do want to marry you. I want to marry you as soon as it can be arranged. I want you to move into the house with Papa and me. I want to give the old man grandchildren, we still have time. Be my wife."
"You are eight years too late," she said.
"I know you must find it hard to forgive me for that," he said. "I find it hard to forgive myself."
He sighed heavily as he offered explanation.
"I ran away, Pru," he whispered to her softly. "I was young and scared, and I ran away. But not from you. It was never about you, about whether I thought you would make a fine wife for me or not. It was about me and my father, I suppose. Or maybe just about me. I was running wild. There wasn't enough liquor in the county to quench my thirst, nor enough loose women to ... well to suit me. My father believed that the burden of wife and family would slow me down if not tame me completely."
He rubbed the back of her hand against his cheek. It was smooth, very recently shaved clean, but there was still the hint of rough stubble.
"I knew he was right," Gidry said. "And I did not want to be changed. I was having too much fun. I was too carefree."
Those dark, expressive eyes that had once lured her into love, now watched her with such honest intent, his sincerity could not be denied.
"Pru, I am different now," he assured her. "I've got all that wildness, all that restlessness, I've got it out of my system now."
She stood beside him, feeling his warmth, his care; as inside her everything turned cold, brutally cold.
"Let me be sure I understand you," she said firmly, pulling her hand away from his grasp. "You didn't want a wife and family then because you were young and free. But now that you've got all that out of your system, well fortunately I'm still here and you can pick up just right where you left off."
His brow furrowed in worry.
"Well, no that's not exactly what I mean," he assured her. "I know that our lives have changed. I know that... that your heart has been or may be now engaged elsewhere. But, Pru, I can offer you so much ... I can offer you marriage. I..."
"Marriage to you? Apparently in your mind that is a great boon, I take it," she said sarcastically.
"No, I didn't say that," he insisted, obviously becoming irritated himself. "But it is better than the alternative."
"Oh, so you are one who believes that for a woman to marry, no matter how miserably, is better than living in spinsterhood?" she asked with great sarcasm.
"I'm not talking about spinsterhood," he said, raising his voice slightly at her challenging tone. "I'm talking about..." He lowered his voice secretively. "I'm talking about loving without marriage."
"A subject you know a good deal about apparently," she snapped.
His expression was somewhat worried. He obviously did not care for the direction of this discussion, but he continued his argument nonetheless.
"I do know about it, Pru," he said with great solemnity, his mind focusing on the memory of her signature on the back of a vulgar French postcard. "I figured it out the first day I got home. But I am not a guiltless fellow, I am far from being blameless enough to cast stones. I don't want to know any more than I already do. And I can assure you that under no circumstances will I ever offer one word of reproach. We will put it in the past and never look back again."
"Reproach?" She was astounded. "How on earth could you have cause to reproach me? Yes, you want to put it in the past. You want to put it all in the past and never look back," she said. "Well I, Mr. Chavis, live with the past every day of my life. You come back in here and say, oh excuse me, I made a mistake eight years ago but now we can be married, no harm done. Well, there was plenty of harm done. There was harm done to me, there was harm done to your father, there was harm done to this community. And there was harm done to an innocent who has no idea who or why it has happened."
"What are you talking about?"
"I'm talking about Mabel," she answered sharply.
"Who?"
"Mabel Merriman," she said.
Gidry's brow furrowed in question.
"She died last year, you know," Pru continued.
"Who?"
"Mabel... Mabel Kilroy, you knew her as Mabel Merriman."
Gidry continued to look at her blankly.
"Mabel Merriman," she said, emphatically and a bit louder than necessary, "the woman you ran away with."
His eyes lighted with recognition.
"Was her name Mabel?" he asked. "Seems like it was Minnie or Mattie. Something a little more doll like than Mabel."
"It was Mabel," Pru declared, horrified.
"Perhaps so."
"Certainly so!" Pru was red faced furious. "You ruin a woman's life, and you can't even remember her name?"
Gidry's expression was incredulous.
"I didn't ruin her life," he answered calmly. 'The day I met her she already knew more about life than most women ever learn."
"You did ruin her life," Pru said. "You ruined my life, you ruined your father's life, and now you're ruining ... you are despicable!"
"I don't know what you are talking about."
“You don't know," she said, sneering. "I always gave that to your credit. The fact that you didn't know was in your favor. But now I see it all quite clearly. You didn't know because you didn't care to find out. You just wanted to do what you're doing now. Put it in the past and never look back."
"What are you talking about?"
"I'm talking about why I would not, not if you were the last man on earth and I was commanded by the heavens, why I would never, ever consent to be your wife. And why I pity the woman who will be."
"Pru, for heaven's sake you are overwrought."
"And I have good reason to be so. You are ..."
She did not have an opportunity to finish her sentence. Albert Fenton came around the corner of the church and spotted them.
"I've found him," Fenton called out to someone in the distance.
"Gidry, come quick," he said to the man beside her.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Henrietta Pauling sat at the bedside of Peer Chavis. With all the windows of the house open on the warm night, the soft strains of music from her niece's Harvest Moon Dance carried into the room. The familiar melody captured her fancy and she began to sing it softly.
"Just a song at twilight, when the lights are low,
And the flick' ring shadows softly come and go.
Tho' the heart be weary, sad the day and long.
Still to us at twilight, comes love's old song.
Comes love's old sweet song."
She turned to smile at the old man in the bed. He was wide awake tonight and watching her. The glow from the lamp showed him perfectly. He was still as handsome to her as he had ever been. His thick black hair was now most
ly white. The prominence of his cheekbones and strength of his jaw were much evidenced in his gauntness, though somewhat disguised by the atrophied muscles on the left side of his face. His once strong physique was now withered and fragile. And his powerful booming voice was now stilled indefinitely.
But she had never loved him for his handsome face, his fine hewn body, or his impressive speech. She had loved him for the man that he was. And he was still that man as he lay among the tumbled bedclothes in the warm summer evening.
"I wish we were at that dance," she told him. "Prudence has had her mind completely full of it for a week. They've decorated the church grounds fit for a wedding and lit the place with enough Japanese lanterns to be seen on the horizon in San Antone."
She chuckled lightly.
"My little Prudence has not turned out to be any shy, wilting flower," Henrietta pointed out with pride. "When a fellow is foolish enough to tell her that she can't do something, then he best just get out of the way."
She raised a teasing eyebrow in accusation.
"I know what you're thinking," she told him. "You're thinking that she is a good deal like me. Well, you are right to some degree. She's sure got my dangerous streak. But I think she's got her mother's capacity for forgiveness. I sure hope that she does anyway."
She sighed thoughtfully, wishing, hoping the very best for her niece. She resolved not to dwell upon it. Pru and Gidry must sort through their lives as well as they could. Happiness not being an elusive quality to be found, but something integral to be lived.
"I do wish we were at that dance," she repeated. "I'd be done up in my very finest, sporting a brand new hat, of course. And you in your cutaway coat. I always thought that cutaway coat made you look a fine figure of a man."
She laughed lightly.
"We would sure surprise them if we showed up at the dance," she said. "I'd make you lead me through every set. We were always the fittest partners on the floor. The two of us would dance till dawn in front of the whole town and then come back up here to this room together."
Henrietta widened her eyes feigning shock at her own words.
"That would brew up a scandal worth seeing," she said. "And you know how I hate a scandal."
The teasing tone belied the truth.
"It was a ruse, you know," she said. "Well, not completely a ruse, I suppose. It is absolutely true that if you got divorced, the entire town would have been scandalized. And marrying me afterward would not have helped poor Pru's chances for a happy marriage.
"That's why you pressed Gidry so to wed her," she said. "You should not have done it. I guess we all see that now. He was far too young and completely unready. It was very selfish of you. But I understand why you did it.
"Once they were safely married, you and I could marry as shockingly as we saw fit. It wouldn't touch them. They could have acted as outraged as everybody else and no harm would have been done.
"It was a good plan, Peer," she said. "But we both should have known better. In life, things are never quite what we plan.
"The truth is, Peer, and I imagine you always suspected this, Pru was an excuse, rather than a reason. I didn't allow you to free yourself from her and marry me, because ... I wanted you to suffer."
She made her confession without any hint of apology.
"I wanted you to suffer as I had suffered," she said.
She leaned forward and adjusted his pillow, then gently caressed his brow.
"I was hurt to the core, wounded to my very being when you brought home your Alabama bride," she said. "I was crushed and disheartened at your inconstancy. And I was angry at the injustice of it all."
Henrietta's jaw tightened as she remembered.
"It all was so very unjust," she said. "You didn't love her, and she behaved unseemly. She had granted you the intimacies that, as a virtuous, innocent female, I would not."
Anger could be heard in Henrietta's tone for the first time.
"And what was her punishment for this wickedness?" she asked. "Did God cast her to demons? Was she publicly stoned? Forever ostracized from decent people? Oh, no, nothing like that."
Henrietta laughed without humor.
"For her lapse in morals she got your name. She got your child. Ultimately she got to live her chosen life among her friends and family upon your money."
She shook her head, incredulous.
"What did I get for my honor? My adherence to morality? What reward did I get?"
She answered her own question.
"I got loneliness."
Sounds of the distant music still drifted into the room as Henrietta swallowed her pain.
"It was all so wrong, so unfair," she said. "I had loved you since I was a girl, and I knew that you loved me in return. We would have been married if you had stayed, but you wanted to go. You didn't want to miss the war. It was to be a glorious adventure, and you wanted to go. I didn't try to hold you back. I loved you and wanted you to have whatever you wanted."
She shook her head, remembering
"What you also wanted was the transitory pleasure of a night of passion."
She turned to look at him once more, no longer feeling sadness or anger, only honesty.
"I wouldn't give that to you, but she did," Henrietta said. "You threw away everything that we were to each other, every dream we had shared together, every chance that we had for happiness, you threw it all away for a transitory pleasure. A few hours of unwedded bliss that ruined our lives. I couldn't forgive you for that, Peer. Truthfully, I didn't want to forgive you for that. I wanted you to suffer as I suffered."
She ran her hand along the length of his arm and down his long, narrow fingers.
"Foolish," she said finally. "I was so very, very foolish."
Henrietta looked up into his face.
"When I think of the time we wasted, Peer, the years we could have shared in this house, I am so angry. And at long last, I am more angry at myself than I am at you."
It was a hard won confession, but having made it, she felt much better, much stronger.
"We were unable to be together not only because you betrayed me, but also because I was unwilling to forgive you.
"I forgive you now. I forgive you, and I beg your forgiveness," she said. "My lingering grief has kept us apart for thirty years. But it is all gone now. I cannot regret my life or yours and anything that has gone on before. Only my bitterness do I regret, and it is gone as if it had never been."
The lines on his forehead relaxed as if a burden had been lifted from him and Henrietta realized, perhaps for the first time how much her own sorrow had hurt him.
"I am here beside you now," she said, bravely acknowledging that it was only the present that truly mattered. "At last I am where I belong. It is far too late for wedded bliss, moonlight dancing, or even transitory pleasure. But I am here and, as always, I do love you."
He gripped her hand. It was strong and firm and full of hope.
She gazed into his eyes. They were bright with tears.
A guttural sound came from his throat. He was trying to speak. His words indecipherable.
"I know," she assured him. 'Truly, I know."
She smoothed his cheek to comfort him.
"We have not had the lives that we had planned," she admitted. "We've not seen many of our childhood dreams come true. But we have had each other through it all. There was never a tear I shed that you didn't dry, not a worry that you didn't share, not a moment of joy that was not saved for the two of us alone. I have had in my life a man who truly loves me at my side. There are women all over the world who would envy me such good fortune."
Henrietta brushed his hair from his brow and leaned down to kiss him on the forehead. But instead, as she moved close, she lowered her mouth to his. She touched her lips to his own as she had not done in so very, very long a time. They were warm and soft, so familiar and beloved.
The tenderness of her kiss was as achingly wonderful as the tenderness of her heart.
&nbs
p; His eyes shone up at her. Young again, strong again, loving each other as they always had. Their hands were clasped together as they had often been as youngsters, blushing and giggling as they chased together down narrow streets and through blooming fields of cotton. The strains of sweet music still drifted softly through the window. Two people truly one if thought and sentiment played any part. Love at last wholly complete. For one instant.
Then the expression in his eyes changed. He gasped roughly.
"Peer?"
Her question a cry.
His whole body went rigid. Pain ripped through him. Tearing at his side, his throat, his life.
"What is it? What is it?"
Henrietta knew what it was.
His expression was momentarily one of abject pain, followed by fear, then resignation. He looked at her. All his heart, his love, his life in his eyes.
"Please, no," she begged. "Please, no."
It was as if she could almost hear the apology that he could not speak.
His pupils widened hugely as if to take in the sight of her one last time, then narrowed quickly to pinpoints and glazed over. He was gone.
He still held her hand in his own.
"Don't leave me," she pleaded.
But he could make no response.
Chapter Thirty-Three
The black armband around Gidry's sleeve felt like a tourniquet upon his heart. The little graveyard just west of town was called Cemetery Hill because of the slight rise of elevation that allowed full appreciation of a cool summer breeze and frigid blast of winter wind. The former was in evidence this day. But in his broken heart Gidry felt the grip of the latter. The area was crowded with people. He should have expected as much, the house had been filled to overflowing.
Peer Chavis had been laid out in a fine cherry wood coffin in his own front parlor. The people of Chavis County had turned out to respectfully say their final goodbyes to the town's leading citizen. Gidry had shaken hands, listened to well meant consolation, and said "thank you for coming" a dozen, a hundred, maybe a thousand times.
