Seven Brides - Fern Part 26

"I don't even dream."

"Sometimes, if my father caught me reading when I was supposed to be riding or cleaning leathers, he would lock me in the stable feed room. There weren't any windows. The mice made tiny squeaking noises as they looked for kernels of dropped grain to eat. If I was locked up for very long, they would run across my legs."

"What's the object of this story?"

"To a.s.sure you we all have nightmares. It helps to share them. I still hate small rooms, but I haven't had that nightmare in years."

He thought of the many hours he had spent talking to Freddy. Fern had never had anyone to talk to.

"Is it so bad you can't tell me?"

She didn't answer.

"Maybe you don't trust me not to repeat it."

He really couldn't expect her to trust him with a secret she had refused to share with her own father. But in the last few weeks he'd developed a very strong interest in her well-being, and it hurt that she might not trust him.

"That's not it," Fern hastened to a.s.sure him. Her expression showed that she realized she had virtually admitted there was something to hide.

"Does it have something to do with the reason you wear men's clothes?"

"Why are you so persistent? You know I don't want to tell you. It should be obvious, even to someone from Boston."

For a change he wanted to help someone else. Ever since he had come to Abilene, since he had met Fern, he hadn't been running from anything. He wasn't asking for help. He wanted to give it.

"You've been alone too long. You've buried everything inside you, denied it existed, until it has become a part of the way you think, the way you act, the way you face the world." "There's nothing wrong with that."

"There is when it keeps you from doing what you want to do and being what you want to be."

Just as his own fears had made him hide from his family for eight years. He had lost too much by that. Fern had lost, too. Now it was time for both of them to stop.

"How do you know I'm not doing what I want?"

"Because I see the difference between you and Rose. Rose is doing what she wants, being what she wants. I've never seen a more contented, happy, outgoing, honest, giving, sharing person in my life."

"So now I'm selfish and mean."

"No, but you hide from people. You're not shy about attacking me when you think I'm wrong, but let me ask you about yourself and you run for cover."

"I'm none of your business."

"You weren't when I stepped off that train, but you are now."

Their lives would be entwined forever. He could no more forget her than he could forget his family.

"I don't want to be."

"Then why have you stayed?"

Silence.

"Fern, I'm not prying out of idle curiosity. I know something has hurt you, and I'd like to help."

"It's over and done with," Fern said. "Nothing can be changed."

"But your feelings about it can be."

He could see her stiffen, as if she were closing her ears, blocking out his voice. He could almost see the walls going up between them, high and topped with broken gla.s.s. Then, without warning, her resistance collapsed.

"Eight years ago a man tried to rape me," she shouted, emptying her bottled-up anger and pain over him. "Can you change that?" With a sob, she kicked her horse into a gallop.

Madison spurred his horse to catch up with Fern.

He had been prepared for many things but not this. What could he possibly say or do that would make any difference?

He couldn't begin to imagine the horrible memories she must have lived with all these years, the feeling of being defiled, the fear that another man might do the same. He thought of the years she had spent hiding behind her clothes, laboring to become something she wasn't, slowly squeezing the life out of the girl she should have become.

The thought kindled in him a murderous rage at her unknown a.s.sailant. If he could have met the man at that moment, he wouldn't have hesitated. He would have killed him.

The sight of Fern's tear-stained face as he drew alongside only made him angrier. Madison pulled both their horses to a halt. He vaulted from the saddle, and Fern slid into his waiting arms.

And they stood there in the middle of the empty Kansas prairie, under a clear summer sky, while Fern cried out the hurt and grief and anger that had been buried inside her for eight long years. She clung to him with all the tenacity of a woman who has finally shared her most closely held secrets with the man she loves.

Madison almost smiled at himself. He had always prided himself on his rigidly correct conduct, yet here he stood wrapped in the arms of a weeping female with no chaperon but their two horses. He had no idea what his friends would say, but he didn't care. He intended to stay here as long as Fern needed him.

You want to stay because you're in love with her. The realization so stunned Madison that for a moment he felt that Fern was holding him up rather than the other way around. He must be mistaken. He couldn't be in love with Fern. Not that he didn't like her a great deal. He did. He had come to have a great deal of admiration for her courage and her integrity, but that had nothing to do with love. He didn't even like her kind of woman.

Wouldn't Freddy laugh. Madison had spent years avoiding the clutches of some of Boston's and New York's most practiced and enticing femmes fatales only to be snared by a farmer's daughter in pants.

Fern's sobs had stopped. Giving a determined sniff, she slipped her arms from around Madison and pulled out of his embrace.

"I didn't mean to start blubbering," she said. "That's what you get for trying to make me act like a woman."

"I'll risk it," Madison said, still feeling shaky but rallying. "I like it better than your trying to run me out of town."

"I'm sorry for that. Troy saved me that night. I owed it to him to see his killer hang. We'd better get going," she said, and remounted her horse. She pulled out a handkerchief and atternoted to remove all traces of her tears. "Reed and Pike will be waiting. I don't want them starting another fight."

Her moment of weakness past, she slipped back into her sh.e.l.l. She didn't even wait for him to climb back into the saddle before she clucked to her horse and rode away. But Madison wasn't willing to let her close the door on him now, or ever again. He meant to share her burdens. Now and always.

Fern couldn't go it alone. The damage had gone so deep, had been so profound, it had changed her whole life. This, combined with her father's coldness, had distorted her view of everything. She thought no one loved her, that men could only l.u.s.t after her. He must help her learn to believe in herself, to believe that a man could love her for herself, not for the work she could do or the pleasure she could give to his body.

At the same time, it was crucial that he control his own growing desire for her. If she even guessed how much he wanted to make love to her, she might never let him come near her again. He would certainly lose her confidence.

And at the moment, that was the most important thing in the world to him.

"Tell me about it," he asked as he came alongside.

"Why?" she demanded, whipping around to face him. "So you can relish the gory details?"

"Do you believe that?"

She turned away, fighting to control the anger and the tears. "No, but it happened a long time ago. It's over."

"Not yet. You're still afraid. That's why you wear men's clothes."

"That's absurd. I wear pants because it makes it easier to work."

"You're afraid if you dress as a woman, you'll attract attention and some man will force himself on you again."

"That's not true."

"Then why did you fight me as if I were trying to rape you?"

"You were crushing me."

"You're lying, Fern, to me and yourself."

"Did they teach you to read people's minds at Harvard?"

"No, but when you start to care for someone, you can sense things you never saw or even suspected in the beginning."

He'd never believed that before. He had thought that cool, impersonal observation could tell you more about a person than clouded emotion. But now that he loved Fern, he not only sensed her mood, he could guess the reason behind it. When she hurt, he hurt. When she tried to hide from the truth, he understood.

"You don't care about me," Fern said, "not really. You probably decided it would be fun to teach this peculiar female to walk and talk and dress like a proper woman. Then you could go back to Boston feeling you had brought a little refinement to at least one person in the wilderness. It probably stems from a highly developed social sense. I'm told Bostonians are like that. Probably a leftover from the Puritan days."

"That's not how I feel. I"

"I hope you're not going to say you love me, because I won't believe it. I'll bet you've got half the females in Boston chasing after you."

He couldn't miss the hard, cynical edge in her voice. Her defenses were all in place. She had told him what happened, but she didn't intend to let him any closer. She didn't believe he cared. She wouldn't let herself. She was too afraid.

"What did your father do when you told him?" Madison asked.

"I never told him."

Her answer shocked him. "Why not?"

"There was no point. Troy chased the man out of Kansas."

"You should have told him."

"No. Papa would have gone after him, and everybody would have found out. I'd always be the woman some man tried to rape. Some of them would even start saying it must have been my fault. I already suffered for it once. I didn't see any sense in paying for it twice." Madison knew Fern was right. Even basically kind people would think she must have done something to encourage the man.

"Did you know him?"

For eight years Fern had kept the memory of that night locked in the dim recesses of her mind. Every time it tried to creep out, she had built the wall a little higher. She had felt safe until Madison showed up with his beguiling smile, tender kisses, and electrifying touch.

Now his demands had caused the wall to come down with a resounding crash, freeing all the ugliness she had tried so desperately to hide.

"It was too dark to see his face," she said, gradually allowing herself to remember. "I was coming in from the herd. I wasn't paying attention. I knew Papa would be furious I was late, so I was trying to figure out what I could fix for supper in a hurry."

"What happened?"

She could see it now just as if it were happening all over again. She shivered. She wished she had the courage to ask Madison to put his a around her.

"He jumped out of a buffalo wallow before I knew what was happening. He pulled me off my horse and threw me down on the ground. I couldn't see anything very well in the dark, but I wasn't trying to. I was just trying to get away."

She could see him rising out of the night, a dark ominous shadow. She couldn't remember anything but that voice, that soft, breathless sound that reminded her of a hissing snake.

"He was cruel. He liked hurting me. He tore my shirt open. He kissed me all over and grabbed at me."

"How did Troy find you?"

"He was coming back from playing cards. If he hadn't been so drunk, he might have caught him. But I didn't care about that. I only cared that he stopped him."

"And you've kept all this inside you all these years."

"What else was I supposed to do?" she demanded, rounding on him.

"Nothing, I guess, but you can let me help now."

"And what can you do?"

Madison had always prided himself on being able to think a problem through to its resolution, but this one had no solution. Something had happened which couldn't be undone. Fern would have to live with it for the rest of her life. Nothing he could do would change that.

But he could let her know he cared, that his feelings hadn't changed.

"I don't know," he admitted, "but I'll think of something. In the meantime you've got one question you need to answer."

"What?" she asked. She seemed edgy, wary.

"Have you decided on a dress for the party? It ought to be something really special. I want everybody to be stunned at the beauty who's been parading around under their noses without them knowing."

Fern laughed, probably at the incongruity of such a question after what they'd just talked about.

"I've got a few more questions to ask before I can worry about that," she replied, but he could see her relax. Now if she just didn't kill him when she reached the farm and found out what he'd done, maybe he could work up the courage to tell her he loved her.

"He bought the Pruitt house," Pike explained. "He had it sawed into quarters and loaded on a wagon. It didn't take more than a couple of hours to put together.''

"But the barn," Fern said, staring at the building of fresh-cut lumber.

"I ordered that from Kansas City," Madison explained. "They shipped it out on the railroad. It only took a day to put it up."

Neither building was very large, but the house had a floor, an iron stove, and furniture. The barn was more than adequate for the few chickens, pigs, and the single cow that occupied it.

"Why did you do this?" she demanded.

I didn't want you to feel you had no place to stay."