Prairie Wife
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Cheryl St.John
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16,6K
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14
Chapter One
Shelby Station, Nebraska, 1868
Jesse entered the kitchen at twilight. After the stage travelers had eaten and gone next door to their assigned lodging, he and Amy always ate a late supper together, and the help thoughtfully left them alone. The room smelled of beef and gravy. Steam rose from a pan of potatoes from which Amy had recently poured boiling water.
“Can I mash those for you?”
He started forward, but his wife grabbed the pan with a pot holder before he reached it. “I’ll do it. You sit.”
She used to let him help in the kitchen. She used to enjoy his company and having him near. Now she tolerated him.
The change had to do with Tim. And the day their son had drowned. And the way he had died. And the loss they’d suffered.
That was the day everything had changed.
But Jesse didn’t know what to do about it. Nothing he said or did or attempted made a difference. Amy had become a different person. A person who didn’t like him much. He doubted she even loved him anymore. As though it had been his fault. As though he hadn’t wondered a thousand times if he could have prevented their son from waking from a nap and wandering from Shelby Station unobserved.
So Jesse sat at his place at the table and waited while she mashed the potatoes and set the food in front of him. Sat there like he did every night, waiting for her to talk to him, to look at him.
They ate in silence. Amy was a wonderful cook, and as he did every night, he told her so and ate everything she’d prepared. He didn’t bother to pick up his plate or offer to help with the dishes, because that was something else she didn’t need him for.
She carried their plates to the sink.
“I have a few chores to finish.” Grabbing his hat, he went outside.
In the stable, he drew a bottle half full of whiskey from a nail keg and took a long pull. The fiery liquid immediately warmed his chest and within minutes his tense muscles relaxed. His newfound friend made the emptiness a little easier to bear. A year was a long time to miss a child without someone to share the grief. A long time to miss his wife’s touch, her smile, anything remotely resembling comfort or affection.
He worked on repairing harnesses, and by the time the moon was high in the sky, the bottle was empty and his patience was chafed beyond endurance.
His last chores were to check all the horses, make certain the lock on the luggage room was fastened tight, and extinguish lanterns. Two windows in the austere boardinghouse beside the house were illuminated, indicating overnight travelers still awake.
He washed at the pump, the refreshing cold water minimally cooling his frustration, then he entered the house, where an oil lamp cast shadows in the kitchen. Amy stood beside the table, cutting fabric around a paper pattern.
“There’s coffee left on the stove,” she said.
“No thanks.”
She folded her sewing and tucked it into a basket. “I’ll get the lamp.”
Jesse walked ahead of her up the stairs, careful to keep his movements steady.
Once inside their room, she placed the lamp on the bureau. Jesse shrugged out of his shirt while Amy removed her dress and underclothing and pulled her nightgown over her head. He watched, glimpsing her slender body in the golden light. She’d lost weight in the past year, enough that she appeared too fragile. He’d hired more help for cooking and for cleaning rooms, but Amy worked too hard.
Still watching her, he pulled off his boots and socks. Avoiding his eyes, she moved to her dressing table, where she sat and removed the pins from her hair.
Her aloofness irritating him, Jesse moved behind her, picked up the brush from the table and, starting with the tangled ends, ran the bristles through the silken softness of her honey-colored tresses. Once the tangles were out, he stroked her hair from scalp to ends, the way she’d always loved.
“Your hair smells better than anything,” he said, bending to lower his face into the tumble of glossy waves against her neck and inhale. All his resolve to keep his distance melted at her familiar clean feminine scent, and a knot formed in his belly.
“You’ve been drinking,” she said.
It was his turn to avoid her comment. This was his wife, the woman who’d once come to him willingly and eagerly. After placing the brush on her dressing table, he threaded her hair with both hands and then caressed her shoulders through the thin cotton fabric of her nightgown. Her gaze raised to meet his in the glass, then skittered away.
He flattened his palms and slid them down the front of her gown, covering her breasts and cupping them. A groan escaped his throat at the long-missed pleasure of touching her, and he resisted pressing himself against her spine. He’d been in this emotional vacuum too long—way too long, and whiskey could only dull so much.
“Jesse—”
Taking her shoulders, he turned her upper body toward him and bent to cover her mouth with his. She didn’t resist, didn’t stiffen…didn’t respond. He knew she tasted the whiskey on his lips, wondered somewhere in the back of his mind if it had become a familiar—or dreaded taste. Damn her! All she had to do was let his kiss and his touch affect her as it used to do. How had it happened that he’d become unable to reach her—to have any effect upon her? Sometimes he wondered if she’d even miss him if he didn’t come to the house for supper. If he never came home again.
A deep aching regret and helplessness surged through him, creating a desperate need to demand the love and acceptance she denied him. He ended the kiss, urging her up from her seat and toward the bed. She turned back the quilt and slipped beneath the covers.
Jesse blew out the lamp, divested himself of his denim trousers and knelt to lean over her. In the moonlight that slanted through the parted curtains, her lovely oval face appeared pale, her eyes dark and luminous. He touched her cheek, skin so soft that every time he experienced its delicacy, he was amazed.
He knew the tender skin at the swell of each breast was just as soft; he raised her gown to pull the garment over her head, and she didn’t challenge his right to do so. With his nose and lips, he appreciated the velvety skin of her breasts, pressed gentle kisses in the swells and hollows, inhaled her heady scent and saw stars behind his closed eyelids. He was weak when it came to this woman.
Jesse swallowed back a crashing tide of love and regret and need, greedy feelings that would get the best of him if he didn’t go slowly and earn Amy’s confidence again. It had been a long, long time.
Cupping her jaw in his palm, he turned her head, touched his nose to hers and kissed the corners of her mouth. I love you, Amy. Amy, where are you?
There had been a time when he’d believed his heart spoke to hers, when he’d listened in the darkness and heard her soul-deep replies to his unspoken feelings, when her caresses had answered his every emotional, sensual wish and satisfied so much more than merely his body. Amy, my love, can you hear me?
Jesse shifted his length over her, felt the dizzying sensation of skin against skin and shuddered with repressed desire.
He kissed her again, hoping against hope for the responses that would tell him she wanted him, too. She kissed him, but there was no flame, merely submission. He pressed himself against her, urged her thighs apart.
Opening his eyes to gauge her expression in the moonlight, he saw the tears that glistened on her cheeks. Fearful at first that he’d hurt or frightened her, he looked hard into her eyes. There were no tears in the haunted gaze she returned.
It was then he realized the tears were not Amy’s, but his own.
Before his grief and loss became a wail he couldn’t control, he pushed away from her to sit on the bed’s edge and collect himself. He had to get away from here. Away from her. Groping, he found his trousers and pulled them on.
“Jesse?” she said softly, the bedclothes tucked against her breasts.
He stopped in the motion of shrugging into his shirt. “What?” It came out more harshly than he’d intended.
She didn’t reply immediately, and he almost thought she’d never spoken in the first place. But then she said in a ragged whisper, “I’m sorry.”
He tucked in his shirttail and grabbed his socks and boots. “I’m sorry too, Amy,” he said. “I’m sorry, too.”
And he left.
Jesse hadn’t returned the night before. Amy wrapped a towel around the handle of the coffeepot and removed it from the heat. Deftly, she turned bacon, then cracked eggs into a sizzling skillet. There was a bonafide restaurant across the road, but Shelby Station took an ample portion of the stage passengers’ business. All the drivers knew the tasty food was reasonably priced and the beds were clean, so they advised travelers thusly.
Jesse could have slept at the stable, or even in an unoccupied room in the building next door. During their five years of marriage, only trips to trade or sell horses had kept him from their bed—those and the night he’d built the coffin.
She didn’t blame him for staying away. Nor did she blame him for the way things between them had deteriorated. She just didn’t have the energy to worry about it.
Her father greeted her with a peck on the cheek, poured himself coffee and took a seat.
A well-dressed couple traveling through from Salt Lake City to Washington arrived, introducing themselves as the Buckinghams and taking seats. Amy greeted them. Her kitchen helper, Mrs. Elthea Barnes, poured milk and coffee.
Pearly Higgs, a stage driver with an accomplished reputation, entered the kitchen and doffed his hat. “Mornin’, Miz Shelby. Smells mighty fine. I told the Buckinghams here, yours was the best vittles between Atchison and Denver City.”
“Why thank you, Pearly. I’ll have to take that corn bread out of the oven now, so you can test it.”
The slim-as-a-whip driver rubbed his hands together and grinned, overlapped front teeth showing beneath his gray-streaked mustache. “Yes, ma’am!”
Jesse entered the kitchen just as she placed the steaming cast-iron pan of golden corn bread on the table. She nodded, but he hung his hat and the holster that held his Colt on a peg inside the door and took a seat without acknowledgment. His hair was damp and neatly combed, his cuffs spotted from his recent wash at the pump. He wasn’t the handsomest man she’d ever laid eyes on—his face was a little too chiseled—but his elemental masculinity gave him an appeal beyond comeliness. He was plainspoken, candid, earthy. She had loved him from the first time she’d seen his smile.
“We need more cooks like your missus on the Overland Trail,” Pearly said to Jesse, accepting the generous chunk of corn bread Amy cut for him.
“Mrs. Shelby’s a fine cook,” Jesse agreed, referring to her the way he always did in front of guests.
“As good a cook as her mama was,” her father agreed.
Mrs. Buckingham nibbled at the food on her plate, but mostly pushed it around with her fork. Her husband ate heartily, even asking her if she was finished and then polishing off her share.
“My wife is feeling poorly,” he explained. “I have a business in Salt Lake City, but we’re going home for a year so she can see her doctor and rest.”
The woman blushed, and her husband patted her hand.
Amy immediately knew the woman was expecting a child, a subject too delicate for a gentleman such as Mr. Buckingham to mention in mixed company. Amy turned away from the table and dished eggs onto a serving platter beside the bacon.
“Do you and Mrs. Shelby have children?” Mrs. Buckingham asked sweetly.
Amy gripped the platter. With concerted effort, she relaxed her fingers and placed the food on the table. Jesse had looked up at her, but she kept her gaze on the checkered tablecloth.
“No,” he said in reply. “We don’t.”
Simple. Honest. No hint at the cost of that statement or the pain behind it. No explanation. No words could convey the unfathomable truth.
Pearly ate his meal oblivious to the tense undercurrent in the room, though he had been traveling through this Nebraska station for enough years to have remembered the cherubic infant who had once sat in a wooden chair at this table—the toddler who had followed his father’s every step whenever permitted.
Sam gave his daughter a look that conveyed sympathy.
“Pony up with Shelby, here, for your meals and room,” Pearly said to Mr. Buckingham, finishing his coffee and pushing back his chair. “We’re gonna pull foot so we make Omaha by breakfast tomorrow.”
The man took a leather pouch from inside his jacket and paid Jesse in gold coins.
The men grabbed their hats and exited.
“Thank you, Mrs. Shelby,” the woman said softly.
“Wait a moment.” Amy quickly prepared sandwiches, added apples from the bushel Sam had brought that morning and wrapped the meal in newspaper. “You’ll need to eat before Omaha,” she said.
The woman accepted the offering gratefully. “You’re very kind. Thank you.”
Amy followed her through the door, stood on the wooden walkway that led to the stable and lifted a hand to shade her eyes from the sun. Three men who’d eaten breakfast earlier were waiting at the corner of the building. Shelby Station was the only one along the Overland Trail with sleeping accommodations, and many travelers had told her that by far, she served the best food. Most stations were at least half a day’s ride apart, and those stops were usually only forty minutes to change horses and drivers. Passengers had to sleep sitting up, being jostled about in the coach, so the bunks her father had built with foresight and a head for business were as good as gold in the bank.
Jesse checked harnesses on the team of matching grays hitched to a Concord coach. He had trained those horses well for the task, and they stood attentively. He was the stock man. He had brought the horses and know-how into the partnership. Amy’s mother, until she died, had helped Amy cook and feed travelers.
Hermie Jackson, Jesse’s right-hand man, had finished loading trunks into the boot and fastened the straps over the lid. The two stood back as Mr. Buckingham helped his wife into the coach and the men who’d been waiting boarded and closed the door.
After climbing to his seat and picking up the reins, Pearly bellowed a “H-yah” and snapped the reins. The team pulled the coach forward. Hermie strode back to the stable.
Jesse turned and spotted Amy where she stood in the sunlight.
They stared at one another for a long moment, a year of silence cloaking anything they might have wanted to do or say, a lifetime of regret and guilt closing the door on what should have been. His partnership with her father had been her introduction to the man she would love and marry. The man who would give her a child.
Jesse adjusted his hat.
Amy flattened her hand against her waist.
He turned and strode toward the corral.
She found her feet and returned to the kitchen.
Though he stood in the shade of the open stable doors, sweat poured from his forehead and upper body as Jesse held the foot of a gelded black between his knees and deftly cleaned the hoof. An intolerable ache throbbed behind his eyes, and he resisted the impulse to go dull it with a hefty swig of liquor. Problem was, he knew he’d feel better if he did, so resisting was a monumental battle.
A soft footfall alerted him to someone’s presence and he looked up to see Amy. She appeared fresh and cool in a calico dress sprigged with a tiny green leaf pattern. Her hair was hidden beneath a straw bonnet, green ribbons laced beneath her chin.
He straightened and, still holding the iron pick, wiped his forehead.
“I’m going to place an order at the mercantile. Will you have time to pick it up after Mr. Liscom has filled it?”
He nodded. “Shouldn’t be a stage until suppertime. This is the last horse to get ready.”
Her gaze flicked over the black gelding. “Anything you need?”
A moment passed and her cheeks turned pink. She waited for a reply without meeting his eyes. Most of their conversations were conducted like this, it seemed.
“You might ask John if the linseed oil has arrived.”
“I’ll do that.” She turned and headed toward the mercantile.
It was a ten-minute walk, but if she’d wanted a horse, she’d have asked, he thought.
Jesse finished with the hoof he was cleaning and spoke to the black, wearily rubbed his forehead and neck. Then he rinsed at the pump and pulled on his shirt before returning to the house.
He entered the kitchen, where Mrs. Barnes glanced up from peeling potatoes. She was a handsome woman, with dark hair turning gray at the temples. Giving her a polite nod, he passed on to the front of the house and stood at the bottom of the stairs, one foot on the first step. This time of day the house was unnaturally quiet. The scent of lemon oil told him someone had been polishing wood.
Silence closed in on him. There should have been a child’s voice echoing through these rooms, footsteps on the wooden floors, toys scattered and a small pair of boots standing beside the door. Tim should be here. His precious Tim.
Jesse’s chest tightened with a familiar, lonely ache.
A man should be able to share these feelings with his wife, the only other person in the world who knew the same grief.
Jesse glanced up the stairs. There should have been other children, too. Another son. A daughter, perhaps. Not to replace Tim, of course, but to fill this house and their lives.
He couldn’t stay here anymore. Couldn’t see Amy every night, lie beside her and grieve for the life they’d once had and the things that should have been. He couldn’t think clearly when he was here, and he needed to sort things out in his head. Jesse pushed himself into motion.
In their bedroom, he gathered his clothing, comb and brush, and extra boots and placed them in the center of a blanket, which he bundled up and carried quickly down the stairs and across the space between buildings to the plain quarters where travelers slept.
Most rooms held at least six bunks, but he chose one of the two downstairs rooms with only two bunks and deposited his belongings on the bed he had slept on the night before. He could hear someone moving in a room above as he stacked his clothing in a drawer.
Footsteps sounded behind him, and he turned.
Adele McConough, the young woman who changed linens and did laundry, started at finding him. She clutched a stack of sheets to her chest.
“Didn’t mean to scare you,” he said apologetically.
“That’s okay. I didn’t expect anyone to be in here during the day.” She gave him a bashful smile.
He hadn’t wanted to explain, but of course the hired girls would know if he used this room. “I’ll be sleeping here. You don’t need to change the sheets every day. Once a week will be fine.”
“Y-yes, certainly, Mr. Shelby,” she said, obviously puzzled.
“And please,” he added, “don’t mention the fact that I’m bunking here to anyone.” Amy didn’t need the added embarrassment of gossip.
“I won’t,” she said, turning to go.
“Appreciate it.” He closed the drawer and left.
Back outside, he went to the spring house and raised a bucket containing jugs and jars from the cold water, found a jar of buttermilk and drank it slowly, hoping to calm his stomach and quench his thirst.
Feeling better, he headed back to the stable to finish preparing for the next stage.
The kitchen table was filled with travelers that evening—two businessmen, a young couple, a woman with a son about the age of eight and two elderly sisters. Sam participated in a conversation about the Wells Fargo lines with one of the bankers.
Mrs. Barnes, Adele and the laundress usually ate before the guests, along with Hermie and the other hands. Often Sam joined the other workers, but occasionally, he dined with the guests to stay current with news and happenings on the road.
Catching Amy by surprise, Jesse arrived and seated himself beside one of the older women.
Amy served the meal, and then, while Mrs. Barnes filled cups, she sliced more roast and cut a thick molasses cake into wedges. Jesse ate breakfast with the guests, but he always waited until they were gone and in their rooms before he came in to share a private supper with her. This change of schedule was an unsettling surprise.
She went about her tasks, and one by one, the diners left, until only Jesse and her father remained. They discussed a mare ready to foal, and as Amy picked up the last dish, Jesse followed Sam out the door without a backward glance.
A sinking shred of disappointment almost made its way into her chest, but she stifled it immediately and, taking her place beside Mrs. Barnes, dug into the stack of dishes.
Eventually, everything was washed and dried and Mrs. Barnes left. She rode in about five miles every day from her son and daughter-in-law’s homestead to the west. Her job here was her contribution to their struggle to keep the place going.
Amy picked up the plate on which she’d saved a portion of food for herself and ate a few bites without bothering to sit. She wasn’t being fair to Jesse, but she couldn’t talk to him. She didn’t have anything to say, and she refused to open wounds best left scarred over.
Taking out her patterns and material, she finished cutting two dresses and started pinning the seams together. With little time to devote to herself, this project would take months, but it kept her hands busy this evening. Night had fallen full upon the station and there was no sign of Jesse’s return.
She wanted to ignore this problem, too, but maybe she had better go see where he was. After putting away her sewing, she lit a lantern and carried it to the stable.
The lamps were still lit, and that was one of Jesse’s last chores, so she searched the building, walking past stalls where horses stood placidly. An occasional nicker prompted her to reach through the gate and rub her knuckles on a bony forehead.
She found Jesse in a large stall toward the back doors, which were closed and barred. He sat on a bushel of hay, a sorrel mare with swollen sides placidly blinking at him.
The swiveling light from Amy’s lantern caught his attention and he glanced up. “Hey.”
“What are you doing out here?”
“Just keeping her company.” Though his words were carefully enunciated, she heard the liquor that laced them.
Spotting the bottle between his boots, swift anger warmed her face and neck. Anger…disappointment…or guilt?
