When Bess woke again, it was to the soft cries of her baby boy, calling to be fed. She shifted, feeling the warmth of another body beside her, and carefully pulled herself out of the bed.
Shuffling across the hall into her room, she hurried to the crib, lifting Daniel to her shoulder and patting his back as she whispered soothing nothings and moved to the rocking chair. The moonlight threw a shaft of bluish light across her as she got the baby and herself into position. His cries subsided so that the only sound in the room was the creak of the rocker as she pushed them back and forth with one foot.
“I think that’s the most beautiful thing I ever saw,” Judd’s voice, raw and rusty, breathed from the doorway.
She jerked, turning herself slightly as if to hide. He was kneeling beside the rocker then, one large hand touching Daniel’s fuzzy head, his thumb just grazing the swell of her breast. Her breath caught, and she held it. “Don’t be embarrassed,” he admonished, his eyes on the baby suckling hungrily. “This is the most natural thing in the world, especially for a country boy like me.”
He turned his black eyes to hers then, searching. She smiled at his tousled hair, thinking how young and boyish he looked in the moonlight, trying hard not to notice his bare chest with the dark hair matted all the way to his torso.
“You don’t have to be up,” she scolded. “You need to be in bed.”
He grimaced. “He’s my responsibility, too,” he said, getting to his feet with an economy of motion and turning on the small light above the makeshift dressing table. He studied the stack of cloth diapers, the old Mason jar filled with safety pins, and said over his shoulder, “I can change a mean diaper. Shall I prove it to you?”
She didn’t know how to take this Judd, who seemed almost talkative, lighthearted even. Well, they said babies did strange things to men. She finished feeding Daniel and stood up with him over her shoulder, patting his back as the nurse had taught her, and moved to stand beside Judd in front of the dressing table.
They weren’t touching, but she could feel the heat from his body like a caress along her bare arms. She shook her head to dispel her foolish thinking, and turned to hand the baby to him. “All right,” she said in a hushed tone, though whether that was to calm the baby or a result of the awe she was feeling standing here with a baby and a husband, she did not know. “Show me what you’ve got, country boy.”
His large hands engulfed Daniel’s rotund body, but they were gentle hands as he deftly replaced the dirty diaper and freshened the baby’s bottom. He finished the job in record time, as if it were a calf-roping event at rodeo and not the first of many such daily things that spin around each other and weave a life. He held Daniel in the crook of his arm for a moment after, smoothing his finger over the almost translucent eyebrows, tapping the button nose and soft, pink lips.
The baby, fast asleep once more, turned himself into Judd’s chest and kicked at his diaphragm. Judd grunted softly, and Bess tapped his arm as if to say that couldn’t have hurt. Judd smiled wickedly and whispered, “Kicks like a mule,” before placing the baby carefully back in his crib.
They stood watching the baby sleep, side by side with just a hair’s breadth between them, until Judd yawned involuntarily. Bess wrapped her hand into his larger one before she could think better of the impulse and pulled Judd back toward his own bed. “Someone has to protect the citizenry and uphold law and order in the morning,” she said as they made their way to the bedroom.
“And throw out more hay bales for the cattle and fix the drip in the kitchen sink.” He hesitated beside the bed, his hand still warm around her palm. “I hope your okay with this arrangement, Bess,” he said into the dark, his voice almost a supplication. “A man and woman are meant to be together when their married, no matter what the circumstances.”
She gulped, feeling a little more like one of his cattle, part of the natural order of things, than his partner for life, but as a beginning, it was something. “I don’t mind,” was all she managed.
He pulled her into a loose embrace and kissed her temple. “Well, good night,” he said, then stepped away from her, rounding the bed to lay down on his side. Without another word, he crawled under the covers and was fast asleep the moment his head hit the pillow.
Bess stood listening to the sounds of the now still house, his regular breathing, deep and rumbly in that strong chest of his, the creek of the siding where the wind whistled outside, the whisper of movement as the baby shifted in his crib. Slowly, she got under the covers, turning her face toward Judd’s shoulder. Carefully, as if any movement might break the spell, she reached her fingertips to lightly touch his bicep. The contact centered her, relaxing muscles she hadn’t realized were tight. In another two breaths, she was fast asleep.
She woke the next morning to find Judd standing beside her, the baby held close to his chest. As she watched, Daniel wiggled and fussed, kicking out his tiny legs. “This boy of ours has a big appetite,” Judd said, laying the baby into Bess’ outstretched arms. He sat down on the bed facing her while she nursed, one hand splayed across her thigh. “It’s Christmas in a few days. It’s been a while since we’ve had a tree with all the trimmings. Would you like that, for Daniel?”
Bess looked up, trying to keep her face from showing too much excitement and failing. “A real tree, like with ornaments you’ve had since you were a kid?”
“Complete with some presents from Santa.” He patted her leg, studying her. “Have you never had a tree, Bess?”
She looked up at the ceiling to hide the pain in her eyes. “It’s not a requirement for a happy life.”
“Look at me,” Judd ordered with that authority in his tone so that she did so without hesitation. “You can have as many trees in the house as we can fit in it, for the rest of your Christmases to come, and that’s all that really matters, right?”
The look he leveled at her, along with the words, started a tingly feeling in the center of her stomach that spread to her fingers and toes. The last time she’d felt it she’d been 13, playing hooky with her new friend, Laura, catching a Greyhound to the beach in Galveston, where they spent a sunny afternoon gathering seashells and kicking around in the foamy, white waves. Stepping onto that beach, seeing the ocean for the first time, the flat, blue horizon that went on forever, beyond herself, she’d thought how big the world was, how much more might be possible. It was the first time she’d thought she might not die alone and penniless, belonging to no one and having nothing after all.
Now, she was not alone. She had Daniel, and she belonged to Judd and to Agnes. She gave in to the luxury of forgetting about life’s losses and dangers and just breathed in the scents of her baby’s soft skin and her husband’s freshly-shaven jaw. Judd’s black eyes were piercing her again, and she realized he was waiting for her answer.
“I think everything that really matters is right here in this room right now,” she told him.
His shoulders seemed to relax. “Maybe you’ll tell me what you were thinking about just then, one of these days,” he said, not pushing her, but standing up instead.
“How about some breakfast?” Agnes called from the door, her arms laden with a tray full of food.
“I ate early,” Judd told Bess, bending forward to give her a light kiss on the lips. “I’ll see you two this evening.” He gave Daniel a kiss as well, then stood.
He passed Agnes in the door, kissing the top of her head in farewell. A few moments later, Bess could hear the front door open and close, hear Jethro’s welcoming bark as Judd’s car roared to life and pulled out down the long drive.
Agnes set the tray on Bess’ lap and opened her hands with a questioning look in her eyes. Bess handed Daniel to her and watched as her wrinkled face dropped years as it peered into the newborn’s wide open eyes. “I’m glad to see a truce of sorts between the two of you,” Agnes said as she rocked to and fro with the bundle in her arms and nodded in the direction where Judd had just left.
Bess was almost sure it wouldn’t last. Like finding out about her tree-less Christmases of the past, Judd was going to chip away at the pieces of her walled up secrets until he knew everything about her. And when that happened, how could he want her any more?
She knew one thing, as long as she could grasp hold of this tenuous feeling that all was well, she was going to do it with both hands. She kept that hope in her heart as she bathed her baby, as she helped Agnes cook pies and holiday cookies, as she put the finishing touches on the chambray shirt she planned to put under the tree for Judd.
The hope lasted through the next days as Judd brought home two different trees, a large Virginia Pine for the living room right by the fireplace with its stockings hanging from the mantel, and a much smaller artificial tree to be placed in Daniel’s nursery, as Agnes helped her string popcorn and cranberry garland and brought down boxes of family ornaments from the attic, as Judd lay sleeping beside her at night, sometimes slipping his arm over her waist so that she felt warm and protected.
It lasted right up to the moment on Christmas Day when Lillian descended on the household, spilling over with tales about Bess that ripped her fragile heart wide open, baring it to Judd’s cold, black glare so that Bess knew for certain what it meant for a heart not only to break, but to shatter.
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