Gracy was mute as she and the lawyer followed the crowd outside. She could see Daniel standing a few steps away; he was angry and agitated as he stood in the sunshine, taking in huge gulps of air.
These charges against his wife, they were all a mistake, Gracy heard him say, his voice loud with scorn.
Jeff gripped his father’s arm as he searched the crowd for Gracy. “Ma needs us. Come along, Pa.”
Daniel nodded and said in a voice loud enough for Gracy to hear, “She was right glad to see you. Surprised, too.”
“You didn’t tell her I was coming?” Jeff’s voice rose above the murmur of the crowd.
“Didn’t know for sure you really were, not after the way you taken out. I didn’t want to disappoint her if you didn’t show up.”
“You knew I would.”
“Did I?” Daniel shrugged. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d run off that way. God, hell!”
Gracy hurried toward her husband and son. At seventeen, Jeff was a slimmer, taller version of his father. No one could doubt that Jeff was Daniel’s son. The boy had Daniel’s handsome face, his broad shoulders, his hips, but his brown eyes were the color of Gracy’s. Well, almost. They had bits of amber that Gracy’s didn’t have. The flecks made his eyes sparkle like shards of quartz in the sun.
Just as Gracy reached the two, someone grabbed Daniel’s hand and said, “It’s a crime, them charging her with murder. My missus thinks a heap of yours after the Sagehen sat through two nights with her. I don’t hardly believe she’d have made it if Mrs. Brookens hadn’t been there. You let us know can we do anything.”
Others murmured their support and slapped Daniel on the back. But not everyone, and a miner said in a loud voice, “That’s the murderer’s man.”
Daniel punched the fist of his right hand into the palm of his left and stared at the miner who’d insulted Gracy. The man backed away, and Jeff grabbed his father’s arm and steered him to Gracy.
She watched them approach, her back straight, her lanky body in the dark dress black against the shadow of the courthouse. After Gracy’s dress was ripped in the buggy accident, Daniel bought her a new one, red, the bright color of fireweed, and she had exclaimed over it. But Ted had said her black merino—her Sunday dress—would be better for a courtroom, even though the room would be as hot as a frying pan inside, and so she had worn the old dress, a garment that had been old when Jeff was a baby.
People stopped talking then, and the silence was eerie, so quiet that Gracy heard the song of a lark bunting and the swish of a squirrel as it scampered up a pine tree. Most people looked openly at Gracy, curious, although a few pretended not to stare and glanced at her from the corners of their eyes. They were watching, waiting to see if she said anything they could repeat, something they could gossip about. A woman clapped, and a few others took it up. It was their way of supporting her. Still, Gracy thought the display odd, more like people clapping at the end of a minstrel show. That was what the hearing had been, and the trial would be worse, a show, an entertainment, something for people to watch and snicker over.
Daniel saw Gracy, and the two of them smiled at each other, the laugh lines beside her mouth and eyes deepening. Then she turned to Jeff and held out her arms. It was an unusual gesture, right out there where people could see. She had never kissed Daniel except when they were alone, and when he took her hand once as they were walking along a street, she had snatched it back, embarrassed. She didn’t show her emotion with her son, either, not in front of people. But right then, Gracy didn’t care what people thought. She hugged her son, and he hugged back, just as he had when he was a boy.
“Son,” she said, her eyes glistening with tears.
“Hello, Ma,” he said as he pulled away, grinning. “You’re still pretty as ever.”
Gracy couldn’t help but laugh at that. She was aware she’d never been much to look at, but in Jeff’s eyes, she knew, she’d always been beautiful.
“You can’t keep out of trouble when I’m not around to look after you, can you?” he asked.
“Seems not,” Gracy said. She used her arm to wipe away the tears. Her eyes watered more now, although she still didn’t cry much. “I never saw a sight in my life that looked so good as you there in the courtroom with your pa. Why, it was almost worth getting into trouble just to have you home.”
“Oh, it wasn’t worth that much.”
“No.” She shook her head. “But it’s good to see you just the same. Where’ve you been?”
“Oh, here and there, everywhere. I went out west, back to Virginia City.”
“I figured you would.” She put her hand on his shirtfront, feeling the warmth of his skin through the fabric.
“I didn’t like it so much as Swandyke.”
“No, you wouldn’t. There aren’t mountains there like the Tenmile, and I know you love a mountain with snow as deep as your head in winter and aspen trees with leaves the color of green apples in the summer. The mountains out there are kind of dry with sun, and puny, as mountains go.”
“And you and Pa weren’t there.”
“There’s that, and you’re a good boy to say so.”
Jeff looked around and saw people watching them, leaning close to hear what he and his mother were talking about, for many were curious about why the boy had disappeared the year before without a word to his friends. Jeff stepped back from his mother. “We got time to catch up later.”
Gracy glanced around and took her son’s meaning. “Best to go on home now,” she said.
She took a step, but a woman gabbed Jeff’s arm and welcomed him home. Then Jeff exchanged words with a young man his own age, and by the time the talking was done, the crowd had dispersed, leaving only those with business at the courthouse.
A man came up to Gracy then and said, “Mrs. Brookens, if you don’t mind, I’d like to get your side of the story.” He didn’t introduce himself, because Gracy knew him as Joseph Grossman, the editor of the Swandyke Clarion.
“My side? I’ve got no side. Only the truth.”
“She has nothing to say,” Ted Coombs said, coming up beside Gracy.
The man started to protest, but instead he turned to Daniel. “What about you, Dan. What do you think of all this?”
“It’s a goddamn shame—”Daniel began.
Ted cut him off. “He’s got nothing to say, either. Ask me your questions. I’m Mrs. Brookens’s solicitor.”
“Well, then, what do you have to say about it?”
“I say it’s a disgrace to charge this good woman with the crime of killing a baby. A poor child is dead, and Mrs. Brookens had nothing to do with it. Why would she do such a thing? Anybody can tell you there are venal men who are trying to blame Mrs. Brookens for the death of the infant. They have a powerful hate. I suggest you look to her accusers, sir.”
“You think one of them did it?”
“You’ll have to ask them. That’s all for now. I will be pleased to talk to you after the trial is over and Mrs. Brookens is acquitted of this crime. Until then, she has my instructions not to discuss the case. I’ll make it hard on you if you speak to her again.”
The editor looked alarmed. “But what if my wife goes into labor? She isn’t due for more than a month, I reckon, but the Sagehen knows that up here in the high country, babies come anytime.”
Ted chuckled. “In that case, you have my permission to contact her, but if you ask her about the trial, I’ll instruct her to return home.”
“I doubt she’d do that,” the editor said.
Gracy smiled. “You don’t have to worry about that, Joe. I’ll be there for your wife. I just won’t answer your questions.”
“Much obliged.” He started to turn away, then spotted Jeff and held out his hand. “Say, aren’t you the Brookens boy? Come back to stand beside your ma, have you? Where’ve you been? Maybe the Sagehen isn’t the only story here.”
“I been farther west, looking to find a gold mine.” Jeff grinned.
“Any luck?”
“Not yet.”
“That’s no story.”
“Come along, boy,” Gracy said. “We’ll go back to the house. You coming, too, Mr. Coombs?”
Ted excused himself, saying he had to get back to Denver. He’d be up in a few days to talk to Gracy, confer about the witnesses, plan a strategy. “Don’t you worry, Mrs. Brookens. There’s not much of a case against you.” He said that in a loud voice.
Gracy only nodded and turned to Jeff. The sight of her son was the best thing in the world to take her mind off the manslaughter charge. They set off, Jeff between his parents the way they had always walked, not talking, because there were stragglers on the street. They turned down the trail to the cabin, and Jeff kicked aside several tin cans lying in the path. “Something’s been in your can pile, scattering everything,” he said.
“Somebody sent by Jonas Halleck to spy. Or maybe it’s Coy Chaney,” Daniel told him. “Someone’s been skulking here at night, looking for trouble. I’ll pound him if I catch him.”
Jeff turned to Gracy. “You in danger, Ma?”
“No—”
“She sure as hell is,” Daniel interrupted. “Somebody tried to kill her when she was out birthing the Boyce babies, felled a tree across the road where she ran into it. I’m thinking Jonas Halleck is behind that, too. They ought to put him on trial for trying to kill your ma. I told her no more babies till this is over, but you know her. She won’t listen to me.”
“Then I reckon I’ll go along with her when she gets called out,” Jeff said.
“Are you staying that long? You’re not here for just a day?” Gracy asked. Her face softened at the idea. She’d bake him brown-sugar cookies and dried apple pie, his favorite fixings.
“I’ll stay as long as you need me, maybe longer. I’ve been doing some thinking. I’ve got things worked out.”
“I’m glad, real glad,” Gracy said. “You tell us when you’re ready.”
* * *
She should have been mending, because Jeff had brought home clothes that needed it, but mending didn’t steady her nerves like quilting did. So later that day, Gracy sat at the quilt frame that hung from the ceiling in the middle of the room. Daniel had made the frame for her when they moved into the cabin, designed it himself because the cabin was too small for a standing frame. It was a large square made of slats of wood and suspended from the ceiling by ropes, and it could be lowered when Gracy worked on a quilt, then raised to the ceiling to keep it out of the way. She had taken the frame down the day before to soothe herself, and now she sat down to quilt for a few minutes.
Gracy worked on her quilting until near dinnertime, then pulled on the ropes to raise the frame, but not before Jeff leaned over to view the quilt in progress. It was one of Gracy’s “people” quilts, as Jeff called them, made up of crude fabric figures set into squares that had been stitched together. The quilt top had been placed on top of a batting and a backing and set into the frame.
“What’s that you’re working on, Ma?” Jeff asked.
“Just a quilt. Something to keep my fingers out of trouble.” She tried again to raise the quilt frame, but Jeff held the ropes.
“Who’ve you got in it?”
Gracy shrugged. “Nobody, just people.”
“I think that’s me.” He pointed to the figure of a man in front of a mountain. “Look, you made me a shirt out of that yard goods once.”
Gracy shrugged, a little embarrassed. “You were never out of mind. Maybe I was making the quilt to keep you warm when you came home.”
“You knew I’d come back?”
“Of course I did, son. The ties between us are too strong.”
“You were right.” Jeff studied the quilt. “Is that Pa in that square, with his gold pick?” He smiled at his father.
“Looks like.”
“And there’s Sandy, sitting right in the middle of what looks like the can pile.” Jeff pointed to a square, then moved his finger to another. “And you, Ma. I can see you down there in the corner, holding a baby. Who’s the baby?”
“Any one of them, I expect. I’ve birthed so many.”
“It’s not me, then?”
“No…” Gracy stopped. She moved Jeff’s hands from the rope and raised the quilt. “It’s not done yet, but there’s no time for quilting with you here. I got to get to your dinner.” She secured the quilt but didn’t go to the dry sink or the stove. Instead, she sat down on the bench at the table and pointed to a seat in front of the fireplace, and said, “Take a chair.” He sat down. “I need to know first how you came to be here,” Gracy said to Jeff, leaning forward.
Jeff nodded. “I guess you got the right. It was John Miller wrote me.”
“John?” Gracy was startled. “How’d he know where to find you?”
Jeff took a deep breath. “I couldn’t write to you. I told you I wouldn’t. I had to go off by myself, work things out.”
Gracy nodded. Daniel had been a wanderer, too, before they were married.
“I asked John before I lit out if he’d write to me and let me know how you were doing. He sent me a letter the day that dead baby was brought in and told me I’d best get home.”
“You knew about the baby, then,” Gracy said.
“Yes, but I didn’t know whose it was. Isn’t Mrs. Halleck kind of old to have a baby?”
Gracy wouldn’t tell him about Josie. She hadn’t even told Daniel. Ted and John were the only ones she’d confided in. So she asked, “John knew where you were, and he never told us? Us worrying maybe you were dead or hurt?” Gracy’s voice was filled with disappointment.
“I made him promise he wouldn’t.”
“That’s not a promise meant to keep.”
Jeff stared at the floor at a spot where a tin can lid had been nailed over a knothole. “Maybe not, but I said I wouldn’t write him at all if he told you. I wanted to be by myself, figure things out without you explaining them to me. I was angry, too, didn’t want anything to do with you for a time.”
“You had no right,” Daniel broke in. He had been standing in the doorway, listening. “You had no right to go off like that and bring sorrow to your mother. Wasn’t right at all.”
“And you, Pa, did you have the right?”
Gracy stood and went to Daniel, putting her hands on his shoulders, kneading the old muscles with her strong hands. “It’s all right, Danny. We gave him cause. But he’s back now. That’s all that matters. We’ll be a family again.” She turned to her son. “I tell you, Jeff, you walking into that courtroom was the happiest thing I’ve ever seen. It’s been the loneliest year of our lives.”
“Not a year, Ma. Only two hundred thirty-seven days. I kept track.”
“Two hundred thirty-eight,” Gracy told him.
“That’s if you count the first day. I don’t, because I was sitting on Jubilee Mountain that day, looking down at the house, thinking, could I really go? I saw you come out of the cabin with my note in your hand, the one I wrote telling you I was going off. You looked around. But you didn’t look high enough. You didn’t see me.”
“Would you have come back if I had?”
Jeff shrugged. “I’d have gone away sometime.”
“I expect he’s right about that, Gracy. There was just so much we could tell him,” Daniel said.
Jeff stood and looked out the window, making it clear he was finished with the conversation. So Gracy moved to the fireplace, set kindling, then took a match to the wood, and it flared up. When she was satisfied the kindling was burning, she reached into the wood box for larger pieces. “I wasn’t expecting you, so it’s only what’s left over for dinner. But I’ll bake a pie for supper. There’s currants I picked only yesterday, a whole pan of them.”
“I guess I’d come home just for your pie, Ma.”
“Oh, go on with you. I was never known for my cooking,” Gracy said, clearly pleased.
Jeff went to the fireplace and took down a piece of ore that he turned around and around, studying it. The mantel was filled with rocks—ore samples and a peach can of gold nuggets smaller than the tip of a baby’s finger. Then he asked his father whether he’d found a vein that last year. It was like old times, Gracy thought, the two men sitting, hefting ore samples, talking about gold prospects, while she hummed at her cooking, pleased to care for them.
She listened to them for a time, then turned to thoughts of the hearing at the courthouse that morning. It had been harder than she’d expected, people staring, smirking, as if she hadn’t birthed almost every young’un in the room. But listening to Coy Chaney and Little Dickie Erickson talk about her as if she were the devil’s wife had almost undone her. A time or two, she’d had to sniff back tears.
And if listening to the charges against her hadn’t been enough, she worried about the young women who would need her when their time came. Would they trust her now? Would they go to Little Dickie instead? He’d be better than no one, but the women wouldn’t like him. He was too brusque. He lacked sympathy and patience. He’d try to hurry the women along instead of waiting for nature’s own time. So some women might turn to a sister or a mother to deliver their babies. And then what would they do if things went wrong? Gracy would never forgive her accusers if a baby or a mother died because someone believed Gracy was a killer and wouldn’t send for her in time of need. And she would never stop blaming herself.
She couldn’t worry about that now. There was the trial to think about. The charges weren’t going away as she’d hoped. She would be tried for manslaughter and maybe sent to jail. Ted Coombs was right, she knew now. The prosecutor would dig up everything she’d ever done wrong and throw it out there. Ted had asked was there anything he should know, something that would throw him off if he wasn’t prepared for it.
Gracy shook her head. She took out a bowl and added flour and the mixings for biscuits. There was leftover stew in the larder. She could add a little water, more potatoes, and make it stretch. She’d cut some lettuce and wilt it with salt and vinegar. It wouldn’t be a dinner to brag on but not such a poor one at that, most likely better than what Jeff had eaten the last two hundred thirty-eight days.
She stared out of the window at Jeff and Daniel, who’d gone outside to chop wood. They worked the way they had from the time Jeff was little. They bore such a strong resemblance to each other. Gracy had seen Daniel in the infant’s face the first time she held him—the chin, the ears bent forward. Only a Brookens had ears like that. The hair, though, that was like his mother’s. Even if it wasn’t apparent to others, Gracy had seen the connection. She always did with a baby.
“You came home,” Gracy muttered. Despite the events of the day, she felt a surge of happiness. Jeff had come to terms with things, she thought. They would go back to what they’d been. But no, Gracy knew. Things were different now. They’d never be the same.