Patricia Potter by Lawless Page A

some fool reason, it did now. And he didn’t know why.
     
    E XCITEMENT SEEMED TO hum in the classroom. Ethan was almost uncontrollable as he dunked a pigtail in an inkwell and threw spitballs at Robert.
    The tension was also evident all over town. Ever since the shooting Saturday night, everyone waited to see what would happen next. Damning eyes, curious eyes, speculative eyes, all focused on Willow, who seemed to be the center of the storm.
    After school she walked over to see Sullivan while the twins were cleaning the blackboards, but he was gone. She stood in front of his office, feeling strangely bereft. She badly needed someone to talk to.
    She had hoped her stranger would have appeared the previous day. She had waited, but only Sullivan came, bringing a harness for Willow’s buckboard and horses. He had also gone in search of Brady and Jupiter, but both of them were still missing.
    Willow had been filled with apprehension since she woke that morning. Her hand had trembled as she’d helped Estelle with breakfast, and she’d watched with unusual concern as Sallie Sue fed her small flock of chickens. Willow did not smile as she usually did when watching the child give special attention to the spoiled and ungrateful Brunhilde.
    Everything seemed tranquil on the surface, but something ominous was brewing.
    The feeling persisted throughout the school day, as if all hell, as Sullivan put it, was about to blow loose. Or maybe it was her intense disappointment that the stranger did not appear. She almost prayed for a catastrophe since that seemed the only time he materialized.
    Some of the town’s apprehension was evident in the fact that nearly one third of her pupils didn’t appear for class. It had grown to nearly forty pupils, up from the fifteen when she’d first arrived. It had not been an easy battle to build that number.
    In the first months she had vocally wondered why she had so many more boys than girls. It had been Betty MacIntyre who told her that most ranchers and farmers didn’t think it necessary that girls learn anything then-mothers couldn’t teach them.
    Willow had spent the next eight weekends riding a rented horse from ranch to ranch, convincing parents to send their daughters to school.
    That was how she had met Jake.
    She had ridden by his place on a Saturday morning, and he was watering Jupiter. She was hot and tired, and saddle sore.
    When she explained her purpose, he’d eyed her with interest and asked her inside. He didn’t have children, he said, but he wondered…
    He’d stopped, but Willow had seen both the shame and longing in his eye, and she knew what it meant. She had seen it before. It wasn’t unusual for many adults to have never learned to read and write. Schools were few and far apart, and many families had just not seen a need for it.
    Jake had been gruff, and even rude, but she’d known he was just feeling her out. When he’d asked her to come and visit again, she knew she had passed some kind of test. She’d made several more trips before he’d finally admitted his need, and she’d spent several evenings a week teaching him how to read and write.
    It was for his wife, he’d said. She had often read to him from the Bible, the only book he had. She hadn’t cared that he couldn’t read, but now he wanted the comfort of the Good Book. It would bring him closer to her, and he felt that need now that he was approaching old age and death.
    Willow remembered her burst of pride when he’d read his first complete sentence. It had been worth all the time she’d spent with him. But then he seemed to sicken and he talked more and more to her about his two friends, Alex and Gar, who now hated each other. He feared dying for what would happen to the two men, yet he wanted to join his wife.
    But Willow could prevent it, he sometimes muttered. Willow could somehow breach that schism that he could not. He knew it.
    Willow wasn’t so sure. Yet, as he lay dying, she could no more