Mary Russell - Doc

Bob was only three years the older, but he understood where Eli’s troubles lay. “The army’s running out of wars, son,” he told the captain. “It’s time to resign that commission! Business is in your blood, and there’s money for the taking out here. You’d do well in politics, too. West Kansas will go Republican someday. A war record like yours’ll be a real asset.”

You have to back tactics with strategy, you see, and Bob always kept the long game in mind. One day he’d be voted out of the legislature, and it would be handy to have a son-in-law there in his stead.

When Bob Wright invited Eli to dinner that first Sunday, they both expected that the captain would be courting Bob’s daughter. Who better to marry Belle than a man with Bob’s best qualities and none of his unsightliness? Eli had seen Isabelle Wright at the store, of course. Pretty, if sulky, and sometimes obnoxious. Still … there were a lot of advantages to marrying the Belle of Dodge, principal among them a rich father-in-law who was already talking about taking Eli on as a partner. Bob wanted to open a new store down in Texas, at the Great Western trailhead. It would make outfitting cattle companies more efficient at both ends of the season, reducing costs and attracting business.

“You put in a couple of grand yourself, we’ll call it fifty-fifty,” Bob told Eli, and it was a generous offer.

What Elijah Garrett Grier lacked, besides two grand to invest, was the ability to keep his eyes on the prize. Traits that made him masterly in combat—his total concentration on what lay right in front of him; the quickness with which he adjusted to changing circumstances—those were the very traits that sapped his ability to stick with a job if it took much more than an hour.

He got distracted, that was the problem. He never seemed to finish anything. And he wasn’t lazy, either! If anything, he was too ambitious. He’d start something, and then somebody would ask a question, or need his help with some task he knew he could handle easily. He’d say yes to each new demand, thinking he’d get it done in a few minutes and then go back to what he’d been doing before, except three or four other things would come up, and by the end of the day, he’d have nothing to show for all his effort and no idea what had happened to the time. It was a failing as mysterious to Eli himself as it was disappointing to his family.

Despite Old Man Grier’s frustration with his youngest son’s shortcomings, he was furious when Elijah up and joined the army right after the attack on Fort Sumter. Mrs. Grier wept. The older Grier boys sneered and called the decision harebrained. Neighbors shrugged and shook their heads, but the laborers at the carriage factory nudged one another and speculated leeringly about why a rich kid like Eli Grier had done such a thing.

Truth was, Eli didn’t have one single reason, not really. Like so many young men before and after him, he craved adventure and distinction in equal measure. He desired to be tested in some fundamental way and to be found true. But enlisting was also a way for the youngest Grier to circumvent two looming difficulties: a girl who needed marrying within the month and a gambling debt he might not have to repay if he joined the army and died gloriously in battle.

What surprised everyone, Eli included, was the sheer perfection of his temperament for war.

Cunning in combat, he would go still in the saddle, eyes on the field, effortlessly commanding the attention of armed and mounted men. They would watch him, waiting breathlessly for the moment when his eyes lit up and he would grin, his face shining as he revealed with terse words and small gestures exactly how they would turn disadvantage into victory. Men followed that slim, spoiled, scatterbrained boy with the ancient, angry joy that warriors have felt since divine Ares lifted the first spear and made it fly. Medals and commendations accumulated. Even Old Man Grier admitted that Elijah had found his calling.

By rights, Eli should have been a colonel or even a general by now. Indeed, he had been promoted to major twice, but as decisive and effective as he was in sudden skirmishes, peace paralyzed him. Wars ended, that was the problem. Tedium set in, and that’s when things went wrong.

Major Grier had been busted back to captain twice—both times for ignoring trivialities that defeated his capacity to give a good goddam. Some sonofabitch by-the-book commander would get a wild hair about inventory or payroll records. Money would be missing. Eli’s careless accounting would be blamed. Last year, there’d even been suspicion that Eli had taken cash after a catastrophic card game. Only the fact that his family was rich made the accusation too absurd to pursue.

Which was fortunate, because he did occasionally borrow from the strongbox.

Well, more than occasionally, truth be told. The first time, it was only overnight. A jack-high straight flush, and the money was returned—no one the wiser, including Eli himself. The risk of being caught added welcome piquancy to the games, for every time he sat down at a poker table, he faced annihilation. Exposure and disgrace would be far worse than an honorable death in combat, but with the South whipped and with the last of the Indians penned up on reservations, only gambling offered him that perfect balance of deliverance or doom.

Until he met Bob Wright’s pretty little wife, Alice.

At dinner that first Sunday, Elijah Garrett Grier made no decision to turn his back on Belle, and the trailhead store in Texas, and his own promising future. Rather, they disappeared from his mind as though they had never existed. In their stead was the mystery and challenge of Alice.

She was oblivious to his attention at first, then mystified, then skeptical. Slowly he made her believe in his interest and his admiration. At last there came a day when she turned her face to him as a rosebud to late-spring sunlight: soaking up warmth, releasing stored energy, unfolding. Coming alive again, after a dark and deadening winter.

Laughing, she would run like a girl, flop down next to him on a blanket warmed by summer heat, and show him what she’d carried back in her apron. Propped on an elbow, she would feed him wild blueberries and recall how she used to gather plums and grapes for jams and conserves and jellies that would bring color and sweetness to meals eaten on gray winter days. A bride so young she grew two inches after the wedding, she had faced frontier life with industry and resolve and no word of complaint about Bob’s long absences. She’d birthed babies and raised children alone, and buried three all by herself. She sewed and mended and knit and washed and ironed. She baked bread and pies, and salted meat, and put up crocks of pickles. She always had a kitchen garden, and grew peas and beans, onions and pumpkins and okra, sweet corn and tomatoes and yellow squash …

“I was never idle when I was young,” she said, her sad eyes wistful.

“You’re still young,” he told her, touching her cheek, but he had seen his own lost purpose in the guarded blue eyes of Alice Wright and understood her melancholy. It was not youth she missed but intensity and meaning. Bred in the Missouri backcountry to pioneer self-reliance, she had become nothing more than the principal ornament in the Honorable Robert C. Wright’s grand new house: proof of his prosperity, as pointless as the dusty rosewood piano, silent in the parlor.

Now when Eli Grier sat at her table—with the children around them and not three feet from her husband—they both felt the exhilaration that comes of gambling with your very life. Behind every ordinary word exchanged, with each passing minute that sustained the pretense, hidden within all the bland courtesies, there was a shining silver wire stretched between them, vibrating with the constant delicious terror of discovery and damnation.