A week passed, during which the waters ebbed and Sophie went about restoring order to her garden. Just this morning Pancho had brought word that the Lockwood bridge had been repaired and it was safe for her to resume the boys’ lessons. It was just as well some time had elapsed. Tate’s rebuke outside the Tylers’, so obviously born out of disappointment with and misunderstanding of God’s purpose, had left her stymied. Even as she fumed, she admitted that she herself had questioned God on occasion, especially after Charlie was taken so cruelly from her. In fairness, Tate had known loss, too. Yet his inflexible position concerning religion not only vexed her but, far more important, concerned her. He was limiting the boys’ knowledge of God and imprisoning himself in his disbelief. She felt helpless in the face of such obstinancy, even as she ached for the deep hurt the man must’ve experienced throughout his life. Could they ever regain the easy camaraderie the four of them had enjoyed on occasion?
Approaching the ranch house this Monday morning, Sophie had no idea what kind of welcome awaited her. Setting aside her trepidation regarding Tate, she had missed Marcus and Toby and was eager to see them. From now on she would stick to the business of education and disregard any fancies she had permitted herself concerning her charges’ father. Her mind set, she knocked on the door, hoping she would not come face-to-face with Tate. Bertie answered with a huge smile. “Do come in. We’ve missed you here. The boys are eager to see you.”
Almost before Bertie finished her sentence, Toby and Buster came running around the corner. “Miss Sophie! I knew you’d come.” He pulled on her arm. “I gotta show you what I did.”
Trailing him into the library alcove, Sophie knew that whatever her relationship with their father, she couldn’t abandon the boys. Marcus rose when she neared the table. “You are most welcome. I fear the direction of my studies has suffered without you.”
Toby produced a full two pages of addition and subtraction problems he’d worked on in her absence. After she’d assigned him a new story in his primer, she turned to Marcus. “Where are you having difficulties?”
“I’ve been studying about plants in one of my father’s botany books, but even though I know some of the scientific names, it would be good to study Latin so I would know the meaning of those names.” He looked at her with hope in his eyes. “Do you know Latin? Could you help me?”
“I’m no expert, but when I studied back East, Latin was among my subjects. I will ask your father to order a few Latin grammars.”
Marcus eyed Toby as if to assure himself he would not be overheard. “I’m sorry for what happened.”
Sophie waited, unsure about the meaning of the boy’s comment.
“Papa shouldn’t have spoken to you like that.” His chin jutted forward. “Besides, it’s my business what I think about God, not his. I’m interested in knowing more.”
“I can help you with Latin, but you heard your father. He has requested I not discuss matters of religion with you or Toby.”
Marcus folded his hands on the table. “Well, then. I’ll do it myself. In this library are books about theology—is that the right word?” She nodded. “And a Bible. Nothing can prevent me from studying on my own, right?”
Sophie groaned inwardly. Marcus was putting her in an awkward position—not openly soliciting her help with such studies, but making her privy to information of which Tate would disapprove. Yet she couldn’t discourage the lad, not given the resolve shining from his bright eyes.
“You are your own person, Marcus.”
There. She had neither encouraged nor discouraged him. His wide-ranging intellect had once more proved itself. If only he could release some of his inhibitions.
The day passed swiftly with a review of previous lessons and the introduction of new skills. Just as she was preparing to depart, Marcus came to her side. “Before you leave, will you ask Papa, please? About the Latin books?” She faltered, knowing she couldn’t disappoint the boy.
“Very well. Is he in his office?”
“Yes. I’ll go with you.”
Did he intuit the awkwardness of her meeting with Tate, or was he merely eager to obtain the means to study Latin?
Tate answered Marcus’s knock, then did a double take when he noticed Sophie. “What do you want?”
“I’m sorry to interrupt you, Papa, but we have come to ask about getting a book. Miss Sophie will explain.”
Then the boy fled, leaving her alone to face Tate. With a gesture of surrender, he bade her take a seat. He stood in front of her, leaning against his desk, arms folded across his chest. She noted the set of his jaw and the bags under his eyes. “What’s this all about?”
Tersely, Sophie explained the need for Latin primers.
“They will be ordered,” he said when she’d finished.
She made as if to stand, but he stopped her with one word. “Stay.”
She was not a dog to be ordered about, but the look in his eyes implored her to remain. Her throat was dry, but she managed to speak. “For what purpose?”
He pulled a chair near hers and sank into it. “I need to apologize to you. You have done nothing but try to take care of my sons to the best of your ability. Grizzly told me it was his idea for you to take them to services.”
“Perhaps so, but I might well have thought of it myself.” So...he was absolving her of the motivation, but not the actual experience.
“The service must’ve made quite an impression. The boys cannot stop talking about it.”
“I don’t imagine you are disposed to listen, however.”
“I wish to put this as gently, yet clearly as possible. I cannot permit my boys to nurture belief in a God who fails them.”
“Like He failed you?”
“What do you know about it? Yours seems to be a glib and easy faith.”
She stood up, glowering at him. “What knowledge do you have about the trials I’ve experienced? There has been nothing either glib or easy about the fact that I’ve come to recognize I’m nothing without God. And you would do well to arrive at that understanding, too.”
“You didn’t have a cold childhood or see the looks on your children’s faces when their mother killed their spirits.”
“No, I did not. But let me tell you something. You can either spend your life in bitterness and, dare I say it, loneliness, or you can come to realize that in and of yourself you are powerless without God.”
“And what’s He done for you?” Behind his sarcasm, she sensed he truly needed her answer.
She sat back down. “If you are serious about that question and will do me the courtesy of listening without comment or derision, I will tell you what I have rarely confided in anyone. I ask only that you listen with an open heart and promise to think about what I will say.”
Moments passed, during which Tate steepled his fingers under his chin and stared at her as if weighing her comments. Finally he sat back and, with a deep sigh, folded his hands in his lap and said quietly, “Begin.”
* * *
Tate had known Sophie was feisty, but he’d never seen such indignation spark from her eyes as when she leaped up to confront him about his assumptions concerning her faith. Faith. The very word made him cringe. He’d had faith once, too, if not in God at least in his wife, and look what had happened there. Beyond that, how had faith ever helped him as a child? If God was supposed to embody love, why had he experienced only tepid tolerance and rejection? He gripped the armrests of his chair. A man made his own destiny, so enough of his self-pity. But God? He’d had no experience of Him. And yet...that day in front of the Tylers’, Sophie had offered his children as evidence of God’s gift to him. And he was powerless to deny their importance.
“You must think I’ve led a charmed life and that faith is as natural to me as breathing.” Sophie’s head was bowed as if to study her hands, which lay gracefully in her lap. “Perhaps for the fortunate few that may be what faith is. But steel is forged by fire, and I think our lives are no different. It is the very trials we endure that help us see God’s hand in our lives and deepen faith.” At that moment she looked up. “You are not the only one to be tested.”
He sensed she was getting to the crux of the matter and hoped she would spare him the kind of sermonizing he’d so often heard from his overbearing father, Spare the rod and spoil the child being one of his favorite texts. He shouldn’t look at her. The conviction in her eyes was undeniable. But he’d agreed to hear her out, and so he must.
“Each story is different, but here is mine. I grew up in a home filled with love, even though there was always the regret of what might have been. My father and brothers at least had the comfort of memories of my mother. I had none. Only a few faded daguerreotypes and their stories of her. Do you suppose it was easy when I went to school to be taunted as an orphan, even though technically I was not? Or that I enjoyed staying home from the church mother-daughter picnic? My eighth-grade graduation dress was one of my mother’s I had clumsily altered—nothing like the beautiful gowns of my friends. Listening in church to the preachers, I decided I had done something to offend God—that it was my fault He’d taken Mother. Yet all around me I heard the platitudes about God deciding He needed her in heaven. God needed her?” Sophie’s voice rose. “I needed her.”
“I had no idea,” said Tate quietly.
“Of course you didn’t. That was all a long time ago. As I approached womanhood, I came to recognize that God doesn’t rain down punishment on the innocent, act capriciously or abandon His children. We are human and therefore subject to human joys and sorrows. What I thought I had learned as time went by was that God was not a distant, indifferent being, but a companion who walked with me and held me up. In essence, God loved me.”
“You said you ‘thought’ you had learned that kind of faith?”
“Yes, it’s easy to get complacent where God is concerned.”
“Something happened.” Tate waited for what he suspected was the worst of her story.
“I’d lost my mother and had finally arrived at a sense of peace about that.” Suddenly Sophie rose from her chair and went to the window, seemingly transfixed by the view of the mountains. “Yet my testing was far from over. When the new courthouse was being built in our town back in Kansas, a young stonemason from the East came to supervise the cutting and placement of the Flint Hills rock. Charlie Devane. Handsome, fun-loving, passionate about his work—he burst into my heart with fireworks and roses.”
Tate fidgeted, unsure if he wanted to hear more.
“What he saw in me, I’ll never know, but from the moment I met him, I was besotted. All I could think about was Charlie. I longed for those times when we could be alone together. To my everlasting amazement, he saw me as his soul mate, just as I regarded him as mine.” She turned around as if to assess his reaction.
Tate hoped his conflicting emotions were not visible in his expression. He envied her that kind of love even as he recognized the jealousy raging in his heart. How could she possibly know the extent of his fantasizing that she might be such a sweetheart for him? Yet he couldn’t hope to compete with the kind of love glowing on her face. He’d agreed to hear her out, but to what end now? “So what happened?”
She paced in front of him. “If you wanted to, you could say God had other plans. Charlie and I agreed to be married. No two people could have been happier. When he had the offer of a lucrative job in Chicago, we agreed to postpone our wedding until he finished that work.” She withdrew a handkerchief from her pocket and turned aside, seemingly overcome with emotion. When she faced him again, she had composed herself enough to continue. “In short, a rope snapped and Charlie’s scaffold fell to the ground. He was killed instantly.”
The mental picture she’d created for Tate was one that would remain seared in his brain. “Sorry seems inadequate, but I regret that you ever had to face such tragedy.”
“Thank you.” Now she took the place he’d formerly occupied, leaning against his desk, arms folded across her chest. The intensity of her gaze pierced him. “So don’t talk to me about God’s absence from your life. Nor His seeming irrelevance. I’ve been there. Do you think you’re the only one who ever raised a fist and shouted at God, ‘Why me?’ When I lost my Charlie, I had no voice loud enough to scream out my questions. Whatever faith I had leaned upon growing up proved ephemeral. I raged at God and blamed Him for my loss.”
Tate rose to his feet. “So why are you arguing with me about faith and insisting I’m wrong to have turned my back on God?”
“Because it is the sinful human part of us that has to find a scapegoat for the bad and ugly things that happen in our lives. And God is handy for such purposes.”
“So how did you recover your faith?”
“Not having it locked me in the prison of my own unhappy thoughts. Slowly I recognized that others around me were tending to me, encouraging me, sitting with me as I mourned. And in them I ultimately found acceptance. Through them I came to understand that they were the agents of God. That far from abandoning me, He had been there all along. Few of us escape pain and disappointment in this life. But when we look around, we can always find evidence of His consoling presence.”
“Like Marcus and Toby for me.”
“Exactly like that. We can wallow in the past and in our perceptions of injustice, or we can embrace our humanity and find God all around us—in nature, in people, wherever.”
“You make a powerful case...for your experience.” He couldn’t voice his continuing doubts about his own faith.
She approached him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Let me give you a story to consider. In Jerusalem there was a pool at Bethsaida where many invalids came to bathe in the healing waters. These included a man who had been there every day for thirty-eight years awaiting the arrival of someone who would lift him into the pool. Then one day Jesus appeared and realized what a long time the man had been lying there. He said to him, ‘Wilt thou be made whole?’”
Tate felt his face flush with discomfort, yet he couldn’t lower his eyes.
She picked up his hands in hers. “How was the afflicted man to answer? He’d grown accustomed to his situation. Saying yes to Jesus would involve a huge change in his accustomed way of being. Could he risk an unknown future? What might be expected of him were he to be healed?” She paused, letting the questions hang in the air. “Isn’t that the issue for you, Tate? Do you want to be made whole? Do you want to leave behind the injuries of the past and see the myriad ways God is working in your life? Or do you prefer to remain imprisoned by doubts and blame-seeking?” She gripped his hands tightly. “No one can answer those questions but you. As for the man in the pool of Bethsaida?” She dropped his hands and smiled, blessing him with the affection in her eyes. “Jesus healed him. Jesus made him whole.”
After she left, Tate remained in his office, pondering what she had revealed. In the end, what stayed with him was the unlikely outcome, both for her and for the man lying beside the pool. Jesus could make them both whole.
How he ultimately answered her questions would impact not only his own life, but the lives of his sons. He sighed and moved to the window where she’d stood gazing at the distant peaks. He remained there for long minutes lost in his thoughts. The heart of the matter was this: Did he have the courage and the will to face her questions?
* * *
Two days later when Sophie had left after her session with the boys, Tate came across Marcus sprawled in front of the fireplace, Minnie resting beside him. In front of him was a thick volume. So engrossed was the boy that he failed to notice Tate’s approach. “Whatever you’re reading must be very interesting,” he observed.
Marcus sat up quickly, shoving the book away, his face red with guilt. “It’s all right.”
“May I look at it? Perhaps you’ll tell me what you find so fascinating.”
Marcus hung his head. Finally, with a shrug, he retrieved the book and held it out for his father to take.
Tate looked at the title spelled out in gilt letters. Holy Bible. With a roiling stomach, he realized that what he did at this moment might forever alter his relationship with his son.
Minnie sat up on her hind legs, and Marcus threw his arms around the dog as if to enlist an ally. “Don’t blame Miss Sophie. She didn’t give it to me.”
Tate winced. “I didn’t say she did. But you are interested nevertheless?”
“It is one of the great books of all time. I should read it. Many poets and even Shakespeare use biblical references.”
“No doubt it does have literary value.”
“Papa, it’s full of exciting stories. I already learned about Noah at the Tylers’, but did you know a man named Abraham took his son to a mountain to be sacrificed to God? That was scary.”
Tate choked back a sarcastic retort. It was exactly that kind of subject matter that made him skeptical of the Good Book. “What did you learn from such a story?”
“That people should put God first and then He will be merciful. He was testing Abraham’s obedience and faith.”
Put God first? “You realize the Bible is an account not only of history but of a belief system.”
“Yes.” Marcus hung his head, but when he looked up, his voice was tinged with defiance. “We don’t talk about God, do we? Why not?”
Why not? Tate’s life experience hadn’t exactly made him predisposed to entertain a God of love. “It’s complicated.”
“I wish we could talk about God. He teaches lots of important stuff, it seems to me.” Marcus stood up and held out his hand. “May I please have the book back? I would like your permission to continue reading it.”
He had never seen Marcus so willing to challenge him, at least in such a mature manner. Between Sophie and Marcus, Tate had the distinct impression he was being sent a message. “Two conditions. You may read it only after you’ve finished the lessons Miss Sophie has set for you. Second, if you have questions about any of the stories, you are to discuss them with me.”
“Thank you, Papa.”
As Tate left the room, he shook his head, wondering when he’d lost control. But he knew—when Sophie came. Sophie, who had revealed a past that put his fantasies about her in even greater jeopardy. Charlie Devane. Even the way she’d said his name spoke of the depth of her love for him. How could he hope to compete with such a paragon?
Late that afternoon he watched a rider approach, slip from the saddle and stride toward the house. When Tate hurried outside, he was dumbfounded to see his cousin Robert Hurlburt approaching, his face grim. “Robert, what on earth? You look as if you’ve been leading a cavalry charge.” He clapped a hand on the older man’s shoulder. “Please, come inside and let me fetch you something to drink.”
“How I wish this was a social call, but as soon as you can be ready, we need to ride to Sophie’s. I presume you know the way.”
“I do, but whatever occasions the haste?”
“I have come to fetch her. We must leave for Denver in the morning. Her father is gravely ill. The family has sent for her.”
Tate’s knees nearly buckled. The death of a mother and a sweetheart to be endured, and now this. Sophie’s faith would be tested yet again, just as Abraham’s had been. He gathered himself. “Of course, we’ll go. While you refresh yourself, I’ll prepare to leave posthaste. Is Sophie expecting such news?”
“She has been informed of her father’s earlier stroke, but doesn’t know of this latest life-threatening stroke. The family is praying she will arrive as soon as possible. I have booked her a train ticket, but there is no time to lose.”
It was nearly dark when they rode to the cabin. Tate couldn’t help thinking that Sophie’s life, too, was about to fall into darkness. What would become of her faith now?
* * *
Roused from her reading just before bedtime by approaching horses, Sophie grabbed the rifle and stood inside the door. Beauty’s guard-dog stance reinforced her unease. Then she heard men’s voices. Not Grizzly this time. Others. Strangers or friends? When she heard the thud of heavy footsteps on the porch, she shouldered her weapon. A loud knock followed. “Who’s there?” she cried out with as much courage as she could muster.
“Tate and a friend.”
She lowered the gun and cautiously opened the door a crack. Tate filled the line of her vision, but when he stepped aside, her mouth fell open. What was Robert Hurlburt doing here? Propping the rifle by the door, she stood aside to allow the two men to enter. Beauty went to Tate, her tail wagging. Sophie stared at Robert. His normally erect posture sagged and his bearded face was drawn. Suddenly she knew. Bad news from Kansas. There could be no other reason for this unexpected nocturnal visit. “Robert?” She didn’t even recognize her own tremulous voice. “Why...why are you here?”
She felt Tate’s arm around her, just as her legs started to give way. He ushered her to a chair and knelt at her side, holding her hand. Robert pulled up another chair and sat facing her. “It’s your father, dear.”
She stifled a wrenching sob. “Is he...?” She couldn’t complete the thought.
“He’s alive, but he’s had a massive stroke. Your family has sent for you.”
The silent scream rending her chest was surely audible, yet neither man flinched. Frantically she looked from one to the other. “But when? How?”
The compassion in Robert’s eyes compelled her to look at him. “I will come for you in the morning and we will make our way to Denver. I’ve made a railroad reservation for you three days hence. While Dr. Kellogg urges haste, he is hopeful you will arrive in time.”
In time. In time? The words battered her soul. Andrew Montgomery—her precious father, who had never done anything but care for her and love her. A world without him in it seemed unimaginable. Charlie and now Papa? Lost in memory, it was only the comforting grip of Tate’s hand on hers that restored her to the present. She got to her feet, her eyes scanning the room. “There is so much to do. I must be about my preparations.”
Tate placed both hands on her shoulders. “Sophie, all you need to do is pack. Beauty can return home with me. The boys will enjoy looking after her in your absence. Curly or Pancho will check on the cabin while you’re away. Please clear your mind of any worries about this place.”
“And Belle?”
“I’ll send word to her.”
Robert stood. “I’ll call for you at sunrise. Effie will be waiting to greet you in Denver. Meanwhile, she sends you her love.”
Such kindness on all sides was her undoing. The tears she’d valiantly tried to withhold burst forth in a hiccuping rush. Dimly she was aware that Tate had gathered her to him and that she was dampening the front of his shirt. That concern evaporated with the onslaught of her grief. Brave, undaunted, independent Sophie? That persona had collapsed under the weight of her worry. Right now, her only shred of comfort came from the shelter of Tate’s embrace.