She’d handed back the tickets. “Thank you, Todd, but I’ve no idea who I would invite. You and Ginny enjoy the use of these with another couple.”
He’d taken the tickets, but she’d later found them in the calling card tray in the foyer.
Todd, two years into his geological studies at Jackson, had been as upset as Mr. Latimer, almost outraged, when he learned she’d given up her place at the seminary. She could not convince him that it was her decision to stay behind.
“Because your parents make you feel you owe them, Sammy!” he’d yelled.
“I do owe them!” Samantha had shouted back. “If you’d seen what I saw—”
She’d pressed her lips together. Never would she divulge to anybody the sights that had sent her running home to her adoptive parents to throw herself gratefully into their arms.
“Saw what?” Todd asked.
“Never mind,” she’d said.
The scene was one Samantha had never been able to forget and had come back to haunt her in her sleep through the years. She was ten years old. Her Sunday school teacher, a well-meaning soul, had thought it a great idea to take baskets of Christmas treats to the unfortunate children who had been left without parents, either through death, misfortune, or abandonment. She proposed a trip to the Millbrook Home for Orphaned Children. On a gray and cold Sunday morning, in lieu of the lesson, her charges piled into a wagon in their warm coats clutching their holiday-decorated baskets and headed off to their destination. Samantha had never forgotten the ugly, forbidding house that loomed into view at the end of a muddy country road. Barren, treeless fields stretched for miles around the dark, sinister-looking structure that proclaimed itself A HAVEN FOR THE HOMELESS in a sign over the fortress of the front door.
Samantha hung back close to her teacher immediately upon entering. The first memory never to leave her was the rancid smell overlaid by the heavy odor of cooked cabbage. The second was the shocking realization that looks could be deceiving. The woman who bustled toward them to introduce herself as the head matron looked as if she could have been the wife of Santa Claus. Rosy cheeked and round as an apple, her gray hair done up in perky braids that framed a cheerful face, the woman personified sweetness and light until Samantha saw how quickly the merry eyes could freeze to ice, the smiling mouth form a trap of steel. She did not fail to notice the ring of jailers’ keys dangling from the matron’s belt, the sharp metal tip of a rod in her pocket, and how the children cringed from her hand upon their shoulders meant to demonstrate affection. The Sunday school teacher had pronounced her a lovely person on the way home, and Samantha had wondered how adults could be so fooled.
One gaze had stood out from all the other pinched faces and blank stares that eyed the members of the Sunday school class as they distributed the baskets. It belonged to a small girl her age. “Thank you,” the girl said, looking at Samantha out of shy hazel eyes when she handed her the basket. Samantha wanted to cry. The little girl, like the other children, looked hungry and undernourished. Her thin face and arms and hands appeared to have been washed, but not enough to wipe away the grime of long neglect. Her golden hair hung limp and greasy, and a rim of dirt was under her fingernails.
“You’re welcome,” Samantha said. “What is your name?”
“Susie,” the little girl said. “What is yours?”
“Samantha. I will come again, Susie.”
“I hope so, Samantha.”
Samantha never did. Her mother forbade another trip to the orphanage and was furious with the Sunday school teacher for arranging the visit and with her husband for allowing it while she’d been away on a weekend shopping trip.
“I thought that by now she would have forgotten that she wasn’t born to us,” Samantha overheard her father defend his action to her mother.
“Samantha may have forgotten, but how could you think that mean, snobby Anne Rutherford would forget? Anne asked Samantha on the way back if she was aware of what she’d been spared. The child is traumatized. I had hoped her never to know what her life might have been like if she hadn’t come to us.”
“So what do we say when Samantha asks about her parents and how we got her—and she will, Estelle. They are inevitable questions only normal to an adopted child. We have to tell her the truth. Her parents didn’t want her and they gave her away. Plain and simple. The truth will keep her with us, Estelle. If her parents come looking for her, she won’t want to go with them. She’ll stay with us.”
“We are not going to tell her the truth. We’re going to let her believe her parents are dead,” Estelle said. “Why would those awful people come looking for her anyway, since that doctor told us she wasn’t wanted? Neal, dear, you must stop living with the fear that we’re going to lose her. Our love, not truth, will hold Samantha fast to us.”
“I can’t seem to shake the fear that they’ll show up someday and take her from us, honeybee. Blood can be stronger than a court order saying she’s ours… stronger even than love.”
Samantha, deeply upset and not wanting to let her parents out of her sight, had gone in search of them and caught the conversation huddled outside the door to the library in the ranch house. Up until then, she’d simply assumed her real parents were dead. It never occurred to her that they were alive and she’d been given away because they didn’t want her. Now, even more terrified at what could have been her fate, she’d backed away and gone to her room before the people to whom she owed her life could discover her presence. She loved them so much. They never had to be afraid she’d go with her real parents if they came to take her back. She’d run away and hide until they were gone.
In her childish hand, Samantha wrote a letter to Susie explaining that she’d been forbidden to come see her again. She addressed it simply “To Susie” and hoped there was only one by that name at the Millbrook Home for Orphaned Children. Whether she received it, Samantha never knew. When she was thirteen and was presented Pony, a quarter horse, for her birthday, her first sprint of freedom was to the orphanage to visit Susie. Susie was no longer with them, the merry-faced matron informed her. She had died of tuberculosis the preceding winter.
Chapter Nine
Did she have regrets about anything? Absolutely not, unless it was Sloan Singleton’s infatuation with Anne Rutherford. Samantha adjusted her pillows against the headboard to indulge in a few more minutes of thought and reflection. Todd Baker and his like had no background or experience to understand her willingness to accept the future laid out for her by virtue of loyalty and obligation. Todd came from a family of academics. He was the son of the president of AddRan Christian University located in Waco, approximately ninety miles south of Fort Worth, and had grown up in a liberal home where all four children had been encouraged since birth to follow their own star. His parents were not native born. They had arrived in Texas from Pennsylvania fifteen years after the Civil War, Professor Baker to spearhead the fledgling AddRan Male and Female College, then situated in what became Fort Worth’s notorious Hell’s Half Acre. Neal and Estelle Gordon, like their parents before them, were Texas born and bred. Todd couldn’t begin to understand the life-blood connection of men like her father to the land their ancestors had settled and fought to keep against every adversary that would have taken it from them. Todd’s father would never expect his children to follow in his footsteps, while in the world of the Neal Gordons, offspring were reared from birth to fill their fathers’ shoes.
Also, Todd Baker had not lived with the knowledge that, but for the loving people who had raised her, she could have been Susie. Samantha did owe them, and that was the end of the argument. She was the only heir to all her father and mother had worked for. To go off to pursue a degree in science—paleontology, to be exact—would have been a betrayal of their caring and giving. What would happen to Las Tres Lomas de la Trinidad—the Three Hills of the Trinity—once its mighty owner died? How could Samantha allow her father to live out his life knowing that all his sacrifice, work, and devotion to the la
nd of his family and heritage would pass into other hands at the time of his death? No other passion was worth it.
When she was sixteen, Todd had asked her if she ever wondered about her birth parents, who they were, where they lived, if they were still alive. “Of course not!” she exclaimed, like one jumping back from a spitting fire.
But that was not entirely true. Around her fifteenth birthday, an incident occurred that caused Samantha to question briefly the fragment of fact about her adoption she’d overheard at ten years old. She was in her workshop cataloging her find for the day, when she heard a moan of animal distress outside the window. Looking out, she saw a mother cow in agony, her unweaned calf beside her. Samantha ran out and discovered the cow had swallowed a crab apple too deep to be extracted from her throat. The animal had wandered far away from the pasture into human territory, and Samantha, peering into the dying Hereford’s brown eyes, wondered if the cow had not intentionally brought her calf to her laboratory workshop where she spent her spare time.
“Do you suppose she led her calf here for me to look after?” Samantha asked Wayne Harris, the foreman, her father’s longtime and most essential hand. Hurriedly, he’d helped her prepare a concoction of milk and mash for the calf to suckle from a “banana bottle,” so named because of its curved shape. It was a glass container with two openings at either end, one smaller for attaching a rubber nipple and the other larger for adding food. It was perfect for feeding motherless calves, and a large improvement over the awkward and unsanitary nursing contraptions used in the past.
“Wouldn’t surprise me none,” Wayne said. “Ain’t no denyin’ a mama’s natural instincts when it comes to her offspring, be she human or animal.”
That drew Samantha’s startled attention. Her father’s words—Her parents didn’t want her, and they gave her away—stuck with her still, if banished to the netherland of memory. A thought flashed in her head never considered before. What if… like the mother cow, circumstances beyond the control of her real parents had forced them to give her up? There could be many reasons… poverty, illness, approaching death, an excess of offspring. Maybe it wasn’t that her natural parents hadn’t wanted her; they’d simply been unable to provide for her. It wasn’t uncommon in hard times for parents who couldn’t care for their children to leave them by the wayside in hope that somebody would come along who would give them a good home. Maybe… her real parents missed her and would like to know that she was loved and well looked after.
“Wayne, do you recall anything about my birth?” she’d asked. She had never gone to her parents with those “inevitable questions only normal to an adopted child.”
A wary look had crossed his face. “Can’t say I do, Mornin’ Glory. I just remember the morning the bunkhouse was informed a baby girl had been delivered to the Gordons in the middle of the night.”
“Why in the middle of the night? Was I a secret?”
“Well, now, if you’d been a secret, the news of you comin’ to us wouldn’t have been shouted to the whole world the next mornin’, now would it? Why do you ask?”
“Just curious.”
“Well, it’d be a good idea to keep your curiosity between you and me. Your folks might not understand it.” He’d squinted an eye at her. “You comprehend what I’m sayin’?”
Clearly, Wayne was right. Her father would feel threatened and betrayed, her mother rejected. They would interpret her curiosity as dissatisfaction with them, and Samantha wouldn’t have them feel that way for anything in the world.
“I understand,” she’d said, rubbing the ears of the baby steer. He had finished feeding and was bawling for his mama. “Wayne, I don’t want this little fellow ever sold. He’s to be allowed to live out his life on the ranch eating all the grass he wants.”
“I imagine your daddy will have a say about that, Mornin’ Glory. He ain’t one to offer free grass and water without somethin’ in return, and this little fellow is money on the hoof.”
“He’ll understand.”
Her father had heard her out in silence and finally, after considering her carefully from behind his massive oak desk, cleared his throat of something rough that had stuck there. “All right, daughter,” he said. “It’ll be done. But how will you identify that dogie from the rest of the herd?”
“I’ll paint the tips of his horns red.”
“I suppose you’ll give the critter a name.”
“Yes,” Samantha said. “I’m going to call him Saved.”
Her father smiled in understanding and approval of her choice. He nodded. “Saved. That’s a fine handle. I’ll let the boys know.”
That had been the last time Samantha had spared a thought to the questions of her birth. At fifteen, she’d been almost grown. She remembered thinking that she was too old and it was too late for the people who’d given birth to her to come looking for her. Her life was set. She had her parents and wished for no other. Neal Gordon no longer had to worry that she’d be taken from him.
Samantha watched the sun spread its light in her bedroom. No, she had no regrets. Las Tres Lomas de la Trinidad was the place where she was meant to be, no matter that her “fit” for it did not come from inherited blood. The wide-open range, where the wind blew fresh and unobstructed and the only smells and sounds were natural to the country, was for her a vast laboratory that offered plentiful opportunities for scientific exploration and analysis. Land and livestock management required paleontological skills. Samantha had rigged up an outdoor workshop with basic tools for testing water, soil, grass, even animal urine and fecal matter, and seeds for fodder production. It was in her workshop that she kept her rock collection that recorded the geology of Texas and a growing accumulation of ancient sea relics found on the ranch while she went about her daily duties. Central Texas was proved to have been covered by an ocean millions of years ago, and Las Tres Lomas was a virtual treasure trove of prehistoric marine life. A shelf in her “lab” boasted a fragment of a fossilized turtle shell, an imprint of a sea urchin preserved in rock, an intact tip of a partial horn that might have belonged to a mammoth, and—her prize: the full impression of an ocean scallop discovered when she was baling hay.
She felt at home on a horse, with cattle and cowmen, and when her father discovered she had a head for making judicious financial decisions, she became indispensable to the business operations of the ranch. Samantha had heard him tell her mother, “We were blessed, Estelle. The good Lord gave us the whole package in Sam. No man’s son has a better head or pair of hands for running a ranch than our daughter.”
Samantha had studied her hands. They were small with slender, tapered fingers and barely visible knuckles. One of her science teachers had commented their shape was “just made” to slide plant specimens under a microscope and to examine bits of rock through a loupe. She’d told the teacher that her hands were also perfect for aiding prolapsed cows in distress.
“Prolapsed cows? What in the world are they?”
“It’s a condition that occurs most often at calving time,” Samantha had explained. “It happens when a cow expels her uterus in giving birth, and it hangs outside her body, sometimes almost to her hocks. When that happens, the uterus has to be cleaned and inserted back inside the cow or she will hemorrhage to death. My father’s foreman thinks the size of my hands are just right for the job.”
“How… interesting,” her teacher had murmured, turning pale.
In her canopied bed, Samantha chuckled, remembering.
Chapter Ten
Samantha threw back the covers. She’d lain in bed long enough indulging in past memories. Time was burnin’ itself, as her father would say. She must get back to the ranch. Many of the heifers—females having their first babies—were calving now, and they needed more help than birthing cows. This was also the last week of the month, when bills had to be paid and profits and losses tallied.
She dressed in the work attire she’d brought along to wear back to the ranch: denim pants, long-sleeved flann
el shirt, leather vest, and high-topped boots. Buttoning the fly of the “blue jeans,” designated such because of their color and style, Samantha anticipated her mother’s sniff of disapproval. It was Estelle’s opinion that “Levi Strauss never meant for women to wear his copper-riveted work pants when he created them,” leaving her daughter to wonder if her mother had forgotten she’d worn men’s trousers in the early years of helping her husband run the ranch.
There were so many things her mother wanted to forget from that time. She’d been the daughter of a poor dirt farmer in 1867 when Neal Gordon came calling and married her the same year. In becoming Mrs. Neal Gordon, Estelle had gained a proud family name. The Gordons were landed gentry. In 1820, the patriarch of Las Tres Lomas de la Trinidad had come to what was then a province of Mexico and established a ranch he stocked with a breed of cattle native to the region known as Longhorns. In 1867, Neal, along with his father and two younger brothers, owned the beginnings of what would become one of the largest ranches in Central Texas, but prosperity was nearly fifteen years away. Comanche raids and Reconstruction were wreaking financial havoc, and that year Neal’s father and his two unmarried brothers succumbed to a yellow fever epidemic that swept up through Texas from the coastal city of Galveston. Estelle was left to fill the boots of the depleted labor force. Not until the end of the Indian Wars and Reconstruction when the Texas and Pacific Railway arrived in Fort Worth did Estelle enjoy the lady-of-the-manor life she’d dreamed about during her courtship. By then, at thirty-six, she was middle-aged.
Samantha had long figured out that her mother had hoped to live vicariously through the little girl she took to raise. Impoverished as a child and a far cry from beautiful, Estelle Gordon would experience through Samantha what it would have been like to be pretty and graceful, to wear fine clothes, and to enjoy the frilly feminine amusements she’d longed to know growing up. Samantha was sensitive to this side of her lanky, rawboned mother and did her best to satisfy her yearning.