Chapter 2

Little Heath was already up and moving around before his father and brother were. He said quietly to his father, "I'm gonna find some firewood."

Heath said, "Don't go far."

"I won't," Little Heath said.

Heath got himself up, took care of his morning ablutions (except for shaving, which he was not going to do) and was unpacking some oatmeal when Little Heath returned with some wood and started the fire. Nicky was still waking up – it usually took him a long time to come around and this morning was no different.

"Time to get moving," Little Heath told him.

"Go use the bush and don't get lost," Heath said to the boy.

Nicky stumbled off without a word.

The fire was going when Heath brought the oatmeal and a pot of water over to it. "You want me to get the horses ready?" Little Heath asked.

"I'll do it if you get the oatmeal and the coffee started," Heath said.

Little Heath nodded. By the time Heath had the horses saddled and ready, Nicky was back and the food and coffee were cooking. Heath noticed that Little Heath's face had a bit more fuzz on it than usual. Little Heath was not planning to shave either. Heath smiled.

"How long before we get to Strawberry?" Nicky asked.

"Less than an hour," Heath said. "Any questions you got before we get there?"

"Not really," Nicky said.

Little Heath poured some coffee into a cup and handed it to his father. "How's this?"

Heath tasted. "It's fine."

Little Heath poured some for Nicky and for himself, saying, "Oatmeal won't be very long now. And I have a couple questions."

"Shoot," Heath said.

"Your mother – your real mother, our grandmother – what was she like?"

Heath smiled. "She was very pretty, very kind, very gentle. She not only would never hurt a fly – she would nurse one back to health if somebody else hurt it. She was a lot like your mama."

"And what about her mother and father? You never mention them."

"That's because I didn't know them," Heath said. "Never saw them, and my mother never talked about them."

"You never asked?"

"I did once, but all my mama said was that they died. Aunt Rachel said the same thing, so maybe they didn't know them either. You should know, I had another aunt and uncle – well, I don't think they were my real aunt and uncle, my mama just had me call them that. I don't know what relation they were, if they were any relation. Their names were Martha and Mathew Simmons, and they weren't nice people. They ran the hotel in Strawberry, and sometime in the late 1870s they both died. That's all I know about them."

"What do you mean, they weren't nice?" Nicky asked.

"They weren't honest," Heath said. "Once they tried to hornswaggle some money out of your grandmother, Mrs. Barkley."

"I'll be she wasn't hornswaggled," Nicky said with a grin.

"No, she wasn't," Heath said, remembering the time his step-mother went to Strawberry to find out what kind of relationship Tom Barkley had with Leah Thomson, smiling at the memory. It was then he learned his father had never known he existed, and that was the beginning of Heath losing all bitterness toward Tom Barkley. Now, Heath was sorry he never knew the man, but glad that bitterness was long gone.

Now that he was getting older, Little Heath was beginning to put together the stories about his father's father, Tom Barkley, and he was beginning to understand what happened between Leah Thomson and him. He didn't say anything now but he put what he was hearing away, to talk to his father someday privately about it, so he could understand for himself what happened.

Heath could almost read Little Heath's mind. He smiled a bit his older son's way. "One thing I want you boys to know before we visit my real mama's grave. Your grandmother, Mrs. Barkley, is as much mama to me as my own mother was, and she is your grandmother in every way. When I tell you about my real mother, Miss Thomson, I want you to remember how lucky I feel to have had two wonderful mothers, and how lucky you are to have Mrs. Barkley as a grandmother."

Little Heath nodded.

Nicky asked, "Is the oatmeal ready yet?"

Both Heath and Little Heath chuckled. Little Heath checked the pot. "It's ready," he said and began to dish it out.

XXXXXXXXXX

The three Barkley men rode toward Strawberry and first came across an old abandoned mineshaft. Heath remembered shooting a man there who tried to shoot him and Victoria when they were there together many years ago, the last time Heath saw Martha and Mathew Simmons. He vaguely wondered if the man's skeleton was still down the mineshaft, but he let that go.

"What's that?" Nicky asked when they saw the tumbled down structure over the mineshaft.

"The played out mine," Heath said. "They just left it as it was, and over the years it fell apart."

"Did you ever work in the mine, Papa?" Little Heath asked.

"For a little while, after I got well from the sickness I got during the war, but not for very long. It's hard and hot work. I didn't like it much."

They rode on together, and soon they came to the ramshackle nothing of a graveyard where there were several graves, most of them with stones that were falling over, but the three that were important to Heath were still intact. Heath dismounted outside the graveyard and tethered his horse. His sons did the same, and the three of them walked in toward Leah Thomson's grave. The boys took their hats off when their father removed his. They watched as he knelt at the grave and brushed some fallen leaves off the bottom of the stone.

"This is my mother, one of your grandmothers," Heath said. "She died of a fever when I was just 24, but I remember her like she was alive yesterday. She was sweet and gentle and she had a laugh like music."

Nicky was looking around and saw another stone that was upright. "Is this your Aunt Rachel?" he asked.

Heath looked over. "Yes, it is. She was murdered, not even a year after my mother died. She was a lot like my mother, just as sweet and gentle. I remember once, when I was maybe your age, Nicky, Mama and Aunt Rachel and Hannah took me to church and had me baptized. I was scared to death. I thought they were gonna drown me. But after, they fixed a big special dinner for me, and my mama told me how proud she was that I behaved myself while I was being baptized. I was all grown up before I realized how important being baptized was to those women. It meant everything to them. It meant I was saved and when I died I'd be with them in heaven again."

Heath grew quiet, remembering, wondering how he could explain to his sons that these women were vital to him becoming the man he did.

"Where's Hannah?" Nicky asked.

Heath pointed to a corner of the graveyard where there was only one stone left standing, but many fallen down. "Hannah was a negro woman. Negroes were only allowed in the little corner of the cemetery."

"Why?" Nicky asked.

Heath sighed. "That's just the way it's always been. I really don't know why, but it is."

Heath sat down on the ground then in front of his mother's grave, and taking the cue, his sons sat down with him. Heath began talking again about times he shared with these women when he was a boy – how once he fell in the creek and Hannah jumped in to pull him out, how he came home from the war all sick and they just fussed over him night and day, how his first memory of anything at all was about the awful tasting medicine they gave him when he had a cough. Heath went on and on with stories until he realized his boys were getting a little restless.

"Let's go take a look at the town," Heath said and climbed to his feet.

"Will we see any ghosts?" Nicky asked.

"There are no ghosts!" Little Heath insisted as they mounted up.

"If you see any, you point them out," Heath said. "'Cause I don't believe in them either."

Heath led the way over the hill and down into the ghost town of tumbled down buildings that had once been Strawberry.