West of Heaven

If he wanted an apology, he wasn’t going to get it. “Common decency is what gives me the right, Mr. Trent. How would you feel in my shoes? What if this were your wife?”

As soon as the words left her mouth, Jayne realized that she had made a terrible mistake. The shovel stopped in midswing, hanging over the grave as the rancher stared blindly into the hole. She’d once seen ice break apart on the Ohio River. The fractured planes of his face were no less treacherous.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know you. I shouldn’t have presumed—”

“Damn right.” He slowly turned the blade of the shovel so that dirt and snow fell together in a tarnished mist.

Trying to be respectful, she said, “I should have realized—”

“You should’ve gone with Handley.”

“But—”

“Dammit, lady. Mind your own business.”

“I’m trying to apologize.”

“Don’t.”

Taking a step back, she bowed her head and kept quiet. She owed him that much for burying Hank, but every instinct told her that silence was the last thing this man needed. He was a kettle boiling in an empty kitchen, one that had long since gone dry and was ready to explode. She’d be wise to keep her distance.

Closing her eyes, she prayed for strength as the rancher worked. The rhythm of the shovel became a dirge, a wordless goodbye that lasted for a small eternity. The snow was blowing sideways by the time he finished.

Tamping the mound with the shovel blade, he said, “I’m done. You can sleep in the barn or freeze on the trail. I don’t give a damn either way.”

Jayne believed him, but it didn’t matter. She’d come back to say goodbye to Hank and that’s what she intended to do. She had a warm cloak and would make a bed in the barn out of straw. She didn’t need the rancher’s help. She felt nothing but relief as he stormed off, put away the tools and marched across the yard to the tiny cabin.

The door slapped shut. In the sudden silence and absence of all things human, she surrendered to the tears she’d been fighting for a week. She sang her favorite hymns. She recited the Shepherd’s psalm and walked through the valley of the shadow of death, over and over, until the words were a jumble.

Exhausted, she dropped to her knees and squeezed a fistful of dirt. Someday she and Hank would be together again, but not for a very long time. On one hand, life was uncertain and eternity was a breath away. On the other hand, that gap spanned thousands of days.

Rising to her feet, Jayne turned her back on the grave and looked across the meadow to the rancher’s cabin. An L-shaped sliver of light marked a small window covered with a sheet of boards. Next to it a vertical line gave shape to the door. She smelled wood burning in the hearth and saw a plume of white smoke rising from the chimney.

As the adrenaline drained from her body, so did her natural warmth. Shivering, she imagined sipping hot coffee and the heat of a fire thawing her toes. She also imagined the rancher’s gaunt frame and his filthy clothes. He smelled like the bottom of a barn. The horses were better company, and that was a fact.

Holding her skirt above the snow, she trudged back to the splintery shell of the outbuilding. The cold and the dark didn’t scare her in the least. She would make it through the night an hour and a prayer at a time.

Ethan let go of the sheet of boards covering the window. The flat wood dropped back into place and pinched his finger.

“Dammit,” he muttered, shaking his hand to get the blood moving again. He had been standing at the sill for close to an hour, and the crazy woman was still singing hymns. He hated that sound. It brought back memories of Laura humming lullabies to their children and singing in church.

The widow had to be frozen half to death, but nothing on God’s green earth could bring her husband back. Ethan knew that for a fact.

Damn him for a fool, but the window drew him like a magnet attracting iron ore. After downing the dregs in the coffeepot, he slid the plywood open again. The widow had dropped to her knees and bowed her head.

He could still taste the acid coffee in the back of his throat and his stomach was burning. He needed to eat something, but the thought of this morning’s charred biscuits didn’t appeal to him. Neither did another can of beans or canned meat or canned anything. Laura had been a good cook, even better than his mother, and Ethan steeled himself against the memory of real food even as the widow’s singing tugged at him.

Be Thou my vision, oh, Lord of my heart.

Naught be of else to me, save that Thou art.

God damn him to hell. The widow was singing Laura’s favorite hymn. Did she have regrets for words left unsaid and things left undone? Was she as alone as she seemed? As brave and daring as it appeared? She must have been crying, but the melody didn’t waver. Her shoulders stayed still and her arms remained stiff at her sides, as if by not moving she could make time stop.

Everything about this woman’s grief was familiar to him except the need to see her husband buried. He wished to God he’d never seen the casket holding Laura’s body with the baby on her chest, nor the pine boxes holding his two sons, nailed shut, one on top of the other in the grave next to hers.

His stomach rumbled with hunger, a defiant echo of life in the face of so much death. Hating himself for feeling that need, Ethan covered the window, slopped a can of beans on a plate and ate them cold. He washed the mess down with more bad coffee.

The hymn stopped just as he took the last swallow. Holding the empty cup, he pulled back the wood and looked for the widow. The sky had turned from gray to royal blue, a sign of twilight and colder temperatures, but the widow hadn’t budged. If she had a lick of sense, she’d get settled in the barn before nightfall.

Ethan felt a niggle of worry low in his belly. He knew how it felt to be numb with grief and, for an awful minute, wondered if she intended to freeze to death. He couldn’t let her stand outside much longer, but the thought of having her in his house was unbearable. Closing his eyes, he counted to ten and then to twenty, praying she’d be gone.

When he found the courage to look, he saw her walking down the hill through the ankle-deep snow. Heavy flakes dotted the shoulders of her cloak and he worried that her feet were wet. Even wrapped in heavy wool, she had to be shivering. When she reached the barn, she looked back at the cabin. Her eyes, he remembered, were bright blue, but in the dim light they were hollow and dark. He slammed his fist against the wall. He didn’t want her here. With a defiant tilt of her chin, she walked into the barn and closed the door.

He wondered if she’d find the matches and lantern he’d put on the shelf for her, and if she’d burrow in the fresh straw for warmth. The temperature would plummet before dawn, and the walls had holes the size of his fist. He’d made them in fits of rage.

She had to be hungry. The thought unnerved him, but he refused to give in to the small voice urging him to invite her inside. Loneliness was the price he paid for the worst decision of his life.

His shoulders sagged with a familiar guilt as he tossed two logs on the fire, stripped down to his long johns and rolled under the comforter covering the wide bed. In the silence of the night, echoes of the hymn she had sung drifted into his usual thoughts of Laura and the children. He considered going out to check on the widow, but he didn’t want to see her clear blue eyes. Besides, he reasoned, even a dog had the sense to get out of a storm. If Mrs. Dawson wanted to come in out of the cold, she could knock on his door. He might not like it, but he wasn’t quite heartless enough to turn her away.

Ethan knew how cold it could be at night. His ranch was situated on a high plateau in the shadow of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Some winters were as dry as the southwestern desert. In other years his land endured as much snow as the Rockies. This winter had been mild and the spring storm would have been welcome, except for the woman in his barn.

Curled against the rough wall, he wrapped the blanket around his feet. The fire had burned down to embers and the cabin was nearly black. Sleep came slowly, bringing with it vivid pictures of his family. But instead of recalling happier times as he usually did, he relived the day they died. Vivid and harsh, the memories followed him into an exhausted sleep until the gray light of dawn filled the cabin.

Waking up with a jolt, he thought of the widow.

Boiling mad, he tossed back the blanket and pulled on his clothes. Just as he did every morning, he stood straight and stared at himself in the heart-shaped mirror hanging over the bed, trying to remember the man he had once been. It was a hopeless cause, and today it was worse because of the woman in his barn.

Guilt burned in his belly like a banked fire as he hunched into his coat and tugged on the gloves Laura had knitted back in Missouri. Pushing down on his hat, Ethan opened the door and groaned at the sight of knee-high snow. His gaze rose to the barn. Half buried in the drifts, it looked like a sinking ship, and his heart sank with it. The trail to Midas would be impassable for days and muddy for weeks.

The thought of having Mrs. Dawson on his property for another minute, let alone a week, turned his mood from sour to rancid. Fighting his temper, he stomped across the yard and stormed into the barn. He expected to see the widow wrapped in her heavy cloak in the pile of fresh straw, but she wasn’t there.

“Mrs. Dawson?”

The silence accused him of being a coldhearted son of a bitch. Had she wandered into the storm to die? He knew how it felt to fight that temptation. Only his pride and a sincere fear of hell had kept him from eating a bullet when Laura and the children had died. If Jayne Dawson had chosen that path, the decision was hers. They would both have to live with the choices they had made.

The thought gave Ethan no comfort. He made his voice louder. “Mrs. Dawson!”

A low moan drew him to the back of the barn. Peering into an empty stall, he saw a filthy horse blanket and the bottom edge of the widow’s navy-blue cloak.

“Lady, get up.”

She stirred beneath the blanket, then bolted upright as a chest-deep cough erupted from her throat. She covered her mouth with both hands, but the air still shook with the ferociousness of the coughing spell. Fever burned in her cheeks.

Ethan wanted to look away, but he couldn’t. Her eyes were the color of the sky at high noon, and her straw-blond hair had frozen into a tangle. Remorse burned from his heart to his head. He treated his two horses better than he had treated this woman. What if it had been Laura in need, or his daughter?

He cleared his throat to soften his gravelly voice. “Ma’am, you need help.”

Struggling to breathe, she clutched at the blanket. “I am so sorry…to do this to you…I shouldn’t have—”