Leaving Independence Read online

  “I felt it.”

  “You felt it.” James looked up at the ledge again. “You don’t feel any more up there, do you?”

  Hoke shook his head.

  James looked back down at the cat and shivered. “I don’t know how you know things, but I ain’t complainin’ about it.”

  As they traveled on, Hoke was careful not to let his mind wander again. A man couldn’t afford to daydream in the wilds of northern Texas. But that cold February night when he and James made camp, he pondered the isolation of his existence. Had he been killed by a mountain lion that morning, who besides James would have felt it enough of a loss to mourn for him?

  The man’s uniform jacket lay at the top of a neatly folded stack of clothes, caught in an early-morning sunbeam. He had been the one to fold them, not the woman who reached across him now, her black hair sweeping the top of his chest.

  She ran her hand across the stitching on the pocket. “This is your name?”

  The woman’s raspy voice never failed to irritate him.

  “What’s it to you?” He slapped her hand away. “Don’t mess my clothes up.”

  She lay half-covered by a horse blanket on the dirt floor of the shed they were in. It couldn’t really be called a cabin. Only one strong wind would be needed to knock it down, but strong winds didn’t often reach down in the base of this holler where he was keeping her.

  “I never learned to spell, but I know that’s a B.” She reached over and traced the circles of it with her finger, then down the rest of the name: “aldwyn.”

  “I like this ’un that goes down.” She meant the Y. “But the B is my favorite. B like in ‘Bonnie.’ My pa’s Irish and called my maw a bonnie lass. That’s how come she named me Bonnie.”

  “A half-breed Piute living in Idaho named Bonnie.” He laughed and ran a hand over his neatly trimmed beard. “You are quite the enigma.”

  “What’s that mean? I don’t have no negra blood in me.”

  He shook his head. “That’s not what it means.”

  When he got up to stir the fire, she opened the pocket flap on the jacket. A worn picture was inside.

  “Who’s this?” Bonnie frowned. “She’s awful pretty.”

  He snatched the picture from her hand. “Leave it alone, will ya? That’s my wife.”

  “Your wife? I thought you said you wasn’t married no more.”

  He looked at the picture, drinking in the neat outline of Abigail’s blond hair and the dark-rimmed eyes he knew to be deep blue. She was a beautiful woman and God knew he’d rather have her than Bonnie reaching across him under a horsehair blanket. But he wasn’t going back to Tennessee. He preferred the freedom of the life he had now.

  He put the picture in his pocket.

  “It’s complicated.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Trains leaving Independence

  As they stood in the kitchen, Mimi pointed the rolling pin at Abigail.

  “I know you don’t want to go ask Mr. Walstone for them ready resources, but I’d say it’s time.” She stretched over the table and rolled out the biscuit dough.

  Abigail looked out the window. Her mind was sore from trying to think of alternatives to asking her father for help.

  “I was mighty proud when you married Mr. Robert.”

  Abigail turned back to the table and watched Mimi pat the flattened dough with loving hands. When they were kids, Abigail and Mimi would lay their hands together and marvel at how, on the inside, their hand color was the same—pink and pale.

  “He was the only one of all them suitors who would’ve done for you.”

  “I did not have a lot of suitors, Mimi.”

  “Why you always actin’ like you don’t know how fine you are? When you goin’ to realize people admire you?”

  “Boys came to the house because of—”

  “Your brothers.” Mimi sniffed and reached for the biscuit cutter. “No, they did not. They may’ve acted like that was why, but they did not. And they was almighty disappointed when Mr. Robert showed up and caught your eye, especially that Hadley Wiles. I know you know how love-struck he was.”

  “Let’s not talk about him.” Thoughts of an embittered father and a husband who had left her desperate were bad enough. She didn’t want to think about the former suitor who made her skin crawl, too.

  “Robert Baldwyn was just as foolish over you.”

  “You sure about that?”

  The fissures in Abigail’s heart cracked deeper every time she thought of Major Talbot’s letter, the contents of which she’d finally had a chance to absorb. Captain Baldwyn requested and was granted three weeks’ leave prior to his departure. It surprises me he did not report news of the transfer to you himself.

  Surprised her, too. She’d thought the letters she and Robert had exchanged after his volatile departure had mended their relationship.

  “Don’t you doubt it,” cautioned Mimi, waving the biscuit cutter. “I can’t understand him not coming home, though . . . that ain’t like Mr. Robert.” She slapped the flour off her hands as she reached for the pan. “But that don’t mean he didn’t love you.”

  The word didn’t rolled back and forth in Abigail’s head as she stepped closer to the window and looked out at the spot where the banker had poked at the icy base of the springhouse wall. Her eyes fixated just beyond that spot, on a small headstone.

  Several yellow jonquils had cracked open, front-runners after a few winter crocuses, hinting at the symphony of colors to come. She needed to clear the winter brush from around the springhouse and that headstone so the daffodils could breathe. Robert had built the springhouse with stones from Mill Creek—the coldest creek in Tennessee—which ran off Treetop Ridge, looping around its base like a lasso. Abigail felt like her own neck rested in the crook of a lasso. All it needed was a little more tightening to become a hangman’s noose.

  When the sentry walked the letter into his office and laid it on the desk, the man immediately recognized the handwriting and swore.

  How had she found him? The memory of Bonnie pulling out her photograph floated back to him.

  Prophetic.

  He carried the letter to his private quarters before opening it. Then he held it to the lamplight with his right hand—a hand missing two of its fingers.

  Dear Robert,

  Words fail me in knowing how to pen this letter. If Major Talbot’s words are true and you are alive and serving in Idaho Territory, why have you not written to tell us this news yourself? Our resources are quite low. The banker, a Yankee, threatens to take the house if we cannot soon find payment. Tell me . . . do you have any intention of returning home to us, or are we left to face this new dilemma on our own?

  She was out of money. He felt marginally guilty. But wasn’t her father one of the wealthiest men in Tennessee? Didn’t that old man have some of the finest horses in the South on that large plantation of his? And he would have bet a large sum that not all the slaves had skipped out on old Mr. Walstone, either. He knew that Mimi’s sister, Annie B, and her husband, Arlon, were particularly devoted to the old belligerent.

  If Abigail lost the house, so be it. He wasn’t going to feel sorry for her. All he had to do was remember their last conversation to stop feeling sorry for her.

  It took him several days and drafts to settle on the proper tone in his reply. Repentant? Evasive? Authoritative? Or nonchalant? He finally decided to strike a balance between them all—all but repentant.

  Repentant was struck from the list.

  Abigail tightened the string of her hat. “You’re sure you don’t want to come with me? Ride out and see Arlon and Annie B?”

  Mimi wrapped two blackberry pies in flour-sack cloths and sniffed. “I’ll just send the pies.”

  Every clop of the horse’s hooves on the familiar, hard-packed path to Franklin brought back a memory for Abigail. The late-February wind chilled her cheeks, but her heart, under woolen wrappings, was fever-hot.

  First she stopped at the cabi
n overlooking the Harpeth River. Three small children ran out, all smiles and gangly arms. Abigail hugged Annie B over the bobbing heads and handed her one of the pies.

  “What brings you all the way out here deliverin’ pies without your brood?”

  “Came to talk to Daddy. What kind of mood is he in?”

  “Ornery as ever, accordin’ to Arlon. He’s up there now breakin’ the north pasture.”

  “It’s too early.”

  “And another freeze is comin’. I can feel it in my bones. But your father wanted it broke.”

  Abigail shook her head and kissed each of the children, then hoisted herself back on the horse and turned toward the big house.

  Her throat tightened as her eyes swept over the horse trails she once rode with her brothers, trees she’d climbed with Mimi, and the spot on the hill where Robert first kissed her. She veered off the path and stopped briefly at a small cemetery, dismounting so she could brush leaves off the headstones.

  Half of her thirty-four years had been spent at Walstone Plantation . . . happy years, mostly. But her childhood home had also been scene to some of Abigail’s bitterest heartaches.

  Abigail understood why Mimi hadn’t wanted to come with her. Mr. Walstone, whose outlook had always leaned toward overcast, had become increasingly caustic since Mrs. Walstone’s death. A heavy cloud had settled over the Walstone house and fields. But Abigail rode through it. She was out of options.

  Her father stood leaning on a rail of his expansive white porch and watched her approach. “That’s a sorry horse you’ve borrowed,” he mumbled as she came into earshot.

  Leo Walstone had never been one to soften sentiments, not even for Abigail, his only daughter.

  “What brings you out here?” he wanted to know as she dismounted and tied her horse to the porch rail.

  She walked up the steps and kissed his cheek before answering. “Mimi baked you a pie.”

  “Blackberry?” He accepted her kiss but didn’t offer one in return.

  She nodded and went inside, setting the pie on the kitchen table, then returned to the parlor, the room he most often inhabited. “The banker came to the house yesterday.”

  “I knew it! I knew it as soon as I saw you coming from Arlon and Annie B’s without your family. He wants his money back?”

  Abigail looked at him—this man she had once loved above all others. He had not wanted her to marry Robert Baldwyn and had shown his displeasure by withdrawing his love for the past seventeen years.

  “Yes. I’ll have to sell the house if I can’t find another way to pay him back.”

  “If you’re here to ask me for money, I can’t help you. If damned idealists like Robert Baldwyn had left well enough alone and stayed the hell off my land and away from my horses, I wouldn’t be left with nothing but worthless bonds!”

  Abigail crossed her arms and tried to avoid looking at her brother’s bloodstains on the floor. Seth had bled out here after being wounded at the Battle of Franklin. That had been the beginning of the end for the Confederacy and had sealed her father’s hatred for all things Federal.

  “You can have all the Confederate bonds you can carry,” he said. “I got a trunkful—but the only thing I have that the bank would see as collateral is my land, and I’ll be damned if I give those Northerners a single acre!”

  Abigail shook her head. “Why can’t you let go of your hatred, Daddy?”

  He scowled and pointed at the parlor floor. “How can I, Abby? I have to look at that every day, thanks to men like your husband. For all we know, he’s the one that shot your brother.”

  Abigail had reached in her pocket for Major Talbot’s letter, intending to tell her father about it, but now she stuffed it back down. What good would it do? She had long ago grown tired of hearing her father criticize Robert, and before that, of hearing Robert criticize him. So without mentioning that Robert might still be alive, she reached for her wrap. If Robert ever did come home, she wasn’t sure he and her father could ever mend their broken bonds. She ought not to have come. Every time she came her father managed to stamp out another remnant of her love. Soon, there’d be nothing left.

  “Give my best to Thad and Nathan,” she said, trying to quell the tide of emotions that had stirred her heart since her decision to ride out and ask her father for help.

  She was outside, mounted, and had pointed the horse toward Marston when Mr. Walstone called from the porch, “Wait! I have something for the children.” He walked back to her minutes later from his barn, a black puppy in his arms.

  “Name’s Rascal.” He lifted the dog up. “In memory of Robert.”

  Abigail leaned over to kiss the bald of her father’s head as she took the puppy from him, heartsick at the events that had changed him into the acidic stranger who stood before her now. “I guess I should be glad you didn’t name him Damned Idealist.”

  “I’ll give you land, Abby—tried to give your husband land but he never would take it. You can come back here and your brothers will build you a nice house.”

  Abigail’s throat tightened. She wanted to protect the good memories she had of him and her upbringing, and she didn’t want his venom infecting her children. “We have a nice house now, Daddy. I’m sorry you’ve never accepted my invitations to see it.”

  She held her tears to the end of the lane. Then Rascal’s tongue licked them as they dropped, as the sorry horse she’d borrowed walked the long road back to Marston in the cold.

  When a letter from Captain Robert Charles Baldwyn arrived a week later from Idaho Territory, Abigail stood once again under the gaze of the postal clerk. But this time she did not slide the letter back into its envelope and press the flap down. She did not smile, she did not nod, and when she reached for the door, her legs were strong and ramrod straight.

  The warming wind whipped past her face and her temperature rose with every click-click-click on the sidewalk as she stepped toward home. When the sole of her boot swiveled and she turned up the walk she peeled off both gloves, her shawl, even her hat, so great was her risk of overheating.

  Mimi was in the kitchen when Abigail burst through the door and handed her the letter.

  “What’s this scrawl?” Mimi peered more closely at the letter. “That ain’t Mr. Robert’s handwritin’.”

  “His hand. Remember?”

  “Oh, that’s right.”

  His hand had been injured in a battle—two fingers shot off in a skirmish. The words were legible, just not written in Robert’s formerly neat penmanship.

  Mimi read the words aloud. “‘Abigail, it looks like you tracked me down.’”

  Her eyebrows shot together in a V.

  “‘You always were a resourceful woman, so I am sure you will figure something out on the house. Here is my suggestion, if you care to know. Sell the house. Drop those children at your father’s or leave them with the colored woman.’”

  “The colored woman! What, he forgot my name? And those children?”

  “Keep reading.”

  “‘Come join me in Idaho Territory. I like it here and do not intend to return to Tennessee.’”

  Mimi stared at the letter a minute as if trying to process its contents. “Well, Lord have mercy. What has got into that man? The Lord ain’t whispered nothin’ about this in my ear. I had no idea, Miz Abigail. How could any decent man have that to say after so long with no word?”

  “Keep reading.”

  Mimi eyed the paper suspiciously before finishing.

  “‘You are a beautiful woman. Lord knows, I wouldn’t mind having you here.’”

  Mimi’s jaw dropped. She read over the letter again and shook her head. “I don’t know what to make of it.”

  “I told you he was altered. It’s the first time in years he’s even mentioned the children.”

  “What do you mean? He loves his children.”

  “He did when he left. I thought he loved us all.”

  Abigail paced the kitchen. Rascal, who had followed her in, stood in
a safe corner and watched.

  How could Robert do this to her? She put a hand to her chest, as if that could soothe her heart. It hadn’t ached this badly in years. She looked at the letter that now lay like an unwelcome cockroach on the table. “Why couldn’t he have just died, like we thought?”

  “You don’t mean that, Miz Abigail!”

  “That would have been more kind than choosing not to come home to us!”

  That night when Charlie slapped his hand on the dinner table and said, “We should go out there,” Abigail waved the suggestion off.

  “No, I mean it.”

  Charlie, oldest of the blue-eyed Baldwyn children, was also the most serious. It wasn’t like him to be impulsive, so it surprised Abigail when he looked to Corrine, Jacob, and Lina for support. “We should go. Join him! I bet he loves it out there.” He turned back to Abigail, his eyes bright with hope. “We could make a new start. You said the banker—”

  Abigail stopped him by raising her hand. “No.”

  She knew Charlie and Corrine felt Robert’s absence the most. They had been the oldest, eleven and ten, when their father left five years ago. Charlie had wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps . . . attend law school in the East. But he’d stopped talking about it, knowing they no longer had the money. Going west was the other direction. No . . . she would think of something.

  “Trains leaving Independence go right by Fort Hall,” said Charlie. “I’ve studied the maps!”

  “What trains are you talking about?” asked Corrine, her blond brow twisted. “Track hasn’t been laid that far west yet.”

  “Wagon trains!”

  “Live in a wagon? With strangers?” Corrine sized up her older brother. “Are you out of your mind, Charlie?”

  “We would have our own wagon, Corrine. With a cover over it.” Charlie grew more excited, which got Jacob excited.

  “We’d see buffalo!” Jacob’s nine-year-old eyes grew as large as Mimi’s biscuits. “Me and Charlie could shoot some.”