The Long Trail (The McCabes Book 1) by Brad Dennison (microsoft ebook reader .TXT) 📗

In school. And Joshua would never have been happy on a farm back east.” It felt unnatural to call him Josh, but she was trying to be a little less stuffy. “He would have wound up heading west and falling in love with the land much as you did, and could very well have found himself in a situation like this, anyway. But he would have been much less prepared for it. And think about Dusty. He would still have been conceived, but he would have had even less opportunity to find his father.”

“What about Bree? My own daughter is in a life-and-death situation she wouldn’t have been in, had it not been for my decision to raise her here, and not back east.”

“John, how did you father die?” She knew fully well the answer. He had been killed by a desperate man, who had robbed a store at gunpoint and was attempting to escape.

Johnny and his brothers had been in the Pennsylvania forest cutting fire wood with their father, when the robber happened upon them by chance. He had just robbed a store in the nearby town, and in his desperation, fired a pistol into the elder McCabe’s chest. The robber fled while the life blood of Thomas McCabe drained onto the earth in front of his sons. And all of this had happened in the woods of Pennsylvania, not a mile from the McCabe farm house.

“Point taken,” Johnny said.

“Even if we all die here tonight, I would still have no regrets. It’s not the quantity of years, it’s the quality of them.”

They stood in silence for a while. Johnny took another draw from his pipe, discovered it had gone out, as pipes do frequently, but decided not to strike a match out here in the open. The glow of the match might be visible from a distance.

The breeze kicked up, and Ginny shuddered at its coldness, and pulled her shawl more tightly about here.

“To revert back to a conversation of a few nights ago,” she said. “are you still thinking of riding to California in the spring?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“You know, John, she isn’t actually there. Only her earthly remains are.”

He nodded, though again knowing she could not see the motion in the darkness. “Ever since my first winter in this valley, with the Shoshones, I have believed the body dies away, but the spirit continues. Kind of similar in some ways to the teachings I got in my mother’s Methodist church, when I was growing up. Really, I guess all religions are pointing in the same direction. The words may be different, from one culture to another, but the goal is always the same.”

“Heaven? Eternal reward?”

“No. There is no reward. And no punishment either, for that matter. Except in our own hearts. It’s all about the spirit, Ginny. The old shaman I talked a lot with, the ‘medicine man’ I guess most white men would call him, said that heaven and hell begin here on earth, in a person’s heart, and continue onward even after the body dies. He said two men can be standing side-by-side, but one can be in hell and the other in heaven.”

“For a supposedly ignorant people, their beliefs and philosophies run quite deeply.”

“That night you and I talked, I was feeling the loss of Lura so strong. But now, as we stand here on the porch, I don’t really feel the loss much at all. I feel almost like she’s standing here beside us.”

“Maybe she is.”

“And I think maybe my place is here, not riding clear across the country just to visit a grave.”

“Loss is like that. One day you feel it so profoundly it’s all you can do to even climb out of bed in the morning, and the next you don’t feel the loss at all, like the one you lost is not really gone. Like, as you said, the spirit continues, so there is no real loss, just a transition. A change. And life is forever changing.”

“You’re speaking of the loss of your father?”

“No. Well, him too. I don’t speak much of a young man who was in my life when I was about Josh’s age. And Dusty’s.”

“Yes, that sailor. You’ve mentioned him.”

“What I never have told you is that I was deeply in love with him. We were going to be married once he had saved enough money. But he was lost at sea on one of my father’s ships. I have never loved again. And there are times when I feel the loss so profoundly, even to this day,” her voice almost broke, and she paused, steadying herself, “and yet there are other times, when I, too, feel as though he is standing right here beside me.”

“It isn’t fair, is it, to love so strongly, to want to build your whole life with someone, then to have that someone for only a short time, and have to go on the rest of your life alone?”

“I don’t know, John. But I do know that I’m freezing to death out here. I’m going to go in and make a hot cup of tea, and put some coffee on for you men.” She gave his arm a squeeze, and stepped through the doorway.

Johnny stood on the porch, not feeling alone. Feeling almost like Lura was beside him. Like he could reach out to touch her. Like he could almost smell her scent, a sort of peach-blossom cologne she used to wear. He realized he was half-consciously reaching out with one hand toward where he felt she might be standing.

He smiled to himself. He didn’t know if her spirit was really there or not. But at least for the moment, he was having an easier time believing what the old Shoshone shaman had told him.

The smell of coffee eventually lured Johnny to the kitchen, so Josh took his place on the front porch. The porch gave the best view of the valley floor, and the probable direction the raiders