Chapter 29 – Early November 1916 – No one knows what I go through every day
It was as though someone had scrubbed her out of every painting, leaving shadows behind where she should be.
It made no sense not to see her on the café porch, sweeping up after the wind had blown the leaves across her steps, or on the way to church with Cody hopping beside her, a grimace turning her face when the dust kicked up onto his Sunday best. It was a twisted sort of psychology that he was always thinking about the absence of her, and yet every town council meeting or stroll past the saloon bench could still catch him off guard with a fresh grief.
The hiring of another person at the café should, perhaps, not have thrown him quite as much as it did. It was only a teenage helper, after all. Still, his newspaper had fallen flat in his hands that morning when he looked up at the chirpy voice asking if he wanted a coffee and saw it belonged to Greta Crocker. Regardless of what was happening outside its doors, and how much he wanted the town to move on from all their speculation, any acknowledgment of the passage of time inside the café stung with a very deliberate betrayal.
He had sputtered stupidly over his breakfast order, guzzling it all down as quickly as possible when it arrived and wishing he could march into the prep area to give Bill a piece of his mind. Problem was, he knew none of the fragments would make sense. It was his heart that objected, not his head, which knew that business was business. And while Bill, of all people, actually might have understood – a thought that nearly made him bark with laughter as it crossed his mind – he wasn't yet ready to have anyone tell him that Abigail might not be coming back.
The gossip had been going on for what felt like weeks, this being the biggest "scandal" the quiet little town had seen since his own arrest. Women seemed to be spontaneously recalling occasions on which their husbands – or others' husbands – had offered perhaps too generous a compliment about the café fritters. Everyone else was frantically crafting an alibi. Henry was still a prime suspect, of course, but it seemed Bill had actually kept their confidence. This was almost certainly due more to Bill's affection for Abigail than any actual allegiance to Henry. He probably thought it would damage her reputation irreparably if it was confirmed that it was Henry Gowen, of all people, with whom she had been foolish enough to place her heart.
So without a slip of the tongue from Bill – or himself, again, stupidly – nothing could be proven. The letter had been burned and most other men of that time had (God rest their souls) been casualties of the explosion or moved on in some other way. There was nothing to suggest the man in the letter was still around. And no one would be able to point to any particular instances of impropriety, as nothing had actually ever happened between them.
Well…nearly nothing.
Henry shook off the memories, which seemed somehow to haunt him now more than they ever had before Abigail had gone. He buried himself in his work, spending long hours in the office, yet trying to behave otherwise normally. He knew enough from the past that trying to avoid notice too adamantly was the best way to get yourself noticed. Thankfully he had never been someone the townsfolk ran up to excitedly with gossip or confronted with salacious rumors. No, that all happened behind his back – conversations suddenly hushed and eyes averted when he entered the room. It didn't feel good, but right about now it suited him just fine.
Unfortunately, there were some people here who had not always been part of the townsfolk.
It took Rosemary far longer to approach him than he had expected; he presumed he had Lee and Elizabeth to thank for that. But as far as Rosemary was concerned, it was a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a secret must be in want of an inquisition.
She had the bad luck to catch him on his way out of the café, still reeling from the addition of Greta to its canvas. The Coulters were on their way inside for the more common breakfast hour – a rush Henry had been rising at dawn specifically to miss.
"Well, good morning, Henry!" Lee had called out. Henry had tipped his hat, trying to move past them quickly. Friendly people rarely know how to take a hint from unfriendly people, though, so Rosemary had joined in delaying him before he was able to get completely down the stairs.
"How is Bill holding up today? I hear he's brought on some new help."
Henry had to bite back the first answer that came into his head, which was that she could simply end the conversation and go in and find out. "Seems so," he said instead.
Suddenly a soft hand was on his arm. "You know, Henry…"
"Sweetheart…" Lee started, a note of admonishment in his voice.
"No, Lee, I'm sorry, but Abigail is our friend and so is Henry."
"Henry's still standing here, trying to get to work, if we don't mind getting on with this," Henry cut in with an impatient gesture. He pulled his arm from Rosemary's grasp in what he hoped was not too aggressive of a manner, but she shot him a frown regardless.
"We just wanted you to know…"
"Let's not bring 'we' into this," Lee muttered.
"We," Rosemary doubled-down, ignoring Lee's second interruption, "are here for you. We understand that you and Abigail have cared for each other in your way for a long time and –"
"You understand?" Henry cut her off, amazed at her nerve. "What exactly is it you think you understand?"
"Hey. Henry," Lee warned, stepping a little further in front of his wife.
"You know, for people claiming to be friends, you seem just as hung up on the ancient history of that letter as everyone else, when what you should be concerned about is the fact that Abigail is gone now. That it's these exact kinds of little hints and questions that made her feel like she had to exile herself, before everyone else did!"
Protectiveness flushed red across Lee's face, but Rosemary's voice was deep and grave. "That is completely untrue, Henry, and very unfair. Lee has been nothing but good to you - "
He stopped her again, not needing her to continue on about how Lee had deigned to employ him in his time of disgrace. "You're still not hearing me. I'm talking about Abigail."
"Henry, come on," Lee held out his hands. "I know this has been tough and we're all completely at a loss here, but you know us better than this. These accusations you're making… I mean, do you really doubt how much we love Abigail and want her to come back?"
"And so what, you want to know much I want her back? Want to know if I was the one who found yet another way to get all those men killed?"
"No, hey, no one said anything like that!" Lee pleaded again. Rosemary's eyes were cast down now, humbled in a way Henry didn't think he had ever seen. It should have shamed him, but it made him feel righteous, powerful.
"Do you want to come back inside? We can talk about this calmly?" Lee asked. He threw a sidelong glance past his wife, drawing Henry's attention to the small crowd that had now formed at the bottom of the café's steps.
Rage flared inside Henry as he looked at them all, rubbernecking and whispering, shaking their heads in disapproval. In the glare of the attention he could give no consideration to Lee's offer – he just needed to get out. He turned away from the Coulters with a defensive snarl, storming too hard down the stairs and sending waves of pain up his bad leg. He pressed his lips firmly together to stem any cry that might escape him, showing no reaction until he had shoved past the assembly of gossips and busybodies. Yes, yes go to her café, go talk about the spectacle!
Lee was calling after him, but he no longer had the patience for this game of polite indulgence. He kept moving, refusing to look back.
ooo
Hickam had started to ask what was wrong when the office door flew open, but quickly thought better of it when it continued swinging back, finally landing with a crack against the wall. Henry dropped down into his office chair and rubbed his face hard in his hands. The tremors in his leg came back to the front of his consciousness and he grimaced beneath his palms, berating himself. He'd taken the worst faith interpretation of Rosemary's approach; he knew it. That was his instinct, always – to push and distrust and keep his guard up at any cost.
He slid his hand down below his eyes and promptly scoffed. Jane might have had something to do with that, he thought bitterly, catching sight of the unwelcome but poetically timed envelope on his desk. He'd been paying young Robert to bring his mail over but he didn't know why he bothered, given the tidings were never good.
The only reason his ex-wife ever wrote to him was to ask for money, ostensibly for their son Christopher. A quick glance after slicing it open proved this particular missive was no different. She must have heard about the new company. Joke was on her. He tossed the letter aside with a grunt and grabbed the account books, flapping them open with a hard thud on the desk and knowing they wouldn't put him in any better mood than the rest of the morning had.
He flipped back and forth through the pages, hoping some new entry might have suddenly appeared that would change his reading of the balance from the day before, and the day before that. No such luck. He'd managed somehow to make a mess of even the one thing he was meant to be good at. Yet another hour spent hunched intensely over the desk trying to squeeze plus signs out of red numbers yielded nothing. Oil was no less elusive for him than peace.
Just as sharply as he'd entered the office, he now pushed himself up with a sudden kick of the chair against the wood floor. "I'm going to see Bouchard," he said, the words mashed together in a growl. Hickam nodded, studiously avoiding any direct eye contact. The door rocked in Henry's hand as he flung it open to leave and he peered up at it with an icy glare, trying to intimidate the rattling hunk of wood into stillness. Inspecting the frame, he saw that one of the hinges had come loose from his little outburst this morning. Well, wasn't that just fucking perfect.
"Get this fixed," he barked over his shoulder, slamming the broken door behind him.
ooo
It was too early for the saloon to be open, but he knew he'd find Gustave and Lucas in there setting up. Despite the empty dining room, Lucas waved him back to his office when he told him he wanted to talk business. Just as well – Henry was not thrilled by the prospect of begging for an infusion of more cash in front of Gustave. The Frenchman was already prone to scoffing whenever Lucas chose funding their petroleum efforts over procuring more snails and truffles or whatever it was he wanted to serve, and Henry didn't need to be on the other end of even more whispering in this town.
Henry took in a few deep breaths as they made the short walk to the back hallway of the saloon. He was doing his best to temper his mood before asking for a favor. It did not help a great deal when he trailed behind Lucas into the office and immediately ran into a cardboard box, sending whatever was on top of it tumbling to the floor. Another animalistic noise escaped him, and he gritted his teeth to bite back a swear.
Lucas, already standing behind the desk and clearing papers, glanced up without concern. "Excuse the clutter; I'm planning a Christmas Festival."
"A Christmas Festival?" Henry asked, pretending at interest while he re-oriented himself. He dragged his eyes over the piles, vaguely trying to find the object he'd displaced. As he searched, the glimpses of mistletoe and fluffs of red and white something-or-others in half-open boxes slowly made him clock what Lucas had said.
He knew that Abigail had been gone since September 24th, and knew from writing checks and invoices that his hibernation had somehow guided him safely to November. He had failed, however, to realize that for those who had managed to keep loved ones in their lives, the turn of the calendar page signaled the imminent arrival of the holidays.
That long-ago Christmas Eve at the Stanton house was so frequent a recollection that the season itself held almost no actual significance for him. It would float into his mind upon something as ordinary as the opening of a wine bottle, nipping at his heart nearly every time he passed a raucous game of darts in the saloon. Specks of dust in moonbeams would whip themselves into a vision of her in the darkness, her front door opening above him as he had hoped but never expected it would.
Sometimes he wished it hadn't. It wouldn't have made any difference. He was already hers by then. He just hadn't realized until that night that she was his too.
"A tradition I'm borrowing from the Europeans," Lucas was saying. "Booths and games, things like that."
"We've already got Founders Day," Henry frowned, still distracted.
Lucas threw his arms open with a grin. "We can't have two fun days?" Henry shrugged in response, and Lucas smirked. "Ah, silly me. Look who I'm talking to."
Henry stopped his search of the floor, flashing his eyes sharply back up to Lucas' face. "What's that supposed to mean?"
The other man tilted his head forward, apologetic yet still somehow mocking. "It was a joke, Henry. But you know, I think it wouldn't hurt for you to get out from under that dark cloud you carry around with you sometimes."
And then there it was again, before he could even try to fight it. That defensiveness that snapped like familiar armor around him as he swung his fists wide, lashing out at anything that threatened to expose his weaknesses for what they were.
"Bouchard," he sneered, "you've lived here for all of five minutes and known me for all of five seconds. Now maybe a good-looking rich kid like you's never had anything bad happen to him in his life, and you can't fathom the day when your hair goes gray and you have to look back and take stock of what you did. When that day comes, you can come find me if I'm not dead yet, and then you can share with me all the glowing wisdom you think you have about life. But until then you haven't earned the right."
The bitter weight of the words hung in the air. Lucas stood motionless behind the desk, mouth agape, but Henry didn't budge. He carved the hardened expression deeper into his face, letting it mask all of his shame.
"Jesus, Henry. I didn't mean to offend – "
"Of course you didn't. Nobody ever means to do anything around here. We've all just got the best of intentions," he said, derision lacing the cruel upturn of his lips. "Well, here's a life lesson for you, young man: intentions don't count. Intentions don't have a single cent of value. Intentions don't stop people from leaving, and they don't stop people from dying."
Henry hated himself. He hated everything he was saying, but he couldn't shake it now – not when his nerves had been whittled down to tripwires from restless nights spent dreaming of her hands and her screams and her eyes, broken up only by the miserable days spent glaring at a bleak horizon that was swiftly narrowing in front of him into a single grim point.
"I tried. I was trying. But all my trying doesn't mean a damn thing to the forty-seven families who still wake up gasping in their beds, thinking about those men's last breaths."
Forty-eight, he thought, remembering his own nightmares. Forty-eight, he thought, his mind beginning to blur.
"I tried being cruel… I lied, but she still…"
The words floated away from him, pulled into some dizzying corner of his brain. The floor was swaying underneath him, and he didn't think he was making sense anymore.
"I wanted… it to be… different, but I didn't... I didn't want…"
He put a hand out, gripping for the wall, trying to catch his breath. His head buzzed and swam and wouldn't stay still. His chin dropped like an anchor to his chest, like the muscles in his neck had melted away. Everything was draining out of him, leaving his broken shell behind, but it was happening somewhere else. He wasn't there. It was another nightmare. He blinked rapidly. Lucas' cardboard boxes were in the nightmare, and on the floor between them was a little Christmas doll.
"Henry!"
He was leaving now. A weaker version of his own voice came from somewhere in the ceiling. "I'm sorry," it was saying. "Tell her I'm sorry."
