Excerpt from Heaven and Earth by Kathleen Eagle
Bell Bridge Books, available in e-book and trade paperback formats
Chapter 1 pp. 11-12
Newlyweds Katherine Fairfield and her husband--a novice but zealous young minister--were on their way to the Whitman Mission in Oregon Country when their wagon train was beset by Typhoid fever. The pair helped care for fellow sick travelers until Thomas died and Kathrine was abandoned by the train, left with a dying orphaned child.
Friendly Shoshone hunters have just warned Jed West of a sick white woman left with a dead child and abandoned by a group of wagons leaving a death trail along the white man’s road.
She’s probably dead already. If he’s smart, he’ll stay away, lest she take him with her. But she might be alive. And if she is, he might be able to help her. And the if she lives, and if she’s smart, she’ll go back where she came from.
Ah, but Reader, what kind of a story would that be? Here’s a snippet of an early scene from Heaven and Earth. I’m betting on two stubborn, strongminded, deeply caring people to draw you into their story.
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“No!”
West spun on his heel, the shrill protest catching him off guard. She repeated the word more than once as she stumbled toward him, waving her bony hand like a wild-eyed apparition clamoring on behalf of a fellow corpse. Her hair could have been a nest stuck high on some gray-faced crag, and her half-buttoned clothes were as dark and dusty as any shroud. She fell to her knees beside the little hole, her hands snatching like ravens’ beaks at the blue-and-yellow blocks of fabric that shrouded the dead child.
West leaned down and took a firm grip on the woman’s shoulders. He hoped she hadn’t gone mad on him. He thought he could treat her illness, but he knew of no herbal remedy for madness.
“Don’t trouble yourself, ma’am. I’ll take care of this, and then I’ll get you to a place—”
“Deeper,” she wailed. “This must be deeper.”
“I don’t know how you made it this far,” he muttered as he tried to pull her away. “Give it over, now. You’re using up what strength you’ve got left.”
But she held her ground, digging at the dirt with one claw while she clutched the quilt with the other. “The wolves,” she gasped. “They rip, and they tear, and they—”
“The child is dead, ma’am.” And you’re not far from it. “Nothing can cause her any more pain.”
With an impossible burst of strength she wrenched herself from his grip and turned on hands and knees, suddenly kin to the very animal she feared. An unholy fire brightened her eyes as she poised herself to defend her charge. “She will be buried decently,” the woman snarled. West watched in amazement as she reached with trembling hand for the shovel he’d dropped beside the hole. “I shall . . . do this job properly myself.”
West grabbed the shovel, and for a moment there was a contest of her will against his physical strength. A man’s power drained in the face of a woman’s instinctive defense of a child.
“I’ll do it,” he said, and she searched his face for some assurance. She must have found it, for she yielded the shovel. He offered a supporting arm, and she gave way to it and let him carry her back into the shade of the wagon.
He moved the corpse aside, removed his shirt and dug. He cursed the sun and the stench of the heat-ripening corpse and the eyes of the crone who struggled to remain conscious only to supervise him. But he dug. Dirt and sweat lay thick on his bare back without a breeze to cool it. It was a relief to deposit the body and drop the first shovelfuls of dirt onto the quilt.
He heard a breathless grunt as he shoveled the last of the dirt atop the mound he’d built, and he turned to find the woman pulling herself up, hands climbing the wheel’s spokes like the rungs of a ladder.
West tossed the shovel aside. “What in hell are you trying to do now?”
He reached to steady her, and she grabbed for his arm and swayed against him. “We must pray for her now.”
“If you keep this up, I’ll be digging another damn hole.” Again he swept her into his arms. “And then it’ll just be me, and I’m not much for praying.”
She rested her cheek against his grime-streaked shoulder. “Please. ‘The Lord . . . is my shepherd.’ You know the words.”
Her voice was thready, and her breath felt like a dandelion puffball tickling his chest. Something inside him rose to the occasion of her determination and would not let her go it alone. He jogged his memory and recited most of the words, lending his voice simply in support of hers. The psalm came to him most naturally in French, but he followed her lead in English. By the time he spoke of dwelling in the house of the Lord, she had given out. He loaded her into the wagon and headed south for his mountain.
Heaven and Earth ASIN: B0BCFCH2HW Available now from your favorite bookseller
COPYRIGHT 1990 by Kathleen Eagle, mass market edition published by Harlequin Books 1990; REVISED by the author for Belle Bridge Books 2022. No part of this material may be used without permission.
