Chapter Two
Two
When Gabe reached the turnoff onto his property, his dog, a yellow-and-brown mutt with one permanently bent ear, which lent the animal an air of perpetual curiosity, raced toward the loaded wagon, barking wildly and causing the horses to toss their heads and prance a little, though they were pretty used to Hector’s tail-wagging, bright-eyed bombardments.
As was his way, Hector leaped through the air like a circus performer and landed on the seat of the buckboard, scrabbling for purchase.
Gabe steadied him with one arm, drew back on the reins with the other, as much to calm the horses as to let the dog settle alongside him.
With a rueful sigh and a fragment of a smile—the best he could manage, these days—he ruffled Hector’s dusty head.
Then he brought down the reins again, and the wagon rolled forward along the rutted way home.
Cottonwoods lined the road on either side, their plentiful, pale leaves shimmering like silver coins in the midday sunshine.
How Bonnie and Abigail had loved to see the leaves dance like that. Abigail would laugh her little girl laugh and clap her tiny hands, bouncing with joy at the sight, while Bonnie beamed with delighted love.
At the reminder of his late wife and daughter, both lost to influenza on the same terrible day, a little over three years back, fresh grief speared through Gabe, cold and narrow and sharp as the blade of a rapier.
The past enfolded him like a shadow, the way it often did.
He’d been a soldier for just a few months, Gabe had; never even seen real action, let alone crossed the ocean to fight.
He’d joined up, though, knowing he’d be drafted soon, and left home in the fall of 1915.
As hard as it was to leave, he loved his country—what it stood for more than what it did—and personal duty required him to stand up for freedom, wherever it was under threat, though he was under no illusion that America didn’t have problems of its own that needed solving.
So he went, even though it meant abandoning Bonnie and their unborn child.
He’d wound up near Seattle, in a U.S. Army training camp, and during a routine exercise, Gabe had been shot in his right leg when another soldier’s rifle misfired, and he’d nearly lost the limb entirely, once the infection set in.
After he’d gone through several surgeries, recuperated the best he could and managed to overcome the infection, he’d been sent back home to Silver Hills, Montana, with an honorable discharge and a marked limp.
For him, the return had been bittersweet, both a blessing—because of Bonnie and Abigail, the child she was carrying at the time—and a source of profound regret.
He knew war was ugly, and that he’d been spared a heap of bad memories, or even a gruesome death, but it bothered him that he’d had to leave the battle for other men to fight—men who loved their wives and families as much as he did, yet had to leave them behind.
Gabe tried to shake off the thickening shadows rallying at the edges of his mind as he drove the wagon toward the barn, but they only crept closer. Even the glaring light of a late-summer afternoon couldn’t dispel them.
The big stone farmhouse, empty these days and nights, except for him and Hector, stood at the end of the long access road, looking sturdy and lonesome.
Sometimes, in the small hours before sunrise, Gabe would have sworn he felt the whole place heave a great sigh, as if it were a living thing, pining for those who’d once thrived there.
As always happened when he’d been away, whether in town fetching supplies or out in the fields, where he grew wheat, potatoes and corn, Gabe felt his grief deepen by fathoms.
He set the buckboard’s brake lever with his good leg—the left one—and slid an arm around Hector, just for a moment or two, as though he could draw strength from his furry companion.
Hector seemed to have enough good cheer for the both of them, but today, after encountering Elizabeth Fontaine in front of the general store, Gabe was inexplicably shaken and more than a little confused.
He’d felt something shift in a bleak corner of his heart, just looking at her. Just the faintest whisper of hope, soft as the touch of a butterfly’s wing.
Hope?
Gabe made a scoffing sound in the depths of his throat. He’d buried hope, right along with his wife and daughter, and there was nothing to do but endure whatever time he had left on this cruel, beautiful Earth.
He’d never loved any woman but Bonnie, and he never would.
They’d been linked, the two of them, since they were little kids just starting out, attending the same one-room schoolhouse—closed now that there was a more modern building in town—a mile or so farther down the road.
Gabe had loved Bonnie as a boy, and he loved her as a man.
Their brief years together had been the happiest time Gabe had ever known, though things had been hard in the beginning, like they were for most young couples.
Early in their marriage, they’d lived with Martin and Annabelle, Gabe’s parents. They had been honest folks, hardworking and still in the prime of their lives, and they’d welcomed Bonnie into the family wholeheartedly.
Gabe had worked the farm with his father and, when they could collar him long enough, with Gabe’s younger brother, Finn.
Gabe’s thoughts soured a little, as they did whenever Finn came to mind.
He was the classic prodigal son, Finn was, except that he’d never come home to be welcomed and feted with a well-fed calf.
Not even when both Martin and Annabelle had drowned, crossing the Flathead River by a horse-drawn ferry. According to witnesses, Annabelle had fallen overboard, and Martin had jumped in after her.
The currents had been too strong for both of them, and attempts to rescue them failed as well.
Bonnie and her uncomplicated love had been Gabe’s salvation in those days, and he’d gradually recovered from the loss of his mother and father.
Finn, perhaps driven by his own grief, had kept his distance, basically withdrawn from what remained of his family—his only brother, Bonnie and little Abigail.
As boys, they’d been close, the two brothers, fishing together, riding horseback all over the sprawling farm and the land beyond. And Gabe had sorely missed Finn’s company—especially after the deaths of his wife and daughter.
Except for an occasional telegram or a brief letter, there had been no word from Finn, and certainly no visits.
In fact, after receiving the designated share of their par ents’ financial bequests, Finn had wanted to sign his half of the farm over to Gabe, free and clear, and that just about rubbed Gabe raw whenever he thought about it.
The farm was as much Finn’s as his; it was good, fertile land, worth holding on to, through good times and bad. When Finn had sent the document for Gabe’s signature, he’d torn it in two, then tossed it into the fire for good measure.
Given time, Gabe had thought then, Finn might still come to his senses.
He might still come home to stay.
And he might not.
After all, it did seem that Finn had been interested in his inheritance and nothing else.
Yes, he missed his brother. But he was furious with Finn for taking off, too.
Now Gabe shook his head, hoping, for the moment at least, to send all thoughts about his younger brother away with the slight wind that had risen to spin up little twisters in the dirt.
Stopping in front of the large, weathered barn, he leaped down from the wagon seat, followed by Hector, and winced at the jolt to his injured leg. He set his teeth and waited out the flash of pain.
With his throat dry and constricted, Gabe tended to his duties.
He released the team from their harnesses and turned them out into the pasture to graze and drink from the little stream that flowed down from the hills.
With Hector getting under his feet at almost every turn, Gabe unloaded the feed he’d bought at the general store—winter was coming, and he was stockpiling rations for the livestock—but when he was finished, he couldn’t bring himself to head for the house.
It was just too damned empty, that place.
Two stories of echoing rooms.
His best friend, John Avery, the town blacksmith and volunteer preacher, had been urging him to either sell up and move to town or pull his head out of his backside and marry up with some nice woman, but Gabe shook his head again, as though John had been there and spoken aloud.
So, with the evening chores still a few hours in the future, Hector frolicking at his side, Gabe slowly made his way around the back of the barn and onto the path that led up the side of the nearest hillock, where the family cemetery stood in full sun, surrounded by more cottonwoods and a scattering of pine and Douglas fir.
There were almost a dozen graves there by now, but Gabe went straight to the one with the headstone he’d chiseled himself.
Bonnie was buried in that spot, and so was little Abigail, who’d been laid to rest in her mother’s arms.
Gabe planted his feet and stood strong, determined not to sink to his knees as he’d done so many times before.
Hector, quiet now, settled into the soft, fragment grass alongside the stones that encircled the grave. A soft breeze ruffled the dog’s coat, and he rested his muzzle on his front paws, watching Gabe with gentle eyes.
Gabe felt another hitch in his throat.
He rolled his head around in a circle, trying to ease the tightness in his neck and shoulders.
What, exactly, had he come here to say?
Nothing he hadn’t said already, dozens, if not hundreds of times.
When Gabe’s knees slackened, he didn’t try to stay on his feet.
He knelt within that oblong arrangement of field stones, closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the marker, felt the words he’d hammered in himself, the words that haunted him.
Bonnie Tyler Whitfield and Abigail Susan Whitfield,
Beloved wife and daughter,
Taken too soon and forever missed.
August 12, 1918
Nearby, Hector gave a sympathetic whimper.
He’d been a pup when the epidemic of influenza reached this pastoral part of Montana, full of that singular joy that comes so naturally to some dogs, making Bonnie laugh by jumping up to grab sheets or skirts or trouser legs as she hung laundry on the clothesline, keeping constant watch over Abigail as she toddled around at her mother’s feet, delighted by her canine playmate.
Gabe straightened, traced the words and numbers on the gravestone with the tip of one calloused finger, his throat tighter than before and the backs of his eyes scalding.
One day, there had been laughter, sunshine, a puppy celebrating the wonders of mere existence. Then suddenly, the fever struck, first in town, then on outlying ranches and farms.
Gabe had tried to protect his wife and daughter, kept them closeted away on the farm, stayed close by himself. But quarantine hadn’t saved them.
They’d taken sick on the same morning, first Abigail, then Bonnie.
Gabe had gone for the doctor, but that, too had been fruitless.
Doc Holbrook had fallen ill himself and couldn’t leave his bed.
Feeling utterly hopeless, Gabe had sat with Bonnie, held a delirious Abigail in his arms and rocked her beside the marriage bed, praying to a God who appeared to be occupied elsewhere. He’d bathed their foreheads in cool water, trying to bring the fever down.
After four days, they’d died, within minutes of each other.
First Bonnie, then Abigail.
Gabe had never been able to understand why he’d been spared the disease that took so many lives, both locally and all around the world, and he hardly counted survival as a blessing.
Now, face wet, Gabe pushed back from the gravestone and rose awkwardly to his feet.
Hector was immediately up and ready for whatever might happen next.
And as Gabe left the small cemetery and started down the hill, he thought he heard Bonnie’s voice, soft and almost inaudible, in the breeze ruffling the shining leaves of the cottonwoods.
You promised, Gabe. You promised to live.