Last Chapter. Thank you all for sticking with my story of the Big Valley and another way Heath might have arrived with his family. I hope you enjoyed it.
Nick took his favorite stance at the fireplace with his forearm leaning against the mantle while he toed the andirons with his boot. Victoria sat playing with her glass of sherry, glad to have something to do with her hands, unable to keep them still.
She thought about her conversation with Heath that afternoon. She hoped Jarrod was right, that all that was driving the boy away was his concern about damaging their reputation with his illegitimacy. She just didn't know, the boy was so closed off to them, fighting his battles alone, unwilling to share his … Share what? she wondered. Anything, she guessed. He told them nothing about himself and shared none of his thoughts. So different from her other children who shared everything, every thought, every event, every concern.
Her other children. Where had that come from, when had it come? She guessed from the moment she realized he was Tom's son, from that day two weeks ago. She smiled; she had told him Tom's children were her children. She had thought that making it so would require some effort on her part. She hadn't realized it was already done. She rose and walked over to where Nick stood lost in contemplation of a cold fireplace. She pulled slightly on his arm, turning him toward the open French doors. "Walk with me," she asked, knowing it would be easier for him to talk if he was moving.
Nick smiled down at her and took her arm in his. "I thought for a while that he couldn't be my brother, I didn't want him to be my brother. Then I went after him to River Pines and I began to think that maybe he could be my brother. I couldn't understand it. I thought that my brother would be angry, being abandoned by Father in a mining town." Nick was silent, looking out at the night. She smiled at Nick, now pulled from her own thoughts by his musings.
"I didn't think that this quiet gentle man could possibly be my brother." Nick looked away, took a deep breath and then, smiling slightly, looked at her in the dim light from the dinning room.
"Then I realized how strong he was. How brave and fine and I began to hope very much that he was indeed my brother. After that hope … Well, belief was easy after that. Who wouldn't want this man for a brother?" Now Nick smiled fully at her. "You should have seen him, Mother. That horse thief outside Jackson had a gun aimed at me. Was going to shoot me and Heath pushed me out of the way and threw a log at him." Nick shook his head smiling widely. "A log. I asked him why he didn't duck. He said he had no hand gun." Nick sobered.
"I didn't know if I could get him to come back. I was afraid he would just ride away. I'm still afraid. He's made his whole life alone. How do we hold him?"
"I don't think we can, Nick." Victoria squeezed her hand softly where it rested in the crook of his arm. "We can love him and treasure him and hope he understands what a family is in time to prevent his leaving."
"I don't want him to go," Nick said simply, trying to understand what his mother was saying. Trying to understand how he could make this thing he wanted happen.
"I don't know what to say to him. He won't talk to me. How do I explain to him? I keep telling him we want him here and he just smiles and says nothing." Nick's voice was rising in volume, reflecting his frustration with his long one-sided conversations with Heath.
"Maybe you're not hearing him," Victoria said.
"HEARING HIM? HE DOESN'T SAY ANYTHING." Nick disentangled his arm and turned back into the house, needing to walk out his frustration she knew.
"Nick."
"WHAT?"
"Maybe you aren't listening."
"Mother, he doesn't say anything."
Victoria smiled. "Listen harder, Nick."
Shaking his head in frustration, he turned back into the house again. She didn't understand, all the words on the trail here from Jackson, then endless hours of talking in the bedroom and the silence from Heath. He didn't think she was listening. He smiled to himself; as least she spoke, even if she didn't listen.
He placed his dirty glass on the tray and headed up the stairs. He would go and sit with his silent brother for a while. See if he could hear him saying something. Listen harder.
Nick opened the bedroom door and nodded to Silas, who smiled at his greeting and rose from the chair near Heath's bed.
"He's sleeping Mr. Nick. He was a little restless, but he's sleeping now, I think."
"I'll sit for a while, Silas. You get some sleep and thank you." Nick spoke softly, not wanting to disturb his brother.
"Good night," Silas said simply and passed through the door.
Nick stood and looked at the sleeping form. They had propped him up in the bed to make it easier for him to breathe with his broken ribs. The lamp was turned low and flickered softly in the light breeze coming in through the open window.
Heath lay perfectly still. His breathing was so shallow and soft that his chest barely moved. Nick remembered Barrett hitting Heath, sitting on the boy and punching him over and over, Heath never making a sound. He realized his hands were fisted, squeezing so tightly that it hurt. He remembered Heath tending to the wounded ambusher with the bullet in his shoulder. Washing the wound and binding it up, offering the man a drink from his canteen, holding his head while he drank. This for a man who not five minutes before had been trying to kill him from ambush. He didn't understand this man, this brother.
He wanted to understand, but he didn't know how he was supposed to if Heath wouldn't explain to him. How could he not feel angry with men who shot at him from ambush, beat him with their fists, abandoned their children in mining towns?
He sighed in frustration and went and sat in the chair that Silas had left by the side of the bed. He put his hand on Heath's head; he didn't feel particularly feverish. He seemed to be sleeping quietly just as Silas had said.
Nick pulled off his boots, put his feet up on the foot of the bed and leaned back in the chair. He thought again about the story of the five soiled doves and laughed softly to himself. He wanted to tell Jarrod that story. They had been up in Canby a year ago and had stayed with Peg Larson. Jarrod would enjoy the story.
He must have dozed off because he woke up to the sound of Heath talking in his sleep, calling out softly, "Danny? Danny? You there, Danny?"
"I'm right here, Heath," he told him, putting his hand on Heath's forehead. "It's okay, little brother, I'm right here. You sleep now."
"Danny? You okay, Danny?"
"Heath wake up, boy." He'd seen enough of Heath's dreams now he knew that the boy wasn't going to want to spend too long dreaming if he could help it. He gave the boy's arm a gentle squeeze, not wanting to shake him and cause him any pain. "Wake up, boy."
"Danny?"
"It's Nick."
"Nick?" Heath's eyes opened and looked directly at him. "Nick?"
"Yeah, your brother, Nick," he said and gave him a smile. "Remember me?" Nick grabbed the cloth from the basin by the head of the bed and squeezed some of the excess water out of it. Then he gently wiped the sweat from Heath's face and neck as he spoke to him. "We're back at the house. Doc Merar was here. He says you'll be fine. Just need to rest."
Not surprisingly, Heath said nothing just gave that small curl to one side of his mouth that Nick had come to recognize as a smile, or at least as much of a smile as he could usually get from this sad brother. He remembered the two of them laughing after the aborted escape attempt on the road to Jackson. There was more humor in this boy than that twitch of a lip, but he was damned he knew how to get it out short of almost dying.
"Go back to sleep. You'll feel better when you wake up again." He didn't need to tell him twice as Heath's eyes were already closing. Nick returned the cloth to the basin, sat back in the chair and put his feet back up on the bed. He needed to think about this boy and what he could say to him.
Nick went easily from thinking to sleeping. It had been a long day trying to catch up on ranch work let slide the past few days while he sat in here watching his brother sleep. Heath's thrashing and crying out in his sleep brought him awake and he flung himself forward toward his brother before he truly recalled where they were.
"Heath, Heath, wake up. It's just a dream. Wake up, boy." He kept his hands on Heath's shoulders, holding him pinned to the bed easily. Every time he touched this boy he seemed to be weaker and thinner, he thought sadly. He was wasting away to memory right in front of him. "Wake-up, boy."
He could see Heath's eyes were open now, staring directly into his, but the boy kept fighting him. "Let me go."
"You awake?"
"Let me go!" There was that suppressed fury in the boy's voice that he had heard on the other occasions he had tried to wake him from a nightmare on the trail. He released his hold on him gradually trying to make sure he was truly awake and wasn't going to fall off the bed before he fully released him. The boy kept fighting his hands until he had relinquished his hold and then he lay there a moment, panting, his whole body shaking as if in a fever. Then Nick could see him gathering himself to try and rise from the bed.
"Whoa, you stay right there, you're not going anywhere." He put his hand back on Heath's shoulder.
"Let me go," the boy said with a steady coldness that belied his shaking body and caused Nick to immediately drop his hand from the boy's shoulder.
"Where are you going? You're sick, you need to stay in that bed."
"I'm going. Where is no concern of yours." The boy spoke with all of the fury Nick had expected to hear from him a week ago. A fury he didn't think was in the boy who had been so gentle and so easy going.
"Well, as a matter of fact, it is a concern of mine. In case you forgot, I'm your brother."
Of course, Heath said nothing. He just struggled to sit up and then, failing, fell back to the pillows, breathing hard. If he'd had either been beaten or shot, he might have made it, but with the two together, he wasn't going anywhere. Then Heath started coughing and Nick wrapped his arm around his shoulders, helped him to sit up straighter and moved in beside him to hold him upright with his arm behind him until the coughing finally ended. The boy just sat there with his head bowed, spent by his struggle.
"So you had a bad dream and you're running out on us?" he asked softly to the top of the Heath's head, unable see his face.
"You got a family now, Heath. You got a brother right here who wants to help you fight your demons." He kept his arm around the boy's shoulders and felt his body gradually still.
"I don't know, Nick. I don't know about brothers. What to do," Heath said, not looking at Nick as he spoke.
"So the dreams get bad and you run?" he asked softly, his arm still around Heath's shoulders.
"Yeah, mostly." Heath looked up at him quickly and then looked away again. "Usually works."
"Makes for a lot of traveling," Nick observed noncommittally.
"Yeah."
Nick waited him out, his arm around Heath's shoulders.
"They aren't always so bad," Heath finally gave him.
"It's the shooting makes them bad, huh?" Nick asked softly, not wanting to push too hard.
"I think so." Heath was silent but making no move to pull away from Nick's supporting arm. So Nick kept his hold on the boy and waited thinking about the shooting that made bad nightmares.
"For a long while, you'll think this is funny, but for a long while it was the smell of horse liniment. I was cavalry and we were always treating horses for something or other so there was always the smell of liniment in the air. A long while after I came home, I just smelled that and …." Nick was silent now himself, lost in his own memories. "Just a whiff of it and I was back in Tennessee."
"But not any more, Nick. Me, every time some lousy bushwhacker tries to kill me and it's like the war never ended."
Nick looked down at the bowed blond head, feeling the warmth of the boy's body against his chest. "You were very young, you were there a long time, a quarter of your life. It's going to take a long time to make memories to replace those." Nick had no idea if he was right or not, but wanted to offer Heath something to take the place of the fears that haunted his nights.
"You need to stay, Heath. You have a family now. We'll help you fight your demons."
"You don't know them, Nick." Heath spoke with such sadness that Nick wondered for a moment if he could have misjudged this young man. Could he have done something in the past to justify his bad dreams, this sense that he somehow didn't deserve a family and the help they could give him?
"No, I don't." Nick paused and tried to listen to the boy in the silence. He tried to understand what it was to be a boy with no family, coming home to Strawberry from fighting a war, alone. A twelve-year-old boy leaving home to ride horses across the prairie for Mr. Russell, alone. He tried to understand the alone part that made a man so still that he could go hours and never say a word. He supposed a man alone would need to listen a lot more than he spoke, would need to be careful all the time. But how did he make Heath understand he wasn't alone any more?
He sensed that what he was about to say was very important and wished again that he was better at talking to this boy, making him understand what he was trying to tell him. "But I know you, Heath. I know the kind of man you are. I know any demon chasing you is chasing me too, because you're my brother. Together we can beat them. Together we can do anything."
"I don't know about brothers, real brothers," Heath said again, that sadness back in his voice and, Nick thought, a tone of yearning.
"Well, I do, little brother. I've been a brother my whole life. I'll teach you about brothers. Give me a chance. Give us all a chance and we'll teach you about brothers and families."
Heath was quiet so long Nick didn't know if he was going to answer or not. He kept his arm around Heath's shoulder, feeling the sharpness of his shoulder bones through the thin cotton shirt. "You're part of this family now, Heath. Let us show you how it works."
Heath's head came up slowly and turned so he looked Nick full in the eyes, as if measuring his words against his face, trying to see the truth of what he said in his eyes.
Nick said, "My mother told me not too long ago, you don't choose your brothers but if I could choose my brother, you're who I would choose."
"Me too, Nick," Heath said and Nick thought he saw tears in his eyes, but wasn't sure because he thought there might be tears in his too. "I'd like to stay. Be your brother," and for the first time Nick saw the boy smile. Truly smile, a wide happy smile that lit up his face. "Big brother, huh?"
Nick smiled back at him. "And don't you forget it, little brother. I'm the big brother in this team."
"I like that," Heath said simply. "Can you help me, big brother. Can you help me lie down here. I'm about wore out all this talking."
Nick laughed and stood up to help his brother, grateful for the chance.