Carved in Love

CARVED IN LOVE

  Tracks of the Heart, Book One

  By Savanna Sage

  This is a work of fiction, which means that the views expressed herein are the sole responsibility of the author. Incidents, places, and characters are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, whether living or dead, or any actual locales or events, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means without the author’s written permission, except in the case of short quotations embodied in articles and critical reviews. In that case, go for it!

  Copyright © 2016 Savanna Sage

  Dedication: to Loraine Hansen, who has the kind of love in her life that most women only dream of.

  Acknowledgements: Thanks to Shirley Ann Hales for expert information on carving and whittling, Amelia C. Adams for inspiration, Steven Novak for a dreamy cover, and Scott Dirk, Robert Dirk, Linda Pratt, Mary K. Olsen, Greg Anderson, Connie McCaughey, Shelbie Ordakowski, Janet Olsen, and Nancy Abbott for their invaluable expertise in proofreading and editing.

  Book One: Carved in Love

  Book Two: Escape to Love

  Book Three: Two Hearts for One

  Book Four: Written From the Heart

  Book Five: High Wire Hearts

  Chapter 1

  The first dress Eleanor Ransom made for herself nearly killed her. It came right down to being her own fault with those big stitches she took, but the enterprise was entirely her mother’s idea.

  Mama set great store in family traditions, believing they should carry on no matter what. Great Grandma was a seamstress, Grandma was a seamstress, Mama was a seamstress, and if Mama had anything to do with it, Ellie would be a seamstress, too. “A young lady of nineteen is no lady if she can’t dress herself,” Linnea Ransom told her daughter, her finger aimed at Ellie for emphasis.

  “I’m eighteen, Mama.”

  “Nearly nineteen. I was able to sew a full dress by the time I was twelve.”

  Linnea had repeatedly tried getting her only daughter interested in sewing, as intently as Ellie tried to make her mother understand that she would much rather wrap her hand around a whittling knife than pinch a needle between her fingers.

  Yet Mama persisted, her businesslike mind discounting her daughter’s arguments. ”Anything can be learned with the proper application of effort and desire,” Mama insisted, standing the full 5’ 4” height of her sturdy, square body. Even her pretty face was square, surrounded by her light hair and blessed with warm brown eyes that lit up when she smiled, which happened most often when Papa was around.

  A musician by trade, lighthearted Papa was engaged at the dance hall nearly every night, sawing away on his violin, running his fingers up and down the piano keys, or blowing a lively tune on his harmonica. He put value on pursuing what a body felt it was called to do, so much that in his eyes, following the heart was more important than tradition. So when Mama had called to a younger Ellie, ready to march her to the sewing basket, Wilburn had taken one look at his daughter’s downcast blue eyes, a smaller version of his own blue eyes, and created various methods to distract his wife.

  He might ask Linnea for a haircut, mention that he would sure appreciate some of her famous apple pie, ask her to show him which of the projects she had lined up for him that she most wanted finished around their modest home. He might even say, “Linnea, my love, dance with me.” Then he’d pull his wife into his arms and spin her around the parlor, her long skirt swishing out in a billow which her husband managed to avoid tripping on. A head taller than his wife, long and lithe, Wilburn still managed to match his steps to hers.

  “Oh, Wilburn!” Linnea protested, sending a look of devotion up at his grinning face, even though the lines on her forehead made it look as if she was trying to be stern.

  While her mother was distracted, Ellie escaped outside to roam the nearby woods in search of perfect pieces of wood to carve. In the absence of their daughter, Wilburn often played his harmonica while his wife sewed, the two of them perfectly content in one another’s company.

  On one occasion, Ellie walked into the kitchen and caught her papa kissing the back of Mama’s neck. Papa pulled away with a grin, while Mama ducked her head and rubbed the spot as if trying to take away the feel of his lips. “Wilburn, you stop this nonsense and go out and chop more wood,” Linnea commanded.

  “Yes, my love.”

  Now that Papa was gone, Linnea seemed determined to get her daughter to spend more time with needles and thread, as if that might bring him back, inviting her to dance. She had shown Ellie how to use enough pins around the hem to keep the fabric flat and even, and to take small stitches while sewing the pieces of fabric together.

  But pinning bored Ellie nearly to tears. There were much more important things to do than take fine stitches in a long seam. Ellie couldn’t help pointing out that her seams were longer than most, since she was taller than Mama. “I am content with my old dresses,” Ellie insisted.

  “But they are too short,” Linnea pointed out. “And you needn’t complain about your height. You’re not as tall as your father, you know.” Linnea turned suddenly and dashed a hand at her eyes.

  Ellie’s heart lurched. She hadn’t meant to make Mama cry. The sting of missing Papa pricked at her, making it hard to breathe. Bending over her work, she decided it was better to stop complaining and simply get the job over with. In the silence, Mama left her alone, so Ellie used her time well, getting the project done with big, impatient stitches on the pink calico that her mother had chosen for her.

  The final loathsome stitch was made while Linnea was in the kitchen sifting flour into a bowl and cutting lard and salt into it. Mama made sure to bake two pans of biscuits for dinner so that Ellie’s 17-year-old twin brothers wouldn’t leave the table hungry.

  Ellie hastily tied a knot at the end of the thread as her mother had shown her, sticking the needle halfway through at the point of her last stitch, then winding the thread around the needle twice. Last of all, she pulled the needle the rest of the way through, making the thread she’d twisted around it form a knot.

  Snipping the thread, Ellie hurried to her small bedroom tucked under the sloping roof shared by the kitchen. Her parents’ larger room was the on the other side of the living room, which was simply an extension of the kitchen, and her brothers shared the upstairs with its steeply sloping roof.

  After pulling on her new dress, Ellie tied the bow in back, which made one side of her dress pull up higher on her waist than the other. It didn’t matter to her, but she untied the bow and retied it more loosely, hoping to keep Mama from noticing. Ellie had no intention of unpicking the threads and resewing it.

  When she walked back into the living room, Linnea was wiping her hands on a towel. She looked up and stopped as if her hands had turned to stone. Her dark-eyed gaze slid up and down the new dress. “Did you press that?”

  Ellie pinched the stiff new skirt fabric between her fingers, hoping that Mama wouldn’t notice that she’d cut the skirt narrower than the pattern. She simply didn’t want the bother of all that fabric tangling around her legs in case she felt like running. “I pressed as I went along.” The truth was, she’d used the heavy old iron on a few of the pieces she’d cut out, but not every single one. If there were no coals in the stove to get the iron heated enough to press the wrinkles out, Ellie didn’t want to be bothered with building a fire. Besides, some of the pieces were so small, they seemed practically unnecessary. How would anyone even notice if they were ironed flat or not?

  “Do you remember I told you the dress goes together best if ironed first?” Linnea hung the cloth on a wooden dowel next to the sideboard and moved closer. “Once the whole
thing’s done, you press it again.”

  Ellie took a step toward the door. “Seems like pressing twice is once too much.”

  “Not if you want to look your best.”

  “I’m just going to the train station, not to church,” Ellie said, putting her hand on the door latch. “I want to meet the train.”

  Mama’s gaze moved from the dress to Ellie’s haphazard job of pinning up her hair. Linnea reached up to tuck the white streak running down the side of Ellie’s head down among the dark strands. Ellie tolerated her fussing. She was used it. Except for the white strands, Ellie’s hair was the same dark color as her father’s, with waves slipping over her shoulders as she brushed it out at night. Papa always told her the white streak was angel light that had come down with her from heaven, but the kids in Rambling, Colorado, had other, less attractive ideas about its origin.

  Some of the girls whispered and laughed behind their hands while the boys chanted, “Skunk Girl, Skunk Girl, pee-yu!” Holding their noses, they circled her, watching for a reaction as keenly as an owl searched for mice to pounce on and devour.

  Ellie’s initial embarrassment gave way to anger. She managed to get in some licks at the laughing boys ducking away from her long arms swinging their way. If she happened to catch hold of one, she flung him to the ground and pierced him with a blue-eyed stare from her impressive height.

  Linnea sighed. “I don’t understand why you want to meet the train.”

  Ellie wasn’t about to tell her mother that she wanted to be the first to take a look at the new shipment of woodworking tools. Mr. Cready at the general store told her last week that he expected the shipment to come in on the next train. Once at the station, Ellie could follow the shipment to the general store, watch the wooden crates pried open with crowbars, and look at the tools all she wanted. She might even purchase some, if the price was not too dear. If anyone looked askance, she could always say they were for one of her brothers.

  Linnea sighed. “At least be sure to wear a bonnet.”

  Ellie grabbed her blue bonnet from the hook by the door.

  “That doesn’t match,” Linnea said. “I’ll just have to make you a new one from the pink scraps.”

  Ellie bit her lips together to keep from reminding her mother that she had wanted to sew a blue dress, but mom had insisted on pink, declaring it as Grandma’s favorite color. Ellie had no way of knowing Grandma’s favorite color, but she couldn’t help but wonder if Mama’s real reason was because she thought that pink might somehow influence her daughter to go after more feminine pursuits.

  Ellie couldn’t help that she loved working with wood. Aside from the occasional nick of the blade on a finger, which was easily disguised with a pair of gloves, Ellie couldn’t understand why her mother was so against her woodcarving. Even when Ellie pointed at the gracefully curved legs on Mama’s favorite French clawfoot dish cupboard inherited from her grandmother and said, “Someone had to carve them into such feminine shapes. It could very well have been a woman,” Mama remained unconvinced.

  Papa had liked carving wood, too. His most ambitious project had been the kitchen table legs. Is that why Mama thought it was a masculine occupation?

  Ellie stepped outside in her pink dress, swinging the blue bonnet up onto her head. She took in a big breath of freedom just as a gust of wind tried to whip the bonnet from her grasp. Ellie tied the bonnet tightly under her chin and strode toward the train station beneath a spring sky tumbling with skiffs of clouds busy crowding out the smooth blue expanse of Colorado sky.

  As she hurried along, Ellie stumbled a couple of times, annoyed that the pointed toes of her boots momentarily caught on the big stitches in her skirt hem before slipping free. Picking up her skirt seemed to solve the problem, and she hurried along the dirt road, between rows of trees filling out with fresh green leaves swaying overhead.

  Before reaching the station, Ellie spotted the far-off plume of steam flowing sideways in the rising wind, the end of it feathering out in the breeze like a galloping horse’s mane. She should easily get to the station ahead of the train, just as she wished.

  This had to be the train bringing the shipment of new woodworking tools. Ellie felt the comforting weight of her whittling knife, whetstone, a just begun rabbit carving, and a nearly finished frog with a wide grin in her pocket. Her pocket was the most carefully crafted piece of her dress, sturdy enough to carry her carvings. Ellie noticed Polly Agar on the path ahead of her, lugging a bucket heavy enough that it tipped her sideways. Polly was made of angles, with long, thin arms and a waist a man could wrap his hands around. While crossing the plains with her parents, Polly was orphaned at a young age. As near as Polly could recall of her birthdays, she was coming up on seventeen.

  As Ellie drew closer, she couldn’t help admiring the practicality of Polly’s skirt hem, threadbare as it was, swaying up above her ankles. There was no need to hold it up with a hand if it was a few inches off the ground. Some might consider it indecent, but Ellie decided that Polly’s scuffed high top boots, each with a few missing buttons, covered her ankles adequately. Ellie considered re-hemming her skirt shorter, but shuddered at the thought of threading another needle.

  Polly’s shorter skirt was not the result of fashion, however. It was all the people who’d taken her in as an orphan would provide. While Mr. and Mrs. Demar gave Polly shelter, food, and two dresses that they were slow to replace when they got too small, it seemed the main reason they took her in was for her to do all their chores.They were stingy with words of praise and quick with another task to do.

  When Ellie drew abreast of Polly, she saw that her normally cheerful face was mottled from dried tears. The frizz of red hair that insisted on escaping her bun spread out around the edges of her frayed bonnet.

  Putting aside her hurry, Ellie slowed to keep pace and said, “Hi, Polly.”

  Polly worked up a smile. “Hey, Ellie.” Then the corners of her mouth dropped like a stone in a pond.

  “Where are you headed?”

  “I’ve got to take this bucket of milk to the general store before it spoils.”

  Ellie glanced down at the wooden cover over the bucket. “Wouldn’t it be easier to use a wheelbarrow?”

  Polly paused and switched the pail of milk to her other hand, tipping her at an awkward angle in the other direction. “Mr. Demar says it’d slosh too much.”

  “Well,” Ellie began. Then she paused, wondering if she could spare the time. Squaring her shoulders, she said, “Let me carry it for you a ways.”

  Polly shook her head, the curls around her face twisting in the breeze. “No need, Ellie.” Her voice was lifeless. “I’m used to it.”

  The depth of Polly’s sadness made Ellie bold. Hoping to stir up pleasant memories, Ellie asked, “Do you remember anything about your parents?”

  Polly stumbled as her face lit up. Ellie reached out and grabbed her arm to steady her, but Polly did not seem to notice. “Oh, yes! My Pa had hair like mine. He had freckles, too.” She turned to Ellie. “Do I have freckles?”

  Ellie scanned Polly’s light complexion, as smooth as cream. “No, I can’t say that you do.” For the first time, Ellie realized that if Polly weren’t so thin, she might actually look rather pretty.

  Polly sighed. “He was jolly. Liked a joke.” She gave Ellie a mischievous grin. “Whenever he passed gas, he’d say it was a spider barking.” Polly chuckled. “Spiders don’t bark. He always told me folks shouldn’t be ashamed of what their bodies were made up to do, ‘cause it’s all natural.” Polly blinked and added, “and he was the best spitter I ever knew. He could win a spitting contest against anyone. I tried to beat him, but his spittle just flew out so far you could hardly see where it landed.” A dreamy smile crept over her face. “He used to call me his little frog princess.”

  Ellie laughed. “Why a frog?”

  “Because when I was a baby, I folded my legs up like a little frog to sleep.”

  “That’s nice,” Ellie said wi
th a smile, picturing a baby Polly folded up a like a redheaded frog, secure in the love of a father watching over her as she slept.

  Tears pricked the backs of Ellie’s eyes. She knew what it was like to lose a father. She swallowed, then asked, “How about your mother?”

  “She had the sweetest voice in the world. She’d sing me to sleep, and we sang while we did chores. She never said I was underfoot or in the way. She never struck me.” With a sniff, Polly dropped her smile and her gaze, shuffling along with her eyes trained on the ground.

  After a few more steps, Polly mumbled, “You don’t need to walk with me.”

  “I don’t mind,” Ellie said, half meaning it.

  Polly glanced up. “You were heading somewhere on the run. I don’t want to keep you. Go ahead, get where you’re going.” Polly pulled up another smile from her reserves.

  “If you’re certain,” Ellie said.

  “Certainly.”

  Ellie strode ahead of Polly, then stopped as her heavy pocket gave her a bump. “Just a minute.” Ellie pulled out the carved frog. At a glance, it appeared to be finished, even though in her eyes, it still needed some work. Before she could second guess herself, Ellie held it out to Polly. “Here.”

  Polly halted, staring at the carving sitting snugly on Ellie’s palm, grinning up at her. “For me?” she whispered.

  “Yes.” Ellie's spirits lifted at the joy she saw filling Polly’s eyes.

  Setting the bucket down, Polly took the frog in both hands. A genuine smile transformed her features, making her positively radiant. “Thank you, Ellie,” Polly said, stroking the wooden frog’s head with her finger. “I love it.”

  “Welcome,” Ellie replied. Even though the frog was not her best work, seeing how Polly gazed at it made it look like it belonged in a treasure box among golden jewelry.

  After a last loving look at the cheerful wooden face, Polly carefully tucked the frog into her pocket and picked up the bucket again. This time, she swung down the road in her tipped-over gait with a spritely step, the wind whipping her shorter skirt merrily around her legs.

  Ellie hurried toward the station, feeling happy until she heard a voice behind her that made her hunch her shoulders. “Mornin’, Eleanor,” David Unger called.

  She didn’t want to stop, but courtesy dictated at least an acknowledgement. Glancing behind her, she saw David rapidly gaining ground. Ellie moved her lips as little as possible to reply, “Mornin’,” and tried to take longer steps. But it was no use.

  Big David’s long strides soon brought him level to her, where he slowed to keep pace. His broad face creased into a smile. Suddenly feeling as if she was being choked, Ellie reached up to loosen her bonnet ribbons a bit. “What are you doing down this way?” David asked.

  Ellie tried to quell her impatience. David was friends with her brothers, particularly Jesse. Lately he’d been spending time with her, thinking somehow that friendship with her brothers gave him leave to pester Ellie with invitations for walks and dances at the community flings. He’d even claimed he’d taken up carving, alongside building apple wood chairs, but Ellie had yet to see a single carved piece of his making.

  He was nice enough in his own awkward way, but she’d seen him chew with his mouth open and blow his nose into his fingers too many times to feel anything but tolerance toward him. She didn’t know how to make him understand that he was not right for her, unless she told him straight out. And since he hadn’t declared his ultimate intentions, it would be awkward to bring it up.

  Glad for the sight of the station up ahead, Ellie didn’t remind him of the incoming tool shipment. He likely already knew. With her gaze fastening on a tall stranger standing on the platform, she said, “I’m here for the train.” For the space of the flicker of a hummingbird wing, Ellie thought it might be her father. But that was impossible. While this man might be of a similar height to Papa, he had lighter hair beneath his short top hat. His frock coat swayed in the wind as he faced away from her, watching the train that was nearly at the station.

  “There he is again,” David said.

  “Who?”

  “That fella in the funny hat. He’s been here the last three times the train’s pulled in, always starin’ down everyone gettin’ off, yet always leaving by himself.”

  Ellie took another look at the stranger as she neared him, her boot heels clacking against the wooden platform raised three feet above the tracks, which made it easier for passengers to get on and off. She couldn’t help wondering who, or what, the stranger was waiting for.

  Just as she stopped behind him, the wind gusted against her skirts, making her brace herself with a sudden, unladylike jolt of her limbs. David reached toward her, but Ellie shied away from his touch, turning on one foot as the wind swirled beneath her bonnet, tugging the loose bow apart and sawing the ribbons against the tender skin at her throat as they parted. Her bonnet lifting from her head, Ellie grabbed her smarting neck with one hand and instinctively flung her other hand toward her bonnet sailing off on the breeze, accidentally striking the man beside her.

  The stranger’s startled blue eyes turned toward her, his straight nose leading to a square jaw opening in surprise as she tipped out over thin air. Heart rising in her throat, Ellie tried to take a steadying step that would have surely saved her if only her boot toe hadn’t caught in one of the wide hem stitches. As effectively as shackles on her ankles, her foot was arrested so that she couldn’t stop herself from toppling over the edge of the platform. In a vain attempt to catch her balance, Ellie windmilled her arms in a most unladylike fashion, twisting them around so hard that the broad stitches in her left armhole snapped. She felt a sharp tug and a sudden breeze under her arm just before hitting the train track with a painful thump. Her head bounced off the rail, leaving her dazed and scarcely feeling the bruises on her body.

  The oncoming train approached through dreamlike clouds of steam. Gasping for air, Ellie stared at it growing bigger and bigger, wondering if it was real. The tracks vibrating beneath her made her head spin. Get up, get up, get up! her mind screamed, but her body didn’t obey.

  Why, oh, why had she taken longer stitches when her mother wasn’t looking?