Mason's Marriage (14 page)

The twelve Jefferson brothers sat around the den of the main house, each trying not to be uncomfortable. It was the day after Christmas, so the tree was pretty but the room had toys and presents scattered everywhere. Fanciful stockings for each and every person lined the stairwell, which was becoming more crowded every year.

The wives and children had all gone into the city to hit the after-holiday sales. Mimi had hired Shoeshine Johnson to chauffeur them in his school bus so they could all ride together, making a party of it. Shoeshine had festooned his bus with garlands, big fat red bows swinging from the garlands and a wreath on the grille. The kids had been delighted, and the men felt good about not having to spend the day in the malls fighting the traffic and elbowing customers.

Although anything would have been better than this, Mason decided. Now that the moment had come, he really didn’t want to face it.
Coward,
he told himself, which was only partially true.

He had sought the answers to what had happened to Maverick Jefferson for years. Diligently. Hiring Hawk and Jellyfish had pretty much assured that he would find some answers. He just hadn’t expected to have the answers in the black pencil of his father’s handwriting.

He felt strangely as if his father’s ghost were in the room, and tears pricked at the back of his eyes. “It’s now or never,” he said. “Who’s going to read it?”

“You are,” everyone said.

They weren’t so much shifting responsibility to him as acknowledging his place as the eldest, Mason knew, and also acknowledging the fact that he’d spent a lot of time and effort worrying about their father over the years. The worst thing, he supposed, would be to find out his father had gone on and led a completely happy life without them. On the other hand, Mason desperately hoped his father had been happy and well.

He nodded. “All right,” he said, reaching out with somewhat unsteady hands to pick up the book. “Here we go.”

Slowly, he opened the book, careful not to crack
the well-weathered spine. Then he began to read aloud from the pages, pronouncing each word carefully.

Mason’s hands started to tremble, and he heard Crockett sigh. He forced himself to read on.

Fannin made a sound that could have been a curse word. Navarro leaned back, putting his boots on the table. The clock on the mantel ticked, which Mason usually found comforting. But not today. It reminded him of the moments of his father’s life that had ticked away, with him being clearly somewhat confused. Having recently suffered a head injury himself and feeling vaguely out of line with the rest of his body occasionally, he knew his father had been searching for who he was, not what he didn’t have.

The knowledge made his heart heal in slow, soothing waves. “He was sick,” Mason said. “I wonder if he’d hit his head on something while he was out working and got confused. I don’t think he would have left us had he not suffered some type of injury.”

“Could have been internal,” Bandera said. “A small stroke or something. I know he’d always missed Mom, but he doesn’t talk about it in the journal. Unless you haven’t gotten there.”

“Well,” Mason said, “he was trying to remember a lot about his life. For example, there’s a list of his favorite foods in here. There’s a list of what he’d eaten recently. And,” he said, turning to the last page, “there’s a family tree with all our birth names.” He smiled. “He’s got Mom’s name surrounded by a heart. There are side notes in a different section about her. For example, he writes,

“Not surprised by that,” Frisco Joe said. “He was a one-woman man.”

“And a one-family man,” Laredo said.

“Now here’s something strange,” Mason said. “On the back of the family tree, he’s written some history in a sort of journalistic style, without dates.”

“Read it,” Tex said. “The suspense is killing me.”

Mason glared at him for a second, then his gaze returned to his father’s writing.

“Damn it,” Ranger said, wiping at his eyes. “I feel sorry for Dad.”

“Yeah,” Archer said. “Wonder why he never told us about his brother and sister.”

“He couldn’t,” Mason said, finally understanding his father after all these years. “He couldn’t save them, so he locked it away inside him. It was too painful.”

“He put all his love and efforts into us,” Frisco Joe said. “We had the benefit of him home-schooling us with what he’d learned from his immigrant parents, and he forged our family and taught us to rely on each other.”

They looked around in the Christmas-lit room, the house they now knew their great-grandparents had built and had struggled to keep and which their father had fought to take back. Then they all went outside to look at the wide, vast land, which was their birthright.

Then they looked at the sky, silently thanking their father for giving them everything he had and for making them the men they had become.

There was no greater love.