Forgiving by Spencer Lavyrle

Author:Spencer, Lavyrle [Spencer, Lavyrle]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Romance, General, Westerns, Historical, Fiction
ISBN: 0515108030
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 1992-02-01T08:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

13

At midnight on Christmas Eve, Rose Hossiter’s brothel was crowded with lonely miners who sought company to relieve their Christmas desolation. Kithless, they had watched the Christmas pageant and thought of home—of mothers, fathers, siblings, sweethearts and friends left behind in the cities as large as Boston, Munich and Dublin; or in rural communities with names too obscure to bring the light of recognition to a listener’s eye. They thought of familiar hearths and mothers’ bread and their old pet dogs, maybe long since dead. Some of them thought of the children they’d abandoned and the wives they’d send for, come spring.

Some were drunk.

Some were tearful.

All were lonesome.

The triangle bells of Tom Poinsett were the greatest boon to the flesh business since the discovery of gold itself. While they played, the tide of lonesome males, fresh from giving gold dust to the infant Jesus, brought the remainder of it to be exchanged for any soft, warm, sympathetic breast upon which they might lay their sorrowful heads and forget their homesickness.

Robert Baysinger was among these.

Remaining at the theater until the lanterns were being extinguished, he had watched Sarah leave with the marshal; the Robinsons leave with their baby; the Dawkins with their family; even Mrs. Roundtree with a group of her lodgers. As the theater emptied, Robert’s solitariness closed in. Who was there for him in this town, save one for whose company he must pay? Damn the woman for her continued aloofness. He should disdain her, but found himself unable. He had, after all, come here largely because of her.

Forlornly he donned his coat and hat, took up his cane and went from the hall into the street, where the sound of the chimes lifted his face to the sky and seemed to widen the spaces between his bones. He stopped a minute, pulling on his capeskin gloves, letting the hymn shimmer through him. At home there had been church spires with bells that tolled the hour. Sometimes, as a child, they would awaken him in the mornings.

Three in a bed they’d slept—he, Walt and Franklin. Seemed like there were never enough beds, nor food, nor money. Sometimes not even enough love. Perhaps he was wrong about that: maybe the shortness had not been of love itself, but of the time to show it.

When he remembered his parents, he pictured them overworked and weary. It seemed they’d never had time to relax. His father labored fourteen hours a day in an effort to scrape together enough money to provide for his outsized family, which seemed to increase by one head per year. Ten hours a day Edward Baysinger worked as a trunkmaker at Arndson’s Leather Factory; evenings, in a tiny shop behind their house, he fashioned wooden stocks for brushes on a foot-powered wood lathe. Sometimes he sharpened knives and shears. Sometimes he repaired chair rungs. Sometimes he bought and sold bone. Always he collected fat and tallow which his wife, Genevieve, brewed into yellow lye soap and sold to supplement the family’s income, which never seemed adequate.

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