A Stranger’s Knock at Her Bakery Door – Extended Epilogue

April 1870

The bulk of Odessa’s belly required that, in order to kiss his wife, Sawyer had to extend his upper body over the immovable obstacle. The kisses were no less passionate for having to accommodate the presence of the child soon to be born.

“I just don’t want to be away if you deliver,” Sawyer fretted. He put his hands upon her belly. The thrill of their child moving beneath his touch was a wonder that never paled.

Odessa insisted on walking him out to his horse even though she had been told to stay off her feet and, even when sitting, keep them raised to avoid swelling.

“Oh, I don’t feel as if I’m going to deliver while you’re away. I remember when I was waiting for Ivy. I was convinced every morning of the final month that this was the day. She was a week late! You go on and do your work there,” she said, “and I’ll still be waiting for the baby when you come home.”

“I hope you’re right,” Sawyer said. “But the minute you feel the first birth pain, you send word so I have time to get back here before the baby arrives. You hear me? The first birth pain!”

“You’ve been a father once before, and I’ve been a mother,” Odessa reminded him after a second goodbye kiss, “and we both know babies make the decision when they’ll arrive. In the meantime, Cynthia won’t let me do anything but sit on the porch and drink lemonade while she cleans the house, cooks the meals, launders the clothes…I’m so lazy that I’ll forget everything I ever knew about keeping a house.”

“She likes being busy while Phoenix is away on Pinkerton business,” Sawyer reminded his wife. “I’m glad she’ll be here with you.

***

Sawyer climbed the ladder with the familiarity of one who knew what he was looking for. Whether he was managing repairs back in Abilene for Odessa’s bakery, helping a group of men build an addition onto the church, or taking careful stock of the orphanage that he had saved from his brother’s planned sale, Sawyer spent a significant amount of his free time mounting the rungs of ladders.

He climbed down the rungs again.

“As soon as we have some dry days,” he said to Mrs. Cameron, the new orphanage matron, “we need to get started on a new roof. This one might last one more winter, but there’s no point in putting it to the test. I’ll order the wood and line up a work crew so that they’re ready to start once the rains ease up.”

Mrs. Cameron, a war widow and former orphan herself, had been hired by the board of trustees, of which Sawyer was president, because she understood the needs of children who did not have parents. She was energetic and enthusiastic, and the children were very fond of her.

“Should I plan for June, then?” she asked. “The children spend more time out of doors anyway in summer, so it would be convenient for your workers and for them.”

Sawyer nodded. “I’ll make sure we have a full crew for June.”

“You’re going to be quite busy this month anyway,” Mrs. Cameron said archly.

Sawyer’s grin was almost boyish. It had been ten years since Milo’s birth, so when Odessa had told him, back at the end of September, that she was expecting their first child, his reaction had been nothing short of euphoric. Now, nine months later, every day began in the heightened expectation of the new arrival.

“I just finished the nursery last week,” he confided. “It’s all ready for the new baby.”

“Mr. Drayton! Mr. Drayton!”

Sawyer turned at the sound of his name. He discouraged formality, but Marta Klein, the orphanage cook, was of the old school, and because he was the president of the board of trustees, she would never address him as Sawyer.

“Marta, what’s the matter?” But Sawyer knew. “The baby?” he asked Marta.

“Ya, ya,” she said urgently. “The wire it come. Baby coming. Pains starting. You must go.”

Sawyer began to run to the stable for his horse. Halfway there, he turned around. “Next week, we’ll discuss the spring fundraising fair,” he said. “Odessa has some new ideas to share with you.”

Riding back through the countryside, impatient to be home but satisfied that his weekly meeting at the orphanage had been productive, Sawyer put aside his irritation that his strong-minded, independent wife had insisted that he keep his weekly appointment with the orphanage headmistress.

“I shouldn’t have listened to Odessa,” Sawyer said, his only audience the blue sky above and the green grass now sprouting after the long winter. “I should have stayed home.”

The orphanage had become a passion for him, his means of trying to undo all the harm that his brother had caused. It had been a longstanding cause for Odessa before Sawyer ever arrived in Abilene. He knew that her devotion to the orphanage meant that it was a priority for her as well, one that she wouldn’t allow him to shirk simply because, in her view, she was just going to have a baby.

Despite his irritation, Sawyer couldn’t help but smile. She knew her own mind, that was for sure. When the doctor told her that she couldn’t continue to work in the bakery in the later months of her pregnancy, she had been rebellious. Until Sawyer reminded her that he knew how to bake and he could do just what he’d done while she was recovering from the gunshot wound inflicted by Severin.

The Baking Blacksmith had made a reappearance, baking pies, cakes, and other pastries during the morning, selling them to customers until noon, then leaving the bakery to work with Hugh Montgomery at the blacksmith shop.

Abilene was home. It was where he and his wife worked, where his children went to school, where his family worshipped, and where his friends gathered. Soon, there would be a new child in the family who would know Abilene as home.

Sometimes, although Sawyer tried not to think back on those grim days when he had been a pawn in Severin’s hand, he wondered what it would have been like had the two Drayton sons enjoyed a normal fraternal bond.

It was no use wondering what might have been, he realized. Severin had been tried and sentenced, as had Vincent Carver. The two had been sentenced to serve their terms in a prison that was using forced labor to finish its construction in Lansing, Kansas. It was time for Sawyer to let that dark past go.

He owed it to this new child who was born after that day and didn’t deserve to be fettered by it.

That was what Odessa wanted.

***

When he finally reached home, he was met in the front yard by Ivy and Milo, and, of course, Britta, their constant companion.

“Pa!” Ivy came to him immediately before he’d had a chance to stable his horse. “The baby is here, but Cynthia won’t let us see it or even tell us if we have a brother or a sister. She says you have to see the baby first. Pa, why does she say that?”

Sawyer tossed the reins of his horse to Milo. “Son, will you put Apple Pie in the stable for me? I’ll go in and greet our new family member so that you two can come in quick as the dickens. How’s that?”

When he dismounted, Britta performed her usual greeting as she ran in circles around his feet while he tried to move forward.

“Britta!” Ivy called in her commanding way. “Be a lady! Pa, you promise that as soon as you see the baby, you’ll call us in?”

“I will,” Sawyer promised, “but first Apple Pie must be stabled. And both of you must wash your hands before you can touch the baby. Those are the doctor’s rules!”

Britta abandoned Sawyer when she saw Milo and Ivy walking to the stable with the horse, so Sawyer was able to climb up the porch steps and enter the house in peace.

Cynthia was in the kitchen, making coffee. She smiled at his entrance. “Your timing is good,” she said. “The baby was born three hours ago.”

Cynthia didn’t approve of men even being in the house while a woman was in childbirth. She said that a woman undergoing labor pains deserved the privacy to groan and cry out and even curse, as the child within her struggled to be born.

He knew that in the three hours since the birth, Cynthia would have cleaned the birth room and bathed the newborn. She would have brought Odessa a fresh nightgown and brushed her hair after the travails of labor. Odessa would have held her baby for the first time and fed the child.

“Go on,” Cynthia told him. “Those children have been pestering me every five minutes to come in. They won’t wait much longer.”

Sawyer hugged her and then ran up the stairs.

The bedroom door was ajar, probably so that Odessa could have some solitude. He opened it and was greeted by his wife’s radiant smile.

“Oh, Sawyer,” she breathed, “Our baby is beautiful!”

Sawyer went to Odessa and held his arms out. “A daughter?”

She nodded. “Ivy will be so pleased. I’m sure she’ll think it’s all because that’s what she told God she wanted. She said she already has a brother and now she wants a sister.”

Sawyer looked at his daughter. She was looking up at him with great interest, her round eyes intent upon his face as if she were trying to connect the person she saw with the voice she had been hearing for months. There was a thatch of dark hair atop her head like the cap of an acorn.

Sawyer laughed aloud. “She has the chubbiest little cheeks I’ve seen!”

“Yes, she already has a hearty appetite,” Odessa boasted.

Sawyer sat on the bed next to Odessa, their daughter enfolded in his arms. “You look beautiful,” he said. “So full of life.”

Odessa knew, because they had discussed their pasts, that Sawyer was haunted by Clara’s death in childbirth and that he’d been fearful that Odessa would suffer the same fate. She stroked the baby’s cheek adoringly. “I didn’t look so beautiful a couple of hours ago,” she joked. “I looked like I’d come straight out of a Halloween haunting. Thanks to Cynthia, I didn’t have to try to be brave and suffer in silence. She sent Milo and Ivy over to the general store to buy candy and then to the boarding house for supper.”

“That kept them occupied and out from underfoot,” he replied as he smiled at his wife and new daughter.

“I’m sorry that Phoenix has to be away on business so often,” Odessa said, “but I’m so very glad that she spends her time with us when he’s gone! It’s like having a mother here.”

Sawyer nodded. “That’s what she was to us. Well, to me.”

He quickly changed the subject, knowing that Odessa didn’t like for him to blame himself for his brother’s transgressions. “We’re putting a new roof on the orphanage in June,” he said.

“Mama!”

Both their heads turned at the sound of Ivy’s voice outside. Cynthia had opened the window after the baby’s birth to allow the fresh air inside. Ivy’s voice, strong and commanding, carried easily.

“When can we see it?”

Sawyer rose and went to the window. “Here’s the baby,” he said, holding his daughter so that they could see her tiny body from the yard below.

“Brother or sister?” Milo asked.

“Come inside, and we’ll tell you.”

In the fewest seconds possible, the sound of impatient feet climbing the stairs was heard as the two children raced to meet their new sibling. They ran in through the open door and stood at a standstill, suddenly taken aback by the tiny infant in their father’s arms.

“She’s smaller than my doll,” Ivy observed. There was a note of scorn in her tone.

“Just as you were,” her mother replied, “when you were a newborn baby.”

“Come closer,” Sawyer said. “Don’t you want to see her?”

“I do,” Milo said. Shyly, he edged closer to the baby in his father’s arms. Then, with trepidation, he touched the baby’s cheek.

“Ivy!” he said. “She’s softer than a caterpillar!”

That got his sister’s attention. She went to Milo’s side and, as he had done, placed her index finger against the baby’s cheek.

An expression of reverence transformed Ivy’s expression. “It is!” she marveled. “It’s softer than any caterpillar!”

***

When Selena and Lydia came by to meet the new baby and see how Odessa was feeling, they howled with laughter to learn that Ivy had been unimpressed with the infant’s arrival until Milo disclosed the texture of her skin.

“That’s Ivy,” Odessa acknowledged ruefully. “If any creature expects to have merit, it must meet the existing standards of the bug population.”

“She was quite funny at lunch today,” Lydia said. “I saw her looking at my belly several times as I was filling the plates. Then, she blurted out, ‘Aunt Lydia, are you going to have that baby while we’re eating?’ I assured her that my baby won’t be showing up just yet.”

“She’s an observant one,” Selena agreed. “I had two pieces of Lydia’s cake, and Ivy asked me if I was eating so much because I swallowed the baby, and it’s hungry!”

Sawyer laughed along with the ladies while his daughter rested in his arms, drowsy from her recent feeding.

“Elias says that we’re going to have to double our food buying if I continue to eat as I’m doing now,” Lydia said. “Last night, I had the most unexplained yearning for rhubarb. There’s some in the root cellar that I put up last year. He was such a dear. He went down and got it and made me a rhubarb pie! He’s taken on so much of the running of the boarding house that I feel quite like a lady of leisure. I sit at the desk and do the accounts and register new guests, and he does everything else. And he likes doing it, too!”

“How did the pie taste?” Sawyer asked, always interested in cooking tips.

“Sour and not at all what I wanted, but I didn’t say so because he was so sweet to make it for me. You daren’t tell him what I’ve just said,” she warned Sawyer, playfully wagging her finger at him.

“What about Hugh?” Odessa asked.

“Hugh couldn’t cook if I were going to give birth to a dozen babies,” Selena said. “He’s quite intent on assuring Margaret that her getting a sister or brother doesn’t mean that she’s not our own little girl. That’s where he spends a great deal of time. She’s our little sunshine, but she got it into her head that we won’t want her now because we’re having one.”

“It’s hard to be an orphan,” Odessa said from her own memory. “You’re never quite sure that you belong. But Margaret will be a lovely big sister. She has such a gentle heart.”

Sawyer knew from Hugh’s own words that the middle-aged blacksmith had been stunned by the news that he and Selena were going to have a baby after so many years of disappointment. Hugh had confided that once Odessa was back on her feet and in the bakery again, he hoped that Sawyer would return to working more hours because Hugh wanted to spend more time with the children.

There were so many possibilities in his life now. The baby in his arms was the most dramatic of the changes that he and Odessa had undergone since their marriage. Abilene, the rough town where corruption was a foe constantly to be conquered, was for him, a haven.

Everything he wanted was here.

He looked over at Odessa. She would always be his bride. They had endured much together before today, each of them having a sorrowful past to overcome. But now, the future ahead belonged to them and to their family and their faithful friends.

“So what are you naming this little angel?” Lydia asked. “No one has mentioned her name.”

Odessa’s eyes met Sawyer’s. “Ivy was all for naming her Polly, but Sawyer talked her out of that. He said the real Polly would be confused if there was another Polly in the family. We’re naming her Claudia, after Sawyer’s mother, because if she hadn’t taught him to bake, he and I might never have fallen in love.”

“Claudia Drayton,” Selena repeated.

“Claudia Joy Drayton,” Sawyer corrected her.

God had chosen an unlikely route to bring Sawyer to this sublime sense of joy and possibility. The child he held in his arms was a sign from God that though weeping endured for a night, joy had come in the morning.

THE END