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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504030632 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Distribution |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 420 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Texas Lily
By Elizabeth Fackler
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2009 Elizabeth FacklerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3063-2
CHAPTER 1
At midnight, Lily walked through the dark to the graveyard, feeling slightly drunk. The sensation wasn't of levity but of a heaviness in her limbs as if the yard were flooded with murky water that dragged at her skirts. An hour earlier the last guest had finally left, officially ending her father's wake. Now he was dead forever. Lily had put her mother to bed, then peeked into her kid brother's room to see Theo sprawled on top of his quilt, asleep, still fully dressed. She'd gone to the kitchen and washed the dishes, the glasses and cups and plates and silverware dirtied by the living to commemorate the dead.
Midway through the dishes, Lily had dried her hands and poured herself a shot of brandy, drunk it down standing at the table, then resumed her work. When the last dish had been put away, she drank another shot, nestled the bottle deep in the pantry, blew out the lamp, and left the house.
The summer night carried a chill, the stars like fragments of shattered ice in the black sky. Above Sierra Blanca on the western horizon, the crescent moon reflected a thin ring outlining its missing part. The mountains yawned to the south. To the east, the valley opened onto the plains of the Panal. To the north, Deep River was silent, though along its banks wind rustled in the leaves of the cottonwoods, dry with the advent of autumn. Near the grove of pecan trees planted by her father from seeds he'd brought from Texas in 1866, Lily leaned on the whitewashed rock wall around the graveyard and looked at the lost members of her family: her older sister, whom she couldn't remember though she had been held in her sister's arms; her older brother, whose boots she often wore; two younger brothers who hadn't survived childhood; and now her father, murdered in his prime.
Lily hadn't been allowed to see him dead. The bullet that took his life had stolen his face. Alone, her mother had washed and dressed him for burial. Jack Crawford, the millhand, had lifted him into the coffin and nailed it shut. Now all Lily could see was a mound of fresh earth the length of her father's body. Ashes to ashes, she repeated from the prayers, dust to dust. Except Robert Cassidy had never before been ashes or dust. He had been strong arms, tall legs, a laughing, wet mouth within a soft, black beard, blue eyes below bushy brows, hair that smelled of wheat or corn depending on what he had been milling that day. On Sundays, it smelled of tonic from a bottle, a sweet smell she could capture on her fingers. A full foot taller than she, he had been so thick her hands had barely met when she hugged him, the smell of his shirt permeating her nose, soap if he was clean, sweat if he'd been working. The metal buckle of his gunbelt hard against her breasts.
She wondered where her mother had put his gun. In their trunk, most likely. The one her parents had owned since their wedding and had carried here from Texas. Lily imagined the darkly oiled gunbelt wrapped in cloth to keep it away from the white satin of her mother's wedding dress folded in tissue paper. White satin and blue-black steel. Old lace and lead bullets. Perfumed sachets and the power of loss. Murder most foul, her mind echoed from the eulogy, then added of its own will, vengeance most just.
Lily was fifteen years old. She knew she was as homely as a gunnysack, but that had never diminished the high opinion she held of herself. Though she felt humbled now, she didn't often suffer from humility. She could ride, rope, and shoot as well as most men, bake and sew nearly as well as her mother, read and cipher better than most grown-ups, and was also the confidante of Emmett Moss, the biggest rancher and wealthiest man in the territory. Uncle Emmett said she had more common sense than other folks, and she'd struggled all day to use that asset as she'd contemplated the formidable task of achieving vengeance for her father's murder. Knowing if she simply took a gun and shot the culprit she would be as guilty as he was, she searched for a strategy that wouldn't bring retribution on her or her family. In normal circumstances she could rely on the law, but the sheriff of Jefferson County was controlled by the man she wanted to kill.
Lily turned away from the shadowed patch of ground within the low stone wall and walked across the moonlit yard to the barn. Inside she saddled her palomino. The mare had been a gift from Uncle Emmett, who wasn't her blood uncle but she was allowed to call him that because he and her father had been such close friends. Uncle Emmett was out of the territory now, in St. Louis on business, and probably didn't even know what had happened. When he returned, she'd petition him for justice. If he wouldn't give it, she'd find it herself with her father's gun and let retribution fall where it may.
She led the palomino to the mounting block and settled herself in the sidesaddle, then reined her horse up the canyon toward the mountains. The canyon was named Cassidy after her father, who had owned it. Now it belonged to her mother. Eventually Theo would inherit it along with the gristmill and the house their father had bought with sections of land on both sides of the river. As a girl, she was expected to inherit from her husband when someday she, too, was a widow.
The canyon narrowed as she ascended into the mountains. The moonlight was lost above its walls and she traveled a dark path, leaving the wide expanse of grass and entering the first growth of pine. Stubby piñons, twisted by the wind that even now cut with a biting chill as she rode without a jacket or hat. At the top of the canyon, she entered a thick forest of juniper and the beginnings of ponderosa. The path meandered through the trees, an old Indian trail between their stronghold in the mountains and the river below. Not too many years before she was born, this land had belonged solely to Apaches.
They rarely made trouble anymore. When they did, it was only the acts of renegades, warriors unhappy with life on the reservation. Even they left her family alone out of respect for her father. Shortly after arriving here, Robert Cassidy had tracked a band of raiders for the army. They found the Apache camp in the Guadalupe Mountains, but only women and children were there. The men had heard the army coming and escaped to the hills. Enraged, the soldiers began shooting the women until Robert Cassidy stood between the army's guns and the defenseless mothers shielding their children. He stopped the carnage, bellowing with disgust for his own kind. A week later, when he was home again, women from the reservation walked into his yard and knelt in the dust until he came out of the mill. They thanked him for his mercy, bestowing gifts of deerskins and cougar pelts and the promise of their men never to harm his family or steal his stock. That promise was kept. Of all the ranchers in the Deep River Valley, Robert Cassidy alone lived without fear of theft from Apaches. A white man had killed him.
Lily remembered all the people who had come to his funeral. More than she had imagined lived in the county, certainly more Americans than she'd ever seen in one place at one time. The Beckworths — the widower Hugh, his sons, Paul and Adam, and his daughter, Clarissa, and her husband, Ben Reed — had come all the way from their ranch near River's End. An itinerant journalist, Lash Cooper had come; she'd seen him taking notes, probably for the story he'd write for the Vegas Optic. Frank Hannigan and Butch Simon, both bachelors like Lash, had come from Siete Rios. So had Mr. and Mrs. Jedediah Stone with their daughter, Elise, and son, Jasper, whom Lily knew well, especially Jasper. Manny Tucker, Uncle Emmett's ramrod, and Shiloh Pook, his top hand, had come from Bosque Grande. Lily guessed they were bachelors, too, though she didn't really know. All those people had traveled thirty miles or more from their homes along the Panal, the big river east of Cassidy's Mill, the one Deep River emptied into.
The lawyer Edgar Homer and his wife had come from Jefferson, the county seat twenty miles west of the mill. Mrs. Homer's sleek black frock made Lily intensely aware of her own plain brown dress. But as she looked around the assembly of people, she realized black was a luxury few could afford. Most of the women wearing black were old enough to have attended enough funerals to warrant the expense of a hot, confining garment that showed every speck of dust in a perpetually dusty land.
Sheriff Red Bond brought his native wife, who wore a mourning frock of shiny black satin, but that was no surprise. Mexican women always had black gowns. It was how they dressed up. Lily found it amusing, though she'd never told anyone except Uncle Emmett. She'd laughed at how the native women wore white peon outfits most days and then dressed up like the conquistadores for special occasions. Uncle Emmett had asked where she'd heard of conquistadores, and she'd told him about Lash Cooper's lecture on territorial history back when he'd been their teacher at the mill. Way back when she was a child. She'd been a child when she told Uncle Emmett the story. Watching people arrive for her father's funeral, she knew she was no longer a child.
Whit Cantrell had come, though he never did get off his horse. When Jasper Stone walked over and reached up to shake Whit's hand, Lily had admired how handsome Jasper looked with the sun falling on his face beneath the brim of his dark hat. She noticed that Rufus Bond, the sheriff's brother and a no-account troublemaker in Lily's opinion, was also watching Whit and Jasper. Seeing Rufus turn his head and spit tobacco juice in the dust at his feet, Lily quickly looked away and saw Woody Wheeler with the Becerra daughters, all of them somber enough to put her in mind of a funeral if she hadn't already been at one.
Now, hours later, Lily ambled her mare along the crest of the ridge, then stopped on a promontory overlooking the Panal Valley. Panal meant "honeycomb" in Spanish, so Lily guessed the Mexicans who named the place thought they'd discovered the Promised Land. Panal also meant "hornet's nest," however, and she considered that a more apt description since gunshot wounds were as common as bee stings in the county.
The foothills sloped down to the prairie stretching flat to the river, invisible in the starlit dark. Neither a flash of fire nor the feeble glow from a lantern broke the wilderness with light. Feeling melancholy in her solitude, Lily turned her horse higher into the mountains. She intended to follow the trail a little farther, to where it circled an outcrop of pale rocks embedded with mica that sparkled even on the darkest night. But she started crying, so she rode by the rocks without seeing them, and missed the loop that would have taken her home.
All day she'd kept her face as rigid as granite. She'd smiled and said thanks to the many expressions of sympathy and offers of help that would never be asked for. Now she cried in grief for what she'd lost and fear for what lay ahead. Her family's strength had been cut in half, and Lily didn't think her mother would ever recover. There had been a defeat in her eyes as she drifted to sleep, holding her daughter's hand as she'd held her husband's while he died. Lily's brother couldn't offer much help. When he was three, he'd been kicked in the head by a horse and hadn't regained full use of his right leg. It barely held his weight, so he'd never be able to do a man's work. The fate of the family was Lily's responsibility now, and she cried, too, partly in self-pity that such a burden had been dropped on her fifteen-year-old shoulders.
Neither aware of the path her horse chose nor of the moonless night around her, she wiped so many tears and blew her nose so many times her handkerchief was soaked. Sniffling, she forced her sobs back down her throat, then rode with silent tears falling across her cheeks. She wiped them with the sleeve of her dress until the sleeve, too, was wet. Then her breasts were wet, and her shoulders and back, and finally her skirt, and she realized it was raining. She'd been so lost in herself she hadn't noticed the clouds blowing in to steal the stars, hadn't noticed the gentle, almost mistlike drizzle falling from the sky. She stopped her horse and looked around, shivering with cold as she wondered where she was.
She'd never been so far from home alone. No trace of a trail anywhere. Only the tall pines soughing in the wind, the underbrush dark and wet. Without the moon or stars to guide her, she didn't know north from south, east from west. All the world was a misty forest, black silhouettes against darkness, silence beneath the wind and the dripping of rain.
"Where you going, Nugget?" she asked her mare.
The palomino nickered as if with reassurance, so Lily slackened the reins and let it continue, hoping the horse had a destination in mind. Its sure little hooves carried her through the forest, winding an imperceptible intention toward what turned out to be another horse. When Nugget whinnied, an answer echoed through the mist. Lily peered into the darkness, her eyes searching. She saw nothing, but her nose caught the faint scent of smoke. She kicked her horse to move. The trees were thinning, which meant the forest was being left behind and they were entering the prairie again. Her skirt snagged on the Spanish bayonet of a yucca, telling her she'd ridden so far south she was on the edge of the desert. A few more steps took them around a cliff and she saw a glow ahead. She puzzled over the deflected source of light until she realized it was a fire inside a cave.
The horses exchanged greetings again, so it was no use pretending she wasn't there, though she doubted the caliber of the man inside the cave. Who would camp so far from company if not someone wanting to hide? She touched the stock of the rifle in her scabbard, wondering if she should pull the gun and cock it before announcing herself, thinking she would merely ask the man for directions and that the weapon would ensure he gave only that. Before she could do it, though, she heard a footstep behind her and wheeled her horse around. Seeing Jasper Stone emerge from the forest, she laughed, pleased that of all the people she might have encountered, she had found him.
"Lily!" he whispered in astonishment, coming up on her right. "What're you doing here?"
"I'm lost," she admitted.
"I'll say," he agreed. "What're you doing riding alone at night?"
"I wanted to be alone," she said, "but I got more'n I bargained for."
He stepped closer and caught hold of her reins beneath her horse's chin. "You ain't even wearing a coat," he said with fresh bafflement. "You best come in by the fire or you'll find your death."
She smiled. "Reckon that's what I was looking for. Not my own, a'course, but some kinda understanding of it."
He gave her a puzzled scrutiny, then ducked under her horse's head to come around on the left, reach up, take hold of her waist, and lift her to the ground. Looking down at her now, he said, "You're drenched clear through." Then suddenly he swept her off her feet and carried her toward the mouth of a cave.
He smelled of the piñon smoke of his fire mingled with sweat off his shirt and the faint fragrance of the oil on his gun. Inside he set her on her feet, then crouched by the fire and added sticks from a pile nearby. She huddled down to watch the light dance across his face, his strong, straight nose and cheeks still as smooth as a girl's, their skin translucent as if they glowed from a fire within. His finely etched lips lay in a noncommittal line as he concentrated on his task, his long brown lashes throwing shadows from the light. When he stood up and looked at her, his eyes were the deep blue of the bottomless lakes on the far side of the Panal.
"You best get them clothes off," he said, then reached to the floor to pick up his blanket. When he shook it out, dust flew around him like a rain of gold. "Wrap yourself in this and call me when you're done." He handed her the blanket, then walked out of the cave and left her alone.
As she unbuttoned her frock, she heard hoofbeats and guessed he was tethering her horse with his, which must be nearby, though she hadn't seen it. Shivering as much from cold as the excitement of being alone with him, she dropped her dress and peeled off her soaked petticoat and shimmy. She hesitated before unlacing her camisole, but finally took it off and dropped it on her other clothes. She kept her drawers on, then wrapped herself in his blanket and called into the dark, "I'm done."
He came back and looked at the pile of her clothes in the dust. She watched him pick them up, using his foot to push a dead tree limb close to the fire, then casually drape them over the twigs on the branch, as if it were nothing new to him to handle women's things. Looking around the vault of the cave, she saw a covered wooden barrel, a ristra of chiles suspended from a crag over a rolled quilt tucked neatly against the wall. The cave was twenty feet long, ten feet high at the deepest point, the ceiling slanting upward toward the mouth and stained with the soot of many fires above the flames.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Texas Lily by Elizabeth Fackler. Copyright © 2009 Elizabeth Fackler. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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