Читать книгу Lawman - Laurie Grant - Страница 9

Brazos County, Texas

1868

“Oh, son, I still can’t believe you’re here, and alive,” Sarah Devlin said. Her voice was choked with tears, but her face was beaming as she stared across the table at him.

His brother Sam, seeing that Cal was in the midst of chewing some of their mother’s famous pecan pie, said, “Aw, Ma, Cal sent me home ahead of him just so you could get used to the idea.” Sam grinned in delight, for it had been he who had found Cal, whom they’d all thought dead, when he’d herded some cattle north to Abilene on a trail drive. Sam had his arm around Mercy, his new bride, whom he’d also found in Abilene and brought home with him to Texas.

“Sorry I’m not the same beautiful boy you sent away, Ma,” Cal said with self-deprecating humor, referring to the black patch that now covered his sightless right eye, the two scars that radiated over his cheek from beneath the patch and the black hair that was now mixed with silver. The middle child of the Devlin brood, he was only four years older than Sam, but he looked ten years older.

“You’re still a beautiful sight to me, Caleb Travis Devlin,” his mother replied stoutly, her gaze still adoring. “I’d gotten so used to thinking of you as dead, you could have come back with both eyes patched and no arms and legs and I’d still think you were a beautiful sight.”

“That’s all we need on this place—one more cripple.” Garrick’s sour voice came from the far end of the table.

Cal winced inwardly as he glanced at his eldest brother, who’d had a leg amputated above the knee after a minié ball had shattered both bones in his shin. It was obvious Garrick still hadn’t gotten over the depression that often came with such a loss. Cal knew what such a morass of despair could be like because he’d gone through it himself.

“Now, Garrick, we all think you do very well, especially now that you’ve gotten that artificial limb,” Sarah Devlin declared. “Why, you keep this family together, Garrick. And you quite put me in mind of your father, sitting at the head of the table like that.”

“Yeah, I do real well for a cripple, lurching around the farm like a drunken pirate, telling the hands what to do. But it’s been Sam who’s been putting the Devlin stud farm back together, with the cash he brought back ‘from Abilene.”

Cal watched as Sam tightened his jaw and stared down at his hands. Then Mercy took his brother’s hand and squeezed it, and Sam smiled slightly at her. Thank God for Mercy Fairweather Devlin, who had made his brother so happy and who was going to give Sam a baby in the spring.

It hadn’t escaped Cal’s notice that Annie, their widowed sister, had been twisting her napkin while Garrick was talking. Now she spoke up. “Oh, Garrick, not tonight,” she said, her voice anguished. “Not when Cal’s just been restored to us. We’ve all lost something in the war, and I think we should be thankful he’s back, not dwell on what will never be the same again.”

Garrick said nothing, just stared morosely down at the food he’d been picking at.

He was probably in pain, Cal guessed, for his brother had already let slip the fact that he suffered a good deal of chronic pain from the way the Confederate army surgeons—”butchers,” he called them—had “repaired” his leg. And it was likely he was in a good deal of emotional pain, as well. He’d probably have been able to adjust fairly well to the loss of his limb if Cecilia, his flighty wife, hadn’t run off the day after Garrick had come home minus a leg. Cal figured he’d have to get Garrick alone soon and see if there was any way he could encourage him. Cal was an ordained minister, after all. Surely that was a part of his job.

He cleared his throat in the awkward silence that followed Annie’s outburst. “Who’s pastoring the Bryan Episcopal Church these days? I’m sure they didn’t leave the pulpit empty all those years I was away, especially after I came up missing.”

“No, I’m afraid they filled that position with indecent haste, right after folks in Bryan found out you had gone away to wear blue, not gray. The fellow that’s preaching now, Josiah Maxwell, is the same man who took over when you left.”

“You don’t say that as if you like him very well,” Cal said, noting the way his mother’s lips had pursed when she said the man’s name.

“I don’t, and God forgive me for that,” she admitted quickly, her eyes troubled. “And it’s not just that he isn’t you, Caleb. Maxwell doesn’t have your gift with people, son. He’s self-righteous and proud, and as far as I’m concerned, during the war he was hiding behind the cloth as an excuse not to go and fight—for one side or the other. He could have at least gone as a chaplain, seems to me.”

Cal sighed. He’d known the pastorate wouldn’t have remained empty all those years he was gone, but he’d had this dream of coming home to find his congregation ready and waiting for him.

“Do you suppose he’d be at all amenable to my offering myself as associate pastor, or as some sort of a helper? The congregation had grown to the point that I was thinking of suggesting hiring an assistant myself before I left.”

Garrick let out an inelegant snort. “He’ll let you help him when there are snowball fights in hell, brother.”

“Son, I do wish you’d mind your language at the table!” Sarah Devlin snapped. “I didn’t raise you to talk like that!”

“Sorry, Ma. But it’s best he knows what his reception’s apt to be like. And it ain’t only the preacher, Cal. Folks in Bryan still haven’t forgotten the war—how could they, when they lost so many sons and husbands and brothers, and we’ve still got a provisional federal government? Folks haven’t forgotten you fought your own kind.”

“I had to do what I thought was right,” Cal said, trying to keep his voice even. He could feel himself flushing with anger.

“Garrick, I absolutely will not tolerate the War Between the States being fought over again at this dinner table, do you hear me?” their mother said quickly, smacking the scarred old table to emphasize her point.

Garrick had the grace to look ashamed. “I’m sorry again. I just thought Cal ought to be warned how it’s going to be. Cal, if I were you I’d tread real softly when I go into town, and don’t be real surprised that no one else is killing the fatted calf over your return.”

“I appreciate the warning,” Cal made himself say, as soon as he could master his temper. “I suppose it’s only natural people would feel that way, even though the war’s been over a good three years.”

Then Sam spoke up, a mischievous grin on his face. “Say, brother, I’ve got somethin’ I’ve been waitin’ to ask you ever since we left you in Abilene, and my curiosity’s been plaguin’ me all those weeks we traveled and while we waited for you to come home.”

“And what might that be, Sam? Dare I ask?” retorted Cal with good-humored wariness. Thank God for his amiable younger brother, who could always be depended upon to defuse a tense moment with something funny. The devilish glint in Sam’s eyes promised just such a moment.

“Who’s the girl you planned to look up once you got back, Cal?”

“Oh, she’s probably already married,” Cal said casually, looking down so his face wouldn’t betray the longing he’d felt ever since he’d regained his memory of who he really was—and of the girl he’d left behind when he’d gone off to war. Whether she was married or not, she’d probably succeeded in forgetting him just as thoroughly as he’d forgotten that he was Caleb Devlin.

“Maybe, but you never know, brother,” Sam said, his grin and his drawl broadening. “Now, if you were to tell me it was Lucy Snow, for example, why, I’ve got good news for you. She’s been wearin’ black for some poor boy ever since Second Manassas, Ma tells me—”

“Sam! Lucy Snow is a wrinkled-up prune of a woman!” chided Annie, obviously trying to hold back a giggle. “Cal has better taste than that! Uh…it isn’t Lucy Snow you were going to look up, was it?” she added with a sudden anxiety.

Cal chuckled. “No, Annie, it wasn’t Lucy Snow. If memory serves, she was a wrinkled-up prune of a woman even before the war, wasn’t she? She never wore her bonnet out in the sun. But I believe she was sweet on the Tetersall boy, not me.”

Annie sighed in exaggerated relief. “Oh, Cal, they were all sweet on you! Everyone wanted to marry the bachelor preacher,” she said, with a fond smile at her brother.

“So who is it, Cal?” Sam persisted. “Come on, brother, you aren’t going to get out of telling us.”

“All right, all right!” Cal said, holding up his hands in mock surrender. “I can see you won’t give me any peace till I tell you. But remember, it was just someone I thought about once I recalled who I was. I know she’s probably already married. You’ve all got to promise me this won’t go beyond the Devlin supper table.”

They all raised their right hands, an old family ritual that suddenly had all of them smiling, even Garrick. They felt like a family once again.

“All right, I’ll tell you. It was Olivia Childress.”

Silence hung over the table like a cloak for several heartbeats. Sam looked at their mother. Sarah looked at Garrick. Garrick looked at Annie. It was Annie who found her voice at last.

“Oh, Cal. I’m sorry. Olivia Childress married, all right. She married a man named Dan Gillespie, over at Gillespie Springs.’

Cal shrugged. That was that, then. The woman he’d dreamed about when he’d been in the Union army, right up until he’d been injured, and had started to dream about again these past two months, was taken. He’d just have to forget her.

“Don’t be sorry. It’s probably just as well,” he said with forced lightness. “She told me she hated me when she found out my uniform was going to be blue, not gray. She probably cusses every time she thinks of me, if she thinks of me at all. And if we never meet again, at least she’ll remember me as that handsome Devlin boy she hated,” he said, pointing to his eye patch.

But something in his sister’s face warned him there was more. “Annie, is there something you’re not telling me?”

His sister looked uneasy. “He’s dead. Dan Gillespie, that is. He died just last month.”

Hope flared anew. Gillespie Springs wasn’t that far from Bryan—just an hour away. He could ride over some fine day and pay his respects to the widow—with Annie along to make it respectable and all—and maybe, after a decent time passed…

“He—he killed himself, Cal,” Annie added, her face anguished.

Cal’s jaw fell. “How awful! Poor Livy—how hard it must have been on her!”

“Poor Livy, hell!” growled Garrick. “They say he put a bullet through his head ‘cause Livy was cheatin’ on him!”