This Loving Land - Dorothy Garlock [2]
One
It was unbearably hot in the closely-packed stagecoach, and remembering the deep coolness of home—the Piney Woods—Summer felt even hotter under her cape of blue-black hair. She was pretty, sitting there in her cotton dress, the sun shooting lights through her hair. Small, pretty and determined; she was nineteen years old and she was on her way west with an eight-year-old boy in tow.
The girl’s face showed lines of tiredness, but the black-fringed violet eyes refused to close. She was determined to stay awake, using her hat to fan the flushed face of the child sleeping in her lap.
He was very dear to her, this small brother of hers. She had brought him up virtually alone. When he was three, their papa had been killed—a wheel of the wagon he was driving collapsed, throwing him and their mother down a steep incline. Their mother’s back was injured, and after that she never left her bed until the day she died. The responsibility of raising the boy and caring for her invalid mother had pressed heavily on the shoulders of the fourteen-year-old girl.
Summer watched the perspiring face of the sleeping child with troubled, patient eyes, as the slight breeze created by the hat lifted the damp hair on his forehead. They had come a long way from the Piney Woods.
Across from her sat a ranch woman in her forties or fifties; it was hard to tell a woman’s age in this country where the wind and dust ate into the skin, making it old and wrinkled after only a few years. The older woman sniffed and looked out the window. Summer knew what the gesture meant. She was piqued because she hadn’t opened up and told her their family history. The woman had been explicit with her inquiries, and Summer had told her no more than that a family friend awaited them in Hamilton.
“It’s a good thing. Hamilton’s no place for a girl alone.”
Summer didn’t tell her about the letter she had received signed simply S. McLean, or that the letter had contained the startling news that she and her brother owned a plot of land with a cabin on it. The letter had been short and curt, without warmth or welcome, but it was a letter nevertheless, and Summer’s hopes clung to the security of the written words.
They rode on in silence as still as the land they were passing through. The land looked lonely, Summer thought wistfully. She understood loneliness, because she had often been lonely herself—in between dilemmas, that is. And there had been dilemmas. Every day. What to do on a cold, windy night when she thought her mother was going to die? Should she run for help, leaving the five-year-old to watch his dying mother? Her mother, whose days were numbered, or the small boy with his life before him? It had not been an easy decision. She had stayed, and her mother had lived—to die three years later, under the very same circumstances. Her sweet, patient mother, who had suffered in silence, had left her and John Austin scarcely three months ago.
Summer smoothed the hair from the boy’s face with long, slender fingers. He has no one but me, she thought sadly. Then her eyes widened and the sadness was replaced by hope. No one but me and Sam McLean.
A nagging recollection of the hill country where she had lived as a small child with her mother until her papa came back from the war tugged at her memory. She vaguely remembered someone squatting down in front of her and saying: “Don’t cry, summertime girl. You go on with your ma and get all growed up and then I’ll come. I’ll come and fetch you home.”
The shadows were longish across the road as the horses sped through their own dust cloud, and into the new town of Hamilton that had sprung to life in 1850, just two short years ago. One rider raced ahead of them down the rutted road, hallooing to announce the arrival of the stage. The big Concord creaked to a halt in front of a lean-to with a shiny tin roof. Grubbi1y dressed men swarmed around the coach from all sides, craning their necks to see who was inside.
“This is Hamilton, John Austin,” she whispered to the tousled boy.
He did not reply. He was