Redeeming Love (32 page)

Joseph did most of the talking. “I think I’ve just about convinced my family to leave New York and come west. Mama said the only way she’ll agree is if I’ll take a wife.”

Michael grinned across the table at him. “Did you tell her to bring you one?”

“I didn’t have to. She already had one picked out and packed up, ready to come west.”

Dinner finished, Joseph poured coffee. The two men talked politics and religion. Neither agreed with the other’s viewpoint, but the conversation continued amicably unabated. She was drowsy. She didn’t care that California had become a state or that mining companies were taking over the gold country or that Joseph insisted Jesus was a prophet and not the Messiah he was waiting for. She didn’t care if the river was rising with the rain. She didn’t care if a shovel cost three hundred dollars while a new plow cost seventy.

“We’ve put Angel to sleep,” Joseph observed, adding another log to the fire. “The second bedroom is right through that door.” Joseph watched Michael lift his wife tenderly and carry her in. He swirled the coffee in his cup and finished it. He had been watching Angel since spotting her by his Franklin stove. She was one of those rare beauties that caught a man’s breath no matter how many times he had seen her before.

When Michael came back in and sat down, Joseph smiled. “I’ll never forget the look on your face the first time you saw her. I thought you were crazy when I heard you married her.” Good men were often destroyed by obsessions with fallen women, and he had worried about Michael. Joseph had never known a more mismatched pair. A saint and a sinner. “You seem pretty much the same.”

Michael laughed and took up his cup. “Did you expect me to change?”

“I expected her to feast on your heart.”

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Michael’s smile altered, hinting at pain. “She does,” he said and tipped his cup.

“She’s changed,” Joseph said. She didn’t have the glow of a woman in love. There was no sparkle in her eyes or flush to her cheeks. But there was something different about her. “I can’t put my finger on it exactly. But she doesn’t look as hard as I remember.”

“She never was hard. It was pretense.”

Joseph didn’t argue, but he remembered well the beautiful soiled dove who walked Main Street every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. He had come out to watch her like all the others, enraptured by her pale, perfect beauty. But she was hard all right, hard as granite. Michael was just seeing her through the eyes of a man who loved her far more deeply than a woman like her deserved. But then, maybe it was Michael’s kind of loving that was changing her. God knew Angel would never have come across a man like Michael before. Not in her trade. He would be something new to her. Joseph laughed silently at himself.

Michael had been something new to
him,
too. He was one of those rare men who lived what he believed, not once in a while, but every hour of every day, even when the going wasn’t easy. As gentle a man as he was, as tender as was his heart, there was nothing weak about Michael Hosea. He was the strongest-minded man Joseph had ever met. A man like Noah. A man like the shepherd-king, David. A man after God’s own heart.

Joseph prayed Angel wouldn’t rip that heart out of him and leave him destroyed for the rest of the human race.

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Eighteen

So whatever you wish that men

would do to you, do so to them.

J E S U S , M A T T H E W

7 : 1 2

Wagon loaded with their purchases, Michael and Angel started for home early the next morning. Michael made a stop at the seed store and purchased what he needed for spring planting. On the way through town, he stopped again at a small building. He came around the wagon and lifted her down. Angel hadn’t realized he intended to go to church until he was almost to the door and she heard singing. She pulled her hand from his and shook her head. “You go ahead. I’ll wait out here.”

Michael smiled. “Give it a try. For me.” He took her hand again. When they went inside, her heart pounded so fast she thought she was choking on it. Several people glanced up and stared at her. She could feel heat pouring into her face as more people noticed their late arrival. Michael found space for them to sit.

Angel clenched her hands in her lap and kept her head down. What was she doing in a church? A woman down the row leaned forward to look at her. Angel stared straight ahead. Another in the row in front looked back over her shoulder. The place seemed full of women—plain, hardworking women like those who had turned their backs on Mama. They would turn their backs on her, too, if they knew what she was.

One dark-haired lady in a doe brown bonnet was studying her. Angel’s 225

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mouth went dry. Did they know already? Did she bear the mark on her forehead?

The preacher was looking straight at her and talking about sin and damnation. Sweat broke out on her, and she felt cold. She was going to be sick.

Everyone stood and started singing. She had never heard Michael sing before. He had a deep, rich voice, and he knew the words without the hymnal offered by the man next to him. He belonged here. He believed all this.

Every word of it. She stared forward again and looked into the dark eyes of the preacher.
He knows, just like Mama’s priest knew.

She had to get out! When they all sat down again, that preacher would probably point straight at her and ask what she was doing in his church. In a panic, she pressed past all those down the row. “Let me by, please,” she said, frantic to get out. Everyone was staring at her now. One man grinned at her as she hurried toward the back door. She couldn’t get her breath. She leaned against the wagon and fought down the nausea.

“Are you all right?” Michael said.

She hadn’t expected him to follow her. “I’m fine,” she lied.

“Would you just sit by me?”

She turned and looked up at him. “No.”

“You don’t have to take part in the service.”

“The only way you’ll get me back inside that place is to drag me.”

Michael studied her strained face. She hugged herself and glared up at him.

“Amanda, I haven’t been in a church in months. I need the fellowship.”

“I didn’t say you had to leave.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes,” she said and reached up to the wagon seat. Michael lifted her. She felt steadier at his touch. Regretting her harshness, she wanted to explain, but when she turned, he was already disappearing into the church. She felt bereft.

They were singing again, loud enough to be heard clearly outside.

“Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war.…” It was a war. A war against God and Michael and the whole world. Sometimes she wished she 226

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didn’t have to fight anymore. She wished she were back in the valley. She wished it were the way it had been in the beginning, just her and Michael.

She wished Paul had stayed in the mountains. Maybe things would have worked then.

Not for long. Sooner or later, the world comes charging in.

You just don’t belong, Angel. You never will.

When the service finally ended, others came out ahead of Michael. Every one of them looked straight at her where she sat on the wagon seat, waiting for him. Several women stopped to talk together in a small group. Were they talking about her? She kept watching the door for Michael. When he appeared, he was with the minister. They spoke for a few minutes and then shook hands. Michael came down the steps, and the dark-suited man looked at her.

Her heart started pounding again. She could feel the sweat breaking out on her skin as Michael strode toward her. He stepped up, took the reins and set off without a word.

“It didn’t even look like a real church,” she said as he drove down the hill toward the river road. “There was no priest.”

“The Lord isn’t bound by denomination.”

“My mother was Catholic. I didn’t say I was.”

“So why’re you so afraid to be inside a church?”

“I wasn’t afraid. It made me sick. All those hypocrites.”

“You were scared to death.” He took her hand. “Your palms are still sweating.” She tried to pull her hand free, but his tightened. “If you’re convinced there’s no God, what are you afraid of?”

“I don’t want any part of some great eye in the sky who’s waiting for a chance to squash me like a bug!”

“God doesn’t condemn. He forgives.”

She tore her hand free. “The way he forgave my mother?”

He looked at her with that maddeningly quiet assurance. “Maybe she never forgave herself.”

His words were like a blow. Angel stared straight ahead. What was the use where Michael was concerned? He didn’t understand anything. It was as though the poor fool had never even lived in this world.

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He decided to press it. “You think maybe that could’ve been part of it?”

“Whatever my mother believed, it doesn’t mean I belong in a church any more than she ever did.”

“If Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary belonged, I think there might be a place for you.”

“I don’t know a single one of those women.”

“Rahab was a prostitute. Ruth slept at the feet of a man she wasn’t married to, on a public threshing floor. Bathsheba was an adulteress. When she found she was pregnant, her lover plotted the murder of her husband. And Mary became pregnant by Someone other than the man she was betrothed to marry.”

Angel stared at him. “I didn’t know you made a habit of running with fast women.”

Michael laughed. “They’re named in the lineage of Christ. In the beginning of the book of Matthew.”

“Oh,” she said blandly and gave him a resentful glance. “You think you can march me right into a corner, don’t you? Well, tell me something. If all that garbage is true, why didn’t the priest speak to my mother? It seems she fit right in to such exalted company.”

“I don’t know, Amanda. Priests are only men. They’re not God. They come with their own personal prejudices and faults just like anyone else.”

He snapped the reins lightly over the horses’ backs. “I’m sorry about your mother, but I’m worried about you.”

“Why? Are you afraid if you don’t save my soul, I’ll go to hell?”

She was mocking him. “I think you’ve had a good taste of it already.” He snapped the reins again. “I don’t plan on preaching at you, but I don’t plan on giving up what I believe, either. Not to make you comfortable. Not for anything.”

Her fingers tightened around the brace. “I didn’t ask you to.”

“Not in so many words, but there’s a certain pressure brought to bear on a man when his wife is sitting and waiting outside in a wagon.”

“How about when a man drags his wife into church?”

He glanced at her. “I guess you’ve got a point. I’m sorry.”

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breath, she said, “I couldn’t stay inside, Michael. I just couldn’t.”

“Not this time, maybe.”

“Not ever.”

“Why not?”

“Why should I sit with the same children who called me foul names?

They’re all the same. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the docks of New York or a muddy hillside in California.” She gave a bleak laugh. “There was a boy whose father visited Mama at the shack. He was real regular. His son would call Mama and me names, obscene names. So I told him where his father was on Wednesday afternoons. He didn’t believe me, of course, and Mama said I had done a terrible, cruel thing to him. I couldn’t see how the truth would make things worse, but a few days later, out of curiosity I guess, that boy followed his father and found out for himself it was true. I thought, now there, he knows, and he’ll leave me and Mama alone. But no. He
hated
me after that. He and his nice little friends used to wait at the end of the alley, and when I would go to market for Mama, they would throw garbage on me. And every Sunday morning I would see them in mass, all scrubbed and dressed up and sitting by their papas and mamas.” She looked up at Michael. “The priest
spoke
to them. No, Michael. I won’t sit in a church. Not ever.”

Michael took her hand again and wove his fingers with hers. “God had nothing to do with it.”

Her eyes felt strangely hot and gritty. “He didn’t stop it either, did he?

Where’s the mercy you’re always reading about? I never saw any given to my mother.” Michael was silent for a long time after that.

“Did anyone ever say anything nice to you?”

Her mouth curved into a wry smile. “A lot of men said I was pretty. They said they were just waiting for me to grow up.” Her chin jerked up and she glanced away.

Her hand was cold in his. For all her defiance, he felt her pain. “What do you see when you look in the mirror, Amanda?”

She didn’t answer for a long time, and when she did, she spoke so softly, he almost didn’t hear. “My mother.”

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