Chasing the Sunset(5)

Obadiah Revelle had felt stifled by the burgeoning population. He had begged the young Frenchwoman Louisa Girardot to marry him and settle far away from the city where they had both been born, and as far as Nick knew, his mother had never once been sorry that she had done so.

Nick remembered asking about his father’s view on slavery once. A lot of their neighbors owned slaves and he had wondered why they did not, and why his father always seemed to be busy doing something, unlike some of the fathers of his friends. He was expected to work, too, and he had been resenting it that day. There was no sitting around in Obadiah Revelle’s house. No, sir. Nick had been oiling the leather of a saddle, and his father had grinned and turned to look at him when he had asked the question, leaning against the shovel he had been using to clean out a stall.

“Well, Nicky,” he had said, taking off one his gloves and scratching the back of his head. “A man with nothing to do is a dangerous man. Boredom is a terrible thing, and it kills more good men than the cholera every year.” He had looked around his stables with pride, the sunlight delineating his sharp cheekbones. “And there is nothing better than looking around at something of yours and thinking ‘I did that. With my own two hands and my sweat, I helped make this possible’.”

He had grinned again, his eyes twinkling. “Besides, if I ever owned a slave, your Mother would kill me. You know how she is, Nicky. She has got the softest heart of any woman I ever met. Remember when your cousins sent her that songbird? She nearly fretted herself to death over having it in the cage. She never slept all night the day it showed up here, and she turned it loose the day after that. It had always lived in a cage, and it flew around inside the house for weeks, probably afraid to go outside, and even after it decided to live out in the wild, it came in and out of the house at will. I found bird droppings in my sheets, it got me on the head every time I got near it, and it near ruined my favorite pair of boots. When I asked her why in the hell she had to let the blasted thing out of the cage, she told me that some things aren’t meant to be owned.”

He grew serious for a moment, his fine dark eyes on Nick’s face. “Well, people aren’t meant to be owned either, Nick. You know what I saw once in a town I was passing through? A man on the street was viciously beating a man on the ground with a whip, and when I intervened, I was almost jailed. The man that he was beating was his slave, and they said that he could do whatever he wanted with his own property. His property, Nicky. We live in a place where killing a man, if he is a slave, takes no more thought than what shirt to wear that day. It is wrong, Nick, and I am never going to pretend that it is not. I am sorry if that is going to make trouble for you or shame you, but not sorry enough to compromise on this.”

He had put his glove back on and went back to shoveling horse manure matter-of-factly. “Better get to oiling that saddle, son. There is plenty more when that one’s done.”

Nick had grumbled, but he had never forgotten that conversation. If he closed his eyes, he could still see the way his father had looked that day, hear his resonant voice echoing through the stables, see the way the sunlight had outlined him. He had come to agree with his father, and he had never been embarrassed by the old man’s views. On the contrary, he had admired the hell out of him. His opinions were not popular ones, but that did not matter to him. If he thought it was right, hell would freeze over before his father ever would bend on the issue. To Nick’s way of thinking, that was a good quality in a man.

The local gentry had called his father crazy but he had refused to listen. He ran his breeding farm his way, and it had turned out well. Now, they lined up at the doors to buy one of these horses. They were the best stable in all of Missouri territory, and people came from all over the country to buy his horseflesh. Some had even been shipped to England by a Duke that took a fancy to a couple of his pretty, high-stepping mares. The Duke had seen some of Nick’s horses in St. Louis and he had traveled all the way out here just to buy a horse. Nick now had ten full-time employees, plus Tommy and Ned, and there was plenty of work for them all. He was proud of his stables.

“Nick,” someone called. Nick turned, and smiled as Ned limped into view.

“Hello, Ned,” he said warmly, with real affection. He was fond of the old Irishman who babied his horses more than some people babied their children. “What can I do for you?”

Ned looked uncomfortable. His wizened old face twisted up in a grimace that Nick had trouble interpreting. He stared at Nick intently, studying him as if he were a horse he was considering buying. Nick wondered what he thought when he looked at him; he knew what he saw in the mirror every day. He saw a man who used to be young, starting to gray around the edges of his dark hair. He saw lines around brown eyes that used to sparkle with fun and now were dull and somber. He walked slower, he thought long on things that used to be instant decisions. Did his bitterness show on his face? What did Ned see?

Whatever Ned saw, it seemed to reassure him. The frown disappeared from his forehead. “I hear tell you fired your latest cook,” he said abruptly.

“You heard right,” Nick said grimly. “He was the worst one yet, and he was stealing the household money to buy corn likker.”

“I might know someone who would be interested.”

The words were diffident, and Ned dropped his head, scuffing his booted foot in the soft

dirt. It was not like Ned to be so hesitant, and Nick frowned. He could see Ned’s scalp through his thinning white hair. It gave him a shock sometimes to realize how old Ned O’Roarke was getting. He had been here all Nick’s life; he had to be at least sixty. His father had told him once that Ned had just showed up at the horse farm one day and informed him that he had heard tell of his fine stables from a mutual friend in St. Louis and he was a damn fool if he did not hire him right now to run them. His father had always laughed when he told that story, his eyes crinkling up and dimples creasing his handsome face.

“I figured anybody with that much nerve was going to be good to have around, even if it was just for a laugh,” he always said. He had hired him on the spot, and Ned began to advise him how to run his stables from that moment on. They did not know where he came from; his father had never even inquired as to who the mutual friend might be. Obadiah Revelle had never regretted hiring Ned, and he had never felt a need to know anything about Ned’s background that he was not willing to share. Ned had become part of their family, and his family was accepted just as they were. If Ned wanted him to know something, why, he would tell him. Was no use trying to pry anything out of the stubborn Irishman.

“It’s me niece,” said Ned hesitantly. “My brother’s girl. She needs a job, and I talked with her about it.”

“I didn’t know that you had a niece,” said Nick, taken aback.

“Why sure I do,” Ned said somewhat indignantly. “I had a mother and father just like everyone else. I also had a brother, God rest his soul. Maggie is his only child.”

Nick grinned. “Calm down, old man. I wasn’t trying to insult you. You just surprised me. Tell her to come by and talk with me.”

Ned dropped his head again and studied the ground. “She is a mite shy.” He looked Nick in the eye. “Fact is, she is as skittish as a beaten horse. Do not take it personal like. Matter o’ fact, she would prob’ly feel better if I came along while she talked to you.”

“Bring her, by all means,” Nick said quickly. “I am heartily sick of my own cooking. You know Kathleen fixes us all a lunch when she comes for the day and she leaves me a supper, but it is either cold or hard as a rock by the time I get to it. Either that or Tommy eats half of it before I can get to it.”

A grin nearly split Ned’s face in two. “Can’t leave any food laying around in front of that boy." The two of them laughed, because Tommy’s prodigious appetite was a source of great amusement. "I will bring her over this afternoon.”



*************************

Nick frowned as he studied the columns of numbers in his accounting books. Sometimes it seemed as if all he did was figure. He hated this part of the business. He rubbed his forehead and pinched the bridge of his nose. Lately, it seemed that even the most mundane of chores, the ones he used to breeze through, took him forever. Everything dragged him down. He used to be happy to sit in his study and do his books. He was proud to look at his bookshelves and to breathe deeply of that dry, musty smell that old books have. He had loved to figure out profit and loss, to decide which monies went where, to decide what repair would be his priority. Now, he just felt tired. He felt older than his years. When he read letters from Joanne and Ronald, he sometimes felt such an overwhelming sense of grief that he had to put the letter away until later. His life was so different from theirs. They lived in a bright world of laughter and gaiety; his was dark and damp and cold. He flung his pen away in disgust, then cursed when ink splattered onto the oak of his heavy old desk. The knock at the door came as he scrubbed at the ink with his fine lawn handkerchief.