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Late summer 1883
Chapter One: Melinda
“I’m sorry, Melinda, but that’s all there is to it.”
Eighteen-year-old Melinda Davies gaped at her stepfather, Clyde Murray, wondering how things had gone from bad to worse. Wasn’t it hard enough that her mother was knocking at Death’s door? Wasn’t it enough that Melinda was already suffering, shocked at how quickly her mother’s illness had progressed and how unprepared she was to lose her? Yet now she was being told that she would have to leave the only home that she had ever known.
They spoke in hushed voices.
“How can you do this to me, Clyde? What am I supposed to do? I told you I’ve been looking for a job in town—”
“And no one’s going to hire you, and you know it,” he interrupted. “Look. I know that you take pride in a job well done, but that’s here at the farm. You know as well as I do that your…personality can be a bit challenging.”
She narrowed her eyes, hands on hips. “Challenging.”
He avoided her direct gaze. “Yes, challenging. Your opinions, your comments, your refusal to act like a young lady should. It’s one of the reasons why you’re not married yet.”
Appalled that he had the audacity to say such things to her, she merely gaped at him, her jaw dropped. She closed it, counted to three, and responded. “I’m not difficult,” she denied. She cringed when she realized she had whined. She stiffened, chin up. “I’m a good Christian girl. I go to church, I honor the Lord, and I obey my mother…most of the time.”
Her stepfather’s caterpillar eyebrows lowered. “You’re also blatantly outspoken, and you rarely stop to think about your words before you say them.” His voice had risen, and he softened it. “I hate to say it, Melinda, I really do, but you can’t go around talking like you know everything all the time. It offends people.”
She took a deep breath. It wasn’t the first time she’d heard such criticism. “I only told Jacob Matthews that he was building that pig crate the wrong way. Anyone with half a brain knows you have to build the bottom of the crate first and then—”
“You called him a dummy, Melinda. Does that sound like a good Christian girl to you?”
She pressed her lips together. “He called me a stupid girl first,” she muttered. She shrugged. “And anyway, I was right. His crate fell apart after he put the pig in it, and she leaned against the side. He was lucky the piglet only weighed thirty pounds. Anyway, if he’d just listened to me—”
“We’re not just talking about pig crates, Melinda.”
She looked up at her stepfather and thought she saw genuine sadness in his eyes. He stood stiffly, his arms crossed over his chest. No, she had been mistaken. He looked past her with a frown, gazing at the crops of shoulder-high corn, and slowly shook his head.
“It’s about the fact that you can be difficult, and quite frankly, nobody around here who needs help with anything wants to hire you. Not at my general store, where you’re likely to offend customers, not the boarding house, and not the bakery, and for the same reason. The plain fact of the matter is, I can’t take care of you, and without a job, well, you don’t have many choices.”
She opened her mouth, prepared to throw a few accusations and criticisms his way, but she tried hard to remember the proverb, ‘Sin is not ended by multiplying words, but the prudent hold their tongues’. Even so, she struggled not to say what was on her mind, to cast blame.
She noted the tears glistening in Clyde’s eyes but found it difficult to have any pity for him. He was tearful that her mother was dying. She knew that. But she believed his tears were due to the fact that his easy life was also about to end. She had never really liked Clyde, who had married her mother just under a year ago, not six months after her father had died.
The family had never been rich, not in money anyway, but her mother had been afraid to try and make it on their own, even though Melinda had insisted that they could, that she would find a job somewhere. She went so far as to promise her mother that, all by herself, she could work hard and maintain the three cornfields surrounding their modest home on their fifty-acre farm in Kankakee, roughly seventy-five miles south of the bustling city of Chicago. Not only that, but she’d pledged to get up early and milk the cows, tend the garden, and help her mother in any other way she could, but it wasn’t enough.
When she learned that her mother had accepted a marriage proposal from Clyde Murray, she had been appalled. How could her mother marry someone so soon after losing her husband of twenty-two years? Yet she knew that the marriage to Clyde had not been forged by affection, but out of necessity and convenience. Clyde was the owner of the local general store, and he promised to provide for Martha and Melinda.
Yet after marrying her mother and moving into their small farmhouse, Clyde had quickly run through the family’s meager savings. It was only after the marriage that Melinda heard whispered rumors that Clyde had always liked to gamble. The more obvious signs of trouble started just a few months after their marriage. She and her mother hadn’t known until it was too late that Clyde hadn’t been paying their bills. After their own savings were gone, Clyde had managed to finagle several small loans of money against their small farm in exchange for goods for his general store. Those loan payments had not been paid. Neither had the property taxes that had been due months ago. It wasn’t long before Clyde lost his store to mismanagement, not six months after moving to the farm. The store goods and supplies had been sold at a discount by the bank to help pay off that obligation.
Though her faith told her she was to forgive—and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, just as God in Christ also forgave you—she couldn’t, not just yet, if ever. How could she forgive him for what he had put her and her mother through? The lies he had told, the excuses he had made? She blamed Clyde for her mother’s illness. The strain and humiliation, along with her lingering grief over the loss of Melinda’s father, had sent her mother into a downward spiral, both mentally and physically.
Her effort to be kind to the man standing in front of her, more worried about losing possessions than the woman he had married and then buried under debt, failed. Melinda spoke plainly.
“This is your fault,” she accused.
He denied it, just like he denied everything else. “How was I supposed to know we wouldn’t get enough rain to keep the corn crops?”
No, she had never really trusted him either. And now here she was, her mother dying, and he had just told her shortly after that he, too, would leave. He planned to strike out for Richmond or maybe even Boston or New York to start over. Start over. As if walking away from her mother was so easy.
He sighed. “You know that the bank has foreclosed on the farm, Melinda. Andrew Bascom at least has shown some mercy in allowing us to stay until…until Martha is gone.” He cleared his throat. “You know as well as I do that the past few months have been extremely difficult financially. The bank has already taken more than half of the dairy cows to sell in order to pay down the debt, but it’s not enough.”
“And who’s fault is that?” she growled. Her head pounded, and she was so angry that she leaned toward him, hands fisted. She tried to calm herself, to keep her voice down. “You gambled it all away, Clyde. You thought you could make some easy money, but you’re as bad at gambling as you are at being a husband. You mismanaged your own business, and then you wreaked havoc on our lives as well!” Her chest heaved. “How could you?”
He tried to hush her, gesturing with his hand toward the closed door on the other side of the room.
“What?” she harshly whispered. “You think Mother doesn’t know? Of course, she does.” She tried to tamp down her fury and thrust out her arm, her own finger pointing at the door. Her mother lay on her bed inside the bedroom. Her voice a low growl, she released her frustration and pain. “It’s your fault she’s there, Clyde, yours and yours alone!” Her eyes blurred with tears. Her voice choked. “This is all your fault.”
“You think I wanted this?” Clyde responded.
His red cheeks and bloodshot eyes were all she needed to see to know that he had been imbibing again. She smelled the reek of whiskey on his breath.
“I loved…I love your mother!” His eyes wide, he continued defending himself. “I did, Melinda, and I think you know it—”
Melinda didn’t want to listen. She turned away and left the house, barely managing to prevent herself from slamming the front door behind her. Her eyes filled with hot tears as she hurried to the small barn and disappeared inside its cool shadows.
How could You let this happen, Lord? Why? First off, my father, and now You’re taking my mother. Why? What am I supposed to do?
She made her way into the rear stall and collapsed into a pile of straw raked into a corner. Only days ago, this had been the stall of her favorite milk cow, Patches, a black and white spotted Holstein with large, liquid brown eyes and the gentlest disposition of any cow she had ever milked in her life on the farm.
She had been sold the day before yesterday to another farmer at the other end of the county, along with half the other dairy cows that her father had raised. Tears ran down her cheeks, and she buried her face in her hands; her shoulders trembled as she wept. She allowed herself a few moments of weakness and then, with a shuddering breath, lowered her hands and stiffened her back, angrily swiping the tears from her cheeks. Her father had taught her to be strong, to rely on her faith, to know that whatever happened in life was God’s will, and it was for her to accept it and not to question it.
She did her best to calm herself, to ask for the Lord’s comfort, to achieve the understanding of the Lord’s will, to accept that this was happening to her, to know that God had a reason for everything.
Yet she couldn’t deny that she was heartbroken. Didn’t anyone care that her mother was dying and that she and her stepfather were being kicked off the farm, the property already sold for cheap? Her father had worked so hard ever since she was a little girl on this farm. It might not be much to some people’s ideas of success, but it was enough for them. Her parents had loved each other. She had witnessed that love every day of her life until the day her father died after toppling from the barn roof one stormy and windy day while making repairs to the roof. He hadn’t wanted the hay that had been stored up in the loft to get ruined.
Melinda would never forget the image of her father up there on the roof, the dark and angry sky overhead, the rain coming down in sheets, the lightning slashing, her father’s shirt soaked through, the wind tugging at it…his hat had been blown off his head. Watching from inside the house, Melinda had almost rushed outside to go grab it before it blew away, but then she glanced back up to the barn roof only to realize her father was no longer up there. The sound of hammering had stopped.
It was the worst day of her life, the day that she and her mother had run outside, drenched in seconds, running around the corner of the barn only to find her father lying sprawled on his back, hammer still in one hand, neck twisted at an awkward angle. Her mother’s scream had been drowned by the sound of thunder. Between the two of them, they had managed to carry her father back into the house and onto the bed he shared with her mother.
That horrible, awful, dark day when the rain had poured, the torrent of water rushing down the roof and over the sides, the thunder crashing, the lightning flashing, as she stood in the doorway to her parents’ bedroom and listened to her mother’s wails, crying to God…
“Melinda.”
She startled and quickly turned her head to find Clyde standing outside of the stall, hands on his hips, gazing down at her, no expression on his face.
“Leave me alone,” she muttered.
“When your mother first got sick, and knowing the outlook didn’t—doesn’t look good—I wrote to your mother’s older brother, Calvin Foster.”
Confused, Melinda eyed him, her head tilted. “Who? My mother didn’t have any family.”
He nodded. “Yes, she did. An older brother who lives in southeastern Idaho.”
“She never spoke of any family.”
Clyde shrugged. “Apparently, he left North Carolina at a young age, just before your mother married Verne. She said he had the wanderlust, hadn’t heard from him in over twenty years until, somehow, he learned of Verne’s death and wrote his condolences.”
Melinda tried to absorb yet another shock. An uncle she had never known she had. “Why did you write to him?”
Clyde had the decency to look chagrined. “When your mother got sick, and when…Well, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to provide for you anymore, and that there were no men around here that would be willing to marry you—”
She gasped in dismay at his bluntness. Once more, she fought back tears of self-pity and instead worked up a glare. “None of them are worth my time.”
There were very few eligible men in or around Fairview, or in Cumberland County itself, that had seemed even remotely interested or willing to court Melinda, known for being outspoken and a bit more independent than she supposed they were used to. Just because she spoke up for herself! Just because she wasn’t like so many other women, demure and well-versed in social graces that were found in city women. Still, she was strong, knew how to grow a crop, birth a cow, and make her own laundry soap.
She knew that her parents had always hoped that she would make a good match, but her strong-headed and often opinionated comments didn’t seem to appeal to men her age, even when she had been old enough to court at sixteen. Just before her father had died, he had told her to be patient, that someday, a man would come along who would accept her for the way she was and not for who he might form her to be.
“You’re not a piece of clay, Melinda,” he’d said. “If a man can’t accept you for who you are, then they don’t deserve you.”
“So what did you write to him for?” A sinking feeling took hold. She already knew the answer.
“Your mother told me he had a ranch out there, one of the biggest in the area. He said that he would take you in.”
While she knew it was coming, hearing the words come out of his mouth prompted a surge of emotion inside her. Disbelief, humiliation, self-pity. “I can take care of myself, Clyde,” she muttered.
He shook his head. “It’s your mother’s wish, too.”
She froze, and her voice cracked when she asked. “Whose idea was this?”
“It was your mother’s, Melinda.”
Without another word to Clyde, Melinda rose from the hay, quickly brushing her skirts. She strode past him, her pulse thundering in her veins. Could it be true? Was this her mother’s idea? She didn’t want to believe it. Surely, her mother knew that somehow, in some way, Melinda would take care of herself. After all, she was nearly nineteen years old!
Tears filled her eyes as she stormed from the barn. She wasn’t angry with her mother. She was angry at Clyde. Sometimes, she was even mad at God for allowing all this to happen. Why, when everything had seemed to be going so well, had everything collapsed?
She didn’t enter the house just yet but instead walked toward the opposite end of the yard where the chicken coop stood. Only a handful of chickens and one rooster were left, clucking softly, beaks pecking at the dirt, seeking any bits of dried corn they could find. The rest of them, just over a dozen, had been sold at a pittance to neighboring farmers. She didn’t blame them for that. They were good, egg-laying hens.
She paced the yard, trying to get a hold of her temper. She remembered the proverb, He who is quick-tempered acts foolishly and repeated it over and over again as she tried to regain a sense of calm. Would she ever feel a sense of calm again? She was being sent away. Away from the only home she had ever known. She turned to look at the house, a simple structure with a stone chimney, all of it built by her father. She turned to the barn, her eyes, as always, traveling to the peak of the roof, forever remembering that day when her father was there one moment and gone the next.
She hadn’t seen Clyde emerge from the barn, and she doubted that he would for a little while at least. While she didn’t want to think of herself as being a difficult woman, she knew how challenging it was to keep her tongue. Even her father had chided her quick temper a time or two.
The thought of leaving this place filled her with a sense of abject loss and fear. It was the same emotion she had felt after her father had died, the emptiness of not having him around anymore. The quietness of the house, not hearing his boots on the worn plank floor after he came inside after laboring all day in the fields. Her mother hadn’t laughed much after that. Before, she had laughed often.
Everything was crumbling around her. She didn’t know what to do, nor how to stop it. Calvin Foster. Not once had she ever heard that name spoken. She was being sent off to live with a stranger, even if he was blood. One who was taking her in out of a sense of obligation.
Taking several more deep breaths while shaking the tension from her hands, Melinda lifted her chin and strode toward the house. She needed to speak to her mother. The moment she stepped inside, her shoulders slumped, and the sense of dread she carried inside her once again lay heavily on her shoulders.
She quietly stepped into the main room of their home, a stone fireplace to the left, two rocking chairs on either side and a small, worn, horsehair sofa against the wall under the front window. A shelf filled with books stood on the opposite end. A small round table in the middle of the room was covered with a doily, standing on a multicolored rag rug.
A wooden table with benches on either end and two hardback wooden chairs on the shorter ends comprised the dining room on the other side of the main room. A glass-fronted corner cabinet stood in the far corner, its shelves laden with the fine China that her mother’s grandparents had shipped over from England following the conclusion of the War of Independence. Those dishes have been a treasured family heirloom. What was going to happen to those dishes now? She eyed the old spinning wheel that stood in the other corner of the dining room. While her mother told her that she had learned how to use it as a young child, Melinda never had. She neither had the patience nor the desire. They didn’t have to weave cloth for their own clothes anymore. She supposed that would be auctioned off as well.
With a heartfelt sigh, she moved through the threshold that led to a short hallway on the other side of the closed door, one room on either side, one for her parents, the other smaller room for herself. The door to her mother’s room was closed. Melinda knocked softly.
“Come in.”
Swallowing thickly, determined to keep a hold on her emotions, Melinda reached for the knob and turned it. The door swung open quietly, and she stepped inside her mother’s bedroom. It felt stuffy with the scent of stale sweat and fever. Her mother lay in bed, pillows behind her shoulders. Every time Melinda saw her mother, whether minutes or hours had passed, she seemed paler, weaker, and the shadows under her eyes deeper.
Melinda forced a smile and stepped closer to the bed. Her mother’s almost skeletal hand patted the bed beside her, her skin so thin that blue veins showed underneath it. Melinda gently sat on the edge of the bed, fighting back the growing lump in her throat. Her mother’s voice was low and raspy as she spoke.
“Did Clyde tell you?”
Melinda nodded, blinking hard to keep her tears from flooding her eyes. “You never told me you had a brother, Mama.”
Martha gave her a small, weak smile. “I haven’t seen him in nearly twenty-five years.” She took a deep, labored breath. “I have a couple of letters from him.” She pointed to the small armoire that stood in the opposite corner of the room. “You can have them. Take them with you.”
Melinda failed to keep the tears back. One of them slid down her cheek. “I don’t want to go, Mama.”
“I know you don’t, but you must be brave. Like in those stories you love so much about those ancient knights in shining armor and their ladies.”
“I don’t feel very brave right now, Mama, but I’ll do what you wish, even if I don’t want to.”
Her mother nodded, her eyes growing heavy. “Your father would be very proud of you.” She took a deep, shaky breath. “I’m very proud of you too. I love you, Melinda, and even when I’m gone, I’ll still be with you.”
She sank into sleep then, but Melinda remained at her side, holding her hand gently in hers, tears trickling down her cheeks and her heart overwhelmed. Yes, she would do as her mother wanted, whatever would help her rest easier. She would hide her fear and doubts and her growing dislike and disgust with Clyde Murray until after her mother was gone. She knew that the end was coming, and more quickly than she had feared.
Life was about to change forever, and she had no way to prevent it.
“Love’s Light in the Frontier’s Shadows” is an Amazon Best-Selling novel, check it out here!
Melinda Davies, a young woman of unwavering faith, stands on the cusp of a life-altering journey. Recently bereaved by her mother’s untimely death, she embarks on a cross-country train ride to live with an uncle she has never met before. Faced with a future marred by uncertainty, Melinda clings to her dreams of chivalry and true love. Little does she know that her encounter with the enigmatic Oscar would set her on a path of unexpected emotions and thrilling adventure, though.
Will the blossoming affection for this mysterious man be able to redefine her destiny?
Oscar Sullivan had once known the joys of a simple rancher’s life, but heartache and wanderlust have driven him to the rails. On the train, fate leads him to Melinda and his protective instincts and burgeoning feelings pull him into her world. Seeking refuge from a nomadic existence, he gets off in Idaho as well, and finds work at her uncle’s ranch, only to uncover dark secrets that threaten their future…
Can he overcome his fear of being hurt again and open his heart to the unexpected emotions that the spirited Melinda stirs within him?
United by their shared struggles and the pursuit of truth, Melinda and Oscar find themselves entangled in a perilous web of deception. While Melinda strives to escape the clutches of a forced marriage, Oscar races against time to uncover the sinister motives lurking beneath her uncle’s façade. As danger looms and their feelings deepen, can their bond withstand the challenges that await? Or will the secrets they unearth tear them apart before they can truly find happiness?
“Love’s Light in the Frontier’s Shadows” is a historical western romance novel of approximately 80,000 words. No cheating, no cliffhangers, and a guaranteed happily ever after.
OFFER: A BRAND NEW SERIES AND 2 FREEBIES FOR YOU!
Grab my new series, " Faith and Love on the Frontier", and get 2 FREE novels as a gift! Have a look here!
Hello there, my dear readers! I hope you enjoyed this little sneak peek of my new story. Looking forward to reading your comments!