Stephanie Grace Whitson - [Quilt Chronicles 03] by Message on the Quilt Read Free Book Online

you think you’re doing!”
    Noah ducked his head. “I don’t want to be Sicilian. I want to be American. And I want to look like you.”
    When Ma finally got the whole story out of him, anger flashed in her blue-gray eyes. She cupped Noah’s chin in one hand and leaned down to stare into his dark eyes. “You got your good looks from one of the best men who ever walked this earth—a man who died saving my life and yours, too. Don’t you ever let me catch you trying to erase God’s handiwork again, do you hear me?” She couldn’t say any more. Tears choked off her words.
    The idea that he’d made his little mother cry broke Noah’s heart. He flung his lanky self into her arms and choked out an apology. That night after Ma was asleep, Noah crept across the room they shared above a bakery to retrieve the small mirror atop her dresser. Moving over to the window, he looked at himself in the moonlight.
I look like Pa. He was brave.
    After that night, Ma began to talk about the past more often. In the evenings, she’d sit with handwork in her lap and tell stories “from the old days” while she sewed. About heading west to start a new life and camping under the stars at night. About the other argonauts on the trail. About the soldiers who guarded the way. About Pa dying and a freighter taking pity on her and letting her ride with him back to Nebraska City. About working her way home to Missouri on a steamboat called the
Laura Rose.
About losing everything and being lonely and then—having God bless her with a baby boy who looked just like his Pa. In time, Noah realized that he didn’t really like Sally Bennet anymore. Eldridge Mason could have her.
    Noah was thirteen when Ma took ill. She was only sick for a few days, but pneumonia settled into her lungs and took her life. Noah was sent to live with a distant cousin he’d rarely seen, even though she lived in nearby St. Louis. It didn’t take Noah long to understand that Cousin Beulah would do “her Christian duty,” but she despised it and would rejoice on the day it was once and for all fulfilled.
    A year later, being different came in handy again. Noah might have been only fourteen, but he was over six feet tall and strong as an ox when he stowed away on a freight car one night, bent on riding as far away from Cousin Beulah and her black snake whip as possible. Before long he was loading and unloading freight cars. Helping unload a theatrical troupe in Kansas City introduced him to Professor Harry Gordon, and Professor Gordon introduced him to Shakespeare and Whitman, Dickens and Coleridge, Byron and Shelley and Keats. And now, ten years and what felt like a lifetime later, Noah Shaw had educated himself and found a life in which his big voice and his height and even his dark looks all gave him an advantage.
    Using Mother’s maiden name had been Professor Gordon’s idea. “There is no reason to give people an excuse not to hire you, my boy. It’s as wrong as it can be, but that statue to liberty they put up in New York harbor a few years ago hasn’t done a thing to change the average American’s opinion of the tired and poor if they happen to be Italian or Irish.” He’d pronounced it Eye-talian, to make his point. “As long as Eye-talian means the same thing as Papist, that’s two strikes against a man. What was your mother’s name before she married?” He’d waited for Noah to respond and then nodded. “There you have it. Be Noah Shaw. It’s a good English name. Protestant, too. Oh, I know it could be Irish or Scot, but you just let people think your roots go deep in the land of the Bard himself. That’s perfect for a theatrical career.”
    Noah had felt guilty about it for a while, but then he decided there was nothing wrong with paying tribute to a woman by using her name. Pa had loved her, too. He’d understand. And so here Noah Shaw stood in southeastern Nebraska, at the place where the prairie met the edge of Beatrice in Gage County,