Melting Carrie's Heart (Chapter One)

Chapter One: Desperation & Opportunity

(Columbus, Ohio, January1860)

"Hang her next. She partnered up with him!"

Taunts from the restless crowd at Carrie Maguire's back reached her at some level, but remembering, her husband, Pete's words of love whispered into her ear as he held her close took precedence. The vision of his handsome face on their wedding day danced before her teary eyes. She jerked the lapels of her coat up around her neck against another blast of arctic air which threatened to freeze her rock solid. If only her heart could follow suit.

"Where's our money, Mrs. Maguire?" Her name shouted out in sing-song fashion by another of the seething crowd at her back eroded what was left of her dignity.

What happened to the wonderful man she married a year ago? The stranger she visited in jail and viewed in the courtroom these past months bore no resemblance to her beloved as she remembered him. His happy-go-lucky personality and unflinching devotion to her vanished, replaced by a detached, uncommunicative man consigned to his fate. After the first month of one-sided visits, Pete forbade her from coming again. Before these events, he admired her tenacity. Her jaw clamped against the chattering of her teeth.

"Yeah, can't hang her until we get our hands on the money!" Nothing she said convinced them. If she had their money, they would have it.

Carrie remembered the way he called her Sweetheart and his tender touch when he would rub his knuckles across her cheek. And his kisses, oh my, they turned her knees into jelly and tasted like heaven. Her wedding day remains the happiest day of her life. Lacking any other family; he became her whole world.

She fixed her eyes on her husband's shoes avoiding the crowd, the harsh winter weather and the sight of the court building behind the gallows where Pete met his destiny. One gloved hand covered her mouth while the other crushed the life out of a handkerchief. His feet swayed back and forth from the momentum of falling through the sprung trap door. Tears ran down her face unheeded. Rope bound his ankles. One shoe fell from his foot, revealing the heel of a sock in desperate need of darning. She cringed with embarrassment by the proof of her wifely negligence. Good Lord, what's wrong with her? A hole in his sock is nothing next to bank robbery and the murder of a Pinkerton man.

Not an ounce of pity spared on his behalf. The tears on her face were ones of betrayal.

"Sheriff, make her confess!" Another of Pete’s former banking customer’s shouted.

Someone pushed her from behind, and she lurched forward. Her arms shot out to catch herself, but she recovered. She spun to stare at them--all the righteous town folk who turned out on this January day in spite of the near blizzard conditions to witness her husband's hanging. Several little children, bundled in multiple layers, perched on their father’s shoulders to better enjoy the view. One pot-bellied man to her left busily gorged himself on a sausage sandwich. The stench stung her nose and her stomach roiled as another crowd member bumped into her while swilling a bottle of whiskey.

So steadfast was their belief in her guilt, their stares never wavered. The prosecution failed to provide evidence of a female accomplice. She had called Columbus home for all twenty-two years of her life, but these are not the faces of neighbors and friends. The sheer amount of hate concentrated on her from the crowd sent chills down her spine.

"Step back," the Sheriff ordered as he waded into the crowd pushing the offenders away from her. "Mrs. Maguire hasn't been charged with a crime." He glanced over at her and shook his head. "The woman has just witnessed her husband hang. Show some common courtesy and move along now."

The Sheriff's words to the crowd were obligatory. The scowl on his face aimed toward her meant he had been one of Pete’s customers as well.

"She shouldn't be allowed to mingle with decent folk." Carrie recognized her landlady, Mrs. Meade's voice.

The same day the jury came back with a guilty plea, the landlady, dubbed her persona non grata. After pleading with the woman on the grounds of Christian decency, as if the pompous windbag possessed any, she had been allowed to stay until the day of the hanging.

The doctor climbed a ladder next to Pete’s hanging body. He placed a stethoscope on Pete’s chest and listened. He paused to ask the crowd for silence.

Carrie gasped. Please just take him down from there.

After checking with the stethoscope again, the doctor verified Pete's death. At the doctor's solemn nod, they cut him down and shuffled him into the utilitarian pine box on the wagon bed.

Carrie walked over and picked up his discarded shoe. As she stood, her nose almost touched the cut end of the dangling rope. She leaned away. She handed the shoe to one of the men standing on the bed of the wagon, and he pushed it back onto Pete's foot.

As she stepped back, a rotting head of cabbage hit the frozen ground in front of her, ruptured and rolled to a stop a few feet away. Little worm-like insects oozed out in every direction. Sickened she glanced up at the offender.

"Next time I won't be a throwing vegetables." A good Irish brogue usually amused her, but not this time. The Sheriff hassled the cabbage tosser backward into the crowd.

The undertaker's assistants reclaimed Carrie’s attention as they pounded on the coffin lid. She flinched at every hammer strike. Each nail pierced her heart killing any chance of future happiness. Fresh tears flowed down her cheeks as she trembled. The driver asked if she would like to ride with him to the grave site. She declined. The workers finished sealing her beloved husband into his final resting place and sat on the tailgate as the wagon pulled away. Why? Why did you turn to crime? What made you so desperate for $10,000 you’d rob your own bank? We didn't need the money.

The wind whistled from behind her toward the cemetery, chilling her to the marrow. Everything inside continued to be as dead and cold as Pete. Her coat and skirt flapped like a flag in a hurricane. She closed her eyes and released the long-held breath.

Carrie put all of Pete’s affairs in order. Once again, she's all alone and must leave town for her safety. As of this moment, Carrie Maguire ceases to exist, and Carrie McCall begins her life. Not many people get a chance to start over. She'll go west until the mention of the name Pete Maguire ceases to elicit a negative response.

A hard lesson learned, and not one she'll soon forget. When she spoke her vows on their wedding day, she had meant to keep every one of them. Yet, he'd become a stranger. She swore another man would never give her mean treatment. To guard against the possibility, she locked her wounded heart away beneath the betrayal, regret and lies. It felt like a stone in her chest.

***

Carrie boarded the paddle wheeler in Cincinnati as dusk approached. One of the boards in the paddlewheel must be loose or cracked and, as luck would have it, her economic aft cabin put her next to the contraption. The bang, bang kept waking her out of a sound. She closed her eyes tight and held a pillow over her ears, but no use. Since sleep alluded her, she decided to get up and read for a while. After shrugging into her night robe and lighting the oil lamp, she turned and froze.

"Don't holler, lady, I mean no harm." A raggedy boy of about 14 years of age crouched in the corner of her cramped room clasping his knees to his chest, not an arm’s length from her. "I won't steal nuttin'. I swear." He appeared out of place in the relative warmth and comfort of the riverboat cabin. He wore a shabby shirt and pants without hat or coat. One toe poked through the worn out leather of one shoe, and he shook from the cold.

“How did you get in here without me noticing, young man?”

"I'da skedaddled before mornin' so's you wouldn't even knowd of me."

“Why didn’t I feel a blast of cold air when you came in?” Carrie placed her fists on her hips and glared at the boy.

"I'm a stowaway, ma'am. If I manage to get on board, I find a cubbyhole of some kind to hide in, but tonight is colder than a miner's pecker." He paused to rub his arms.

Pulling the blanket from the cot, she wrapped the boiled wool expanse around his thin, shaking frame. "There. Much better." She tucked the edges in around him. "How did you get in here?" She couldn't resist pushing his dirty blond hair back away from his face.

"I'm sorry I picked your lock. I only cracked the door open enough for me to siddle through real quick so’s it wouldn’t wake you."

Something about him seemed familiar. "Does the lock still work?"

"Yes'um. I didn't break it." He kicked off his shoes and began rubbing his feet.

Carrie relocked her cabin door then turned to find terrified brown eyes pleading with her for mercy. "So, young man, what do people call you and when did you eat last?" She recognized the frightened, deserted look on the boy's face better than most.

"Billy, ma'am, and I ain't ate nothin' in days." He swiped his dirty finger under his runny nose and wiped the wet digit dry on the blanket.

"Well, I'm Carrie McCall. And if we can refrain from referring to miner's peckers again, I'll get us something to eat."

After eating, she tucked the cold, worn-out boy into her cot for some rest after losing the argument with herself to scrub him clean first.

"You wouldna snuff the lamp, would ya, ma'am?"

She thought him past the frightened night terror stage, but she recognized real fear in his eyes. "No. I got up to read for awhile. Why?"

"Only babies oughta be afraid of the dark, but you never knowd what'll happen to a feller in the devil's own darkness." He punched the pillow into submission and yanked the blanket up to his chin. "He won't be catchin' me unawares."

"Don't you worry about the devil. We've waltzed around a few ballrooms together before. He'd sooner take on a prairie twister than Carrie McCall again." He gave her a crooked smile as he rolled away from her toward the wall. Why did she assure him? He couldn't keep fear and loneliness from showing all over his dirty freckled face. She used to be a lost, lonely child like Billy.

She turned the lamp down low and took two steps to the wooden chair crowded into the functional, but small cabin. Instead of reading, she thought about Billy’s daily struggle to survive while watching him sleep. She kept herself busy by counting the number of thuds from the defective plank in the paddlewheel.

***

After four days of questions, conversation and sharing a little trust, Carrie found herself enjoying the afternoon sun and young Billy on the deck overlooking the Ohio River in spite of the nip in the air. During that time, she had arranged Billy’s passage with the captain. In exchange for passage to Paducah, Kentucky where they would transfer to a train to St Joseph, Missouri, the Captain put Billy to work wooding and daily cleaning of the deck. Not enviable jobs since the boiler consumed enough wood daily to heat a entire neighborhood back home and many of God’s creatures, accompanying their respective owners on the trip south, occupied the deck.

Carrie shared her plans for the future with Billy. Tomorrow morning they would arrive in Paducah. Decisions needed to be made.

"You cain't run a Pony Express Station all on your lonesome, Mrs. McCall.” Billy stood at the boat railing prodding goats out of his way with a stick. They were secured with rope, but had enough leeway to wander toward him. “I can pitch in. I'm horse smart and can do chores around the house or barn. Take me with you. I'll learn you how."

"Do you think we could make it work, Billy? I wrote Mr. Russell, and claimed my name was Carl McCall. I'm going to pass myself off as a man. That's going to be a hard enough hurdle to get past much less having a boy with me." Right at this moment submitting her application to run a relay station for the Pony Express seemed ludicrous. When she read about the new opportunity in The Columbus Gazette, a lonely relay station somewhere out west sounded ideal.

She needed to get far away from anyone with knowledge of Peter Maguire, a bank robbery and murderer of Hank Lipton, a Pinkerton man. She put her faith in the Lord. Because of her small frame and bust, she hoped to pass as male. If she tucked all her hair up in a hat and dressed in a work shirt, denim and boots, she might pull this sham off.

"You said the horses are gonna be high-grade, not average plow horses. Dem horses need special care, feedin’, and exercise." Billy turned toward her. "Mrs. McCall, I been doing stable work longer than I can ‘member and those riders’ll be coming in bone tired and starvin'. They’ll be a cussin' and chawin' tobacco. Men like to scratch and spread out ifn' you get my meanin'." He demonstrated by scratching at an armpit.

Carrie rolled her eyes and smiled, but his point held credence. She couldn't complain about the pay. Caring for the high-quality Pony Express horses would be a daunting task. Not to mention her biggest stumbling block, being a member of the fairer sex. She began to doubt her desperate plan.

What other option did she have? "What do you think I should do?" Carrie beamed her answer at him.

Billy smacked the boat railing in success. "First, we're gettin' to St. Jo early right?"

"Yes, about a week early."

"Good, for seven whole days I'll learn you enough so's you don't make a dang fool of yerself." He beamed at her like a toddler on Christmas morning. "How would you like a little brother? I'm house-trained and don't eat much to speak of."

She liked this little scamp. "You eat like a wolf." Carrie tousled his washed and cut blond hair. The raggedy boy had been replaced by a well-fed, cleaned-up young man. She got off at the next port to buy some essentials for him. Her funds dwindled fast. She prayed their ruse would work, and they’d land the job. "I'll tell you what. You teach me how to run a relay station, and I'll teach you how to read. Deal?"

You would have thought she had stolen his last peppermint stick by glare he gave her. "Aw, all right, if'n I have to learn to read to go, I will." Billy pushed away from the boat railing and came to sit next to her. "You don't even give a feller a fair fight."

In four short days, Billy showed her more compassion than the whole city of Columbus had in the last year. Like her, he lacked kith or kin which created an affinity between them. She figured with Billy's help, they'd make the station hum like a tuning fork. "You're sure there's no family to send you to? Promise me you're not a runaway. I would be devastated if I kept a boy from his parents."

"Nobody ain't never gave a damn about me before you, Mrs. McCall." He put his hand in hers and squeezed. She squeezed back and smiled.

The hope in his eyes and the sincere tone in his voice rang as familiar to her as breathing. What would they do if the Pony Express job didn't work out? She set out to seek a way to support herself far away from prying eyes, but now she's part of a family again. God help the soul who tries to come between her and this boy.

“Maybe you ought to call me Carl if we’re going to be brothers.”