The next morning he had Gal saddled and he was riding out of Strawberry before the sun was up. He'd said his good-byes to Miss Rachel and Aunt Hannah the night before. He didn't want to spend one more moment in that town then he had to. He didn't wholly hate the town, there were too many good memories of his life there to hate it all. But he guessed, on the considering of it, he surely hated it more than not.
Some days he could look around and see the happy places. There was the little garden where he and his mama and Aunt Hannah had grown their vegetables; those few vegetables that could grow and thrive in the cool mountain summers, mostly squash and potatoes but very fine to eat in the cold of winter. There was a little, wide, deep spot in the stream up the mountain from town where he could swim or wash after the mine. There was the livery where Mr. Finch had let him ride the horses after his evening work. There was Mama's little house so full of love that it always seemed magical to him. So safe and warm even when they had both needed to sleep right next to that old cookstove to keep from freezing in the winter cold.
Today all he could see were the reasons he had left this place when he was twelve and had only ever come back for short visits. Everywhere he looked seemed to be a place he had had a fight with somebody; somebody calling his mama some stupid name because of him; somebody beating on him for no reason he ever understood. As he rode through the center of the silent town, all he saw was places where they'd been insulted on the rare occasions he and Mama were in town at the same time.
Once he found out what a bastard was, and what his being a bastard meant to his mama, he had tried not to go to town with her. He figured if he weren't there, she wouldn't look any different from any other lady in town. She would be a beautiful lady, not the mother of a bastard. He sure hoped it had worked like that, but he just didn't know.
He rarely went any further into town then the livery and the general store. He could get to the hotel by the back way and the livery was on the outside edge of town and so he didn't need to go into town to get to work.
The only time he had to parade past all those sneering folks was to go to the general store. That was a trip he took as rarely as he could. Wasn't much of a problem; all they could buy at the store was a bit sugar and flour, maybe some bacon or beans and shells for his little rifle. Mostly they ate what they grew and what he shot. Saved going to town, so he didn't mind squirrel stew or rabbit.
Going to that general store and standing there until all the real folks were taken care of before Mr. Cronin would even consent to notice him waiting there. The ladies moving their skirts carefully aside but never looking at him, as if being a bastard was catching, as if a skirt brushing against a bastard would some how contaminate a person. Then when the last customer was waited on and Mr. Cronin had dusted his counter top and maybe rearranged a few cans, then maybe, if no one else came in, Mr. Cronin would say, "What do you want, boy? What are you doing in here?"
The only reason he went there at all was that he feared that old man might treat his mama the same way; that those ladies might twitch their skirts away from his mama; that the men might not tip their hats to her, or hold the door for her. So he went to that store and stood there silently, invisibly waiting to exchange his few coins for those things he needed to sacrifice his pride to buy.
Three buildings past the general store was the hotel. Strawberry Hotel. He kept his head facing down the gradually brightening road and didn't even glance at the hotel out of the corner of his eye. That hotel was the first place he had ever been really scared. He'd been scared a lot since that first day in the hotel, but that was the first place he felt that fear that made his knees weak and his hands shake. He had never been in that building since without feeling some part of that terror.
That first time had been the day his Uncle Matt beat him senseless, the first time he thought he was going to die, the first time he had felt the fear of his own mortality. Beat him until he passed out, until he thought he had died. He'd had plenty of chances to know his mortality since then, but he supposed you never forgot the first time.
He supposed he should go in and thank the old devil. There had been a lot of soldiers he served with who, when they first heard the shells crashing around them or first felt the bullets moving the air past their faces, had frozen in fright. Not him though. He could thank Uncle Matt for that.
He knew what it was to have someone try and kill you. He knew what it was to live your life at the whim of another man's violence. He was used to the sounds of violence. Used to moving through enemy territory knowing at any moment violence could reach and grab you away. So while men twice his age stood transfixed by the fear of their own mortality, he just loaded and fired, loaded and fired. He and fear were old friends.
Even so, he didn't need to look at that place. He didn't need any more reminders of that place, of the only family he had, except… they weren't the only family he had any more. He had a family. Well not a real family. Not, he thought angrily, not a "legitimate" family. But he had more blood kin than Matt Simmons.
Once he was clear of the last outlying buildings, he heeled Gal into a slow ground-covering jog and considered this new family; the family that his father had cared for; the family that had mattered to the man who sired him; Tom Barkley's real family. There had been a time when he would have given everything he had, which admittedly was precious little, to know his father's name.
Now, he knew it. He was surprised to find that knowing the man's name had opened up that pocket of rage he thought he had closed away years ago. He hadn't realized how angry he still was at that stranger, whose thoughtless act had given him life, until he had seen the old newspaper clipping in the back of Mama's Bible.
That got him to thinking about his mama. He had worked his whole life to put a roof over his and his mama's heads and food on their table. True, the past few years he hadn't been here to share that roof, but his life had still been centered around earning money for him and his mama to live on. Now suddenly things were different. He sat so still with this realization that his horse stopped too and the two remained stationary while he worked his head around this difference. Was it a difference? He still needed to eat and live. He would still send money to Miss Rachel and Aunt Hannah. So had anything really changed about the shape of his life?
Well, yeah, he knew it was different. His love for his mother had been the center of his life, the focus around what he did and how he saw the world. Caring for her, even when he was thousands of miles away, was what he did. Knowing that no matter where he was, she was saying a prayer for him had mattered, had mattered a lot. Now that was done. Now there was no one to care if he lived or died except two elderly ladies in an old mining town, who had lives of their own to live. Did that make his life something different? He knew it must, but he couldn't see his way clear to what it meant.
Did not having a mother and suddenly having a father all in one day make a difference to his life? Should he feel differently somehow, finally knowing his father's name?
He had been sure all those times he had begged his mother to tell him about his father, and later when he had ranted and raged for his name that it would matter. That knowing this one missing thing about himself would change his life. Now, knowing it, he was damned if he could see how. He wasn't this man's child. He had never even met the man. He was Leah Thomson's child. The woman, who had raised him, loved him, done without to give to him. What was Tom Barkley to him?
After another half hour of riding and thinking down the steep mountain trail, he was no closer to understanding what had just happened to his life. He was working on his mother and Tom Barkley and what them being together had meant when he found himself plucked out of his saddle and falling to the earth. All he could see was the ground coming at him; he was so astonished he couldn't even put up his arm to break his fall. It was the sound of the second rifle shot as he hit the ground that set him rolling off the trail into the brush.
