A Race to Splendor by Ciji Ware Page B

mother, Melly,” he added, peering up at her. “To make up for… for all the harm I’ve caused.”
    In all her years as his daughter, she’d witnessed a sober Henry Bradshaw act charming, witty, even sometimes wise, but she’d never ever seen him truly repentant.
    “It doesn’t matter now, Father,” she hushed, brushing a stray shock of hair off his forehead.
    “It does, Melly! It does.”
    She gently patted his bandaged hand. “Of course, it matters, but what I mean is that I always knew, somehow, you were sorry when you hurt us.”
    Her father motioned for her to lean closer. “I think earlier tonight, I dreamt I was back in Donner Pass,” he whispered, “trapped in the ice cave.”
    Her father had never once mentioned this unspeakable subject. Amelia had assumed he’d mercifully been spared any memory of the many days the Donner Party a half century earlier endured the snows near Lake Tahoe without proper food and supplies. He had only been three years old at the time and Aunt Margaret barely seven when their parents died en route. Little Henry wouldn’t have even understood the word cannibalism.
    “Maggie gave it to me,” he murmured. “She chewed on a piece of cowhide and gave me the only real food she had. We were just young ’uns, but I remember that cave and people dyin’, one by one, and the bitter cold. And then, there was just me, along with a cow wrangler, a farmer, and Maggie alive in that hellhole. When the cowhand died… well, the survivors reckoned we had to, Melly.”
    Amelia shuddered at the allusion to the topic that had been forbidden all her life.
    “That was a long, long time ago, Father,” she said softly. “You need to sleep now.”
    “They said it was wrong. The newspaper fellows hounded us for years afterwards. Still do. Came sniffing around just before Christmas last year. Coming up on the anniversary, y’know. They said Maggie was bad to feed me and I was wicked to take it.”
    “You were a tiny little boy,” she said with genuine sympathy for the horrors he and Aunt Margaret had endured. “None of it was your doing.”
    “The whiskey made it all disappear, Melly. That was wrong too, but the memories and pesterin’ get so bad, I have to find a way to blot it out. Your mother never understood about the cave. How cold it was. How hungry we were…” He was shivering with the fever—or was it because of the horrible memory, she wondered.
    Soon he appeared to drift to sleep. Amelia was about to return to her cot when he suddenly opened his eyes.
    “Did you keep those three playing cards?” he demanded hoarsely.
    She patted the pocket of her skirt. “Shhh… yes, they’re right here.”
    “Good girl,” he rasped. “Go back to the club. Find the other two.”
    “I’m sure the club burned in the fire,” she whispered, seeing in her mind’s eye flames licking at the buildings a block away from the Bay View. “I expect everything on Nob Hill’s gone by now.”
    Continuing as if he hadn’t heard, he said, “We were playing five-card stud. I had four cards up and one face down. After the call, I turned the last one over. Kemp saw me put that winning ace on the table, I know he did! He was sitting on my right side. He had to have seen it! J.D. was across the table, though, so I’m not sure if he—”
    “ Quiet over there!” croaked a voice from the dark.
    “Shhhh,” Amelia soothed her father and glanced at the rows of shrouded cots. “We’re waking the others.”
    “But, Melly—”
    “You must sleep,” she insisted firmly. “We’ll talk more in the morning.” She bent down and kissed his forehead. He’d had no liquor for hours now and, sober, seemed much more like the man she’d adored as a girl.
    Spent from the effort to talk, he soon drifted back to sleep, leaving Amelia to wonder forlornly what life might have been like if her father hadn’t taken to the bottle, and if the shock that followed his injuries was the cause of his wild story about