Chapter 12
Zetta Lee Welling was the second wife of Hamilton Welling.
Hamilton, or Ham as others knew him in the territory days, had used up his first wife putting eight babies in her.
The first three were stillborn, and he grieved hard for the son but hardly gave the two daughters that followed an afterthought except to make certain Essie Clare knew she was not to present him with any more girls, dead or alive.
She did not. She gave him two boys, Gideon and Jackson, with another stillborn son in between.
Essie Clare begged him not to touch her again, but Ham had it in his head that he required at least four sons to manage what he intended to make of the land, and he got Essie Clare with child two more times.
She presented him with two more sons, both alive at birth and both dead within days.
Her last baby outlived her by fourteen hours.
Still of a mind to add two sons, and needing a mother for the two little ones he had, Ham took his sons, ten head of cattle, and rode to the outpost at South Pass on the Oregon Trail to wait for a wagon train to pass through.
He found Zetta Lee right off, and because the wagon master was happy to send her packing, she only cost Ham six of the ten head he was prepared to settle on her family.
Zetta Lee always maintained that the cows were her farewell gift to the wagon party, not a bride’s price.
She had no family to formally accept what Ham Welling was offering, and besides that, she was as delighted to be gone from the wagon train as her fellow settlers were happy to see her go.
Even before her husband died because he was too slow or too stupid to get out of the way of a runaway wagon, Zetta Lee was at the center of unrest in the group.
The women were suspicious; the men were smitten. Zetta Lee was in her glory.
She was a widow at nineteen and beholden to no one, so when Ham Welling proposed to make her his wife, the mother of his two sons, and the mistress of Welling & Sons in the Eden Valley, she accepted.
Hamilton was her senior by sixteen years and range work had kept him lean and hard.
He did not have a kind face, but he had the kind of face that gave her a little thrill when she caught him looking at her.
She was as much taken by the way his eyes ate her up as she was by the fact that he already had two sons.
She did not want children of her own. The thought of being pregnant terrified her.
There was no surer means of a woman becoming old before her time than producing a litter of brats.
Zetta Lee would later say that one of the things that attracted Ham to her was knowing that she was already broke in.
She would also say that he never suspected how true that was.
If he thought he was ever the master in their marriage, it was because she let him think it.
He put his dead wife’s ring on her finger, but he may as well have put it through his own nose because Zetta Lee led him around by it in and out of bed.
Zetta Lee was a hard worker. She made sure Ham had no complaints with her there, and she did right by Gideon and Jack, raising them to benefit from what she had learned through the eighth grade.
She never turned Ham away, but neither did she give him the children he wanted.
She kept her figure trim, her breasts firm, and her ebony hair glossy, and when he was range riding for days, sometimes weeks, on end, she entertained his friends from nearby Lander who stopped by to see if she needed anything. Or anyone. She always did.
Ham Welling did not know about his wife’s interests outside of their marriage bed, and because she let it be known that Ham would kill her if he ever found out, none of her lovers betrayed her—or themselves.
The one concession that Zetta Lee made came five years into their marriage.
Ham got it in his head again that he wanted another child.
He would accept a daughter, if that’s how it turned out, but he had an unnatural fear that one of his sons would be Cain to the other’s Abel.
He did not understand how it was possible to plant eight babies in Essie Clare and not one in Zetta Lee.
What he knew was that it was not for lack of trying.
Zetta Lee fell into a melancholy state. She was listless, quiet, and undemanding in bed.
She rarely spoke except to apologize for her inadequacies as a wife.
She cried a great deal when Ham was around.
She ate very little. This went on for three weeks, and just when she thought she might become as mad as Lady Macbeth, Ham took it all back.
That was when she suggested an orphan. They would take on just one boy at first and see how it went.
If it was a good fit for their family, they’d choose another later.
Zetta Lee was not certain how Ham would take to the idea, but when he said yes, she figured she had bought herself another five years.
Raising someone else’s child was less onerous to her than bearing one.
Ham had to travel a piece to meet the orphan train.
The Union Pacific’s rails did not reach as far west back then, and most orphans ended their journey in Indiana.
Ham set out from Eden Valley with three of his ranch hands and two hundred head of cattle destined for the eastern markets.
He returned a month later with his men, a decent profit from the drive, and a skinny redheaded boy who sat better in a saddle when he was tied to the horn.
Ham liked him because he didn’t whine about it.
Morgan Longstreet was a good fit. He didn’t look like a Welling, but he took the name because no one ever said he shouldn’t.
Sometimes he forgot that he didn’t look like the rest of them.
Mostly it was Zetta Lee who reminded him.
She liked to point out that she was different, too.
Where Ham and his two sons had coffee-colored hair, Zetta Lee’s was as black as a pirate’s heart.
Gideon and his father shared sharp, angular features that Jackson would also see once his face thinned out.
Zetta Lee’s face was heart shaped, her lips fuller, her eyes rounder.
Morgan avoided the mirror so he would not have to gaze into the freckled face she told him was angelic.
She called him Ginger Pie. Until Zetta Lee, he had always been “that redheaded boy.” He had never heard the word “ginger” used in reference to his hair.
He didn’t mind so much. She had silly names for Gideon and Jackson as well, but it seemed to Morgan that she used them less frequently and not always kindly.
He did not know if the endearment made him special or was meant to set him apart, but it was years before he objected to it, and still years after that before he objected out loud.
Morgan figured he got along with Gideon and Jack about as well as any brothers ever got along.
Early on he recognized that Gideon and Jack shared a bond that he would never have with either of them, together or separately, but they did not make it their life’s work to exclude him.
The three of them made a triangle, and that usually meant that one of them was sitting on the outside.
Sometimes that was a good place to be, like when Gideon and Jack were tearing into each other, but other times he was there because he was their target and they were fixing to bury him in a heap of trouble.
They all worked hard on the ranch. Everyone had chores.
From the beginning, Morgan was expected to do his share, and depending on the mood of his brothers, he sometimes did their share as well.
Morgan learned to ride and rope, and Ham taught him how to break a horse.
There was an old hand named Hatch Crookshank who taught him how to gentle one.
Gideon, owing to his age, was the first one allowed to accompany his father on a cattle drive.
He came back with stories that made Jack and Morgan long to go.
They talked excitedly about what they would do when their turn came, and Gideon listened to them with his chest puffed out, like he was ten years their senior and a score of years more experienced.
Jackson was permitted to ride out next. Ham let his sons flank the herd on the left, keeping them together so they could look out for each other. Morgan stood back on the porch with Zetta Lee and watched them go. She laid her hand on his shoulder and comforted him.
“Come inside now, Ginger Pie. I want to show you something.”
That was how it started. Zetta Lee took him to her bed, and in the absence of her husband, she broke him in.
The two hands that were left behind to help manage the ranch came sniffing around at different times, but Zetta Lee told each one that he no longer pleased her.
From the bedroom window, Morgan watched one, then the other, slink away.
He wondered if he would leave her like a whipped puppy when she said the same to him.
There were men from town who stopped by. Morgan recognized them from previous visits. He also remembered that their visits usually lasted longer, and he remembered that when they came he and his brothers were sent away from the house. On one of those occasions, Jack had nearly drowned in the pond.
Now Zetta Lee did not let any of them stay beyond a few minutes. Some of them were angry, others merely resigned. She remained firm. She held a Bible in the crook of her arm and told every one of them the same story. She had been visited by an angel, and she was saved.