Lynna Banning - The Courtship

“Talk plain English, Jane. This is the frontier, not a parlor.”

“Out,” she snapped. She snatched up the broom and whacked it across his knees. “Out!” Fury gave her the strength for two more blows before he backed out the doorway, still grinning. She heard his lazy laughter as he climbed into the wagon and rattled off down the street.

Jane leaned against the broom handle to steady her shaking body. Even if she was a lady, the next time that man kissed her, or touched her, or even looked at her sideways, she would kill him! She had no time for such nonsense; she had work to do. Dresses to sew. A loan to pay back.

She propped the broom in the corner, swiped her dust rag over the sewing cabinet one last time, and surveyed the rudimentary beginnings of her new life. Rough, uncultured town and Mr. Rydell Wilder be damned. She would succeed or she would die trying.

“You mean you jes’ grabbed her and bussed her, right there in front of the store window? Lord love ya, Dell, you’re gonna scare the bejeesus outta the lady.”

Rydell watched his friend hobble to the potbellied stove in the corner and splash more hot coffee into his mug. “She didn’t act scared, Lefty. She acted more like she’d been poleaxed. Truth is, I don’t know exactly what came over me.”

“You’re the one that’s poleaxed. What were you thinkin’ of, fer God’s sake?”

Rydell shifted on the hard wooden chair, the only available seat in the tidy one-room cabin Lefty Springer called home. The older man occupied the neatly made-up cot on the opposite wall.

“I wasn’t thinking.”

“Well, I guess not, son! Like I said, all you have to do is stand still and wait. Don’t push her—ladies like Miz Jane may look soft, but they can be stubborn as a mule and twice as skittish.”

Rydell sipped the black sludge his friend called coffee and nodded in silence.

“Somethin’s eatin’ at you, Dell. I seen it right off.”

Again Rydell nodded. He’d fought his way to acceptance, and then respectability, in this small, close-minded town, overcome his background, his lack of education and polished manners. It had been a long, hard pull. He’d worn patched britches that were too short for his long legs, learned to spell and do sums with the younger children and been ridiculed by the older ones, watched through the hotel dining room window to learn proper table manners.

What bothered him was not that he hadn’t succeeded. He had. He’d lived in the tiny shack down by the river and eaten beans and biscuits for ten long years, worked hard, and saved every last penny. Now he owned the bank, dressed in suits that fit, ate whatever he wanted. The townspeople had begun to overlook his hard-scrabble beginnings, began to patronize his bank, even hint that their daughters were unmarried.

The only thing his life lacked now was Jane, and that was the problem.

“Well?” Lefty clicked his thumbnail against the tin cup balanced on his left knee.

Rydell met the older man’s sharp blue eyes. No use hedging to Lefty. He’d always seen right to the core of a man.

Rydell exhaled. “To be honest, I see something in myself I’m not sure I like.”

Lefty’s bushy gray eyebrows waggled. “Yeah? What?”

“I guess I’m afraid that something I’ve worked hard for in this town might slip away.”

“Why would it?” Lefty snapped. “Hell, kid, half the town borrows money from your bank to pay the other half fer somethin’ or other, and pays you back interest for the privilege. I told you at the start, it was a good idea. You ain’t got a thing to worry about ’cept where you’re gonna build a house for Miz Jane.”

Rydell worried his forefinger around the rim of his coffee mug. “What if there’s more to it? See, inside I still feel like maybe I don’t belong here among all these decent, respectable folks.”

“’Cuz of your pa, is that it? Why he never gave you his name?”

“Partly.”

“Well, spit it out, son. I’ve been cooped up here a day and a half with a swole-up knee and I’m gettin’ hungry for a hotel dinner.”

Rydell smiled in spite of himself. Lefty always had a hard time when he couldn’t move around much. Seemed to remind him of that Army hospital when he lost his arm.

“I never knew who my pa was. Whether he was a good man, or a card sharp. An honorable man or a thief.”

“So,” the older man said, heaving his weight off the cot. “You’re not so sure who you are, izzat it?”

“Partly.”

“Partly! Lordy, Dell, you’d a been a good lawyer. You gonna string this out ’til the dining room closes? Tell me the other part and let’s eat!”

Rydell stood up and set his cup in Lefty’s spotless dry sink. “The other part is this: The man who marries Jane Davis will automatically be respected.”

“Shore will. So?”

“Even if that man turns out to have a horse thief as kin, having Jane as a wife would protect him.”

“Yup. What’s the problem?”

“The problem is that it doesn’t work both ways. Such a man couldn’t protect Jane in the same way. Coming from a family like hers, being associated with him would ruin her.”

Lefty clapped his good arm on Rydell’s shoulder. “Son, I’ve known you since you was sixteen and so skinny-ribbed and knob-kneed you looked more like a baby moose than a man. And I’ve watched you fall for Miz Jane like a felled tree and moon for her these ten years while you turned yourself inside out to grow up and get yerself established.”

“That obvious, huh?” Rydell grinned at the older man.

“Plain as a duck’s bill to me, though I doubt anyone else cottoned on to it. You always were good at keepin’ secrets.”

Rydell flicked a glance at Lefty’s face. How much did the old man know?

“You’re growed up now, Dell. You’re a finelookin’ feller with half the gals in Douglas County sweet on ya. What the hell else do you want? You want to marry Miz Jane, you go ahead and marry her. If she’ll have you.”

A fifty-pound lead weight rolled off Rydell’s chest. “Should have been a lawyer yourself, Lefty. You talk just like you know all the answers.”

“Ain’t the answers that’s important, it’s the questions. An’ the question here is, what the devil’s got into you? No matter about yer pa, you’ve got everything to gain by marryin’ Miz Jane. Now come on, so’s I can get some supper before my stomach caves in.”

Rydell shortened his stride so Lefty could keep pace with him with his injured knee. With every step he took between the old man’s cabin and the Excelsior Hotel he turned the matter over and over in his mind.

He wanted Jane. Had always wanted her, ever since that day in the schoolyard. He used to walk out to their place on the hill after it got dark and listen to her play the piano. The rippling notes floated like pearls on the warm air, and he stood for hours outside the trim white picket fence and gazed at a world he knew nothing about. A world that excluded him. He wanted her anyway.

He stepped off the walkway and started toward the hotel, then stopped dead in the middle of the street.

“Whatza matter?” Lefty complained.

“Nothing. Everything.”

His dream was within reach, now. He wasn’t going to give up. Nothing on the face of the earth was going to stop him.

Jane dragged herself up the hill to her house as the red-orange sun slipped behind the mountain tops. Just as she reached for the front gate latch, a tall, wellbuilt Negro man stepped out onto her porch.

“Miz Jane?”

She stared at him. She’d seen him about town, but she didn’t know his name.

“It’s Mose, ma’am. Mose Freeman. The blacksmith.”

“Oh, yes. What are you doing here?”

“Was jus’ walkin’ home past your house and I smelled somethin’ funny, like hot iron. I know that smell, see, and I knock and I come on in cuz sure as God made sweet corn, I smell fire.”