The Rose Legacy Page 9

“Perhaps he doesn’t like in return.”

  “Oh, I don’t know that I’d say that.”

  Carina started a new plate stack. “He doesn’t like Mr. Beck.”

  Mae laughed. “Honey, most of Crystal doesn’t like Mr. Beck.”

  “That’s not true. He is always treated with respect. People come to him for help.” She pictured the magnanimous smile, the crates and crates of legal cases he had handled, cases she had only just succeeded in bringing to order. “His table is always held at the hotel, no matter how many others are waiting.”

  Mae laughed, deep and heavy.

  “He is kind. And he did not push my wagon over the cliff.”

  Mae’s eyes widened, but her chest still rumbled. “Is that what happened? Quillan sent your wagon over?”

  “Mr. Beck says he had the right, but I say, beh!” Carina curled her fingertips to her lips with the word, then flung open her palm.

  Mae stilled the chuckle. “Well, Quillan’s a strange one. Comes and goes like the devil’s on his heels.”

  “Maybe he is.” Carina crossed herself.

  Mae laughed right out again. “You’re a strange one, Carina DiGratia.” She seemed to settle inward. “But I’m glad you’ve come.”

  Carina sensed the warmth in the words within her own breast. Her throat filled with tears, and at that moment she could have cried out her homesickness and the hurt that had sent her on this crazy flight to Crystal, Colorado. But Mae hung the washrag and left the kitchen. Carina guessed it was closer than Mae had come in a long time to speaking her heart. Why it should be to her, she couldn’t say.

  Carina boiled water and scrubbed the floor with green lye soap. On her knees, she remembered each member of her family and blessed them one by one: uncles, aunts, godparents, grandparents living and deceased, and her brothers, Angelo, Joseph, Vittorio, Lorenzo, and Tony. She blessed Mamma and Papa. But she did not bless Divina, nor did she allow a thought for Flavio.

  Quillan set the half-eaten plate of beans on the ground before the brown-and-white mottled dog. Resting his forearms on his knees, he sat back against the crate inside the tent wall. “Thanks for dinner, Cain.”

  “Nice of you to stop in.” Cain Bradley raised the left stump of leg that ended at the knee and adjusted the flannel pant leg, tied in a knot at its base. “Don’t get around too easy now.”

  Quillan nodded, absently stroking the dog’s ear like a swatch of velvet between his fingers and thumb. The animal had lapped the beans in three quick strokes of his long pink tongue, then collapsed at his side in bliss.

  “You got to get you a dawg.”

  Quillan half smiled.

  Cain waved a finger. “I mean it, now. Man needs a dawg near as much as vittles.”

  “Don’t have time for a dog.” He stroked the underside of the animal’s jaw until it rolled over and suggested its belly. Quillan rubbed the matted fur along the ribs and soft tissue between.

  “Now that’s just the thing. A dawg makes you slow down, take time for livin’.”

  “I’m livin’, Cain.”

  “Yeah, yeah. You and that half ‘count son o’ mine.” Cain scratched his own side clear up to his armpit.

  “He’s bringing in the ore.” Quillan patted the dog’s belly.

  “And spendin’ twice what he takes out in the saloons and bawdies.”

  Quillan shrugged. “You only live once.”

  “I don’t see you throwin’ yer gold down the gully.”

  “Don’t have time.”

  “Son, when yer sixty-eight, you can talk to me about time.” The old man slapped his hand on the crate at his side. “What are ya? Twenty-three, twenty-four?”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  “Hah. You got more years left than a porcupine’s got needles. You ever been skewered by a porcupine?”

  Quillan grinned. “No, can’t say I have.”

  “Man alive, it hurts worse’n almost anything ‘cept losin’ a leg.” Cain rubbed the stump.

  “I’ll remember that.” Quillan curled his hand around the dog’s forepaw. “You got everything you need, Cain?”

  “What man alive can say yessir to that? I make do on what the good Lord allows me.”

  And the Lord allows you precious little, Cain. Quillan glanced about them. “Well, then is there something I can pick up for you?”

  “Tobaccy. Bull Durham, for smokin’, don’t ya know. It’s a vice, but the Lord Jesus ain’t perfected me yet.”

  Quillan patted the dog’s neck, then pushed himself up.

  Cain’s eyes followed him. “You’re off again, then?”

  “Bright and early.”

  Cain shook his head. “There’s such a thing as too much comin’ and goin’. Ain’t natural.”

  Quillan shrugged. “It’s my job.” He shook back his hair and put on his hat. “I’ll be back with that tobacco.” He stooped to exit the tent.

  “Thanks for stoppin’ by,” Cain hollered after him.

  Quillan waved, then started for his own tent. The wagon stood behind it, already loaded with ore to leave at the smelter on his way out. The horses were in the livery, fed and rested, and he pulled open the canvas door flap and went inside his tent. It was only slightly larger than Cain’s, but sewn and treated by a man named Levi so that it repelled the rain like duck’s feathers. And unlike Cain, he lived in it by choice, not necessity.

  He pulled the cash from his vest pocket and knelt beside the bedding neatly tucked around the straw mattress on the canvas floor. Pulling aside a flap of canvas, he touched dirt, then found the edge of the box with his fingertips. He lifted it, dropped the money inside with the rest, and laid the lid in place.

  Smoothing the canvas, he sat back on his haunches, considering the disguise that hid his stash. He didn’t know how much was in there, made a point not to count it, a small defiance of his dependence on it. Not dependence literally. Once the money was in the hole, he never took it out. He used what he needed for food and essentials before he put the remainder under his floor.

  But it had a hold on him nonetheless. It was his means to personhood, his proof of worth, his guarantee he would never again be indebted to anyone. He smiled grimly at his weakness. No, he did not throw his gold down the gully as Cain said. He buried it under his floor for a tomorrow that might never come.

  But then again, it might. Quillan rubbed a hand over his eyes, stretched, then settled into his bedding. He rolled to his side and tucked an arm under his head. Morning would come soon enough.

  Staring at the tent flap after Quillan left, Cain felt a familiar pang. What was it about the young man that stirred him so? Though he knew the parts of Quillan’s past that they’d talked of directly—and some few that Quillan might not even know—it wasn’t that. It was in the fabric of the man himself.

  Everyone had flaws, and Cain was sure Quillan was no different. But there was in him a basic goodness, try as he might to hide it in nonchalance and sometimes downright surliness. Quillan had a good heart, though maybe he showed it more often to an old cripple and his wayward son than most others. Still, there was a shell around that goodness like a limestone geode holding the crystals inside where none could see.

  Why? And why did he resist the Lord’s call? Cain knew it was so. Soon as the name of Jesus came up, Quillan got all quiet and closed up, then skedaddled. It was sure enough the quickest way to show Quillan Shepard the door.

  Cain reached down and grabbed his soft, worn leather Bible. He held it in one palm and caressed it with the other as a man might the warm cheek of his first love. Quillan was like the rich young man who came to Jesus asking, “What must I do to be saved?” The man walked away sad because he couldn’t do the one thing the Lord required … give over himself.

  Had nothing to do with riches, really. That was just where that story-man’s heart lay. Quillan wasn’t wrapped up in worldly goods, but his worth was bound up somewhere and locked away where the good Lord couldn’t get at it. Cain shook his head. “I cain’t fig
ure it, Lord.”

  Quillan followed the rules. He treated men decently. Fact was, he had an overworked sense of justice. Quillan said it hadn’t used to be that way. As a youngster he’d broken every rule there was to break—a regular hellion, taking pleasure in the scowls the congregation gave the “preacher’s son.” Cain could hardly picture it.

  But Quillan had a brush with the law that turned him quicker than a hornet shies a horse. What was it he’d said? The thought of doing time, of being locked into one place unable to get out, was enough to put him on the straight and narrow for good. Cain shook his head. It must be part and parcel with being such a fiddle-footed man, never staying put long enough to cool his heels.

  But Cain suspected a deep tenderness in Quillan. He had seen it more than once. Quillan had a gentle hand for the dog, a keen wit with D.C., and most of all, the heart to reach out to an old man fool enough to get his leg blown off. Not to mention the way he always dug in for the underdog and those suffering some injustice. That’s what had gotten him crosswise with Berkley Beck to start with. And now he was as committed to upholding the good as he’d been to thwarting it in his youth.

  He did good, and he cared. But Quillan did it all without grace. Cain opened the Bible and pictured Quillan in its pages. Some of these words had to be the key that would open his heart and let out some of the pain. Cain knew where it came from, some of it, anyhow. No one with a start like Quillan’s could be free of hardship, not in this life. Cain just wished he could help. He thought if only … But then, he hadn’t succeeded so well with his own boy either.

  He swallowed that bitter truth with a familiar sadness. The Lord knew his own son, D.C., had been hearing of God’s glory all his life by Cain’s own mouth, and where was the boy now? Cain didn’t want to picture what den of sin the boy wallowed in presently. Sometimes it was just too hard.

  He lay down wearily on the cot. What with the worry and the jumping ghost pains in his leg, sleep was elusive. That came with age, he’d been told. Didn’t seem to make much sense, though, when he spent so much of each day tuckered out. Unlike D.C., who didn’t seem to need sleep, not if the hours he kept were any indication.

  In the first dim light of dawn, Cain strapped on his wooden leg and took up his crutch. He pulled himself up by one pole to balance on another. The sorry thing was, the wooden peg would outlast the joint in his good leg.

  He limped out of the tent, ducking under the flap, and headed for Central. He’d look there before searching Hall Street. It was more likely gambling than women that kept the boy out all night. The women of Hall Street didn’t linger.

  He teetered along on the crutch up the slope from the creek, past the livery, and onto the boardwalk of Central Street. It didn’t take his old eyes long to realize the dusty heap in the road was his boy. Nineteen years old and hardly the smarts of a coon. Robbed, no doubt. Beaten maybe. Chastened? Not hardly. Cain shook his head. He’d give him what-for just as soon as he cleared him from the wagon road.

  EIGHT

  Time is an undying enemy. No matter how much you put behind you, there is always more. I think eternity the cruelest joke of all.

  —Rose

  FROM HER WINDOW, Carina watched the old man shake the lump in the street. With his crutch he struck him once on the backside, and the younger man scrambled to his knees. There must be strength still in the old one’s limbs, for he heaved his companion onto the boardwalk, and she lost sight of them behind the corner of Fisher’s Mercantile.

  What was she doing watching some old man pull someone from the gutter? One week in this place and she ached for home. Why was she here? If she asked him, Papa would send her money to go home. She could ride down with a freighter…. No, not that, but somehow. Dom would carry her. Anything to go home, away from this place, these strangers. To see her own people, hear their Italian voices raised in laughter and song, the warmth of their hands, their hugs.

  She pressed her forehead to the grimy glass and imagined how Mamma would welcome her, tears shining in brown eyes wreathed with creases, arms strong and thick. She had dreamed all night of the ones she’d blessed and wakened with an aching longing. How they would pet her and soothe her, scold her for leaving, then crush her with hugs and kisses and cry on her neck!

  Carina wanted to cry herself. But if she once gave in to the ache, she would undo all her plans and run home. Yet how could she? She held a hand to her throat where the aching lodged. If she went home now, it would spoil everything.

  The old man resurfaced, pushing the other ahead of him. He, too, reminded her of Ti’Giusseppe, her great-uncle on Papa’s side. Indomitable, fearless, yet gentle as a dove. The young man wedged his head between his palms. From her vantage he looked weak, tottering, forgettable. But then it was the old man who stumbled, and the young who reached out his arm.

  Coiled together like that they passed from her sight. Carina sighed, feeling alone and foreign in a way she never had before. All that she knew—the lilt in speech patterns, an expression in the eyes, shared memories and expectations, simple generations of being—all had been left behind, a thousand miles away.

  She felt thrown into a stew, and she couldn’t find another of her kind anywhere in the broth. She had gone into exile—self-imposed, though not chosen. What had seemed to her bruised heart a dramatic, even romantic severing, was now only dull reality. Who was there to see her brave defiance? She had thought to make a home in Crystal. To show Flavio, to show them all, to show the world. How could she know, pampered daughter of Angelo DiGratia, that the world didn’t care?

  She dropped to her knees beside the cot, folded her hands, and rested her forehead on her peaked fingers. “Il Padre Eterno …” Shaking her head, she closed her eyes. “Please bless Mamma and Papa and Great-Uncle Giusseppe….” Her voice broke before she could name the others. “Keep me from the Evil One.” The words were empty. As empty as her hope. “And give me back my house today.” It had become a litany.

  Pulling on her boots, Carina frowned. She should buy a pair of slippers for walking in town, but she had been shocked by the prices in the stores. The choices for women were few and so high priced she had refused to spend her dwindling cash on shoes when she already had one pair of boots. But they were hot and heavy travel boots, not walking shoes. All her slippers had gone over the side with her wagon, thanks to Quillan Shepard.

  Somehow the loneliness and displacement she felt this morning seemed centered on his single rash act. If not for him, she would have the things with which to make a home. She would not be living in a stall with canvas walls and changing in the dark so that her form would not show through to her neighbors. She would have her clothes and her furniture.

  But not my house. The thought crept in unbidden. Losing the house was not his doing. But it seemed possible that it was, as though he’d started the misfortune and it grew from there. If he had not destroyed her wagon, her entrance to Crystal would have been as she expected. She would not have been robbed, and maybe, possibilmente, the Carruthers would not have run her off.

  That was the way of things. Good brought good, but evil did likewise. Once misfortune began, it stayed like an unwanted guest. Inverità, her misfortune had begun before she lost her wagon. But she would have stopped it, had stopped it. If not for Quillan Shepard, things would have happened as she planned.

  She went down the stairs and found Mae kneeling in the flower bed along the porch, grunting with each thrust of the handspade into the hard earth. The clumps of bachelor’s buttons and daisies looked pale and tired, leggy in their search for air and water.

  “If it don’t rain soon,” Mae spoke without looking, “this ground will be hard as mortar. Hand me that pail, will you?”

  Carina lifted the pail, careful not to slosh the water on her skirt. Mae took it and poured it around the flowers. The cuts she had made with the spade sucked the water in, and Mae nodded. “That’s better.” She smeared mud across her forehead with the back of her hand. “Month of May was a run
ning muck, but this is the driest June I can remember.”

  A freight wagon rumbled by, raising a cloud of dust, and Carina recognized the long brown hair beneath the hat. Mr. Quillan Shepard, off early and about his business as usual. Frowning, she turned away.

  Mae rocked back on her heels. “You know, in these parts folks need a thick skin. You can’t let one offense eat you up.”

  No? Carina pinched off a broken daisy and raised it to her nose. Was it not human to harbor a hurt, to nurse a wound? She should take injury and not remember? Not return it in kind? “Quillan Shepard. You know him well?”

  Mae pushed herself up, breathing hard. “Don’t know that anyone can say that, though some try, some who wouldn’t know the truth if it hit them in the face. But then, tales here grow as tall as Mount Pointe.”

  “What tales?”

  “Rumors, is all. Nasty rumors.”

  Carina quirked an eyebrow. “Rumors start from truth.”

  “Or spite.”

  “Spite? Toward such a compassionate man, so charitable?” She waved a mocking hand as she spoke.

  Mae rested her hands on her hips. “You have a sharp tongue.”

  Carina turned away. She felt sharp this morning, lonely and cross. If people talked about Quillan Shepard, it was his own fault. “I am not deceived.”

  “Then you’re a first.” Mae pinched a dried straw-colored bachelor’s button from the stem and tossed it.

  “Has he been here long?”

  Mae leaned on the porch railing. “He’s been freighting to Crystal for a year or so.”

  “And before?”

  “Don’t know much besides that he was born in Placer.”

  “In Placer? Where you mined gold?” Carina turned back, curious.

  “Oh, I see that look.” Mae tucked a gray, kinky strand of hair into the loose bun at her neck. “Listen, I’m not a tale spinner, especially that tale.”

  Especially that tale? Now Carina was more than curious. What was Quillan’s story? And more, how could it benefit her to know? Carina dipped her head obediently as she would to Mamma’s scolding, a look of compliance, surrender even, but inside … She turned toward the street.