Jenny's Wish Read online

  They ate in silence for a few minutes, both of them seeming transfixed by the river. Finally, Arlon cleared his throat and spoke.

  “So, how come you didn’t camp out last night? The weather sure is good still.”

  “To be honest, completely honest, I am not allowed to camp out anymore.” She fought feelings of embarrassment and tried to laugh it off. “Yes, that’s right, me, who is nearly twenty-years-old, has been forbidden by her mama and daddy to camp just a stone’s throw from their house.”

  “But why?” He looked concerned for her rather than showing any sign of looking down on her for her admission.

  “Because I foolishly told my mama about you. Not much, just that we were friends and that we’d been at the same barn dance.”

  “What does that have to do with you camping out?”

  “Well, my mama hasn’t really said anything outright, she just goes on and on about how she is just looking out for me. I would like to say it’s as simple as that, but it isn’t.”

  “How so?”

  “Because it’s always been like this. For as long as I can remember, my mama had this fear for me, something she just can’t seem to get over.”

  “That’s a shame. It must be exhausting for her,” Arlon said gently and picked up her hand again, squeezing it reassuringly.

  “I must admit, it’s me I currently feel sorry for.” Jenny laughed, although she felt like crying. “I’ve never been allowed to do things and, even now, when I am old enough to be married and have a family of my own, still she treats me like a child. And Daddy does too, although I reckon he only does it to keep Mama happy.”

  “He certainly wouldn’t be the first husband.” Arlon chuckled and she knew that he was trying to make things a little easier for her.

  “I can tell sometimes that he wants to let me have my own way now and again. I don’t mean in the house, I just mean enough space to be myself, you know?”

  “Yes, I know what you mean.”

  “But it seems that that’s the very thing that makes my mama afraid. The minute I stop being myself, the minute I hover about the house or don’t go any further than the town barn, my mama is happy. The problem is, to make her happy, I have to make myself unhappy.”

  “You can’t really do that, Jenny. I don’t mean for a minute that you should be fighting with your family the whole time, I just mean that there are some things you can’t let go of and yourself is one. Surely, your mama realizes that you’re old enough to do pretty much whatever you want?”

  “I think that makes it worse. I think she realizes that her control over me isn’t quite so complete anymore.” She laughed humorously. “Or maybe it is? After all, where’s my tent? Which of the stars did I get to see last night? None, none at all. Instead, I got to look at the ceiling from the safety of my little bedroom. My little prison.”

  “Prison? Is it as bad as all that?”

  “The thing which really makes it bad is that my parents do not seem harsh in any way. My whole life, people have told me just how lucky I am to have them, and in so many ways that is true. But in this one most important way, it isn’t. I’m not lucky to have them, at least not my mama.”

  “Has she ever explained to you just exactly what it is she’s afraid of? I know it’s a mother’s instinct to look out for her child and I’m sure that doesn’t go away when the child turns into an adult. But from what you say, she does seem a little extreme.”

  “Whenever I ask her, she just says that there are bad people out there. By people, I’ve always assumed that she means men.” She grinned apologetically. “But she’s never even said that much. It’s as if I’m a little child who can’t be told such things. Nobody can be honest with me, I’m too young or too stupid to understand.”

  “You’re certainly not stupid, Jenny, neither are you too young to understand anything. It does seem like your mother doesn’t trust you though.”

  “I did ask her why she didn’t trust me.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said it isn’t me that she has to trust.”

  “Ah, so we are back to the badness of men at large.” He laughed and then popped the last piece of bread into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. “I take it your mama never wants you to marry.”

  “Funnily enough, she does. She wants it to be a man she knows, preferably one she’s known since he was a child, and whose parents she knows thoroughly. But life doesn’t work like that, does it? Parents should not get to choose their child’s spouse.”

  “Did you tell her anything about me at all?” Arlon asked cautiously.

  “I did,” Jenny said and closed her eyes as she blew out a great and exasperated breath. “I suppose I was lulled into a full sense of security. We were having such a wonderful conversation that we felt like any other ordinary mother and daughter. I suppose it led me to say too much and I told her that you work on the barges and that you’re from California. From that moment onward, I haven’t known a minute’s peace from her. Even this morning, I had to get up when it was still dark to be sure that I could even get out of the house to see you.”

  “I’m so sorry, that’s such a hard way to live,” he said and shifted along the riverbank a little, closing the gap of just a few short inches between them so that he could put his arm around her shoulders.

  Jenny leaned her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes, enjoying the contact in silence for a moment or two.

  “I hate it, Arlon. I’m torn between being so angry that I pack up my things and set off as I’ve always wanted to, and guilty that it would upset them both so terribly if I did just that. My mama really would have something to be worried about then, wouldn’t she? If I just packed up and left without looking back.”

  “It’s not something I’d advise, if I’m honest.”

  “But that’s what you did, isn’t it?”

  “There was no risk for me, Jenny. I had absolutely nothing and I was leaving nothing and nobody behind. The fact of the matter was that I realized I could be poor just about anywhere in the country, I didn’t have to stay in California to achieve it.”

  “But you’re not poor now, are you?”

  “No, but I’m not wealthy, either. I get by, I suppose. And maybe you could get by too, you’re certainly adventurous enough. But I don’t reckon you’d get a job on the barges like me and I’m not altogether sure it would be the right place for you. I guess what I’m saying is don’t storm off into something you’re not ready for. I understand you wanting to see the country, even the world, I know that yearning, really. But Jenny, do it in a way that is comfortable, fun even. Don’t do it in a way where every day is a struggle and you live from hand to mouth.”

  “And in the meantime, how am I to cope with my mama?”

  “Now that’s a tough one.” He chuckled. “I reckon I don’t have an answer to that.”

  Jenny laughed also, leaning into him just a little more to enjoy the feel of his body against hers. He turned just enough to face her, taking her face between his hand and kissing her tenderly on the lips. The kiss was brief, just as it had been at the barn dance. For the next one, however, he didn’t pull away. Instead, he brushed her dark hair away from her face and leaned in to kiss her again. The next kiss was deeper, longer, with the merest hint of a most wonderful passion lurking deep inside him. And not only inside Arlon, but Jenny too. As they continued to kiss, she reached up and plunged her fingers into his thick mane of fair hair, running her hands along his warm scalp and down the back of his neck.

  “I reckon I ought to stop right there otherwise I’ll prove your mama right, won’t I?” he said hoarsely when he finally pulled away. “And you really won’t ever be allowed out again.” His laugh was slow and deep.

  “Yes, I suppose so,” Jenny said, hardly recognizing her own voice at all; more than anything, she wanted them to keep kissing.

  She wanted to forget all about her mother and father, those irrational and unexplained fears, all of it.

&
nbsp; “Do you think it would help your cause any if I met your mama and daddy? Maybe they would realize that they don’t have anything to worry about if they met me in person?”

  “You’d really do that?” Jenny said, hardly able to believe her ears.

  The very thing she had fought with her mother over for two weeks straight had been the idea that Arlon should present himself to the farmhouse for inspection. It had annoyed Jenny, not least because she would never dream of asking him to come and meet her parents so soon. After all, they had only seen each other a few times and had, at that time, only kissed once. It had seemed like an impossible task to appease her mother and not frighten away this wonderful young man at the same time.

  And now he was suggesting the very same thing himself. It was as if he could read her mind and heart and knew what was in there and she found herself spiraling ever deeper in her attraction to him.

  “I guess it couldn’t hurt,” she said and smiled sweetly. “To be honest, I think my mama would be very keen to meet you.”

  “Just tell me when,” Arlon said and leaned in to kiss her again.

  Chapter Ten

  Jenny was to arrange a meeting between Arlon and her parents when he next stopped at their part of the river. He had been bright and cheerful about it at first but, as the days had gone on and the reality of this meeting grew nearer, Arlon began to feel less and less confident.

  There were so many reasons for Jenny’s mama not to take to him. His lifestyle alone would be enough to put off any sensible parent, that was for sure. But perhaps a woman who fell into a paroxysm of fear just because her daughter was on the other side of the woodland was likely going to be even more dead set against a bargeman from California.

  If anybody might whisk her daughter away far from her clutches, wouldn’t Arlon be just that sort of man? He could marry her, after all, and quickly find his boss changing his route to the farthest north reaches of the Willamette, hundreds of miles away. And what then? Could he not simply set up home in the North, taking his wife away from her family altogether?

  Or perhaps their fears would run in a different direction altogether; perhaps they thought a man who had been raised poor was going to keep his eye on the main chance, look out for a young woman with land to inherit and no brothers to stand in her way. Perhaps they thought a man like that might do anything in his power to persuade a sheltered young woman like Jenny Swain down the aisle.

  There was, of course, another objection to the young bargeman that Arlon could think of; that he was a man who moved from place to place without an ounce of responsibility to his name. The sort of man who would use a young girl and then move on, never looking back, never wondering about the consequences. And if her mother was the one who had such great fears, Arlon couldn’t help but think that this, above all things, would be chief among hers. It would certainly explain why she had disallowed her daughter to go camping anymore. Already, she did not trust Arlon Hurst to treat her daughter like a lady.

  He had to admit that it was the last that made him feel offended. The truth was that he could understand all three of the arguments he had come up with on the long days trudging along the river on the barge. Worse still, it had been Ted who had planted the last argument in his mind; trust Ted to lower the tone.

  Arlon could understand the potential objections, with or without his own offense. He would never do anything to hurt Jenny, nor any woman, but he guessed he didn’t have a right to expect her parents to happily assume that was the case.

  But there was more to this than he had yet explained to Jenny, things which would certainly turn her parents away from any ideas he might have of getting to know their daughter better.

  It had begun to niggle away at him some weeks before when he first realized that there was a great potential for him to fall in love with Jenny Swain. His mind had already made a search for all the things which would stand in their way, and it seemed that his working on the barge was probably the least of them.

  Ever since Jenny had been so honest with him about the restrictions that her mother placed on her life and always had done, Arlon knew that he ought to have been equally honest with her. He hadn’t told a soul who didn’t already know exactly how it was that his father had died all those years ago, any of the true details. In California, he and his mother had never left town and so everybody there already knew the circumstances of his father’s demise.

  But how would Jenny feel when she discovered that Arlon’s father, a lifelong philanderer, had been murdered by a jealous husband? With a baby of his own and a wife at home, Arlon’s father had been such a determined cheat that it had come as no surprise to his careworn mother that she was not the only woman in his life. But of course, a young woman with a baby is not always in a position to voice her objections. What little he did bring home was certainly better than nothing, and so Arlon’s mother had done what so many other women in her position did; she stayed silent, she smiled when she felt like crying, and she carried on. And for all of that, Arlon thoroughly despised the father he had never known.

  Arlon had not even been a year old when a local man had beaten his father to death outside a saloon bar. The man had been suspicious of his wife for some time and so, when he heard Arlon’s father giving lurid details of his intimate knowledge of the woman to another man in the bar, it had tipped the man over the edge.

  From that moment onward, the whole town viewed Arlon and his mother in a certain way. Some folks felt pity for the young woman and her baby for the way they had been treated. Others looked sideways at his mother, thinking that she must be at fault for her husband to have strayed so far and so often. There were those, of course, who liked nothing better than enjoying the shame of others and it would hardly matter the person or the circumstances, they simply liked to keep things going; they were the gossips, the pernicious, the spiteful. And all of this, every type of negative treatment, had found its way out of parents’ mouths and into those of their children and, as such, the whole sordid tale of a man he could not even draw to memory, followed Arlon Hurst throughout his years in the schoolroom.

  The times he had begged his mother never to send him back were without number, but that fine woman, tears streaming down her face and her heart breaking for her son’s pain, was most determined that he have an education. She wanted him to have something in his pocket that he could walk away with one day and, in the end, that’s exactly what he’d done.

  He was a clever young man and, when he’d approached the man who would one day be his boss on the barge, it had been noted immediately. Even without a moment’s experience on the river, the bright and personable Arlon Hurst had been given a chance. He knew he had his mother to thank for that, and silently prayed that she would know now just how grateful he was to her for it.

  But how would Jenny see him now? For sooner or later he knew he would have to tell her everything. It didn’t matter that they were not in California and nobody for miles and miles around knew anything of Arlon’s beginnings. It didn’t matter that she would likely never hear of it at all if he did not tell her. What mattered was that he was honest; that he begin things with her as he meant to go on. After all, hadn’t she just done that?

  She had. He had been able to feel her embarrassment as she had admitted to so many years being treated like a child. A woman old enough to marry and yet not allowed to stray far from her parents’ house. No wonder she wanted to strike out across the country, to find new places, to see new things. No wonder she described her parents’ house as the gentle prison, for surely that was exactly what it was.

  But he knew that now was not the time for him to judge her parents, even if it was only silently to himself. Now was the time for him to find a way to explain to her in great detail just how he had begun his life. He could only hope that she would not think that he would be nothing more than a chip off the old block; a young man unable to control himself.

  But Jenny was a clever woman, wonderfully sensible; surely, she w
ould not think that the son would automatically behave like the father.

  Perhaps it would be best for him to meet her parents first, to get that out of the way, before he sat Jenny down in private and told her everything there was to know about him.

  Chapter Eleven

  Jenny had felt nervous all day. Watching her mother prepare vegetables for the evening meal, Jenny had found herself entirely unable to help. Her mother seemed hardly to notice, peeling and chopping, rolling out pastry, tidying up as she went along. It appeared that Polly Swain was suffering a few nerves of her own and was obviously glad of the constant work. Anything to keep her mind at bay.

  “So, he’ll be here by seven,” Polly said for the tenth time that day.

  “Yes, Mama, he’ll be here by seven.”

  “I must say, I’m surprised this young man has agreed to meet your family so soon.”

  “I’m not. He’s a good man and he knows what it means to me,” Jenny said.

  Polly smiled and Jenny felt quietly angry with her—this was all her mother’s doing and it was all so unnecessary. Worse still, Polly assumed that her daughter wanted this. What a terrible joke that was. It meant so much to Jenny because she knew that if Arlon had not agreed to come, she would likely never see him again. This was what her mother did, and it most certainly wasn’t pretty.

  Jenny had hovered about the house for hours, feeling almost as if she had put her mother to some trouble and ought to stay and help. She felt stifled by her own character’s propensity to dual with itself; her mother had caused this, why did she feel she was putting her out?

  In the end, Jenny gave into her stronger self.

  “If you don’t need me for anything, I’m going to get myself changed for dinner.” She spoke assertively, something which always made her mother raise her eyebrows.

  If only Polly Swain knew how tired her daughter had become of this way of living. If only she realized that Arlon Hurst would not even have to ask her twice; she would run with him if he gave her the opportunity. Jenny knew she liked him, but did she already care for him so much that she would be prepared to spend the rest of her life with him? Or would she simply have done anything to escape her mother after so many years of fear and mistrust? Would she have run with any man to escape the gentle prison?