“Hear me out. I need a place to stay and work. You and your mother can have all the upstairs. When I walked around last night, I think I noticed six rooms. You can live in them all or rent a few out if you like. This house is so large, you’d hardly notice me.”
Adam faced the nun. “Will you stay with them a little longer? The boy’s mother needs care, and I can use help. I can’t pay you, but you’ll have a roof and food. I’m sure they’d welcome you as their guest.”
“I’ll stay as long as I’m needed. I’ll accept no pay.” She folded her arms. “I help when I can, but I work for no man for pay.”
Adam looked back to the boy. “We’re not taking over your place, son. We’re just asking to be boarders. It’s up to you. You can turn us out on the street if you like. For payment, I’ll doctor your ma and provide food. Maybe I can pay rent once I open my practice.”
He knew the boy had no choice, but he admired the way the little fellow took his time considering.
“All right, but I help out, too,” the boy finally answered. “A man who’s healthy and don’t work shouldn’t oughta eat. And don’t call me boy or son. My name’s Nance, Nance Edward Jamison just like my pa.” He stood as tall as his five years would allow. “And my dog’s named Terry, Terry Jamison. He don’t have no middle name cause he’s a dog, but he’s a Jamison just like me.”
“Fair enough. I’m Dr. Adam McLain, but you can call me Doc, or Adam.” He looked up at the nun waiting for her introduction.
“I’m Sister…” Sorrow clouded her eyes. “Just call me Sister, Dr. McLain.”
Nodding, Adam moved to the table. He’d spent most of his cash buying food and supplies to be delivered later that day. He’d also sent word for the postmaster in Corydon to send his medical books. He hoped they arrived before his doors opened. He had his worries about treating anything except gunshot wounds.
Adam was so busy the next few days he saw little of Wes. His older brother spent his days sleeping and his nights drinking while Adam used every second of daylight to turn one side of the downstairs into offices and the other into a study and a bedroom.
Wes surprised him one morning when he stopped by to say good-bye. Though his eyes were red and his face dark with a week’s growth of beard, Wes still sat the saddle tall and proud just the way the military had molded him.
“Keep an angel on your shoulder!” Wes yelled the familiar farewell with a hint of their father’s Irish accent as he turned his horse away.
“And your fist drawn till you brother covers your back,” Adam finished the line. He waved, watching Wes ride out. A part of him wanted to go with his brother, but Wes was a loner who guarded his solitude. And Adam liked things settled. Living out of a saddlebag had never appealed to him. He preferred waking every morning and knowing everything would be where he left it the night before.
He returned to his chore of patching the roof. Wes was in as much hurry to start his life as Adam found himself to be. It was time to start catching up on the years they lost.
Once he decided to plant a few roots, there was no stopping Adam. He figured he could have an office open in a few weeks, and by spring would have completely forgotten about Bergette and all the plans he’d dreamed with her. She’d have a fit if she knew he was opening an office between a whorehouse and a saloon. But somehow, he figured, Nick would be proud of him.
Nichole wouldn’t be quite as easy to erase from his mind, he realized. Most nights he found himself reaching for her in his sleep, like she’d spent more than two nights in his arms, like he needed her. She was somewhere deep in Tennessee, fighting for her land beside her brother. She wasn’t thinking of him, he told himself repeatedly, and he wasn’t thinking of her.
The nun offered little help in conversation. She answered no questions, not even that of her name. She also took no orders, but was good at guessing what Adam needed. If he asked her to hand him a hammer, she’d say she didn’t have time, but if he left his dirty shirt out, she managed to find an hour to do the wash. She cleaned and cooked and listened.
By the end of November, Adam had told her every thought and dream he’d ever had, and she’d told him how to make potato soup.
He’d spent hours trying to guess what she’d done that was so terrible that she’d left her order and couldn’t speak of it. The only thing he’d learned about her was that if cleanliness is next to godliness, she must be heaven’s next-door neighbor.
As December blew in bitter cold from the north, two letters came from Daniel. Both were full of facts about the growing twins he still hadn’t named, and nothing about him. Adam decided his brother and the nun were bookends.
Slowly, the townfolks started calling to test the new doctor. As he’d expected, they paid in trade, but not in money. Farmers with cuts, housewives with complaints of dizziness, children with colds. One chapter at a time, Adam learned how to treat each ailment. Mrs. Jamison and the boy kept to themselves upstairs most of the day. She was feeling strong enough to come down each afternoon and help the nun cook supper. Though not out of her twenties, the widow Jamison seemed a sad, broken woman with little of life’s light in her eyes.
She spoke of her husband sometimes, telling of how dashing he was and how foolish. He and his partner had been carpenters after their enlistment was finished in the frontier army. About the time they settled in Fort Worth, the war came. Her husband and his partner turned their energy less to repairing the house and more to robbing. One day they made plans for rebuilding the street of dilapidated houses, and it seemed the next day they were arrested.
Adam found his work challenging and read far into the night of the new theories in medicine that Doc Wilson kept sending. After a few weeks of burning a lamp late into the midnight hours, people began tapping on the back door. They were the folks who lived in shadows, the drunks, the prostitutes, the beggars. Adam found himself with two practices, one by day, one by night. Though some of the after-dark callers offered to pay in trade, Adam insisted they wait until they could pay him back some other way.
He found himself wishing he could tell Nichole some of their stories. In a way, she was one of them, a creature of the night.
By March of 1866, Adam began to relax and enjoy the challenges of life in Fort Worth. Folks on both sides of the street spoke to him and more books were coming every week for him to study.
Then, on Tuesday, March 22, Nance opened the door and the wind blew in trouble.
“Telegram for you, Doc.” The young man from the new telegraph office ran in all excited to have been allowed to bring the doctor something he was sure must be important.
“Thanks for bringing it by, Harry.” Adam wiped his hands on a towel and opened the note expecting to hear word from Wes or Dan.
The message read:
TEN
NICHOLE SLAMMED HER fist into her brother’s chest with all the fury she could muster. “I’m not going!” she screamed. “You can’t make me!”
“Like hell I can’t, Nick!” Wolf’s voice was so angry it rumbled around the tiny grove like a huge cannon, rattling the air all the way to treetops. “You’ll be on that train tonight if I have to lock you in a trunk and have you shipped to Texas.”
“But you need me.” Nichole paced in front of him, showing no fear of the man twice her width. “I’m the best rider you have. It’s my land, too. You think I can stomach the idea of someone stealing it any better than you. Let me stay and fight with you.”
“Not this time, Nick.” Wolf glanced toward the campfire where two men waited. “Tyler and I have it all planned out. When trouble rolls in, I don’t want to have to be worrying about where you are. For my own peace of mind I have to know you’re safe. You’re all the family I got left, don’t you see, Nick?”
“All right. I won’t ride with you, but let me go somewhere else. Anywhere else.” Adam was probably married by
