Smoke River Bride

“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.

Chapter Five

“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.

Thad swung open the double doors, but when he looked back, Teddy had his head down on top of the once-shiny cabinet and was gasping for breath. Obviously the load was too heavy for the boy. Damned thing was solid oak. Must weigh at least a hundred pounds.

He strode to the back of the barn, grabbed up a large gunnysack and spread it on the floor in front of the sewing machine.

“What do we do now, Pa?”

“Now, we go to work again.”

They rocked it back and forth until all four legs sat squarely on the sturdy hemp sack.

“Think we can pull it, Teddy? Slide it over the ground to the porch?”

The boy eyed the load with a frown. “Nope.”

“Want to try at least?”

“Nope.”

But when Thad stooped to grasp one corner of the sack, Teddy was at his shoulder, reaching for the other.

“Good lad,” Thad murmured. “Let’s go, then. One, two, three, pull!”

The sewing cabinet inched forward. They had to tilt-walk it over the barn door sill, but after that it bumped over the two-hundred-yard path to the cabin with only three stops along the way to let Teddy catch his breath.

Thad had to wonder at his son’s sudden helpfulness. Had he decided Leah was not so bad after all? Or maybe Teddy just wanted to be close to his father? Thad guessed he’d been so wrapped up in mourning Hattie over the past year he’d pretty much ignored the boy.

His breath caught in a sudden rush of emotion. Had he really done the right thing? Would Teddy ever forgive him for marrying Leah, bringing a stranger, a foreigner, into his home? Turning his young son’s life upside down?

“Pa?”

Thad straightened. They had reached the bottom step.

“How’re we gonna get it up to the porch, Pa?”

Thad scratched his newly trimmed beard. “Well, let’s see. I can heft one end, and you…”

Teddy’s head drooped. “It’s too heavy for me, Pa. I can’t lift it.”