Author: Elizabeth Grayson
Category: Western
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/elizabeth-grayson/page,17,76810-a_place_called_home.html
Livi and Eustace consulted on the question of the padlocked door one warm and rainy morning shortly after the corn had begun to sprout. They immediately established that the key David had left with Livi didn't open the lock. Eustace pried at the hasp with every tool they had, and while the metal rasped and groaned the lock refused to give.
"David did pride himself on the strength of those locks," Livi said her voice tinged with mingled frustration and pride.
"He sure did build 'em good, Miz 'Livia," the black man observed, blotting his brow on the back of his arm. He applied the same tactics to the door itself, but the stout wood didn't budge.
"Well, Eustace," Livi said when it was clear the other half of the house was locked up tight, "there must be neighbors around here somewhere. When we have time, maybe we can find someone with a file."
They turned their energies instead to staking out and turning the earth for the kitchen garden. Working together, Livi and Violet planted beans and squash, cabbage and potatoes, onions and radishes. Livi spiced the vegetables with a scattering of herbs and dug pennyroyal in around the foundation of the house to keep out fleas.
While the women worked, Eustace and Tad built a pen for the pigs, a stout coop for the chickens in the hope of discouraging varmits. A corral for the cow and horses came next.
As they turned their attention to other projects, the plantings flourished. Green tufts poked up through the ruddy earth, sprouting with vigor unknown in Virginia's James River plantations.
The need for a barn loomed before them, a project far beyond their capacities. To build one, Livi would need to solicit help. David had told her there were settlements in the area, but she couldn't bring herself to ride out alone to look for them. As odd as it seemed, she found this valley a small, inviolate world she wasn't eager to breach.
April slid seamlessly into May. The corn grew taller. Livi rounded out a little. Tad and Eustace worked together as if they could read each other's minds. Violet took both of the Talbot females under her wing, clucking gruffly over Livi and petting Cissy as if she were the cleverest child on God's green earth.
David would be pleased, Livi found herself thinking one day as she squatted in the dirt, weeding the kitchen garden.
She could hear the torrent of wind spill through trees along the ridge, watch shadows scamper across the yard. She could feather the rich, rusty earth beneath her hands with undeniable satisfaction. This bit of Kentucky wasn't what she'd wanted, it wasn't all it would have been if David had lived, but she'd done her best.
She sensed a stroke of warmth along her back, caught the drift of what smelled like pipe smoke in the wind. And for one precious moment, Livi felt as if David were smiling down on her.
Chapter 11
The man came out of the forest at midday. The first stranger Livi had seen since they'd been at the cabin. The first intruder.
Livi spotted him from the doorway, noticing instantly how tall he was, how broad. He was leading his horse and three plodding mules across the track between the fields of rustling corn, striding along as if he owned them. She could not see his face for the distance and for the shadow cast by his wide-brimmed hat, but a flare of impending menace fired up in the pit of her belly.
Trusting her instincts, Livi stepped back into the cabin and snatched the pistol from the mantel, taking time to check its load. She moved back to the door and watched him approach, glad that Eustace, Violet, and the children were away from the house. They'd all gone to pick the wild strawberries they'd discovered growing on the far side of the ridge and were well out of harm's way if she had to defend herself.
As the man crossed the bridge, she noticed the spill of thick black hair against his shoulders and the cant of the feathers in his hat. She picked out the familiar lines of his countenance, recognized his lithe, almost savage movements. Even as far away as that, she could feel the blaze of his nascent energy.
Reid Campbell crested the rise and stopped at the bottom of the steps—a tall man, rangy and long-boned; a hard man, his face weathered down to its elements. Even in dress he flaunted the two worlds that had spawned him. He wore a white man's trousers and boots, an Indian leather shirt, fringed and quilled, and a medicine bag on a thong around his neck.
While they stood there, Reid had been studying Livi nearly as intently as she had been studying him.
"Hello, Livi," he finally greeted her, one corner of his mouth cocked up in a leer of pure derision. "So you did make the trip, pregnant and all. I wasn't sure you had the gumption. Where can I find David?"
Anger ripped up Livi's spine—anger that Reid Campbell could so easily dismiss her struggle to reach Kentucky, anger that Reid was here when David was not. The anger made her thoughtless, made her cruel.
"David is dead." She meant the words to shock Reid, to make him feel the pain that weighed on her every moment of every day.
She saw the corners of his mouth constrict, saw something flicker at the backs of his eyes. "How did it happen?"
Outrage swept in behind her anger. "Is that all you have to say? Is that all you care about?"
Reid's eyebrows rose, conveying both surprise at her fury and frigid detachment.
"How did it happen?" he asked again.
Could Reid Campbell possibly be so unaffected by word of David's death? Livi wondered, searching his face for some shading of grief. How could he have demanded so much of her husband over the years and feel nothing at all?
"He was killed on the trail," she answered, fighting down the memory of digging David's grave, of wrapping him in her daisy quilt and lowering him into the earth.
"How?"
She refused to recall more than he had made her remember already. "Indians."
If Reid wanted more than that from her, he was going to have to crawl down her throat and pull the words out, one by one.
Instead of pursuing the matter, Reid dropped his horse's reins and went to the door of the locked-up cabin.
"What is it you're doing there?" she demanded, shifting her grip on the pistol and coming out onto the steps.
He took a key from the medicine bag around his neck, unlocked the padlock, and pushed the portal wide. "That seems obvious, doesn't it? I'm unlocking my half of the house."
His half of the house?
For an instant Livi couldn't get her breath. David had built this house for her. For her!
He hadn't said anything about sharing their cabin with Reid. But then, David wouldn't have told her—not until they arrived, not until it was too late for her to object. Tears scoured her eyelids, and she blinked them back. She wanted to shout and curse and throw things.
When they met in the Hereafter, David was going to have to answer for this.
"I'd rather share this house with the devil himself!" she spit at Reid.
"I've heard the devil's busy elsewhere," he drawled and began methodically stripping bundles of furs from the mules' backs. One by one he chucked them onto the floor of his cabin.
"Are both Tad and Cissy all right?" he asked, never pausing in his work.
"They lost their father. They saw him killed before their eyes."
Pure perversity made her want to wring a response from this unfeeling man. David deserved Reid's regret, Reid's grief. Her husband had earned it a hundred times over in the long years of their friendship. For herself, Livi wanted the satisfaction of seeing sorrow or loss in Reid's dark face.
"I was inquiring as to whether they survived the attack," he clarified.
"They're here with me in Kentucky."
With the packs and his saddle stashed in his side of the house, Reid finally turned to look at her. His eyes were glacial, that pale, translucent blue that always made Livi think of a fast-flowing stream beneath a sheen of ice.
"You seem to have come through everything—intact." His words were more accusation than observation.
Livi stood her ground and glared at him. She didn't care what he thought or said. This was her house, these were her newly pla
nted fields, and she was not about to be intimidated by Campbell's presence. If he resented her being here, so be it. She resented him, too.
Reid said nothing more, only bent and picked up his rifle. "I'll put the animals in the corral out back and go shoot some game for supper. With David gone, you probably haven't had fresh meat for quite some time."
She wanted to tell him that Tad had been providing for them very well, that Eustace was better at barking squirrels than anyone she'd ever seen. But more than putting Reid Campbell in his place, she wanted him out of her sight.
With antagonism bubbling behind her sternum, Livi watched Reid feed and water his animals. She watched as he hefted his rifle and turned his back on the cabin and her. She didn't loosen her grip on the pistol or let out her breath until he'd stalked off into the hills again.
* * *
Reid blundered across the creek and up the hill. He scrambled over the boulders in his path and scratched for purchase on the grassy slope. He climbed until he was gasping for breath, until his heart was thundering in his ears.
Jesus, God! David was dead!
He looked back into the valley below. Back to the cabin he and David had built with their own hands. Back to the cabin Livi Talbot had quite obviously taken for her own.
Goddamn the woman, anyway.
How could she have broken the news of David's death to him so coldly? So calmly. With venom in her eyes. She might just as well have blasted a hole clear through him with that pistol she'd been hiding in her skirt. She might just as well have reached right in and torn out his heart.
David had been killed. Solid, rock-steady David. Strong, dependable David. David, who was more like a brother to him than any of his father's other sons.
Reid could scarcely take it in.
How could this have happened? On the trail that Reid had traveled a score of times. At a time when David had finally gained the land and security he'd been seeking all his life.
There was no mistake. The desolation in Livi's eyes, the anger and the blame, were real. Reid knew she had not lied to him.
He turned toward the top of the rise and kept moving. Crashing through the underbrush. Beating back the bushes. Fighting his way through thickets and down ravines.
Grief pressed up the back of his throat, and he did his best to swallow the burn of it. His eyes stung and his chest ached, but Reid pressed on. He drove himself forward, climbing the spine of each hill, fighting instinctively upward.
The sun hung low in a hazy sky when he hauled himself the last few yards to the rocky outcropping at the top of a distant ridge. The land fell away around him under an ocean of shifting leaves. He could see miles of the land that David loved, from the mountains to the south to the rippled hills to the north and west.
Reid stood there panting, his lungs wrung raw, his muscles burning. His Indian heritage had brought him to this mountaintop to mourn a man who had been so much more than a friend. Here Reid would rage and weep for David. Here he would curse the men who had taken David Talbot's life and vow revenge. It was the Creek way. He understood it now. He understood it in a way he never had when the Panther clan killed his uncle in his stead all those years before.
Slowly he lowered his rifle, powder horn, and shot bag into the slight hollow in the top of the boulder beneath him. He flung away his hat and tore off his shirt. He straightened joint by joint, locking his knees and hips, lifting his chest and shoulders. He sucked in a long, deep breath and raised his head.
"David!" he howled at the endless sky, tortured, anguished, as if he could call his friend's spirit back from the grave. "David! David!"
Echoes wailed back at him as the sun sank low. They blended with his cries, wove in circles through his head as the sunset dimmed.
At length, Reid staggered to his knees. His chest heaved, his throat burned raw from shouting. His hands were trembling. Yet with unerring precision, he took his knife from its sheath and rested the point at the base of his throat. He drew it slowly down along the midline of his body. Warmth welled up from the whisper-thin line. It gathered and pearled, deep, rich crimson in the fading light. He scribed a second line diagonally from right to left and a third from left to right. Shivering, Reid lay down on the rock and let himself bleed.
The boulder was smooth against his back, cold in the gathering veils of night. The sky drifted above him, black overhung with gray, shifting and circling. Stars picked their way through the gauze of clouds. Sparks of ice, cinders of some cold and ancient fire.
Memories crept out of the dark. Visions of David Talbot flooded Reid's senses. The childish David, laughing when he'd been thrown from the back of James Campbell's stallion. David standing alone at the end of the plantation drive crying welcome when Reid returned from the hellish school in Charles Town. He saw that same David uneasy and confused by the change in Reid after his years with the Creeks.
Since boyhood they'd been joined, working, playing, fighting, dreaming. Reid closed his eyes to shield himself, but the memories dwelled in his head and in his heart. They filled him, taunted and tortured him.
Now David existed only in his mind, only as part of the cosmos, only as part of the past.
As his blood seeped into the rock beneath him, Reid's soul drained and emptied, leaving a sparse, bitter residue of grief and regret. He came to his feet slowly, his body quivering, his head reeling. He bent to retrieve his gun, powder horn, and bag of shot. Raising his voice in the rise and fall of the funeral chant he'd learned so long ago, Reid lifted his rifle and fired east into the deepest veils of night. Still humming, he reloaded and fired once to the north, once to the south, and once to the west.
Standing tall, he addressed the sky. "This is to herald the arrival of the soul of my brother, David Talbot. He is not a Creek, but his heart is pure. May he find peace in the World Beyond."
Alone on the rocky crest of a hill, Reid mourned his friend, his brother, his single tenuous link to the world beyond himself. As the moon rose, chasing the clouds to the west, Reid savored his memories of David Talbot and somehow managed to say his farewell.
* * *
The children gave Livi ample warning of Campbell's approach.
"Reid! Reid!" they cried, their voices rising in delight and welcome.
Livi glanced out the door into the bright morning sun just in time to see Campbell scoop up her daughter in his arms, to see Cissy press her fair, smooth cheek to his darker one. Tad left off stacking the wood that Eustace was splitting and ran toward him, too.
"Ma said you came in yesterday," he greeted Reid, capering along beside him like a puppy eager for a scratch behind the ears. "Where did you go off to? We expected you back last night."
"I had some things to do," the big man answered. "And I told your mama I'd get us something good for dinner." A brace of rabbits dangled from a thong at his wrist.
"I've been getting some rabbits myself," Tad burst out. "With snares, mostly. But on the trail I killed a deer!"
"That's damn good, boy," Reid acknowledged. "Your pa would be proud."
Tad ducked his head. "That's what Ma said."
It was the only thing she and Reid were ever likely to agree on, Livi thought. She heard Campbell approach the door and renewed her efforts chopping the greens Violet had picked in the woods.
At least he had the courtesy to knock before he crossed her threshold. "I brought those rabbits I promised you," he said.
"I expected them for dinner last night," she snapped at him, never looking up.
"Well, you always have accused me of being unreliable."
"It's all right about last night's dinner," Cissy put in. "We had wild strawberries instead. Violet and Eustace took us to pick them. They were sweet."
Putting Cissy down and depositing the rabbits in the bucket on the hearth, Reid settled himself on the bench at the far side of the table where Livi was working. Near as he was to her, the prickly warmth of his vitality danced across her cheeks and chest.
He cast a glance
in Violet's direction. "I didn't think David held with owning slaves."
Livi slowed her chopping and chose her words with care. "Violet and Eustace aren't slaves. They're my hired hands. I didn't think I could handle this place all by myself, and they agreed to work for me."
Just to prove her point, she made proper introductions. "This is Mr. Campbell, Violet. It seems he's just become our—um—neighbor. Reid, this is Violet Mae Hadley."
Violet looked up from where she was weaving a basket and skewered Reid with a single look.
"Eustace is very industrious, too. Perhaps you saw him chopping wood."
Reid leaned a little closer, the lines deepening at the corners of his mouth. "Just what are you planning to pay them with? David didn't think there would be much money left once he bought supplies."
Livi's face heated. What she'd promised the Hadleys was none of Campbell's concern. Still, she'd made no secret of the agreement. Tad knew the particulars, and she wasn't about to put her son in a position where Reid would go to him demanding answers.
"We agreed that if Violet and Eustace would work for me for a year, I'd give them a piece of my land. They've already built a face camp at the edge of the meadow up on the ridge and their house is under way."
Campbell straightened abruptly, color ripening under his tan. "You promised them land, did you, Livi? Then I think that's something we need to discuss."
"I don't know that I have anything to say to you."
"Well, I have an opinion or two I'd like to express when it comes to giving this land away," Reid told her and pushed to his feet. "I need a few minutes to set my cabin to rights, and then I'll be back so we can settle this."
Campbell was out the door before Livi could tell him what she did with her land wasn't something she was willing to debate with him.
"What'd you say to make him so mad?" Tad wanted to know.