Jake Walker's Wife Read Free Page B

locked up in a dark root cellar. Certainly Micah had ever forced her outside on a cold, windy night to teach her to appreciate the roof over her head, and Jake didn't suppose she'd ever been forced to memorize Bible verses when she got the wrong answer on an arithmetic problem, or stand in front of the entire congregation and admit she'd gone fishing rather than attend mid-week services. She probably didn't know what it was like to sit at a food-laden table and not be allowed to eat because she'd nibbled at the crust of a pie without first asking permission....
    She hadn't experienced any of those things because she'd grown up in the loving presence of a good daddy. Micah, Jake reasoned, had been everything his own father had been...good and decent and rock-solid. If the prairie fire hadn't taken his ma and pa, life would have turned out differently for Walker Atwood...alias Jake Walker.
    He'd worked for enough bosses during his ten years on the run to know a good one from a bad one, and Micah was a good one. If only he hadn't said that confounded prayer before they ate....
    Everything about the man, from his folded hands and bowed head to his tight-shut eyes, reminded Jake of his Uncle Josh, deacon of the King's Way Church.
    Josh Atwood, his father's only living relative, had taken Jake in after the fire. He’d lived a happy, sheltered life to that point in his life. Then, suddenly and mercilessly, the gentle, loving lessons of his parents were replaced with the harsh, sometimes brutal 'disciplinary' methods of his uncle.
    One month to the day after he buried his parents, Jake had been in the cemetery, standing between their tombstones when Uncle Josh joined him. "W.C.," he'd said, "starting right now, you're going to begin earning your keep around here. There'll be no more molly-coddling. 'Spare the rod an' spoil the child,' the Good Book says," declared his uncle, raising the Bible high above his head.
    "Are you gonna hit me with the rod...or your Bible?" he’d asked, grinning.
    His uncle failed to appreciate young W.C.'s humor, and the boy endured the first of many beatings that day. Jake couldn't help but wonder how his pa and uncle, both raised by the same mama and papa, could have become such different men. His father had been so loving, so tender and kind, while Josh had been....
    Whipping and chastising his nephew didn't appear to satisfy the uncle. Ridicule and shame, it seemed, were as important in the rearing of a child as food and water. And Jake endured it, mostly because he wanted to believe it when his uncle said, "I'm doing these things because I care about you, boy."
    He'd stopped believing that, once and for all, when Josh testified at the murder trial. "Heard him arguing with Horace that very afternoon," Josh had said. "Heard him tell Pickett if he ever caught him threatening a woman again, he'd break his fat red neck." Leaving the witness stand, he'd stood beside Jake and, with tears in his eyes and a sob in his throat, said "May the Good Lord forgive you, W.C."
    He hadn't been anywhere near Lubbock when the murder was committed, but who were the good people of Lubbock to believe...the angry young man who rarely attended church, or the good deacon who'd provided a home for his dead brother's orphaned son?
    During his years with Uncle Josh, he sometimes had vivid dreams...memories of his parents' caring ministrations. Waking was heartbreaking, because then he was forced to admit that never again would he experience their brand of love. The images were fiction, no truer than the stories written by that Dickens fellow.
    T he Beckleys seemed an awful lot like Josh Atwood, praising God for clean water and hot food, thanking the Almighty for bringing the hired hands safely from Baltimore to Foggy Bottom. If life hadn't taught him anything else, it had taught him this: When something appeared too good to be true, it was. And he had the scars up and down his back—put there by the good Deacon Atwood—to prove