Lawman

“Cal, you must be reading my mind! I was just about to send a note asking you to supper! Delilah’s cooking chicken and dumplings, and strawberry pie, and…” Her voice trailed off for a moment. “But you look so serious! You aren’t still thinking about that silly quarrel we had the other night after the church picnic, are you?”

“Yes. No. That is, not about the quarrel, Livy. You know I can’t stay angry with you. But I’ve come to tell you that I’m leaving tomorrow—to join the army. I’ve come to say goodbye, and to ask you to wait for me…if you want to, that is.”

He’d seen her fine eyes narrow into blue storm clouds and the lips he loved to kiss tighten into a furious line. “I might. But it depends. What army are you joining, Cal Devlin?”

“Aw, Livy, don’t make this so hard. You already know the answer to that—I haven’t changed my mind. How can I, when it would be going against all I believe in?”

She’d looked at him as if he were some species of vermin. “Evidently you don‘t find it hard to contemplate going against your fellow Southerners, against other Texans. or to think about having to kill them in battle?”

“Livy, I hate the idea. You know I do. But in this instance my fellow Southerners are wrong, and I have to fight on the side I believe to be right. Livy, my family’s all fired up at me about this, please don’t let it divide us, too! Disagree with me about my choice, but please say you’ll wait for me? This awful conflict isn’t going to last too long, sweetheart. It can’t. The South doesn’t have the wherewithal to fight like the North does. And then we’ll have the rest of our lives to be together, Livy, if you’ll be there waiting for me when I come home to you…”

She’d laughed then, scornfully and without mirth. Her face was that of a stranger, a stranger who smelled a foul odor. “Wait for you? You must be joking, Cal Devlin. Unlike you, I have some loyalty to my country—”

“Your country is the United States of America, Livy,” he’d interrupted her to say. “We’re trying to preserve the Union—”

“My country’is the Confederate States of America now,” she’d informed him in lofty tones. “And as a loyal daughter of the South I despise all her enemies— and that includes you, Caleb Travis Devlin.” She’d turned her back on him before saying, “I suggest you get back up on that stallion and ride outa here before my papa takes a bullwhip to your hide.“

He’d ridden away as ordered then, and left to join the Union army the next day. A year later, in a letter from his mother—Sarah Devlin wrote him regularly, even if she’d deplored his choice—he’d learned that Olivia had married Dan Gillespie, a captain in the Confederate army, when Dan was home on leave.

So much of that world was gone now, almost as if it had never been, Cal thought. He had ridden past Childress Hall on his way to Gillespie Springs. The plantation was a ruin. After Livy’s father had died, shortly after the war ended, the estate had been bought by carpetbaggers at a fraction of its value. Those scoundrels had had no notion of how to manage such a place, parceling it out to sharecroppers and living in just a room or two of the formerly splendid mansion. The big house looked as if it would fall down around their Yankee ears any day now.

Yeah, he’d forgotten Livy could hurt him like that, but he wasn’t going to lie awake at night and ache, as he had after his long-ago dismissal.

He was so deep in thought that he nearly bowled right into a plump matron coming out of the general store.

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