Wildflower Harvest: Includes Bonus Story of Desert Rose Read online

  “Good for you!” Loud clapping followed the approving statement.

  Laurel and Ivy Ann turned, torn from complete absorption in their discussion by the deep, masculine voice. A stranger stood on the bottom step, still applauding. Dark, interested eyes surveyed the twins. One fine hand held the reins of a spirited filly. Tall, straight, dark-haired and strong….

  There never was knight like young Lochinvar.

  These words echoed in Laurel’s brain. Laughter bubbled inside and to her horror escaped. Her dumbstruck twin just stared. But the stranger’s dark eyes twinkled with merriment and Laurel couldn’t help but wonder. The man had certainly come riding out of the west, down the hill and up their road. Could he possibly be the fate Ivy Ann predicted, stealing up while they talked, over-hearing their girlish conversation?

  And if so, whose fate might he prove to be? Two young women, one handsome man.

  Laurel gasped. And in the split second before her twin recovered her wits enough to hold out her hand in greeting, Laurel thought, I’m glad I didn’t promise Ivy Ann what she wanted.

  Chapter 2

  Dr. Birchfield?” The plain-faced, middle-aged woman who came in daily to clean his cottage and office tapped lightly at the open door.

  Adam raised his head from the medical journal he had stolen time to read. “Yes?” Although his mind stayed on the report of new advances in treating contagious disease, his alert eyes caught the telltale twisting of Mrs. Cutler’s hands.

  Her firm mouth trembled. “Is it true what they say? That you’ll be leaving Concord soon?” Before he could stifle his amazement and answer, the good woman added, “Why, Birchfields have lived in Massachusetts as far back as anyone can remember. None ever wanted to live anywhere else, until—” She broke off and dull red suffused her face.

  “Until my older brother Nathaniel refused to fight in a war he hated and left home,” Adam grimly finished. He set his lean jaw and his dark eyes flashed. “Where did you hear that I might be leaving?”

  “I couldn’t help overhearing you argue, er, your discussion with your father this morning.” She stared at the floor then looked straight into Adam’s furious face. “Begging your pardon, Doctor, but Jeremiah and Patience have already lost one son. Surely you won’t desert them, too.”

  Only strong regard for Mrs. Cutler’s long, well-meaning friendship kept back the hot words that sprang to Adam’s lips. “I’d appreciate it if you keep what you heard to yourself,” he told her. “I don’t know what I’m going to do—yet.”

  Mrs. Cutler sighed. “You’ll have to do what you think is right. Every tub has to stand on its own bottom. But isn’t there a way for you and your father to part without anger if you feel you must go?”

  Adam didn’t reply and Mrs. Cutler vanished from the doorway, leaving him more disturbed than he cared to be. He stood, walked to the window open to an early August afternoon, and stared unseeingly into the perfect day that at another time would have enticed him outside.

  Without anger—if only it could happen! He could not deny the restlessness that had filled him ever since he finished medical training and returned to Concord. Had it started when his father exploded at his idea of setting up a separate office when Jeremiah had long planned that Adam would join him in practice?

  First Nat, then me. Adam drummed his fingers on the white-painted windowsill. The admission opened Pandora’s box. Memories Adam wished he could forget crowded into the sunny room.

  From the time he could toddle Adam worshipped his brother Nathaniel. He followed after him, never realizing until he grew up how unusual it was for a boy six years older to suffer the presence of a small child and make him feel welcome. Jeremiah and Patience looked with approval on the boys’ relationship. Dr. Birchfield’s dream of having Nathaniel march in his own steps inspired Adam. Someday he, too, would study medicine. How wonderful if all three of them could work together!

  Like a thunderbolt came news of war with the South. No man in New England carried the fire of patriotism higher than Jeremiah Birchfield. He could not volunteer because of a heart problem, but his face flamed when he summoned twenty-year-old Nathaniel home from his medical training in early 1862.

  “I can’t go, but I proudly send my best, my oldest son.”

  Patience, whose name matched her God-fearing personality, wrung a fine handkerchief mercilessly but made no protest. She seldom took a stand against her rock-ribbed husband. His streak of granite resembled those found in the stern New England hills.

  Adam, whose fourteenth birthday had just passed, started to speak. A single glance from Nathaniel quelled his words. The next instant Nat spoke.

  “I am sorry to disappoint you, Father, but I cannot go.”

  Patience’s nervous fingers stilled.

  Adam could only stare at the white radiance in his adored brother’s face.

  Jeremiah rose to full height, towering in his shock and disbelief. “What is this foolishness? You must go.”

  “I cannot.”

  “To think I would see the day my own son turned coward and refused to fight for his country!”

  Jeremiah’s rage brought misery to Nathaniel’s dark eyes but his steady gaze didn’t even flicker. “I am no coward. I cannot fight in a war I don’t believe should happen.” He warmed to his subject, given opportunity by his father’s stunned silence. “Don’t you see? The North condemns the South for slavery. Yet how many families living here keep colored servants?”

  Speechless, Jeremiah raised a warning hand but Nat rushed on.

  “If I thought this conflict was about preserving the Union or bringing equality to all people, it would be different.” The fight went from him. A beseeching look replaced his determination. “Father, please, if you can’t understand, at least respect my decision.”

  Adam held his breath, silently praying to God to do something, anything.

  Jeremiah got his second wind. Anger overrode reason. “As long as I furnish you with meat and drink and shelter you will obey me. I say you will put aside these blasphemous ideas and serve the country your forefathers sought to be free and worship God.” Every word beat into the room with the force of a physical blow.

  Patience roused from her submissiveness. “Don’t do this!” She ran to her husband and caught his arm. The strings of the morning cap she wore loosened.

  “Woman, be still.”

  “I will not be still!” she cried. “He’s our son, yours and mine. Nothing can ever change that.”

  “He has changed it of his own free will,” Jeremiah stormed. “Nathaniel Birchfield, if you refuse to do a man’s duty, you are hereafter no son of mine.”

  “Jeremiah, no!” Patience burst into mournful weeping.

  “It’s all right, Mother. Father may not claim me as a son but he can’t stop me from loving him. I am truly sorry.”

  When Nat marched from the room Adam choked. His brother’s shoulders squared in such an erect position Adam had the feeling Nat stepped to the sound of martial music only he could hear.

  That same afternoon Nathaniel left Concord. “Don’t blame Father too much,” he told his brokenhearted brother. “Someday, when the war is over, perhaps he will change.” He tousled Adam’s raven hair, so like his own. “Try and make up for me if you can. Godspeed.”

  While the war raged and Patience and Adam grieved, Jeremiah Birchfield permitted no mention of Nathaniel’s name. He could not control his younger son’s thoughts though. Adam held tight to a dream that one day, when he had the resources, he would find Nat. Years and miles meant nothing compared with the brother enshrined in Adam’s heart. A few scattered letters came. Twice Jeremiah saw them first and tore them into bits without reading them. The others told little except that Nat was well and had worked at everything from being a farmer to a blacksmith. He also wrote he missed his family.

  Adam took a deep breath and held it. When it rushed out he turned back to the desk, his mind still turbulent. “I’ve been faithful, Nat,” he said half under
his breath. “I became a doctor as Father wished. But I’m twenty-five years old now. You’re thirty-one. Lately I feel you need me.” The same prickle that had caused the earlier argument with Jeremiah returned. A trivial comment had slipped out in spite of Adam’s guarded tongue.

  “I’ll wager that if Nat had become a doctor he’d be a far better one than I.” He instantly clamped his mouth shut but it was too late.

  “I know no Nathaniel and if you are as wise as you ought to be you’ll do the same.”

  Adam had learned patience and pity for the father who had aged so in the past eleven years. Yet he had also inherited Jeremiah’s quick temper and his own sense of justice. “Father, why can’t you forget the past? I’ve heard you read stories from the Bible about the need to forgive—”

  “Are you daring to tell me what to do?” Slumbering fires fed by guilt and stubbornness flared.

  Adam shook his head. “No, I just know how much Mother misses Nathaniel. If you can’t forgive him for yourself and for him, can’t you do it for Mother’s sake?”

  Jeremiah’s features turned to chiseled marble. “I believe you had something you wished to consult me about?”

  Adam’s despair at his family’s estrangement caused him to lose control. He clenched his hands and said slowly. “I want to leave Concord.”

  Suspicion reddened the old doctor’s face. “You’re not considering going after—him?”

  Adam had never lied in his life. Nat had taught him from babyhood that lies and deceit lead to dishonor. Of all the sins, Adam learned to despise dishonesty most.

  “Someday.” Before Jeremiah could answer he added, “Besides, I’d like to take my medical skills where they’d do more good than here in Concord.”

  “Perhaps to the Wyoming Territory?” His father’s loaded question confirmed Adam’s belief that Jeremiah had kept far more careful track of Nat than anyone realized.

  “Perhaps.”

  “You’d give up all you have here, a secure practice, the respect of the town, the chance to prosper…” Jeremiah’s face grayed.

  “Father, didn’t you and Mother come to Concord not knowing what it held, not sure if you could establish a practice here? Adam spread his hands out, palms up. “Look at these hands. They are skilled in surgery and caring for the sick but they aren’t needed here. You and Dr. Partridge can handle things while I’m gone.”

  “And how long is that to be?” Jeremiah folded his arms in a gesture that warned Adam the discussion was not settled.

  “I don’t know.”

  Jeremiah grunted. “I thought so. Adam, if you walk away from everything I’ve given you—” He hesitated. Did he remember another gauntlet thrown down to a son who had no choice but to pick it up? “We’ll discuss this later.” He strode away, his shoulders slumped but still determined.

  No wonder Mrs. Cutler’s plea haunted him, Adam thought. The arrival of afternoon patients and several calls on horseback swerved his mind from the problem. How old and tired and ill Jeremiah looked. Could his one remaining son leave him, even for the best of reasons?

  “Dear God, what shall I do?” Adam reverted to his usual way of solving problems. “Go? Stay? Or merely wait?” When no answer flashed into his brain and heart he decided God’s signal must be to wait.

  It didn’t take long. A few days later Jeremiah Birchfield commanded Adam to come for supper and startled both wife and son with an announcement.

  “You’ve been wanting to see what medical practice out in the wilds is like. Can you be ready to leave tomorrow morning?”

  “Leave? For where?” Adam put down his fork and swallowed his last bite of molasses-sweetened apple pie.

  “West Virginia.” Satisfaction oozed from the older man’s entire being. “I have it all arranged. You’ll visit mountain areas where everything you’ve learned will war with the conditions you find there. You will see poverty and squalor, superstition and apathy until you’ll be ready to come back and appreciate Concord.”

  Adam ran the full gamut of emotions: anger at his father’s high-handed disposal of himself; unwilling interest and a sense of adventure; compassion for his wide-eyed mother; even amusement at Jeremiah in foiling his plan to head West.

  “I can be ready.” Adventure had won, but the war between father and son had not ended. This trip to West Virginia was simply the first skirmish between them.

  Adam’s departure had to be postponed a day. Such a furor over his going ensued that Jeremiah gruffly said, “Wait until tomorrow. The neighbors are determined to bid you Godspeed.” A dazed Adam was only half aware of the impromptu covered dish supper, an expression of the townspeople’s regard. Not surprisingly, his leaving rekindled village gossip of years before about where “that ungrateful Nathaniel Birchfield” had ended up. Adam stumbled onto one such conversation and effectively stopped it with one steady look at the offenders.

  He secretly rejoiced when everyone left and he could go back to the cottage for his last night there. When would he see it again? Despite what Jeremiah thought, Adam instinctively knew all the miseries he faced in West Virginia wouldn’t send him running for home like a whipped dog.

  “Dear God,” he wondered aloud, “Is this the first step toward Nat?” The soft night wind blew in from the west and brought cooling relief and an invitation. He wished he could have gone that morning instead of having to wait. Yet the next day he gave thanks to God it had not been so. Just before he locked his cottage door for the last time, Patience Birchfield’s hired girl rushed up to him. From the folds of her voluminous apron she pulled a letter that showed stains of travel. “Miz Patience says take it.” She scurried away just before Jeremiah arrived.

  Adam quickly pocketed the worn letter. His heart pounded from the glimpse of bold writing and it took all his concentration not to betray himself to his father.

  “I’ll be expecting reports of your work.” Eyes undulled by age and heartache bored into Adam.

  “I’ll write. I promise.” The younger doctor held out a slim hand and grasped the other’s lined one.

  “Godspeed.” After a moment Jeremiah added, “Son.”

  “Godspeed, Father.” Other words trembled on his lips but refused to form. Adam watched his father turn away heavily and walk down the road toward the red-brick traditional house that had been built a few years after the Birchfields came. Jeremiah didn’t look back. If agony and the same uncertainty of father and son meeting again in this life touched him as it did Adam, no one knew.

  The trip by rail to West Virginia always remained a blur in Adam’s mind. Enthralled by the long letter Nathaniel had sent, irretrievably caught by the older man’s plea for him to consider coming West, Adam’s eyes saw the changing country but his heart and mind could not take them in. Snatches of the letter haunted him.

  Medical help is practically nonexistent.

  It will come as a great surprise, I am sure, but I made the greatest decision of my life a little over a year ago.

  I feel God has called me to be His servant. After much prayer and study, I have accepted a tough assignment and am building a church in the small but wiled hamlet of Antelope in the rugged Wind River Range of the Rocky Mountains.

  Here will I live, serve—and one day lie.

  How much you could do, if you came….

  The next days and weeks tore at Adam. Father had been right: Many of the West Virginians struggled and overcame, but some did not. Bound by tradition and mountain superstition, bereaved and desolated by heavy losses of both family members and crops, Adam found he had more to do than three doctors could handle. The old doctor who should have retired years before demanded and got a fine horse for Adam. Beyond that and his food and shelter, Adam received little. Yet mountain-proud patients gave what they had, simply and quietly—a haunch of venison, turnips, apples, and once, a worn but still usable quilt.

  At first Adam protested but his host soon stopped that. “Everything’s been taken from them but their pride. Tuck yours away in your pocket
and let them keep theirs,” he advised when Adam insisted the families needed things more than he.

  August ended and September slipped in. One beautiful afternoon Adam found himself free for the first time since he came to the hills.

  “I don’t know quite how to act,” he confessed to his good mentor.

  “Now if I were forty or so years younger and had a free day, I’d ride out and say thanks to the folks who donated the filly.” The mountain doctor’s eyes twinkled. “Being it’s such a nice day and all.”

  Adam distrusted the twinkle but eagerly snatched the idea. He’d sent thanks but wanted to let the generous family know how much he appreciated the loan. The filly’s easy stride gobbled up miles and Adam had found to his amazement that he was a natural horseman.

  Adam whipped his face from the burning September sun and recognized from Doc’s directions the land he sought. A flash of blue from the wide porch showed someone was home. A little hesitantly, he rode closer to the house, dismounted, and paused with one foot on the bottom step. Cool vines and a climbing rose offered no obstruction to the clear voices.

  “Would you or would you not be a nineteenth-century Ruth?” a light voice demanded.

  “I would. I would follow my husband wherever God called him to go.”

  Why should the rich voice send joy through Dr. Adam Birchfield? “Good for you!” he called and applauded.

  Not one but two bewitching young women whirled to face him. Then the one in blue laughed, and Adam thought of bubbling water.

  Chapter 3

  Dedicated to medicine and determined to learn everything he could, Adam Birchfield had wasted no time on romance. When he saw a particularly attractive woman, a vague realization that one day he’d have to find a wife pierced his studies. He laughed then reassured himself that when that time came God would provide. His fellow medical students jeered at the idea.

  “God? Why, He’s busy enough keeping this old world from going to ruin. How can you expect Him to be a matchmaker?”