Chapter Forty-Nine

Jacob trudged into the store the next day to find Frank already standing behind the counter, one finger trailing down a column in the ledger. The young man was dressed in the neatly tailored three-piece suit he’d bought from Jacob for Lyddie’s wedding. Despite having ridden in from the ranch that morning, Frank didn’t have a speck of trail dust on him or a single crease in his jacket. Jacob’s eyes widened. The young man looked up and grinned.

“Morning, Uncle Jacob. Luo Jun let me in.” He stepped from behind the counter, revealing immaculate, crease-free trousers and polished shoes. He caught Jacob staring, glanced down at his clothes, then looked back up and grinned again. “Thought if I was gonna play like a fancy businessman, I ought look the part.”

Jacob nodded. “You’ve done well.” He slunk toward the office to deposit his lunch pail and coat. Frank followed.

“You feelin’ better?” the young man said.

Jacob shrugged and plunked his lunch on his desk. His head ached. He’d opened his wardrobe that morning to get a small whiff of chloroform to ease it, only to discover that either Claire or Will—or possibly both together—had cleared out all his medicines. The laudanum, chloroform, morphine, carbolic acid, ipecac, even the iodine, were all gone. He glanced down at the wardrobe’s floor and saw that his medical bag—and all its tools—was missing, too.

He rubbed the back of his neck and looked at his nephew. He wanted to tell Frank to get the hell out of his store and leave him alone. The impulse startled him. The now-familiar rush of shame coursed through him.

“I hate to take you away from your brother,” he said.

Frank’s grin vanished. “He’s all right during the day. Pa keeps him plenty busy while Ma watches Benji. It’s the nights that are hard for him. So it’s fine as long as I’m back at his house by the time he gets home with the baby.” Frank shifted. “Sometimes I wonder if he’d be better off leaving Benji with Ma or Lyddie all the time for a while. Some days he can’t put that baby down, and others, well, it’s like he can’t even look at him.”

Jacob remembered that all too well. After Hannah’s death, he threw himself into his practice, logging long hours at the clinic to avoid the house where his wife should be but wasn’t. Lyddie’s presence had been both a comfort and an additional source of sorrow. She was his best connection to his wife and also his sharpest reminder of his loss. Jacob rubbed the back of his neck again.

“I’m sorry, Uncle Jacob,” Frank sputtered. “I don’t mean to burden you more than you already are.” He flushed bright red. “I’m making a mess of this. I’ll be out front straightening trousers or… something.” He spun on his heel and darted out of the office.

Having been raised on a cattle ranch, Frank didn’t know a lot about men’s fashion, but he proved a quick study. He had a good eye for color and fit and asked Luo Jun to teach him to take measurements. Jacob showed him how to write up customer orders, and by the end of the week, Frank was the first to greet customers and was handling entire orders alone. This suited Jacob just fine. He spent most of his time in his office pretending to balance the books, emerging only when long-time customers came in. At the end of the week, when Frank asked if he could stay on another week, Jacob was only too happy to say yes.

“Letting your family run your business for you now too?” The Minié ball said. “As if they haven’t done enough to keep your sorry hide afloat already these past few years.”

“Who cares anymore?” Jacob said. “I ruin everything I touch. The store’s better off in Frank’s hands anyway.”

“What’s that, Uncle Jacob?” Frank said.

“Nothing. Enjoy your weekend.”

Frank stayed on the following week and the week after that, and good thing he did. They were so busy with orders for Christmas suits and alterations that Jacob had to put his own tailoring skills to use, leaving Frank to man the showroom on his own. Jacob couldn’t shake his melancholy, but at least he had something to do to kill time.

On Christmas morning, Jacob, Claire, and Grace loaded into the buggy and drove out to the ranch to celebrate with the rest of the family. Grace clutched a new doll Claire had purchased. When Claire asked Jacob a few days before Christmas what he was planning to give Grace, he shrugged and handed her a fistful of bills from his wallet and asked her to please take care of it.

Dinner passed in a blur. The family vacillated between remembering Eleanor’s loss and trying to keep up with the festivities of the season for the little ones. Jacob kept his distance from Andrew. He didn’t want anyone asking him if he wanted to hold Benji. The seven-week-old seemed to be thriving on his canned milk, but every time the baby whimpered, Jacob cringed, remembering what he’d robbed the child of. He was relieved when the evening wore late enough that he could head for home without offending the family.

The new year arrived without fanfare. Jacob rose in the morning, went to the store, let Frank handle most of the customers, and came home in time for supper. Most evenings he went to bed when Grace did, having no desire to stay up reading as he used to. Halfway through January, he realized how odd it was that Claire was still home.

“Shouldn’t you have returned to school already?” he asked at supper one night.

Claire shrugged. “Thought I’d be more use here. Seems like you could use the company.”

The Minié ball cackled in Jacob’s pocket. “Well done. Didn’t even remember to send her back to school.”

“What about the spring term?” Jacob said.

“Mrs. Mills knows we had a, uh, loss in the family,” Claire said, not making eye contact. “Uncle Will wrote her and asked if I could make up the term later. Said I was needed at home. She said that was all right.”

Jacob bristled. He didn’t like Will making decisions like that for his daughter. And he didn’t like the insinuation that he needed a babysitter. “He should have spoken with me about it,” he said with a huff.

Claire’s eyes went wide. “He did, Père. Don’t you remember? He mentioned it at Christmas. You told him to do whatever he wanted.”

The Minié ball laughed again.

“Fine,” Jacob said. “Whatever you want to do.” He shoved back from the table. “Come on, Grace. Time to get ready for bed.”

“You got a letter,” Claire called after him. “I left it on your desk.”

After Jacob put Grace to bed, he retrieved the letter. He immediately recognized the handwriting on the outside of the envelope and grimaced.

Alice.

He’d forgotten about the letter he sent her gushing about Benji’s birth. He’d never followed up to tell her about Eleanor’s death.

The letter sat unopened on his desk for a full week. When he could no longer stand the guilt of seeing it sitting there, he ripped into the envelope and scanned the pages.

The message was as he’d expected. Three pages gushing with congratulations on his new grandnephew and successful surgical delivery. Hope that he would be able to send her a photograph soon. And, worst of all, wishes to Eleanor for a speedy recovery. The Minié ball cackling in his pocket, he flung the letter into the small fireplace in his bedroom, dropped onto his bed, and wept.

February and March passed in the same monotonous manner. At some point, Frank expanded the shoe selection in the store to double its previous size. Jacob shrugged his shoulders at this. He felt it was a foolish idea—there were several cobblers and places to buy shoes in town already—but he couldn’t argue with the revenue it generated. Apparently, the men and boys of Placerville liked being able to buy their suits and their shoes all in one place.

Tom Nugent came in frequently. The bookseller bought two shirts on his first visit, and on his second he dropped off some mending his wife should have easily been able to do. By the third time, he didn’t give any reason for his visit and spent ten minutes leaning on the counter and strong-arming Jacob into a conversation about some new books he’d gotten in at his store. Eventually, he started showing up when Jacob, Frank, and Luo Jun closed for lunch, metal pail in hand. While Frank and Luo Jun kept up a boisterous conversation in the storeroom, Tom and Jacob sat in Jacob’s office. Tom came in without saying a word, the two men ate in silence, and then he would leave, as quietly as he’d arrived.

In early April, Jacob shook his head when he ran the numbers for the first quarter of 1869. The expanded shoe department had increased the store’s takings nearly ten percent.

“The place really would be better with Frank in charge,” he mumbled to himself.

He sighed, folded his arms on the desk, and rested his head on them. He should be ashamed of himself. His nephew running his store, Claire out of school to supervise him in the evenings. What did she do all day long while Luo Shu tended Grace? She stayed up reading in the evenings after he went to bed, but surely she didn’t read all day long.

And Grace.

Now only a week from her fourth birthday, the child had more energy than any other two people he knew. She wanted him to play with her in the evenings and on weekends, but all he could muster the spirit to do was sit dully between her and a doll and pretend to sip tea from a tiny china cup. And even this took a herculean effort.

He was failing them all, and he couldn’t even rid them of himself.

On the evening of April 9, the entire Lewis clan showed up at Jacob’s house just as he got home from the store.

“What’s all this?” he said, meeting them on the front porch.

Claire and Lyddie shared a smile.

“We wanted Grace to have a birthday party, and we weren’t sure you were feeling up to throwing one,” Lyddie said. “So we organized one ourselves.” She handed to Declan to him and turned back toward the street, where Fionn was walking up, balancing a large wooden box in both hands. “Just put the cake in the kitchen,” Lyddie told him. She stared at her father for a moment, her brow furrowed. She looked like she wanted to say something, but she slipped around him into the house.

Even Declan tugging on his nose and yelling “Ding dong!” couldn’t make Jacob smile genuinely. He plastered a fake one on his face for his grandson’s benefit, but the cheery toddler couldn’t shake him out of the deep shame coursing through him.

Again, he’d been unable to meet his responsibilities and his family had had to step in. How could he have neglected to organize a party for Grace?

Andrew must have been having one of his better days because he smiled a lot and played with his son, and he seemed reluctant to hand him over whenever someone else wanted to hold the baby. Not that Benji was so easy to hold anymore. At just over four months old, he’d developed a love for his rattle and spent the entire evening shaking it with such enthusiasm that whoever was holding him was liable to get clocked in the face with the little wooden toy.

“Hold him, Uncle Jacob,” Andrew said, holding Benji out to him after dinner and cake. The baby brandished his rattle at Jacob.

Jacob shook his head and made a show of looking for Grace in the crowded parlor. He muttered something about wanting to make sure she’d thanked Mary for the new dress she’d sewn for her.

“Hold him,” Andrew said again, thrusting the baby a little closer to Jacob.

“Just hold him, Jake,” Will said from the armchair next to him.

Jacob sighed and took the baby. Benji looked up at him, his head wobbling a little on a neck that looked too skinny to support it, and he smiled a gummy smile. Jacob couldn’t help but smile back. Babies’ smiles were the most infectious agent he’d ever come across. A tightness in his chest loosened, and he relaxed into his chair, Benji balanced on one knee. They stared at each other. The baby’s hair had started growing, but only in one dark strip down the middle of his head. It was coming in coal-black, like Andrew’s. Something about the shape of his head and tiny upturn at the tip of his nose told Jacob that Benji was going to favor his father. But his eyes, already dark-brown pools, darker than Andrew’s hazel, were Eleanor’s. Jacob’s chest tightened again, and a distant ringing sound echoed in his ears, like it had for so many days after the barrage at Gettysburg. He handed Benji back to Andrew.

“Amazing how fast they grow,” he said.

Andrew grinned and took Benji across the room to chat with Lyddie.

“I think the birthday girl is all tuckered out,” Will said. He waved a hand toward the corner of the parlor where Grace and Declan sat together building towers of blocks. Or, rather, Grace was building towers, and Declan was knocking them down. Grace burst into tears, ran to Jacob, and crawled into his lap, still sniffling.

“Papa, he knocked down my blocks,” she said.

“Come now, Gracie, this isn’t like you,” Jacob said. “This is the game you two always play.”

The little girl snuffled and wiped her nose on Jacob’s shirtfront. “He knocked down my blocks.”

Jacob looked over at Will, and the brothers shared a knowing glance.

“I think it’s time we headed home and let you get our new four-year-old to bed,” Will said. Jacob nodded his agreement, and Will gathered up the extended family. After several choruses of goodbyes, Jacob, Claire, and Grace were again alone.

Jacob made quick work of putting Grace to bed, and she fell asleep almost as soon as Jacob tucked her in. He ambled back to the parlor to see if anything still needed to be cleaned up.

Claire was gathering the last of the brandy snifters when he came in.

“I hope that was all right, Père,” she said. “Didn’t seem right not to have a party.”

Jacob waved a dismissive hand. “You’re right. I’m sorry I didn’t take care of it myself.”

“You’ve had a lot on your mind.”

Jacob shrugged and grabbed a stray cake plate and followed Claire into the kitchen with it. A stack of dishes teetered precariously in the sink. He sighed and grabbed a dishrag. Claire laid a hand on his elbow.

“The party was my idea. I’ll clean this up. You get to bed, Père.”