Lynna Banning - Smoke River Bride

Thad was surprised in a way that he did not regret it. He knew it was the right thing. He had given her his name and his protection, and by God, he would give her a home and all the comforts he could afford in this lean year, starting with the boy’s trousers and shirts and work boots he’d purchased yesterday at the mercantile. She sure couldn’t do housework in that silky red outfit.

Ah, hell, maybe it would work out just fine. He was respected in Smoke River, known as a steady and resourceful man, and she seemed to be good-natured. And—he felt his face grow hot—she sure was pretty.

What could go wrong?

He drew rein at the front porch and watched Leah study the small house he’d built, the barn, and the barely sprouted three-acre field of winter wheat he’d gambled his savings to plant. He’d put his whole life into this farm; he hoped to goodness she liked what she saw.

The minute she walked into the cabin and gazed at what was to be her home, his heart shriveled.

Leah stared at the plank floor, sticky with something that had spilled but never been mopped up. A tower of pots and skillets and egg-encrusted plates teetered in the dry sink. The bare log walls were chinked with brown mud and a grimy, uncurtained window over the sink looked out on the withered remains of what had apparently been a kitchen garden. Another bare window beside the front door suddenly resembled a yawning face, laughing at her.

Were all the houses in Oregon like this, so carelessly kept? Or was it only this house?

The room smelled of dust, wood smoke, stale coffee and rotting food, the latter odor drifting from a slop jar that she fervently hoped was intended for a pig. She closed her eyes and tried not to breathe in.

“Guess it could use some cleaning up,” Thad said with a catch in his voice. “Hattie always said…” He left the thought unfinished.

“I am sure she was right,” Leah said evenly. She could not imagine how difficult living here must have been for Thad’s wife. She could also not imagine how she herself could manage to live in this filth and clutter.

Thad lifted her valise. “I’ll just put this in the bedroom.”

Bedroom! Heaven help her, she had avoided thinking about what marriage would mean at night. “Is…is there—How many bedrooms are there?”

“Just the one,” Thad muttered.

“Where does Teddy sleep?”

“In the loft up there, over the front room. Says it’s warmer at night. I planned to sleep up there, too.”

Thad lifted his head. “Oh, I almost forgot. Yesterday I bought you some work clothes. Should make do until you can get to the dressmaker’s in town.”

“The dressmaker’s?”

“Sure. Don’t you want some dresses like the other women wear?”

No, she did not. Having a Western dressmaker poke at her and criticize her comfortable silk trousers and tunics made her stomach heave. But she was starting a new life in America, and she knew she must fit in.

“Could I not make my clothes myself? Did Hatt—” At the stricken look on his face, Leah couldn’t bring herself to speak her name. “Did your wife own a sewing machine?”

Thad ducked his head and started toward the closed door of what she assumed was the bedroom. “Yeah, she did have a sewing machine,” he said over his shoulder. “Brought her mother’s fancy Singer with her from Virginia. But she never learned to sew on it.”

“Perhaps I could use it?”

The puzzled look in his eyes almost made her laugh out loud.

“Uh, well, sure, I guess so. It’s probably out in the barn somewhere. I’ll—I’ll have to find it.”

He flung open the bedroom door, plopped her valise in front of a tall chest of drawers and motioned to a square paper package on the bed. “I brought some duds from the mercantile for you.”

“But I brought clothes from—”

Thad cut her off. “That red outfit’s too fine to wash dishes in. Same for that pretty blue shirt thing you wore yesterday. Silk, wasn’t it?”

Leah nodded but did not answer. Instead, she unknotted the string securing the brown paper package on the bed and began to unwrap it. She lifted out a pair of boy’s jeans. Why, they looked just like the ones his young son wore!

She looked up, but Thad was gone. She heard the front door click shut and the thump of his footsteps across the porch. Teddy took one look at his father’s receding figure and bolted after him.

Leah straightened her spine, shook out the strange-looking American trousers and a long-sleeved red plaid shirt. Since she had stepped off the ship in San Francisco she had not seen one woman wearing clothes like these, not even here in Smoke River. She fingered the boy’s shirt. At least it was red; in China, red was a lucky color.

With shaking fingers she slipped free the frog closures down the front of her beautiful scarlet wedding gown and let it drop to the floor. Her life as Mrs. Thaddeus MacAllister had begun.

“Pa?”

Thad peered into the dusty gloom of the barn, where Teddy was hunched over on a mound of fresh hay. “Yes, son?”

“I don’t like her, Pa. She wears funny clothes and she looks real diff’rent, and she doesn’t talk to me.”

Thad knelt to look into the boy’s stiff face. “More like you’re not talkin’ to her, isn’t it?”

“I don’t got anything to say to a Chinese lady.” His chin sank toward his shirtfront and Thad waited. Teddy usually took his time with more than one sentence.

Thad gazed about the musty smelling barn interior, idly searching for Hattie’s sewing machine. Was that it, there in the far corner? That burlap-draped lump next to the hay rakes?

“Pa?” Teddy raised his head, then let it droop again.

“Yeah?”

“How come you married her? Do you like her better’n me?”

The boy’s muffled words cut into Thad’s heart like a cleaver. He gathered his son into his arms and held him tight.

“Theodore Timothy MacAllister, there is no one— no one in this entire world—I like better than you. And there never will be. You’re my son, and I love you more than…” His voice choked off.

He wanted to do what was best for Teddy. At the same time he wanted to ease Leah’s way into their lives, to fill the hole left by Hattie when she’d died.

After a long silence, he heard Teddy’s voice, the words mumbled against Thad’s Sunday best shirt and fringed deerskin vest.

“Pa, d’you think maybe she’ll cook supper for us?”

Thad chuckled. “I think maybe, yes. Now, how’d you like to help me find something in our barn?”

Teddy’s voice rose an octave. “A horse?”

“Not a horse, son. A sewing machine. Your momma had one, but she never used it, so I stored it out here in the barn somewhere. You’ve got sharp eyes. Where do you think it might be?”

Teddy sat up straight and studied his surroundings, moving his eyes from the array of shovels and axes against one wall to the bridles and harnesses that hung on the opposite wall, to the two saddles draped over a sawhorse in the corner—one man-size, one slightly smaller, for a woman. That one had belonged to his mother.

Purposely he looked away, then pointed to a burlap-draped object in the opposite corner. “I bet that’s it!”

“Might be,” Thad said. He rose and pulled the covering aside. “Well, look at that—you’re right. Come on, son, think we can lift it?”

“Nope.”

“You want to give it a try?”

Teddy’s lower lip jutted out. “Nope.”

Thad shrugged and started to jockey the oblong sewing cabinet away from the wall. He remembered it, and seeing it again brought a funny pain in his chest. Before he could draw another breath, Teddy was puffing beside him. Together they hauled the machine across the hay-strewn barn floor until they reached the entrance.