Morgan Longstreet was a good fit. He didn’t look like a Welling, but he took the name because no one ever said he shouldn’t. Sometimes he forgot that he didn’t look like the rest of them. Mostly it was Zetta Lee who reminded him. She liked to point out that she was different, too. Where Ham and his two sons had coffee-colored hair, Zetta Lee’s was as black as a pirate’s heart. Gideon and his father shared sharp, angular features that Jackson would also see once his face thinned out. Zetta Lee’s face was heart shaped, her lips fuller, her eyes rounder. Morgan avoided the mirror so he would not have to gaze into the freckled face she told him was angelic.
She called him Ginger Pie. Until Zetta Lee, he had always been “that redheaded boy.” He had never heard the word “ginger” used in reference to his hair. He didn’t mind so much. She had silly names for Gideon and Jackson as well, but it seemed to Morgan that she used them less frequently and not always kindly. He did not know if the endearment made him special or was meant to set him apart, but it was years before he objected to it, and still years after that before he objected out loud.
Morgan figured he got along with Gideon and Jack about as well as any brothers ever got along. Early on he recognized that Gideon and Jack shared a bond that he would never have with either of them, together or separately, but they did not make it their life’s work to exclude him. The three of them made a triangle, and that usually meant that one of them was sitting on the outside. Sometimes that was a good place to be, like when Gideon and Jack were tearing into each other, but other times he was there because he was their target and they were fixing to bury him in a heap of trouble.
They all worked hard on the ranch. Everyone had chores. From the beginning, Morgan was expected to do his share, and depending on the mood of his brothers, he sometimes did their share as well. Morgan learned to ride and rope, and Ham taught him how to break a horse. There was an old hand named Hatch Crookshank who taught him how to gentle one. Gideon, owing to his age, was the first one allowed to accompany his father on a cattle drive. He came back with stories that made Jack and Morgan long to go. They talked excitedly about what they would do when their turn came, and Gideon listened to them with his chest puffed out, like he was ten years their senior and a score of years more experienced.
Jackson was permitted to ride out next. Ham let his sons flank the herd on the left, keeping them together so they could look out for each other. Morgan stood back on the porch with Zetta Lee and watched them go. She laid her hand on his shoulder and comforted him.
“Come inside now, Ginger Pie. I want to show you something.”
That was how it started. Zetta Lee took him to her bed, and in the absence of her husband, she broke him in. The two hands that were left behind to help manage the ranch came sniffing around at different times, but Zetta Lee told each one that he no longer pleased her. From the bedroom window, Morgan watched one, then the other, slink away. He wondered if he would leave her like a whipped puppy when she said the same to him.
There were men from town who stopped by. Morgan recognized them from previous visits. He also remembered that their visits usually lasted longer, and he remembered that when they came he and his brothers were sent away from the house. On one of those occasions, Jack had nearly drowned in the pond.
Now Zetta Lee did not let any of them stay beyond a few minutes. Some of them were angry, others merely resigned. She remained firm. She held a Bible in the crook of her arm and told every one of them the same story. She had been visited by an angel, and she was saved.
Morgan knew this because Zetta Lee invited him to sit at the kitchen table when she saw one of the men coming. She gave him a biscuit with honey. He nibbled at it while she spoke to the man. Even then he understood his presence tempered their exchange. After they were gone, she took him by the hand and led him to the bedroom. He forgot about his half-eaten biscuit when she showed him there were other ways he could taste honey.
He thought it would end when Ham returned from the drive. He felt different, but he wasn’t sure what he felt. Zetta Lee was beautiful, and what she did to him was exciting, but no matter what she said to justify what they were doing, the fact that she was justifying it at all was his assurance that it was wrong. He wrestled with a confession that he practiced when he was alone, and he was prepared to say every word of it to Ham, but Zetta Lee practically dragged Ham to bed when she saw him again, and Morgan felt such a confusing surge of jealousy and betrayal that he said nothing.
And on the second afternoon of Ham’s return, when Zetta Lee sent Morgan to the smokehouse on an errand and then trapped him there, he felt both joy and shame as she opened the fly of his trousers, dropped to her knees, and took him into her sweet, hot mouth.
When it came time for him to ride with the others, the cattle drives were much shorter. The advance of the Union Pacific made it possible to take the cows no farther than the nearest depot, in this case, only as far as Rock Springs, a distance of little more than a hundred miles. Zetta Lee complained prettily that she didn’t like the idea of her youngest going off with the others, and because Ham considered the ranch was better served by having Morgan manage it than ride, he agreed with Zetta Lee that Morgan should stay back.
Morgan remembered that Zetta Lee had hardly let him out of her bed, let alone out of her sight. He was old enough, strong enough, understood enough now to tell her no, but that counted for nothing. She had him so twisted up inside that he did not know the word when she was around.
Ham Welling came back from that trip to Rock Springs with the bones of his right foot smashed by the chuck wagon’s wheel. The doctor came from town to look at it, but there was nothing he could do. It would heal or it wouldn’t and that would be that. The foot became infected, then gangrenous, and the doctor returned to Eden Valley to amputate. Ham died three days later, and his wife and sons buried him in the shade of a cottonwood tree.
Zetta Lee spent the evening mourning her husband and all of the following day trying to get into his safe.
Morgan shifted. It only required that small movement for Jane to lift her head. “My arm is numb,” he said, a tad apologetic.
“Oh, yes. Of course.” She felt a twinge of sympathy for him as he eased his arm back to his side and flexed his fingers. “You should have said something a long time ago.”
“I don’t think I really noticed.” He rubbed his upper arm until Jane took over the task for him. “It feels better when you do it.”
“Mmm.” She propped herself on an elbow and concentrated on what she was doing. “How did it end, Morgan?”
He stared at the ceiling for a long time before he looked at Jane. “I told her I was done with her. Just those words: ‘I’m done with you.’ I don’t know why I said it that way. Until then it always seemed as if she had the whip hand, but saying it like that, and hearing myself say it, I took it from her, and I never gave it back.”
“Was it hard to tell her? I am imagining that you steeled yourself to say the words.”
“It wasn’t hard. Not then. Not after so long. Maybe if I’d thought about it, I wouldn’t have been able to get the words out, but I didn’t think. I just said them, and it was done.”
“Zetta Lee didn’t argue?”
“Some. But she never cornered me again or invited me to her room. She would not humiliate herself like that. I used to wish that she had argued more or set some traps again. When she didn’t, it got me thinking that I could have ended it whenever I wanted. Years earlier even. Maybe ended it before it started. It made me feel more responsible somehow.”
Jane pushed herself upright and looked down on Morgan. She searched his face, but he would not look at her. “No. She was a wicked woman. And clever. She is still punishing you. You could not have stopped her one moment earlier than you did. She would have manipulated you; she did manipulate you. You think with your man’s mind when you look back on it now, but you were a boy then.”
“Sometimes I know that,” he said. “And sometimes it slips away from me.”
Jane touched his shoulder and angled her head. This time he looked at her and held her gaze. “I grieve for that boy,” she said. “I grieve that he has never known peace.” She took his hand, squeezed it. “But I love the man who keeps him close and protects him and has the courage to let me know him.”
“The boy or the man?”
“Both. The courage to let me know the boy and the man.”
