Under the Desert Sky Page 13

“It’s good to be eating together,” Phoebe said when everyone was gathered around the kitchen table. “July, you have my eternal thanks for doing what you did when my brother-in-law came.”

  July was abashed by Phoebe’s kind words. “I didn’t do anything. I just knew that Will didn’t want to go with that man, and I said I’d take care of him until you came back.”

  “And you did that very well,” Phoebe said.

  “I don’t ever want to see Uncle Frank again. He’s mean,” Will said.

  “Honey, he’s your daddy’s brother,” Phoebe said. “Uncle Frank was probably worried about me, and that’s why he was so gruff.”

  Will shook his head. “I don’t like him.”

  “Well, he’s not here now,” Christian said. “I think I need to go out and see if I can count the new baby chicks. Does anybody want to come with me?”

  “I’ll go.” Will jumped down from his chair, then stopped. His face contorted. “I can’t go. I have to take care of Mama.”

  Phoebe laughed. “You go ahead. Miss Gwen’s here if I need anything, and besides, I’m going to take a long nap. Do you want to take a nap, too?”

  “I’ll go with Wet.”

  • • •

  Phoebe’s condition improved slowly over the next few weeks. Although the bouts of nausea and dizziness occurred with less frequency, they were often enough to make it difficult for her to actually tend to her birds. She found herself totally dependent on Christian and July.

  She was pleased to see how both men took to Will’s insistence that he help them. They never gave the slightest indication that he might be in their way, but included him as much as they could. It was almost as if they were a family, as if Christian was there, not simply because he was needed, but because he belonged. But, Phoebe told herself, this was a temporary arrangement. It couldn’t last forever, and she knew that she had to keep the arrangement in perspective in order to keep Will from being too badly hurt when Christian left.

  But even as that caution crossed her mind, she knew that she wasn’t thinking only of Will.

  Christian tapped lightly on Phoebe’s door.

  “It’s open,” Phoebe called softly.

  When Christian opened the door, Phoebe was propped up against the pillows.

  “Hi.” He stepped toward the bed. “Do you mind if I sit here awhile?” He intended to sit in a chair, but Phoebe moved over, indicating that she wanted him beside her. When he sat, he took her hand. “It’s been a long day for you.”

  She smiled wanly. “For you, too. Will can be a handful for someone who isn’t used to being around small children.”

  “He’s a good boy, Phoebe. You’re an excellent mother.”

  “That’s not what the Sloans think. They think Frank and Myra should be the ones to raise him, and maybe they’re right.”

  “I know you don’t mean that. A boy should be with his mother. Believe me, I know.”

  “That’s a strange comment coming from you, a man who’s had so many opportunities.”

  “That’s true, I have had opportunities, but I’d trade all of them to have had the love of my mother.”

  “What happened?”

  “It’s a long story. I was young—about Will’s age, I think—the last time I saw my mother.”

  “She died?”

  “I was taken from her, so I really don’t know. I suppose she did, but the people who ran the orphanage never tried to find out anything about her, or if they did, they didn’t tell me.”

  “You lived in an orphanage?”

  “For a little while.”

  “What happened? Were you adopted?”

  “Not exactly. Some older boys took pity on me,” Christian chuckled. “I guess you can say I was a runaway when I was about six or seven, and from then on I was on my own in the world.”

  “A seven-year-old can’t take care of himself.”

  “He can if he’s determined, and if he has no other choice.”

  “Oh, Christian, how awful.”

  “It was a long time ago, and I don’t want to talk about it right now. I came in here to see if you needed anything before you went to sleep.”

  “There is something I need. Is Will in bed?”

  Christian nodded. “He’s all tucked in and been read to. I started ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’ again, and we didn’t get as far as we did the first day I tried to read it to him. If I ever see Kipling again, I’m going to let him know his story puts children to sleep.”

  “Do you mean the writer Rudyard Kipling? You’ve met him?”

  “I have.”

  Phoebe sighed.

  “Is there something wrong with me having met an author?”

  “No—it’s not that.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “Last night, I had a hard time falling asleep. I was thinking about us.”

  Christian smiled. “And that’s bad?”

  “You have to know that I’m attracted to you. I like you, but you and I are from two different worlds. Nothing can ever come of a relationship between you and me.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Do you know who I am? Do you know what I am?”

  “I know that you are a very vivacious woman, a woman who enjoys—”

  “No.” Phoebe put her finger to Christian’s mouth. “Don’t say that.”

  “Enjoys life. What did you think I was going to say?” Christian had a mischievous twinkle in his eye.

  “Since we are baring all tonight, I think it’s time to tell you something.” Phoebe repositioned herself. “This could be a long story, so you’d better pull up a chair.”

  Christian moved to the chair and, taking off his boot, rested his foot on Phoebe’s bed.

  “You weren’t the only one abandoned by a mother, except for me it was different. I was seventeen when Mom went to the Chicago World’s Fair, an innocent enough thing to do, but she met a man there and never came home.

  “If this man had been someone she fell in love with, I think my dad and I might’ve understood, but that’s not what happened. The man was John Dowie. Have you ever heard of him?”

  “I can’t say that I have.”

  “He’s a charlatan, and he made my mother into one, too. He goes around the country holding ‘divine healings,’ but they’re all fake. My dad met someone who’d seen one of his services. He said my mother was healed from a different illness every night.”

  “But, Phoebe, what your mother did has no bearing on you.” Christian lowered his foot and moved his chair closer to the bed.

  “It’s the reason I’m here. The people of the small town where I grew up made fun of us, and my father thought I’d have a better chance if I left Mount Olive. He put an ad in the Phoenix Republican, and the Sloans answered it. I came out here to be their maid.”

  “Then how did you and Edwin get married?”

  “Now, that’s the question, isn’t it? A maid and the banker’s son, they don’t go together, do they? That is, unless there’s a baby on the way.”

  Christian’s only response was to lift her hand to his lips and kiss her fingertips.

  “Judge Johnstone married us before the Sloans ever knew about the baby. When Edwin told them we were married and I was expecting, W.F. disowned him. It’s hard to not be bitter when you lose as much money as Edwin thought he’d lost. After a while, as he watched Frank spend the money that Edwin considered his inheritance, he got even more bitter. He resented me and he resented Will.”

  “Then why would Frank want to take Will away from you?”

  “Because Myra hasn’t given Frank a child, and now W.F. concedes that Will may be his only legitimate heir. He’s willing to forget that the child carries my lowly blood, just to carry on what he considers a dynasty.”

  “That’s ridiculous. He’s a banker. That doesn’t make his lineage a dynasty. July has more claim to lineage than he does. His father was the son of Shaka, one of the greatest Zulu monarchs in Bulawayo.”

  “Th
ere it is again.” Tears welled in Phoebe’s eyes. “Who’s ever heard of Bulawayo, much less Shaka? You know everything and you’ve seen so many places. What could I possibly have to offer you?”

  Christian leaned forward and kissed her. “You can give me what I want most.”

  Phoebe sat up and wrapped her arms around Christian, holding him to her as she permitted herself to cry.

  • • •

  Christian climbed the stairs. When he walked by Will’s room, he opened the door and walked over to the sleeping child. When he’d started the conversation with Phoebe, he thought he’d tell her about the child of the streets that he’d been, but he couldn’t get the words out.

  He felt the small scar on his face, remembering the night he woke to find a rat gnawing on his cheek. Phoebe said he’d had opportunities. Yes, he’d had opportunities—opportunities to find scraps of food that others had found unfit to eat, opportunities to pilfer and steal. All of this, he learned when he was little more than Will’s age.

  Even though Christian had never met Edwin Sloan, he disliked the man intensely. If he understood what Phoebe had said this evening, her husband had turned his back on her and Will because of money.

  How could any man do that? Phoebe was fascinating, and Will was entertaining. Christian had seen extreme poverty and extreme wealth. In both situations, Christian had never overcome the feeling of being alone. Being here with Phoebe and Will had made him feel as if he could belong to their family.

  Christian bent down and kissed Will on the top of his head. The boy shifted positions in his sleep, and Christian stepped back, not wanting to awaken him.

  Tonight, he’d asked Phoebe for permission to court her, and he meant it. But he’d do more than court her. He’d do all that he could to convince her he loved her.

  Then, unbidden, the thought of Ina Claire Woodson popped into his mind. Was he being unfair to her? He and Ina Claire had never spoken of love, had never expressed anything more than friendship for each other. But they had brought comfort to one another during that long, terrible siege.

  Memories of the war and those times at Kimberley came flooding back to him.

  • • •

  “Ina Claire, you shouldn’t be out of the shellproof.”

  “Why not? We’re all going to die anyway. Either we starve to death, or we get hit by the Boers’ big gun.”

  “You can’t give up, not now. We’ve been here 117 days—the column has to relieve us soon.”

  “I don’t believe the military will ever come. Papa says the shells from their new gun weigh a hundred pounds,” Ina Claire said. “Long Cecil can’t compete with that.”

  Long Cecil was the gun that the American engineer George Labram and Ina Claire’s father had built, to compete with the heavy siege guns being used by the Boers. The gun was named after Cecil Rhodes.

  “You’re right, Long Cecil’s shells are about a fourth as powerful, but that’s not to say he is useless,” Christian said. “Think where we were before we had it.”

  “I know. Papa’s just sorry Mama and I didn’t go back to America when Mrs. Labram left.”

  Christian reached out for Ina Claire’s hand. “For my sake, I’m glad you didn’t. We would never have met had you gone back to Albany. Come on. What do you say we get something to eat before the soup is all gone?”

  When they reached the soup kitchen at the De Beers convicts’ station, Christian and Ina Claire took their place in one of the never-ending lines. About forty thousand people had to be fed, including about ten thousand indigenous Zulus and Hottentots who, before the siege, had been working in the diamond mines. Now Rhodes had put them to work repairing the damaged streets.

  The daily rations were down to a cup of tea for breakfast and for dinner, a soup made with horse flesh, and wizened carrots that looked like corks. Occasionally, a few mangel-wurzels were added, but the extreme heat of the Karoo summer caused the beets to shrivel in the ground. The Boers had cut the water from the reservoir, so the only water came from the seepage in the mines. If anyone was caught watering a garden, the imposed martial law—or Military Situation, as it was called by the civilians—withheld that person’s meager rations.

  Before Ina Claire and Christian got their tin cups filled with soup, a loud boom sounded. The bugler in the conning tower began to blow the warning, having seen the smoke from the great gun on Kamfers Dam.

  Seventeen seconds. That was all the time Christian and Ina Claire had to find shelter, so they ducked into one of the nearby tunnels that had been built in the debris taken from the mines.

  The incoming shell sounded like an empty and disconnected railway car rolling down the track. There was no whistle, just a rushing sound, and then the big shell hit with a loud thump.

  “Where do you think it hit?” Ina Claire asked.

  “I think out in the road somewhere. If it hit a building, I think we would’ve heard it collapse.”

  “Yes, that’s probably right. But it’s so frightening.”

  Christian drew Ina Claire to him and held her close until they heard no more explosions.

  • • •

  Christian pinched the bridge of his nose to make the memories go away. He wasn’t being unfair to Ina Claire, he knew he wasn’t. They had shared a genuine camaraderie, but no words of affection had ever been spoken.

  • • •

  Christian stayed with Phoebe for an entire month.She laughed when he and Will attempted to cook or clean or wash clothes, but they did whatever had to be done, letting her rest and recuperate. The dizzy spells still occurred, but were definitely subsiding, and the few that she’d had were much less severe. Even the bruises had faded.

  One day, Christian announced it’d be a good time for Phoebe to go to town to see the doctor.

  “I want to go, too.” Will hurried to put on his shoes.

  “Not today,” Christian said. “This is going to be a day for your mama and me.”

  “But I want to go,” Will whined.

  “Miss Gwen said you could spend the day with the girls,” Christian said. “I think she told me that Hannah has a new pony and they want you to go for a ride. Maybe they’ll even have a picnic.”

  “I’d like that,” Will said with enthusiasm. He and Christian went to the shed to get the buggy.

  Fifteen minutes later Christian and Will brought the buggy around. Christian helped Phoebe in, then disappeared into the house, returning with a small bundle that he laid on the seat.

  “What’s that?” Phoebe asked.

  Will covered his mouth with his hand as he began to giggle.

  “Shhhhh,” Christian said as he climbed in. “It’s a surprise. Don’t tell her, Will.”

  “I don’t like secrets,” Phoebe said.

  “You’ll like this one,” Christian said. “I know you will.”

  Releasing the brake, Christian made a clicking sound as he snapped the reins, and the horse started out at a leisurely trot. Will entertained them by singing one song after another. He surprised them both by singing a folk song that July had taught him.

  Baphina obaba

  Ba semazalwini

  Basitshiyel’ indubeko

  Indubeko zomhlaba

  “Do you know what the words mean?” Christian asked.

  “No, I like made-up words,” Will said.

  “Those aren’t made-up words. When July was little, he didn’t know how to speak English at all, and this is how he talked.”

  “Do you know what the words mean?” Phoebe asked.

  “I do.”

  “So what are they?”

  “I’m sure he taught it to Will for a reason. It says:

  ‘Where are those fathers?

  They are in heaven.

  They left us problems.

  These earthly difficulties.’ ”

  “Not a very joyful song,” Phoebe said. “Will, why don’t you sing ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’?”

  The rest of the trip went quickly and they were soon p
ulling into the Prinsens’ lane.

  “Can I tell her now?” Will asked excitedly as Gwen came out to meet the buggy.

  “You mean she doesn’t know?” Gwen asked.

  “No, Wet wouldn’t tell her.”

  “All of you certainly have my curiosity up. What’s this about?” Phoebe asked.

  “Gwen told me you haven’t had a free day since you came to Arizona, and she thought it was a good idea for us to go up to the hot springs.”

  “I can’t do that.” A frown crossed Phoebe’s face. “Who will take care of Will?”

  “The same person who took care of him the night you stayed with Dr. Evans,” Gwen said. “Don’t worry about him. Just go and have a good time.”

  “The night? Christian, we’re not going to spend the night, are we?”

  “If we go, we will. We’ll take the train up to Hot Springs Junction, and then we’ll catch the stage for Castle Hot Springs.”

  “But we can’t do that,” Phoebe sputtered. “What would—”

  “The Sloans think?” Gwen finished.

  “Yes, they think I’m terrible as it is. What would happen if they found out about this?”

  “Phoebe, Castle Hot Springs is a resort. It won’t be just you and Christian there,” Gwen said. “You deserve the time away. Think of it as a little vacation.”

  “I didn’t bring any clothes.”

  “The Chicago Store is having a big sale. Have Christian take you there and you can pick out something that you want.”

  “I can’t afford a new dress.”

  “But I can,” Christian said. “Think of it as rent money if you must. I sleep in your bed and I eat your food.”

  Gwen’s eyes rose when she heard Christian’s comment.

  Christian chuckled. “That didn’t come out the way I meant it. I sleep in a bed that Phoebe owns.”

  “Oh, that’s better,” Gwen said. “Will, kiss your mama good-bye, and then you two better get going or you’ll miss the train. Did you bring him any clothes?”

  Will kissed his mother, and then Gwen helped him out of the buggy.

  “You be a good boy and make certain you save us some cookies that I know you’ll bake. We’ll see you tomorrow.” Christian said, handing the package containing Will’s clothes to Gwen.