Titans (3 page)

N
athan lifted his gaze to the man whose vague likeness to him he could not deny. “Why are you here?”

Trevor Waverling straightened his shoulders, the fine tailoring of his wool coat accentuating their power and breadth. “To claim you as my son. To take you home with me if you will go.”

“Why?”

The rapid-fired question caught Trevor by patent surprise. His mouth opened before his mind could conjure an answer. “Why?” he repeated after appearing to grapple for a reply. “Because I would like to have you in my life, that's why. I want to give you a better one than the one you have here.”

“There is no better life than the one I have here.”

The man moved to stand over Nathan. “How do you know, Nathan? This place is all you've known. I'm a wealthy man, and I want to share my good fortune with you. If things work out, I'd like you to be my heir—”

“What if things don't work out?” Nathan challenged. “What then? Would I be fired as your heir?”

Again Trevor made to reply but appeared confounded for an answer. “This is all turning out badly. I'm implying things I don't mean and giving you a wrong impression. If you and I could just go somewhere and talk, let me tell you about myself… what I have to offer…”

Abruptly, Nathan stood up. “I'm not interested. This is my home, and these are my parents. I'm not going anywhere with you.”

Trevor spread his hands imploringly. “Nathan, please. Don't you want to know about your father?”

“Did you want to know about your son before now?”

“No, he did not!” Millicent snapped.

“All right! All right!” Trevor said, his voice rising on a sharp note of impatience. “I admit it. I had you investigated. It's what has to be done when you're in my position, but I swear I did not know your mother was pregnant when I left her. I didn't know until one of my salesmen passed through Gainesville six years ago and reported that he's seen a boy in a general store who looked enough like me to be my son. He casually mentioned it to me, making a joke of it by asking if I'd had a one-night stand in a burg in Cooke County.”

Millicent uttered a cry of protest and made to object, but Leon had gained control of himself. “Be quiet, Millicent,” he said in a voice of quiet authority. “Nathan needs to hear this.” Millicent cut a startled look at her husband but set her lips in a thin line of silent defiance.

Trevor continued. “So I sent a trusted employee here to look into the situation. He took your picture…” Trevor withdrew a money case from an inner pocket and removed a photograph he offered to Nathan. It was a shot of him standing by the road fence, and he remembered the afternoon a man asked if he could take his picture against the background of the flowing wheat field behind him. He had told Nathan he was a photographer shooting scenes for
Progressive Farmer
magazine.

“When I saw that picture, I knew instantly that you were my son,” Trevor said, taking back the photograph. “I looked just like you at fourteen. I didn't come for you because… well, how could I? You were still in school, apparently happy here with your mother and… the man you thought was your father. I didn't want to break that up, but then, once you were a couple of years graduated from high school, I thought it my right and obligation to show myself, so I waited until today, your twentieth birthday, as an appropriate time to make myself known.”

Nathan stared at him.
Today was his birthday?
It should have been a day he remembered. Turning twenty was an important milestone to a boy, but he had forgotten, easy enough to do now that he was out of school and each day flowed into the next with no guidepost but seasons to mark important events.

But his family had forgotten, too. “How did you know today was my birthday?” he asked the stranger.

“I had your birth record at the county courthouse checked.”

Leon turned to Millicent. “Did you bake him a cake?”

“I… forgot. I had my mind on nothing but that today was wash day…”

“And the day you planned to finish sewin' Lily's dress for that party she's been invited to in Denton,” Leon said, his voice cold.

“God, Millicent!” Trevor's glare at Millicent was filled with loathing. “I see the way things are around here. Nathan is worked like a hired hand, but you make dresses for your daughter and scrape together every dime to send your other son to Columbia University.” In his disgust, he looked as if he could have spat on the floor at Millicent's feet. She rebutted by folding her arms and turning her head to the fire in scornful disregard of his condemnation.

Leon addressed Nathan, who'd listened in dismayed wonder at the bitter revelations of which he'd been unaware. “It breaks my heart to say it,” Leon said, “but it can't do no harm listenin' to the man, Nathan. He
is
your father.”

Trevor gestured imploringly with his hands again. They were large and powerful but smooth and well kept. “If there is some place we could go to speak privately…”

Stunned, confused, hurt, Nathan stammered, “There's no place. My brother and sister need to come in. It's cold in the barn, and my brother will want to study in our room.”

“Then let's you and I go to the barn to talk,” Trevor suggested. “Please, Nathan.”

The stranger had said
please
twice, not easy for a man like him, Nathan figured. He felt disoriented, as if he'd been caught in a snowstorm where every familiar landmark had been blanked out. “Not tonight,” he said. “I need time to think about… all I've heard, then I'll see.”

Disappointment settled in the corners of Trevor's mouth and dulled his hopeful gaze. “I suppose I can ask for no more than that. In your position, I would do the same. All right, then.” He opened the leather case again, inserted the photograph, and removed a printed card. “Here's the information you need to contact me when you're ready to hear me out. It contains my business address, or…” He extracted a pen and scribbled on the back of the card. “You can write to me at my residence. As you can see, they're both located in Dallas. You're welcome to come to my place of business, or if you prefer, I can meet you in Gainesville. I can even meet you here again, if you like.”

“Not here, Trevor.” Millicent glowered at him. “Never again on the soil of my family's land, you hear me? I'll shoot you if I ever see your face around here again.” She swiveled her sharp gaze to Nathan. “And take that dog out of this room right now, Nathan. You know he's not allowed in here.”

Nathan turned his attention to his mother. A stranger he'd never seen before had showed up on her doorstep to announce himself as his father, and she was mindful only of her hatred for the man and the forbidden presence of her son's dog in her parlor. She had not shown the least concern for his shock, his disbelief, his pain. A heartsick truth merged with the other numbing revelations. His mother did not love him. She never had and never would. Under his quiet scrutiny, Millicent's expression altered. A faint awareness wafted across it as if she recognized he would never think of her again in the same way. Nathan patted his leg. “Zak, come with me, boy.”

He left the parlor, and without a word of protest, as though conscious the boy had moved beyond any further attempt at discourse, his parents and the stranger let him go. Nathan walked out into the fading dusk, oblivious to the sting of cold air on his face. His hunger pangs had disappeared. The drop in temperature had no effect on him through his lightweight work jacket. The carriage driver's head popped up in the window of the coach, where he had gone to get out of the cold. “Is me boss coming soon?” he called.

“He has no reason to stay,” Nathan called back without slowing down.

Randolph and Lily were huddled in a bed of straw under a horse blanket. They had taken turns drinking from the milk bucket. “Coast is clear for you two,” he said before his voice broke.

Lily threw off the blanket and rushed toward him. “Nathan, what's wrong? Who is the man in the house?”

“I have no idea.”

“Why is he here?” Randolph asked.

“He came on a family matter,” Nathan said.

Lily peered uneasily into his face. “What's he done to you?”

“He… broke something that can't be fixed.”

Only then did Nathan realize he still held the stranger's business card. He gazed at it, the name Trevor Waldo Waverling like a hot brand searing his eyeballs. Only then did the knowledge that he was not a Holloway fully hit him. It drove through him with such force he grasped the lodgepole to keep from keeling over. Tears cloaked his eyes. His windpipe closed. He was a Waverling. The blood of the man who had looked after him tenderly since he was born, who had taught him to walk, read, ride, farm, the man he loved and believed he took after, did not pump through his veins.

“Oh, my God! Are you crying?” Randolph squealed.

Lily touched his arm and asked in a plaintive key, “Nathan, what is it?”

“Leave him be, and you children go to the house. Your supper is waiting,” Leon ordered from the doorway.

Randolph let out a huff of relief. “Finally,” he said. “Do we have to bring the milk?”

“If you want any with your supper.”

With a sigh of being put upon, Randolph grabbed the handle of the bucket, but Lily stood on tiptoe and kissed her big brother's ear. “It will be all right,” she murmured softly and hurried to follow Randolph from the barn.

B
ut it would not be all right. Never again, Nathan knew. Leon shuffled toward him, shoulders hunched in his farmer's jacket, his hands plunged into the pockets of his overalls. “I wish I knew the words to say,” he said. From outside came the clop of horses and the squeak of carriage wheels pulling away. The man had come by coach expecting to stow him and his things in it for the return trip, Nathan reckoned. Otherwise, he'd have arrived by train.

Nathan shrugged and brushed at his eyes. “This has to be as hard on you as on me.”

Leon turned over a couple of buckets and set them on the barn floor. “In that I've lost a son as you have a father? Neither is true, Nathan. You've got to believe that. Kinship is not a matter of blood but of feelin's. You're my son. You always have been, and you always will be. And I'll be forever your father. Nothin' on God's green earth—no other man's claim—can undo that.” Once more, Leon pulled out the handkerchief stored in the pocket of his overalls. He blew into it, his eyes watering again.

“Still…” Nathan said, accepting the seat Leon offered. “The truth changes things, doesn't it?”

Leon sat down on the other bucket. Zak took a vigilant stand between them. “Only things, not feelin's.”

Nathan handed Leon the business card. “What kind of business is he in?”

Leon read aloud, “
WAVERLING TOOLS
. He told us his company primarily makes drillin' machinery for water and salt wells.”

“As if I would know or care anything about that.”

“He told us he'd been married twice, is divorced, and has one child, a retarded daughter named Rebecca, aged twelve. She lives with his mother—your grandmother. He's forty-six.”

“Do you believe he raped Mother?”

Leon returned the card and leaned on a hip to push the handkerchief back into his pocket. “I believe your mother believes it. I've never known for sure. She was the belle of Gainesville as well as Denton in her youth. As the beautiful only child of well-to-do parents and the darlin' of your mother's childless, rich godmother, she was spoiled to the core and grew up thinkin' the world was hers for the asking, like she's gotten Lily to believin'. I fell in love with her in the fourth grade when she enrolled in school, the prettiest little thing you ever saw. I carried her books. Made sure no one bothered her. I was like her big brother. She could tell me anything and did. I went to work for her folks on this farm when I was eighteen. I watched as the boys made a beeline to her door durin' her midschool years, and they followed her here after her time in finishin' school, but she kept 'em all danglin' until Trevor Waverling showed up in town. He must have been around twenty-five.”

Nathan had never heard any of this story before. “What brought him to Gainesville?”

“His aunt. She died and left him a saddle and tack shop she'd inherited from her husband. Trevor had no interest in runnin' a business in a small town like Gainesville, so he hung around until he sold it.”

“And that's when he met Mother.”

Leon got up and struck a match to the barn lantern. “Yep. I saw him only two, three times. He was a handsome devil. I heard the ladies were wild for him, but he had his sights set on your mother, at least accordin' to the way she tells it. He squired her about until the shop was sold, then vamoosed, leavin' her pregnant. Her daddy came to me. No decent man would have her, he said.” Leon's attempt at a wry grin failed as he sat back down on the bucket. “That's what the man actually said to me.”

Nathan had not liked his mother's father. Liam Barrows had no time for his first grandson and brushed him off like a pesky fly, but Nathan mainly disliked his grandfather because he treated his son-in-law like hired help. Today's disclosures had revealed the cause of the man's disaffection. He had died when Nathan was ten, succeeded by his grandmother who lived only a year afterward. The farm had then gone to his mother.

“Do you know if he was telling the truth when he said he didn't know that Mother was pregnant with me?” Nathan asked.

Leon plucked a piece of straw from a bale of hay and stuck it in his mouth. “Yeah, that part I believe. I'm not sayin' he'd have done anything about it, but I'm sure he didn't know.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because your mother didn't know, not until Trevor had been gone for two months.”

“So the reason she hates him is because he didn't marry her, baby or not?”

“That's the way I see it.”

“Fancy a woman hating a man all these years when she has the best husband alive and three good kids.”

“Trevor Waverling was the only man your mother couldn't have. She's never gotten over the insult. It's my view he wouldn't have had to rape her. Because of him, she was forced to marry a man beneath her and become a farmer's wife, a far cry from the life she'd expected to have, and she's never forgiven him for it.”

And gave birth to a son she didn't want, Nathan thought. So much was making sense now. It explained why his mother never looked directly at him but spoke to him from her profile. He gazed up at the open barn window where the first star of the evening had appeared. He could hardly stand the pain of admitting it, but he agreed with his father's view. He was not the child of rape, but he might as well have been for all the chance he'd had of winning his mother's love. “Wonder why the man has shown up now,” Nathan said.

Leon chewed on the straw. “Could be it's like what he said. He wants an heir.”

Nathan drew his jacket tighter around him. “Well, he's shown up twenty years too late, but I have a feeling there's more to his motive than that. Something else brought him here.”

“Then why don't you go find out what it is?” Leon said.

Nathan looked at him in surprise. “Why should I? I have no interest in knowing the man. Like you said, you're my father. What do I need him for?”

Leon shifted his weight and looked uncomfortable, sure signs to Nathan that something was on his mind he was reluctant to talk about. He felt another level of unease. “What is it, Dad?”

Leon spit out the chewed straw. “Well, you might as well hear all of it, son. Take the blows all at once. The healin' starts faster that way.”

“What are you talking about, Dad?”

“The farm, Nathan. It ain't comin' to you—or to me, but I married your mother knowin' that. The place is willed to Randolph and Lily.”

Nathan hopped up from the bucket. “
What? Why?
They don't know piddling about farming. They hate the place. They'll only sell it!”

“I know that. You know that. Millicent knows that, but it don't matter.”

Nathan plopped down again, too stunned to stand. “How could she, Dad? How
could
she? She knows how much I love the farm, that I live for it, that I'd be like a fish out of water anyplace else.”

“It don't matter, son. I wish I could say it did, she bein' your mother and all, but your feelin's for the farm don't matter a drop of spit to her, not when it comes to makin' sure Randolph and Lily are taken care of financially, and that's why…” Leon pulled in his lip.

A shiver ran over Nathan's flesh. “That's why what, Dad?”

“Your mother is puttin' the farm up for sale. She wants it sold and a house bought in Gainesville 'fore Randolph leaves for college.”

“
God!
” Nathan jumped up again, incredulous. He dragged his hand through his hair. “What will happen to you if she sells it?”

“She says I can go to work for the new owners or come live with her in town.”

Nathan reeled. He could almost feel the ground move under his feet. His steady, certain world had suddenly collapsed, and everything he believed, trusted, loved, lay shattered around him like the aftermath of a tornado. He pressed his palms to the sides of his head. “She doesn't care a whit for us, does she?”

Leon answered with a mirthless chuckle. “Oh, Millicent cares for us, son. It's just that she cares more for Randolph and Lily. It don't matter about me. Let's talk about you—this opportunity that's landed in your lap.”