Eternity Read online

  He and Tem went to the cornfield, and he did his best to try to make the corn grow, but he threw down his hoe. “The goddamn plants know I hate them,” he said. Tem solemnly nodded in agreement.

  Josh tried going fishing with his children, but there wasn’t much joy in the outing, no one to tease them and challenge them, no one to make a game of the day.

  On the previous evening everything had come to a head. He and the children were eating a meal of fried ham and canned beans when they heard a dog barking outside. They should have known that it wasn’t Carrie’s dog, for it was the deep voice of a large dog, but that fact didn’t seem to register with any of them. Without looking at each other, without a word spoken between them, the three of them leaped from the table and made for the door all at the same time. Since the door wasn’t big enough for the three of them, they began pushing each other. Dallas bit her brother’s shoulder, and Josh nearly knocked his son down in his hurry to get outside, but then Josh had enough presence of mind to realize what he was doing, so he picked up a child in each arm and went through the door.

  The dog ran away at the sight of the three fused people coming at him at once. It was a big, scrawny farm dog and not at all like Choo-choo.

  Putting his children down, Josh sat on the porch step and looked out at the moonlit yard. As always, the three of them kept to their policy of not saying a word about Carrie, but it was Dallas who began to softly sob.

  Without saying a word, Josh pulled her onto his lap and stroked her hair. Beside them Tem began to sob too, and Josh knew that Tem would rather die than allow anyone to see him in tears, so he knew how much pain his son was feeling. Josh put his arm around Tem.

  “Why did she leave?” Tem whispered.

  “Because I’m stupid and a fool and have no sense,” Josh said softly.

  Dallas nodded against his chest, and tears came to Josh’s eyes too. It always amazed him at how much his children loved him. He had sent away a woman they had grown to love very much, but not once had they even questioned him. They loved him enough to believe that what he did was right, and they were willing to accept his decision no matter what it did to them. They loved him with complete trust.

  Josh sniffed and wiped the back of his hand across his eyes. Carrie had said that she loved him. Did she love him enough to come back to him?

  Josh hugged Tem. “Think she’d forgive me?”

  It took the children a moment to understand what their father had said, then they looked at each other, smiled, leaped off the porch and began to dance about the yard. Josh hadn’t seen them with this much energy in six weeks.

  “I take it you do think she’ll forgive me,” Josh said sarcastically.

  “She loves you,” Dallas said.

  Josh laughed, for his daughter made it sound as though she couldn’t understand why Carrie loved Josh. “Maybe if I wrote her a letter and explained—”

  At that the children stopped dancing and looked at their father. The next moment they were pushing him into the house, where Dallas fetched pen, ink, and paper, while Tem, his hands behind his back, looking very much like his father, began to tell his father what to write. “First of all, you have to tell her you love her, then you have to tell her you think she’s the best in the world. Tell her you like her…her name. Tell her you like her dresses and her hair. Tell her she can fish better than you. Tell her that you’re sure she is a better farmer than you.”

  Josh lifted one eyebrow. “Anything else?”

  The children didn’t seem to realize that their father was being sarcastic, or if they did, they ignored him. “Tell her about the food we have to eat,” Dallas said as though that one fact would make Carrie take pity on them and return.

  His hands still behind his back, still looking like a miniature version of his father, Tem looked down at the floor with a frown and began to pace. “Tell her she makes us laugh. Tell her that if she’ll come back, she can sleep in the morning if she wants to. Carrie likes to sleep late. Tell her I won’t do anything dumb like run away again.” He looked up at his father, and his face was as serious as any adult’s. “Tell her you’re sorry for all the mean things you said to her and that if she’ll come back you’ll treat her like a queen and you won’t argue with her and you’ll give her the big bed all by herself.”

  Josh smiled at that. “She, uh, likes sharing with me.”

  Dallas gave a snort. “You kick and you’re too big and you snore sometimes.”

  “Don’t tell her you snore,” Tem ordered.

  Both children stopped and looked at Josh as though waiting for something, and it took him a moment to understand. Picking up the pen, he began to write. “Anything else I should tell her?”

  “Tell her she doesn’t have to see Uncle Hiram,” Dallas said. “I don’t like him anyway.”

  Tem took a deep breath. “Tell Carrie about Mother. Tell her about you.”

  Putting down the pen, he looked at his children for a moment then opened his arms to them, hugged them, and kissed their foreheads. “I will write everything you’ve said and more. I’ll tell her how we miss her and…love her and want her back with us. And I’ll tell her all about me.”

  Tem looked up with questioning eyes.

  “Everything,” Josh promised. “After she hears about me, she may not want me. She may want to stay back in Maine with her family.”

  Dallas looked as though she were going to cry again. “Tell her she can kiss you all she wants.”

  Josh laughed. “I’ll be very glad to tell her that. Now, I want the two of you to go to bed. And don’t look at me like that, I swear that I’ll write the letter.”

  “Can we read it?” Tem asked.

  “No you may not. This is my letter and it’s private.”

  “You won’t forget to tell her that—” Dallas began.

  “I don’t want one more order from either of you two runts. Now go to bed so I can work on this. And stop looking at me like that. I’m perfectly capable of writing a letter by myself.”

  The children didn’t say another word as they went up the ladder to the loft, but Josh thought he heard Tem whisper, “He hasn’t done anything else very well without us.”

  Josh resisted the urge to defend himself, but what stopped him was that what Tem had said was correct. Smiling, he looked back at the paper.

  Last night he had written the letter to Carrie and now he and the children were on their way into town to mail it. This morning Tem had found his father asleep, his head on the table, a many-paged letter beneath his arm, and when Tem had tried to sneak the letter out from under his father, Josh woke.

  “What time is it?” Josh asked, rubbing his stubble-covered face.

  “Late. Are you going to mail the letter today?”

  Josh smiled at the pleading look on his son’s face. “We will mail it today. All three of us will go into town. The corn can’t get worse than it is already. Go on, get dressed and help Dallas while I shave.”

  So now they were riding into town, but it was a town that they barely recognized. The last time Josh had been to Eternity—with Carrie—it had been nothing more than dirt streets, usually filled with people leaving town. Now there were rich carriages and men in suits such as he’d not seen since coming West.

  “Is this Heaven?” Dallas asked from her seat in front of her father.

  For a moment Josh thought he’d made a wrong turn and was in another town, Denver perhaps, but he recognized too many things for it to be anywhere else.

  When they reached the mercantile store, where the post office was, Josh stopped. Tem dismounted, then Josh got down and helped Dallas to the ground. All three of them were speechless as they looked about at the activity in the usually dead little town.

  “What is going on in this town? The last time I was here, this place was dead,” Josh said to the storekeeper as soon as they were inside.

  Before anyone could give Josh an answer—and they had plenty to say to the husband of the town heroine when he had