Dorothy Garlock by Leaving Whiskey Bend Read Free Book Online

asked.
    She stood silently, offering no answer.
    “How long ago?” he demanded, his voice rising in anger.
    As he stared at the rigid face of his mother, her eyes regarding him as warily as she would have a wolf or other predator, Eli wondered if she would ever bring herself to tell him what he wished to know. She was famously stubborn, refusing to yield an inch when she held the belief that she was right. He was about to shout at her again, when she finally spoke, her voice was flat and emotionless.
    “Six weeks,” she said. “He died and we buried him six weeks ago.”
    “Why in the hell didn’t you tell me?” Eli shouted incredulously, all the words exploding out of his mouth with a will he could not have stopped even if he had wanted to. “Why, Mother? Why didn’t you at least send me a letter so that I would have known that Father was gone? Tell me why!”
    “I reckon that’s why Hank wrote you.”
    “Why didn’t
you
write?”
    “Because you’re dead to me.”
    His mother’s words were the last straw. As if he were the vicious animal his mother thought him to be, Eli shot across the rows of his mother’s garden, his boots pounding the tender plants into the ground, and grabbed the woman by the shoulders. His grip held her locked in place, his face turned down to hers, his eyes burning with fury. Through it all, she didn’t flinch.
    “I am
not
dead, Mother!” Eli insisted. “I’m right here!”
    “But I don’t want you to be,” she retorted. Her small body seemed to grow larger with every angry word. “When you left this place, you left for good. You were more than willing to leave your father behind, no matter how much he begged you to stay. If he didn’t matter to you when he was alive, why should it matter to you that he is dead?”
    “You’ve never understood—” he began, but his mother was no longer listening.
    “It’s not just your father, either. Where were you when poor Abraham was sick?” she asked accusingly. “It was for your father and me to bear, watching him lie in that bed, unable to say a single word and then, when he woke, to no longer even remember that he was our son. You were nowhere to be seen.”
    “If I had known that Abe was sick, I would have done all I could to see that he was cared for,” Eli argued. “When I left, you knew damn well I had no intention of turning my back on you, Father, Abe, or any of this forever. That was never what I wanted.”
    “But it’s what you chose.”
    Eli was at his wit’s end. Try as he might, he couldn’t think of what he could possibly say to make his mother understand why he had chosen the path he had taken. So much had changed for him after he left Bison City and the family ranch, but so much there remained exactly the same. He was about to try again, to attempt to find another argument, when his mother mentioned the one name that always managed to stop him cold.
    “Then, of course, there was Caleb.”
    “What about him?”
    “It’s still so hard for me to believe that my boy has left me,” she said, her gaze turning away from Eli for a moment, as if facing the son who had returned was more painful than speaking of the one who was forever gone.
    “What happened to Caleb was not my doing, Mother,” Eli explained, his ire rising at her suggestion. “You can hate me for many things, but I won’t allow my brother’s death to be one of them.”
    “It’s more than that,” she shot back, shaking her bony shoulders free from his grip; he let her go without comment. “That you, Caleb’s own brother, could bring himself to up and leave town just as soon as we put his body in the ground . . . well, it’s more than I could stand.”
    “I left because it was what Caleb would have wanted. I left—”
    “Don’t you even pretend to speak for him,” Mrs. Morgan barked, her wrinkled face growing crimson with rage. “You don’t know the first thing about the matter! What he would have wanted was for you to find the