Bid for a Bride Read online

  “You and your pa will keep so busy I’ll never see you,” she joked.

  Chuckling, he replied, “I doubt that. I like being here, especially since you came to live here.”

  Her cheeks warmed. “I like it when you’re home.” Clearing her throat, she said, “I finished the bedroom curtains and was about to hang them up.”

  Walking forward, he stretched his arms out with his palms up. “I’ll hang them.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “Sure. I find the window and then feel along the top for the hooks to place the rod on. I do this for Ma from time to time when she washes the curtains.”

  “I suppose there’s a lot more you can do than I give you credit for. I’m sorry for assuming you couldn’t hang curtains just because you can’t see.”

  “A lot of people don’t realize how much I can do. It’s not your fault. I don’t know what it’s like to see. If I could, I’d probably wonder how a blind person could do the things I can.”

  She handed him the curtains. “I’ll have to stop underestimating you.”

  He went to their bedroom and to the window.

  “I can see why your ma wanted you to hang curtains for her,” Lucy said. “You’re tall enough to reach the hooks. I’d need to stand on a chair.”

  “There’s no sense in going through more work if you don’t have to.”

  She watched him, marveling at the ease with which he could perform the task. Yes, she’d have to stop thinking of him as someone who had a handicap. What he really was, if she was honest with herself, was someone who learned to build on the strengths he possessed instead of letting his weaknesses define what he could and could not do.

  When he finished, he stepped aside. “What do you think? Are they straight?”

  “They’re perfect,” she admitted. “You did a great job on the first try.”

  “It comes with lots of practice.”

  She laughed. “And here I thought you worked on nothing but furniture.”

  “I do most of the time, but once in awhile, Ma will call me or Pa in to help her around the house. Is there anything else you need for the house?”

  She scanned the bedroom and then did a quick walk through the other rooms. When she came to the empty room which would one day be a child’s room, she quickly turned away from it. She hadn’t done anything for that room, nor did she plan to until she had to. Trying to make it comfortable wasn’t something she could tolerate at the moment. Maybe it would take her a full nine months and hearing the baby cry before she could accept the child, if there was one already growing inside her. But she couldn’t do it now.

  Facing the parlor, she said, “A couch. This room has no couch, and I used to enjoy curling up on a couch with a quilt in the afternoon.”

  “You came to the right family if you want furniture,” Brian replied from where he stood in the kitchen.

  “No one can argue that.” She studied the parlor again and nodded. “Yes. Once there’s a couch and a quilt, this room will be done.”

  “I think we need a fourth chair.” He tapped the kitchen chair where three chairs surrounded it. “We’ve been working on one, and we’ll have one for the porch too.”

  “I forgot about those. Yes, extra chairs would be nice as well.” She returned to the kitchen. “You came home early, so I don’t have anything ready for you to eat.”

  “That’s fine. I don’t mind waiting.” He pulled out a chair but hesitated. “Do you need me to help with anything?”

  “No. I can do it myself. You should rest.”

  He sat down. “If you change your mind, let me know and I’ll help.”

  “Alright.” She pulled out her apron. “It’ll be nice to have someone to talk to while I cook. I enjoy the peace and quiet out here, but once in awhile, I like the company.”

  “Then I’ll do what I can to entertain you.”

  She chuckled and got ready to make the meal.

  ***

  Brian woke up to find Lucy in his arms. It was the second time since they married that it happened, so he didn’t expect it. On all the other days, he woke up to the delightful aroma of food that made him eager to get out of bed. Lucy was a better cook than his ma. His ma said the same, but he’d never voice the observation. His ma had a good heart, so no one could fault her.

  Turning his attention to Lucy, he pulled her closer to him. It was a bittersweet experience to hold her this way every night. On one hand, she was wonderfully soft. He didn’t touch her anywhere but the parts granted him—her arms, her back, her face, and her hair. But his body was often painfully aware that there was more to her than what he could feel with his hands. Much more. Her soft breasts and stomach pressed into his side. One of her legs was draped over his. He took in what he could with the limits given him.

  As smart as it might have been to sleep somewhere other than the bed with her, he didn’t dare, and he was relieved when she never brought it up. There was a certain degree of closeness afforded him in the intimate quarters they shared. He stroked her back, careful to not cross any boundaries.

  His body notified him that it wanted to do more than lie next to her, but once again, he shoved the urge aside. She shifted in her sleep, and he felt her roll onto her back. He sighed in disappointment. He didn’t like how empty his arms felt whenever she wasn’t in them. If he had his way, she’d stay in them for the rest of his life.

  As reluctant as he was to leave the bed, he did and quietly got dressed so he wouldn’t wake her. From the sound of it, she still slept. He left the house to relieve his bladder. After he washed his hands, he gathered a fresh pail of water from the well and used the rope to lead him back to the house. The air was still a bit cool in the mornings, but the days would soon be warm enough to open the windows. He inhaled and noted the lingering scent of the previous night’s rainfall in the air. No doubt his shoes would be damp upon his return, so when he got up on the porch, he removed them and set them outside the door.

  He softly closed the door behind him and set the pail on the table. Pausing, he waited and didn’t hear any movement from the bedroom. Good. Lucy was still asleep. He wanted to surprise her by making coffee for her for a change. As he did, he thought over the possibility of having a child in the house. Whether the child would be his or Adam’s, it made little difference. He, after all, had once been abandoned by his real father, and this would be similar to that. He recalled the day of his real mother’s funeral. As sad as he was, he was more frightened than anything else.

  His father was a hard man. Nothing like John who displayed great tenderness to Eliza and Brian. His mother often told him that before his father took to drinking, he was a good man. “It’s the moonshine,” she’d say. “It turns people into monsters.” At the time, he didn’t fully grasp what she meant, but as he grew older and remembered his childhood, he understood everything.

  It was his fault she died when he was eight. He might not have meant to kill her, but the end result was the same. He was there the day the priest said the words that were to usher her into Heaven.

  Brian tried not to cry. His father kept jabbing him in the arm every time a tear slipped down his cheek. Most of the small community had shown up for the funeral, but his parents had lived so far out of town that he didn’t really know any of them. As the priest read from the Book of Common Prayer, Brian hardly heard anything he said. All he kept wondering was what he was supposed to do now that his mother wasn’t there.

  “Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear sister here departed, we therefore commit her body to the ground.”

  The priest paused and for a moment Brian was distracted from his fears and sorrows to listen to what the priest was doing. The sound of dirt hitting the wooden box in the ground echoed through the still air. Despite the August heat, Brian shivered.

  “Earth to earth,” the priest continued. “Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.”

  Then his father grabbed his h
and and pulled him toward the hole in the ground. Startled, Brian dug his heels into the ground, not knowing what his father was doing or why the other people would watch and say nothing to stop him.

  “Do as you’re led, boy,” his father gruffly said and then forced Brian’s shaking hand into something cool and lumpy. “Throw the dirt into the hole.”

  It took a moment for Brian to understand what his father meant. Relieved his father hadn’t shoved him into the hole, he hastened to obey. His hand clamped around the dirt and he felt for the opening of the grave before he tossed his handful into it, waiting until he heard the resounding thud of the dirt, followed by other thuds as others threw their handfuls into the hole.

  His lower lip quivered. He’d never hear or touch his mother again. She had passed from this life to the next much too soon, and he couldn’t do anything to bring her back. As the priest continued his prayer, Brian cried harder despite his father’s jab in the side to stop him.

  The rest of the funeral passed, and then he and his father went to eat and visit with some of the people in the community. Brian spent a good deal of time sitting in a chair and listening to everything that went on around him. He didn’t talk to the other kids because he didn’t know them and they whispered about how different he was because he needed a stick to help him walk. He didn’t bother explaining that the stick was to guide him, not help him physically walk.

  One conversation he overheard was a woman asking his father what he planned to do about him. Tuning out the other conversations going on around him, he listened with acute interest. He had assumed he would go back to live with his father in the cabin he grew up in, but his father said he had female relatives who offered to take care of Brian. That was the first Brian heard of such relatives.

  His father took him home shortly after that. Brian wanted to ask about the people his father planned to send him to but didn’t have the nerve. Through the night, Brian hid in his secret place while his father got drunk. He wrapped himself in his mother’s quilt and spent the night softly crying and inhaling her scent from the fabric.

  A week later, his father told him they were going on a trip. He wanted to ask if this was the trip he’d be taking to meet the relatives he never knew about but resisted the temptation. In many ways, he was looking forward to it. He wanted to get away from his father. Whatever his new home would be like, it couldn’t be worse than what he’d been through.

  It was two days into the journey when his father told them they were stopping to take a break. Brian found a private spot to relieve his bladder as his father instructed. When he returned to the spot he knew his father had left the wagon, the wagon was gone. At the time, the realization his father had lied—that there were no relatives—devastated Brian. Of all things he believed about his father, he never believed his father would leave him alone to the elements to either struggle for survival or die.

  Even the memory of all those years ago made Brian angry. He no longer cried over any of his past, but there were times when he felt anger over what happened because now he understood what his father had done to him and his mother and there was nothing he could do to change any of it. She was still buried in the cemetery in Wyoming, and his father had gotten rid of him without enough concern to even give him food or water.

  Brian recalled there being three days of walking through tall grass, crying until he was dehydrated and weak. That was when John and Eliza found him in the fields. He was so grateful to find another human being that he didn’t wonder if it was safe or not. Fortunately, John and Eliza turned out to be the type of people an eight-year-old blind boy could trust.

  Footsteps brought Brian’s attention back to the coffee pot in front of him. He lifted the lid and smelled it, assured it was ready and took out two cups from the shelf above the cook stove. Whatever got him thinking of the past? He rarely did it anymore. Then he recalled Lucy’s situation. It was the possibility of her having Adam’s child that brought the memories back. Another man treating a woman wrong and then running off to potentially abandon his child. Few things angered Brian more.

  Pushing aside the unpleasant feelings, he called out a greeting to Lucy, hearing from her footsteps that she was still in the bedroom.

  Grinning, he walked to the bedroom, and from the direction of the rustling skirt, he turned his head toward the dresser. “Good morning. This time I made you coffee.”

  “Morning, Brian.”

  He frowned when he detected the worried tone in her voice. “Is something wrong?”

  She didn’t answer, and from the way all sounds stopped, he gathered she stood perfectly still.

  “Lucy?” He reached out toward where he’d heard the rustling of her skirt.

  “I’m still here,” she whispered and took his hand.

  Caressing her cool hand in his warm one, he asked, “What’s wrong?”

  He heard her bare feet scuffing across the floor before her arms went around his waist and she rested her head on his chest. Surprised, but pleased, he wrapped his arms around her and rested his head on the top of hers so he could better smell her lavender soap.

  They stood there for a full minute, and he was beginning to wonder if she’d ever tell him what was on her mind when she softly said, “I’ll find out in a couple days if I’m expecting a child or not.”

  “You have nothing to fear with me. I’ll love the child.”

  “I know you will, but I’m afraid I won’t.”

  “Sure you will. A mother can’t help but love her child,” he said, thinking of his real mother and how much she loved him. She loved him to the point of taking the brunt of his real father’s anger. He didn’t doubt for a minute that Lucy would lay down her life for her child, regardless of who the father was.

  “I didn’t love Adam,” she confessed. “I was fond of him. I thought he’d make a good husband and father, but I never loved him.”

  He wondered if it was wrong for him to be happy to hear her say those words. Obviously, she didn’t love him when she married him. Theirs was a marriage borne out of necessity. But at least he didn’t have to worry about her mourning the loss of someone she loved.

  “I would have been faithful to him,” she continued. “I meant the vows when I spoke them. I would have done what I could to be a good wife for him.”

  “I know.”

  “I meant those vows with you too, Brian.”

  “And I meant them with you. For better or worse, Lucy. We’ll get through this.”

  He felt her body relax.

  “You feel better?” he guessed.

  “A little.”

  “Good. We’ll take it one day at a time.”

  She remained in his arms for another minute before she stepped back. “Are you hungry?”

  “A bit, but I can wait until I get to Ma and Pa’s place if you don’t feel up to cooking.”

  “No. I want to cook. I like to keep busy so I don’t worry.”

  “Whatever you feel up to is fine, Lucy.”

  “I’ll go out for a minute to take care of personal business and then I’ll be back.”

  He listened to her leave the house before he returned to the kitchen to pour their cups of coffee. Maybe it was wrong, but he couldn’t stop smiling. Whether or not she had Adam’s child didn’t matter. Being a father was more than getting a woman pregnant. Any man could do that. He didn’t consider his real father his actual father. John was his father. That’s where his loyalty and heart were, and he knew that Lucy’s child, should there be one, would feel the same way.

  What had him smiling in what was probably a most foolish manner was the fact that she never loved Adam. The reason she married Adam meant little to him. Whatever the circumstances were, they were hers to tell him or keep to herself as she saw fit. The only thing that mattered to him was that one day—sooner better than later—she’d tell him that she loved him. And deep in his heart, he thought the beginning of love was already there.

  Chapter Ten

  When Monda
y came, Lucy spent a lot of time going to the outhouse where she could check her rags to see whether or not she was bleeding. On Tuesday morning, she woke earlier than usual and slipped out of the bedroom. This time she didn’t even bother going to the outhouse. She lifted her nightgown and checked her rags. Nothing.

  Her hands shook as she pulled her nightgown back down. She went back to the calendar she’d hung on the kitchen wall and counted the usual days in her cycle. It could be anywhere from twenty-eight to thirty days, and right now she was on her twenty-ninth day. That meant if tomorrow passed and she wasn’t bleeding, she’d have no other conclusion to make than the one she didn’t want to admit.

  Slipping out of the house, she closed the door behind her so Brian wouldn’t hear her crying. She hurried away from the house in case he woke up and searched for her. Up ahead was the creek where she sat. Drawing her knees up to her chest, she allowed her tears to come as they wanted.

  It was hard to go about the daily chores with the continual sense of dread pushing down on her. She left Minnesota to get away from this feeling, but all she’d gotten from that attempt was another reason to worry about how the future would play out.

  After the onslaught of tears subsided, she remained by the creek, paying close attention to the gentle flow of the water. It soothed her as much as the lake back home had. She liked the bit of familiarity in her new world.

  When she knew she could return to Brian without crying, she stood and went back to the house, relieved to see he was still asleep. She quickly got dressed and set about the chores of the day, opting to stay in her new home instead of going to visit Eliza.

  The day passed in agonizing slowness. She spent most of the morning in bed, hoping the cramping would start, signaling the start of her flow. At lunch, Brian came home, and she made him something to eat, only half-listening to what he was saying. She picked at her food since her stomach kept twisting up into knots.