The Preacher's Bride Claim

“Let’s pray that Billy comes to his senses and returns of his own accord,” Elijah agreed. There were other requests following the first two—anxieties about whether they would be equal to the task of wresting a living out of the prairie, concern over ailing livestock, squabbles among kin. He listened to each one, wondering if the pretty stranger in the back row might make a prayer request, but she did not. A glance showed her still sitting on the back bench, her face tense, her eyes watchful. What was she worried about? Please, Lord, comfort her.

At last, when there were no more requests, he bowed his head and began to pray aloud over each one. Sometimes when he was done praying on a matter, others voiced their own prayers, expanding on his requests or merely repeating them, but today no one did. “And now,” he concluded, “we’ll just be silent for a moment, knowing that there are often needs too sensitive to say aloud, needs that You want to meet, Father...” Perhaps the female newcomer’s requirements were of that nature.

“Father, in closing, I pray that You will keep us as one body united in purpose, with the goal of building a community united by faith. Bless these people until we meet again.”

It was his custom to shake hands with those who had come, so while everyone was getting to their feet, he moved to the back, hoping to meet the worried-looking woman and find out what was troubling her.

* * *

Alice had hoped to leave the tent without meeting the preacher. His eyes—what color were they? Brown? No, something lighter; hazel, she decided—simply saw too much. They seemed to pierce through her carefully guarded exterior to her uneasy heart inside. But the garrulous sisters who’d sat next to her had started chattering to her the moment the reverend stopped praying, delaying Alice’s escape.

She’d wanted an atmosphere of worship in which to make her appeal to God, so when she’d spotted the sign in front of the tent announcing services every day, it seemed to be a sign from Heaven. But it went against her resolve to stand and proclaim her prayer request boldly—and didn’t everyone here have the same request anyway? So while Elijah Thornton prayed aloud, Alice prayed silently. Please, Lord, let me win a good plot of land, so it won’t matter if the bank takes our farm in New York, so I won’t be forced to marry Maxwell Peterson to keep my mother from destitution...

There was no polite way to evade shaking the preacher’s hand, she saw that now—short of ducking under the rolled-up tent flaps on the side. The stair-step boys who’d sat in front of her lost no time in doing that, despite a call to halt from their mother. But a well-bred lady would not do such a thing, so Alice resigned herself to the encounter. She would keep it short and be polite but not reveal too much about herself. A person has a right to keep her worries between herself and the Lord, doesn’t she?

The sisters had spotted someone they knew across the tent and had dashed over to greet them, so Alice was spared a further inquisition by the talkative twosome while she stood with the lined-up worshippers filing toward the preacher. Carrie and Cordelia’s departure left Alice directly behind the parents of the boys, and while she awaited her chance to likewise escape, she had an opportunity to study the couple.

The husband radiated irritation. “If you can’t keep the boys in line, Desdemona, maybe I’ll have to start doing it—with my belt,” he muttered to the fretful-looking woman next to him.

The woman was already pale, Alice saw, when the woman turned her face to look up at her husband, but she went a shade more so at the man’s rumbling threat. “Now, Horace, that’s a long time for young boys to sit still,” she said with a timorous reasonability, but the man was not to be placated.

“It’s the belt, if it happens again,” he hissed.

Alice stiffened behind them. She should say something, Alice knew, but making a scene to protest the man’s harsh threat would only bring her the very notice she was trying to avoid. Her view was not likely to be supported either and would probably result in LeMaster taking reprisal against his wife.

Desdemona’s brow wrinkled in confusion. “But I thought you said we weren’t—” She suddenly clamped her jaw shut and smoothed her features though as Reverend Thornton held out a hand to her husband.

Alice wondered what the woman had been about to ask.

“Good morning, sir,” Elijah Thornton said to Horace LeMaster. “And is this your wife? Thanks for coming to the service. I hope you’ll come back—”

LeMaster ignored the outstretched hand and the hint that he should introduce his wife. “We won’t be comin’ back,” he said, his voice raised, his chin jutting forward at a pugnacious angle. “I just wanted to see if you were as big a hypocrite as the Chaucers said you were.”

Everywhere in the tent, heads turned, and conversation ground to a halt. As Alice watched, Elijah Thornton’s face flushed.

“You—you knew the Chaucers?” he asked, his voice suddenly hoarse.

“I know the Chaucers,” LeMaster corrected him. “They’re right here in the territory, waitin’ to claim homesteads same as you. But unlike you, they didn’t come here from a plantation. They didn’t profit from the war, as you did, because they didn’t turn traitor to the South. The war and the taxes levied against them by their Union conquerors and traitors, like yourself, left them destitute, and they lost their plantation. And you call yourself a Christian? Worse yet, a Christian minister? No, Thornton, we won’t be back.” Taking hold of his wife’s elbow, he steered her around Thornton and out of the tent.

Being from the North, Alice didn’t believe a Union sympathizer from the South was a bad man, but might Thornton be a hypocrite in other ways?

“Wait, sir! Please, can’t we discuss this?” Thornton called after LeMaster, taking a few steps.

The man merely increased his pace.

Chapter Two

Thornton turned back, ashen now, his eyes stricken. Alice’s heart went out to him. How very embarrassing, to be accused of hypocrisy in front of his congregation—or at least in front of the few who remained. Alice glanced around, and the faces of those who remained looked as shocked as Thornton himself—and uneasy, too, as if they wondered if LeMaster’s accusations were true. They’d talk about what they had seen, Alice realized, and in short order those who had already left would know what had happened.

She watched as the preacher visibly pulled himself together and cleared his throat.

“I—I’m sorry for the unpleasantness, ma’am,” he managed to say. “Such things normally don’t happen at our services. It’s your...your first visit, isn’t it, Miss—Mrs.—?”

“Miss Alice Hawthorne,” she said. She hadn’t the heart to be evasive with him after what had just transpired. His eyes were hazel—a rich chocolate color mixed with rust and green, like a forest floor in autumn. His accent was Eastern, like her own, but with occasional tinges of a Southern drawl. His tone was deep, wrapping itself around her heart like a warm cloak.

“It’s nice to meet you, Reverend Thornton. I...I enjoyed the service,” she surprised herself by saying. She merely wanted to make him feel better after the awkward incident, she told herself.

“You’re new to Boomer Town, aren’t you?” he asked then. “And from the East, I think. New York?”

She nodded. “Upstate, originally. I grew up on a farm near Albany. More recently I’ve been nursing in New York City, at Bellevue Hospital.” What was wrong with her? She hadn’t meant to say anything more than her name before proceeding on into the sunlight. But there was something compelling about those hazel eyes set in an earnest, scholarly but masculine face that somehow rendered her as talkative as Carrie and Cordelia Ferguson.

His eyebrows rose, and those eyes warmed. “A nurse? You’ll be much appreciated here, Miss Hawthorne.”

“Thank you,” she said. “But I’ve put my nursing career behind me. I—”

“The Lord must have sent you to us,” Elijah Thornton went on, as if he hadn’t heard what she had said. “We don’t have any sort of doctor here. I go around and pray with people who are ill, but they need so much more than I can provide, Miss Hawthorne.”

“But I’ve come to Oklahoma to farm,” she told him firmly. “My mother is not young, and she’ll need all my help, once we have our claim.”

“Is she here now? In Boomer Town, I mean?”

Alice shook her head. “No, I’ll send for her once I’ve managed to erect some sort of dwelling. And now I must be going, Reverend,” she added firmly.

“Miss Hawthorne,” Reverend Thornton continued, “please consider what I’ve said about nursing here. Pray about it, if you would. It’s not that there’s any great amount of sickness and injuries, but occasionally the need is great.”

“I will, Reverend. Good day.”

The man didn’t know how to take no for an answer, Alice thought, as she entered the muddy main street of the tent city. And yet, Elijah Thornton was not the least bit overbearing. There was something very kind in his twinkling hazel eyes.

He was certainly nothing like Maxwell Peterson. If only she’d met a man like the reverend in New York....

Still, she’d made her decision, and there was no use dwelling on “if only.” Marriage and family were not for her. She’d keep her independence and take care of her mother by working the land. No man was going to take over her life and divert her from that goal. Perhaps it was best if she did not return to the daily services at the Boomer Town Chapel, where she would have to listen to and look at Reverend Elijah Thornton—who did not wear a wedding ring, she’d noticed, nor had there been a wife hovering near him.

Yet the idea of not returning to the chapel sent a pang of regret through her. It had felt good to sing hymns with other Christians and to hear the preacher’s deep, resonant voice praying for all of them. But could any threat to her independence be worth it? If she got to know people better at the chapel, they’d start nosing into her business. They’d want to know why a decent-appearing unmarried lady like herself was here in the territory all alone. They’d suspect she was running from something—and they’d be right.

Perhaps it was better to keep to herself. There were only three weeks to go till the Land Rush. Surely she could manage to lead a solitary existence among the crowded tent city until then, so that no one would suspect that a certain man in New York would pay highly to know where she was and what she was about to do, to make sure she never needed anything from him.

* * *

Normally Elijah joined his brothers for the noon meal, which was cooked over their campfire by Gideon, and usually consisted of beans and corn bread, or if Clint had hunted, rabbit, wild turkey or prairie chicken stew. Today, though, still feeling the sting of LeMaster’s denunciation, he had gone to pay the promised visit to Asa Benton’s ailing wife and had been invited to share dinner with them. The meal had been a simple soup and the last half of a loaf of bread, but Mrs. Benton seemed to take encouragement from his company and to keep inventing reasons for him to stay longer.

He paid several other calls around the tent city after that. It appeared the community was buzzing with reaction to Horace LeMaster’s remarks, and Elijah spent a lot of time answering questions and easing their concerns as best as he could. Many would-be homesteaders came from the South, particularly Texas, and even these days—twenty-four years after General Lee had surrendered—the Civil War wounds had not completely healed between the North and the South. Some folks felt as warmly toward him as ever, while others were definitely cooler.

Ah, well, he was not called to be popular but to preach the Gospel. Perhaps this would all blow over, perhaps it wouldn’t, but he would be obedient to his calling.

Still he wondered where Miss Alice Hawthorne’s campsite was and kept an eye out for it. But he never spotted her.

Before he knew it, the afternoon had passed and it was nearly time to meet up with his brothers for their nightly trip to Mrs. Murphy’s dining tent for supper. The red-faced Irishwoman’s meals were filling, cheap and quickly served, and if her beef was occasionally tough as boot leather, her desserts always made up for it. And it made a welcome change from Gideon’s cooking.