The Milch Bride Read online

  THE MILCH BRIDE

  J.R. Biery

  Copyright © 2014, Janet Biery

  All rights reserved

  ABOUT THIS BOOK

  A dear friend I taught with planned every day for the birth of her son. She died a few days after he was born, never realizing her dreams. I couldn't stop mourning her until I wrote this book. I believe she is like the mother in this story, an angel who is hovering over her son.

  (I was surprised it ended up being set in Texas in 1872, but there you go, writing is always a trip.)

  DISCLAIMER

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters and incidents are products of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  DEDICATION

  Dedicated to Jerry, my patient and loving husband, who has always supported and encouraged me to follow my dreams, and to the members of Cookeville Creative Writers' Association who prodded and nudged me forward to actually publish some of my books. Special thanks to Sarah Holloway for reading and providing me with a great critique.

  CHAPTER ONE

  March, 1872, Mill County, Texas

  Jackson Harper stood at the edge of the grave and strove to hold back the tears. Donna was gone. Gone with her, all the joy and excitement about J.D. -- her hours of planning, sewing, and talking about how wonderful life would be when their son was born. None of her dreams included death, leaving him alone with their helpless son who was now growing weaker every day.

  He knew women died after childbirth, but not women like Donna. A rancher’s daughter, tall, strong, self-assured, she had been confident that Jackson Dawson Harper would be a boy, healthy and handsome like all the Harpers.

  Why had he believed her? Because she had lived the charmed life of the beautiful only daughter of the town’s biggest rancher, a powerful man who was also president of the bank. She knew that whatever she wanted she would have, even Jackson. He had resisted at first, not interested in her father’s money or in Donna for that matter. Finally, he found himself enjoying her charms, her happy laugh and her bold, daredevil ways. When the baby became a possibility, he had done the honorable thing. Their marriage had been a happy union with the promise of the child and a stable future.

  Charles Dawson moved over, scowling at him. “Son, you don’t have to worry about the baby. Irene and I will be happy to look after him. She’s already planning to send to Austin for a wet nurse.”

  “Thanks, but I promised Donna I would raise our son.”

  “According to Doctor Jenkins, your baby isn’t able to digest cow’s milk. He predicts that J.D. won’t make the week if you don‘t find a woman to nurse him.”

  “I’ll handle it.” Jackson stormed away before Charles could argue. He didn’t believe the quack. Hadn’t he assured him Donna would stop bleeding and be fine? Doc was wrong, but what if he were right about the baby. They had tried canned milk, cow’s milk, even goat. None worked.

  The doctor was waiting for him on the board walk, his bulk well clothed in a brown wool suit. “You could steal a Choctaw squaw, if you find one with a papoose board on her back. However, the only lactating female in Star is Tom Stoddard’s daughter.”

  Jackson stood beside the buckboard and accepted the tightly bound bundle from the doctor. He checked that the quilt was still inside the emptied wagon toolbox and tucked the baby inside, then pushed the wooden box back into place beneath the seat. He stepped up, exchanging nods with the last somberly clad friends and neighbors who were leaving the graveyard. Most of the church people had stopped work and come to town for Donna’s funeral. But Jackson could not respond to their sympathy the way they wanted.

  The woman they had helped him bury was not his Donna. He felt the sudden cold tightness in his chest and clucked at the horses to clear the feeling and get things into motion.

  “If she’s the only woman available, then I’m going to fetch her home. I’m not losing J.D.”

  Even as he wheeled the buckboard to head out of town, he wondered if Indian milk wouldn’t be easier for J.D. and him to swallow. Tom Stoddard had been a good man, but he hadn’t been seen in town since the disgrace of his unwed daughter’s pregnancy became common knowledge. According to some of the owl-hoots that hung around the saloon, the girl didn’t even know who to name as daddy.

  The morning rain which had stopped, as if by the banker’s order so they could bury his daughter ‘properly’, once again poured down relentlessly. For once, Jackson appreciated the cold rain. He didn’t need the town folk’s pity, any more than he needed Charlie Dawson’s suggestions about the proper thing for him to do. When they had come storming out to the ranch on the baby’s arrival, his mother-in-law shooed him out of the bedroom, grabbing his new son from his arms. She acted outraged that he had been in the room at all.

  Never an easy relationship, at first he had been grateful for their help. His father-in-law’s effusive confidence that everything would be great. J.D. would be the first of the half-dozen he and Donna could expect to have. Charles had strutted about the study, crowing about how J.D. had the best bloodlines in Mills County. The boy would be enrolled at Harvard, the best Eastern college money could buy. Jackson wouldn’t have to worry because Charles would pay for everything.

  Jackson protested he would provide for his son if he wanted that much education. Charles laughed, reminding him it was what his Donna would expect. Who else would he spend his money on, if not his daughter and his first grandson?

  Jackson had swallowed his pride, along with a couple of glasses of the bonded whiskey Charles had brought out for their celebration. When he checked on Donna she had been pale and exhausted from the long labor. But she had insisted he take her dad out to see the new bull and the other spotted cows he had purchased during the last drive to Abilene.

  Relaxed, his fears gone now the baby was here, he had listened to them all. He should never have gone.

  Charles had admired the stock but resumed their long-standing debate about the new Hereford cattle that some of the cattlemen were bringing into Houston from England. He was thinking of changing his herd to the thicker, red stock and had already ordered a breeding pair for himself. That had decided Jackson; he would never have anything to do with them. If Charles thought they were so perfect, then they were too good for him. Besides, with cattle still free-ranging, hornless cattle wouldn’t stand a prayer grazing on the rough pasture around Star. Maybe if he hadn’t gone…

  He had wanted only to sit beside Donna and watch her and the baby.

  By the time they had ridden back, it was dusk. Doc Jenkins was gone, and Irene was frantic. He knew everything was wrong from the loud wails of his son.

  He hadn’t followed his father-in-law to the barn to unsettle, merely swung down at the house.

  “I sent one of your men after the doctor,” Irene wailed. “It’s Donna, I can’t wake her, the baby is hungry and I can’t keep him quiet.”

  Jackson had rushed into the bedroom, ignoring his mother-in-law’s shocked protests. When he turned up the lamp, he recognized the waxy pallor at once from men he had seen on the battle-field. Throwing back the covers, he groaned and sank to his knees beside the bed. The heavy towels he had helped the doctor position under her hips as birthing pads were red from her blood.

  The doctor burst into the room behind him. “Jesus, why didn’t you send for me sooner?”

  Jackson sat rocking, devastated. Why had he listened to any of them? If he had stayed, stayed beside her, he would have seen what was happening in time. He would have known to call the doctor back sooner.

  Instead, he lifted her to let the doctor and housekeeper rush to move the soaked towels into a wash basket, hurriedly piling clean ones on top of the stained oilsk
ins.

  He laid her down, muttering his agonized apologies against her cheek, listening to her shallow breaths. He had stayed this time despite Irene’s protests, letting the housekeeper deal with his outraged mother-in-law and the baby.

  When he yelled at Doc Jenkins, the quack had paled. “You know where I learned my trade Harper? As an orderly for an eastern doctor on the battlefield. Do you know how many women were on the battlefield?”

  “You have to try. You have to do something to save her.”

  He had held his wife while the ignorant fool of a doctor heated a polished metal rod to white heat. He had held her, feeling her horrified scream in every inch of his body, as the doctor inserted it inside her to cauterize the bleeding.

  The first tears were for Donna. The next were for the other children they would never have. After the first scream she had passed out, a mercy if ever there was one.

  When he was forced from her side, he left her mother and father holding her hands as she lay, unknowing, hopefully unfeeling. The rest of the night, he sat outside her room until his in-laws went to bed, then kept vigil beside her. It was nearly dawn the next day when she finally slipped away. It happened so quietly.

  Numb, he had walked to the barn, grabbed a shovel and headed to the hill behind the house where he had buried his dog Henry. He marked off the grave, six by three feet, and dug in the hard rocky soil until he was below six feet.

  They had carried the baby to nurse twice during those last twenty-four hours. They fed him with sugar water in between, and when he stayed ravenous, canned milk in a bottle.

  The canned milk gave him colic. They tried boiling cow’s milk for him. It streamed out nearly as fast as he sucked it in. Desperately, he demanded Doc Jenkins help him find a wet nurse.

  In the meantime, his in-laws ordered a casket and arranged for Donna’s funeral in town.

  As the baby’s cries grew weaker he fled into the night long enough to dig another grave on the hill, this one shorter and shallower. He prayed until he had himself in hand, and then returned to the house to sit beside his dead wife and listen to the weak cries of the baby.

  Listening to the baby, he had almost run back to fill in the small grave. He wasn’t going to die. Jackson was determined to do whatever it took. Even if it meant having a trollop like Harriett Stoddard hold Donna’s child to her breast.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Hattie felt as cold as the dead babe in her arms. God had taken him back because she had never wanted him. Sickly from the start, he had come into the world on a whimper, blue and lifeless. Without help, he would have been stillborn. How many times had she prayed it would be so?

  But the doctor had been there. Thanks to her racing into town, gun in hand, terrified she would not find him in time or that the same men who had destroyed her life would find her first.

  Her father had been grimacing in pain, holding his arm, his whole body contorted. Pregnant as she was, she had headed into town, afraid to leave him, terrified of what would happen if she didn’t go.

  The Doc had driven them back in his buggy. Her labor began before they reached the ranch, but she insisted the doctor continue the race to reach her father in time.

  When they arrived, her father’s attack was over. His breathing was shallow and the right side of his body sagged as though an avalanche had happened inside and everything on that half of his body had slid downward.

  The doctor admitted he wasn’t sure if the attack had been Dad’s heart or merely apoplexy. He gave him one of the new “trinitin” pills containing nitroglycerin, a compound that had been proving magical in treating heart attack patients. Her Dad’s color had returned immediately, and the doctor had turned his attention to Harriet and the sickly slip of a child that she delivered.

  He had cleared the baby’s throat, breathed into his mouth a couple of times, and Hattie had watched the baby go from blue to gray.

  At least coming a month early, the delivery had been easier than she had feared. For the last few weeks, she worried that its delivery would kill her and she would leave her father all alone. When Hattie accepted the child from the doctor, she waited, wanting to feel the sweep of emotion, the love of a mother for her child. Instead, she was swept with a heavy wave of sadness. Her child, created in pain and violence, weak and helpless, was blameless in the crime against her. She knew it, but it did not change how she felt.

  Passively she waited while the doctor laid the child on top of her; placed her nipple in the baby’s mouth. At his weak tugs, the doctor showed her how to stroke his cheek to help him nurse. When he let go, she collapsed. The doctor spent the night, guarding all three of his patients and Hattie slept.

  When the doctor left the next morning, Hattie’s two weeks of unrelenting toil began, working to tend her father and the struggling infant. She cooked, cleaned, washed bodies, did laundry, and then fed each in turn. Doc Jenkins thought her father was having a heart attack when she described his symptoms. But the drawing on his right side was clearly the result of apoplexy. He left her a small can with twenty of the precious miracle pills with instructions to use only one if her father showed the symptoms of another heart attack; chest pains, shortness of breath, flushed face and severe pain. All twenty of the little explosives still rested in the small metal can.

  When Doc came by a week later, he had patted her shoulder, shocked to see her sitting with the babe at her breast, her free hand spooning gruel into her father’s crooked mouth, mopping it up, and refeeding it to him. Doc agreed to spend the night to relieve her.

  As Doc left the next morning, he told her to prepare to lose one or both. The baby still showed little interest in feeding. His skin was so pale it was translucent, and his breathing so shallow his little chest barely moved. As for her father, the doctor pointed out that the reason he could not get out of bed, even with help, was because he’d had one or more additional seizures. When he told her the strong man who had always taken care of her would never be able to take care of his own needs again, she knew he would not want to live.

  Her father died a week later. At the end, Hattie had held his head up, trying to help him breathe. He had smiled his new lopsided grin, his eyes speaking to her. She heard in her mind the words, “Buck up Hattie, you’re my brave girl, you can do it.”

  She had smiled back at him. Even as he took his last, gasping breath, she had whispered her reassurances. “I’ll be brave, Daddy. I’ll be all right.”

  But she had not been. When the realization came that she would need to prepare her dad for burial and dig a grave, she felt a despair so heavy it made her want to give up. Only the weak mewling cries of her newborn put her back on her feet. First, she would clean and feed the baby. Then while he slept, she would eat a bite and rest. In the morning, she would prepare and bury her father.

  She had finished bathing her father, putting him in his best pants, shirt and black frock coat. It was a suit he had worn at his own father’s funeral, his wedding, and on the rare Sundays when her mother had been able to coerce him into accompanying her to church, and finally at her mother‘s funeral. He had scoffed when she suggested he buy a new one. “It’s my pall-bearer suit, probably be my burying clothes.”

  With everything done, the bag of spices in his mouth, his blue eyes closed forever, she turned to check on the baby.

  Shocked at his stillness, the coldness of the soft skin, she realized with pain why he had not stirred nor cried yet. He had died in the hour just before dawn. The poor child was gone, lost, never loved, never to be loved. He would never grow into a man like her father, or as she had feared, like the animals who sired him.

  She had been tearless for so long, tearless despite the ordeal of the terror and shame of the pregnancy, and then her father’s suffering. There was too much to cry about, if she ever started, she would never stop. There was no time for self-pity, and that was what crying felt like. Besides, crying for her father seemed wrong, knowing he was free and happy again to cast off his helpless body. She h
ad remembered his smiling eyes at the last and knew he was now in heaven with her mother.

  When she lifted the babe to her chest, no tears would come. She wanted to shed hot and scalding tears for him, tears for herself, and tears for the misery of her condition.

  It was nearly noon before she could release the tiny body. She had rocked and screamed in rage, but the emptiness would not leave her. Finally, she forced herself up to do the rituals, to bathe another Stoddard for burial. Even as she tucked the tiny closed fist into the sleeve of the drawstring gown, she bent to kiss the downy head. When she laid the dressed body down, she tucked the baby into the crook of her father’s arm.

  She wanted to move but couldn’t, held by the beauty of the two together in endless sleep. For the first time she noticed the dimple in the boy’s chin, just like the one in her father’s. Why hadn’t she noticed, why hadn’t she allowed herself to love him before it was too late?

  Trembling, determined not to break again, she went to the barn for the shovel. Dragging it behind her, she plodded toward the tall walnut tree in front of the small cabin.

  <><><>

  The wagon wheeled into the yard so quickly, Hattie raised the shovel in defense.

  “Whoa.”

  The loud yell could have been aimed at the foam-flecked mustangs or the soaked girl waving a shovel. As soon as he pulled the team to a halt, he wrapped both reins around the brake handle and swung down to snatch at the shovel in her hands.

  Hattie fell backward but retained the shovel, as insubstantial a weapon against the towering man above her as her clawing hands had been against those men.

  “Whoa,” he surprised her by backing away, holding both arms in the air. “I’m not here for trouble. I’m looking for a young woman to help me care for a baby.”