Chapter Two

"I see you there, Jack Harrison," cried the girl. "You aren't welcome in these parts."

Jack lifted her hands in the air, displaying the letter for the woman to see. She knew better than to mess with Margaret Hunt, whose rumored skill with a shotgun rivaled Jack's. When Fred MacIntosh, from the no-good MacIntoshes of West Irvington, showed up to take her courting, Margaret shot a clean hole through his finest top hat.

"I don't mean any trouble," Jack replied, wishing she'd brought her own shotgun to visit the Hunts. She should have known they wouldn't accept her arrival peacefully, and she wished she'd had the presence of mind to come armed. "I have a letter for Frances Hunt."

"Ma ain't home," Margaret answered. "Leave it on the front porch and then get off our property."

The girl, in her mid twenties with two tangled braids of dark auburn, stood with her feet apart in a pair of holey boots, the gun cocked tight against her shoulder. Her gingham dress with an apron looked like something out of the previous century, stained and torn from years of neglect. As much as Jack wanted to leave the letter and escape, she hesitated.

"Margaret, the letter's about Roy. I'm afraid it's bad news."

Margaret's freckled complexion blanched and the gun wavered in her hands. Jack took a few steps closer, abandoning her bike along the roadside. What was she supposed to do? Comfort the young woman? Jack had no words of consolation to offer, no promises or banalities to soothe the loss. Still, she owed it to Roy to deliver the letter into the hands of his family.

Margaret cried out, "No, no!" and dropped the gun. Jack fell to the ground, covering her head with her hands and herself in mud as she did so. The gun went off, a bullet lost somewhere in the empty marshlands around them. She felt the whiz of air over her head and thanked her lucky stars she'd dropped to the ground at the crack of the gun.

"What in tarnation!" yelled Jack, rising to her feet and straightening her dress where it had gotten caught in her underskirt. "Have you lost your mind, woman? You nearly killed me!"

But Margaret was lost to Jack's ministrations. The girl sunk to her knees on the front porch of the Hunts' house, the shotgun discarded on the uneven boards beside her. Her hands reached to cover her face, tears wearing a clean path down her dirty path. No sound escaped the woman's mouth, but Jack could feel her misery in her own heart.

"I--I'm sorry," Jack murmured, striding up to the girl more confidently with the gun discarded. "For Roy."

Jack outstretched her hand, offering the letter from the war office. Like a starved dog, Margaret snatched the letter from Jack's hands, tearing the envelope open with greedy fingers and devouring the contents with her wide, hungry green eyes.

"No, no, no," the girl chanted beneath her breath like an incantation that would somehow bring Roy back.

Jack cleared her throat and looked down at her hands, picking dirt from beneath her bitten fingernails. "Well, uh, I suppose I'll leave you alone. I am sorry, Margaret."

At Jack's voice, Margaret lifted her eyes from the letter to Jack, the paper crumpling in her angry fists, as if just remembering the postwoman was still there.

"You're sorry?" she hissed between her crooked teeth, lifting the wadded paper into Jack's face and stepping towards her. "That's all you have to say for yourself, Jack Harrison?"

Jack pursed her lips and crossed her arms over her chest. She would not be intimidated by a scrawny mite of a woman, no matter what pain she must be enduring.

"After everything you've done, that's all you can say is that you're sorry? And you wait until our Roy is dead to tell him?"

"I'm not apologizing for breaking our engagement," cried Jack, unable to contain her anger. I have been screamed at, shot at, and now accosted, and I've had quite enough. "I never meant to hurt Roy, and you know that."

"He never would have gone off to war if it weren't for you, Jack," Margaret continued, seething. "He wasn't--he weren't anything like father afore you ended the engagement all those years ago. Don't think I don't remember just 'cause I'm young. I recall it all. That's when Pa took him under his wing and turned him into another no-good Hunt."

Jack sighed and tried to placate her anger--the girl just needed someone to blame for Roy's death. Jack knew anger was an easier emotion to process than grief, and she couldn't blame the child for lashing out at the nearest target. She did make sure to kick the gun beneath a nearby barrel on the rickety porch in case Margaret's ration completely failed her.

"Margaret, I'm not the reason Roy chose the path he did."

"Then whose fault is it? That he went off...lying and cheating and stealing and all the other no-good things my folk do? You're the one that ended the engagement and left him nothing else to turn to."

Jack knew better than to answer the girl honestly and tell her that Roy had made his own choices, right and wrong. Perhaps Jack was part of the reason, but she could not live with guilt she didn't deserve. If nothing else, it only confirmed that Jack's choice all those years ago was the right one despite the dire consequences. She could not have lived tied to a man with such a corrupt character. At least he died a hero.

"He won't go down in infamy as just another no-good Hunt. He's a hero, a fallen hero," Jack said as softly as her rough voice allowed. "That's how he'll be remembered."

Margaret's lower lip trembled, but she lifted her pointed chin and wiped at her tears with the back of her hand. "Remembered. Just another dead soldier in a graveyard. Ain't the kind of legacy he meant to left behind, not with so many years ahead of him."

Jack thought of Roy as he was before he was shipped to France--a sallow-faced, paunchy man with little to recommend him but the laugh lines around his eyes that recalled a better time. Maybe the years would have been kinder to him had he chosen to spend his life in better pursuits than food, drink, revelry and money, but there was little to be done about that now.

"There's nothing to be done," Jack said, turning to leave. "I'm sorry to bring such ill tidings. I'm sorry, Margaret. Truly."

Her presence was only an aggravation to Margaret in her grief, and Jack's own discomfort demanded she leave the situation for the solitude of her ride home. Jack spared the girl one last glance and found Margaret glaring at her, tears welling in her vivid eyes.

"This ain't over, Jack Harrison," she said, clenching the letter in her hand. "You destroyed my brother, and I swear I ain't about to forget it."

Jack heaved a sigh--she had greater problems to tackle than her old beau's angry sister. She hardly knew what tales Roy had told Margaret about her--some may have been true, but for Margaret to see her as such a villain, Roy must have been spreading lies. She climbed aboard her bike again, the messenger bag now empty, and took the dirt path back to Irvington.

"Hell hath no fury like a man scorned," Jack murmured aloud, a half-smile on her face.

She couldn't hate Roy for whatever he had said in her absence--perhaps she deserved it, perhaps she didn't. Either way, she could not allow herself to wallow in regrets and memories. As Jack continued towards Irvington, however, a few memories escaped her mind and refused to be repressed. She remembered that first sweet kiss under the lamppost in town, Jack's face ruddy and smiling and Roy's soft and benevolent. And she recalled their goodbye, tears brimming in Roy's eyes and Jack itching to escape it all.

Do I have any regrets? Jack asked herself, and she realized she hadn't. There may have been moments when she could have been kinder, but she had made the right choice for herself and perhaps even for Roy. He would not have tolerated her free-spirited ways--she could only imagine what he had said of her nomadic ramblings after the termination of their engagement when she'd traveled the eastern coast on her own, living with the American Indians and learning their ways. No. I have no regrets.

Jack's heart lifted and she forced herself to recall Roy as he had been, a sweet boy with a notorious family. She couldn't pretend this was the first time she'd wondered what her life would have been if she'd married Roy as everyone had expected, but the imaginings rarely brought comfort. Perhaps Jack sometimes wished she had married, but not Roy, and not anyone that she had ever met. She had no regrets, but she did have a nagging discontentment when she saw her nieces and their beaus and the great love they cherished.

"Watch out!" a sudden voice yelled, and Jack skidded to the side of the street, narrowly avoiding a newfangled Model T that careened down the street.

She had become so distracted by her reflections that the man and his car had nearly flattened her. Jack's bike skidded beneath her and she landed on skinned knees, bike discarded beside her with a bend in one of the spokes.

Jack leapt to her feet and yelled after the offender, "You peckheaded mug!"

Between the mud on the road, falling to the ground to avoid Margaret's stray bullet, and the near-collision with the automobile, Jack's dress was now completely coated in mud and dirt and only her hat had escaped unscathed. She cursed her bad luck--if she couldn't scrub out the stains, she would have to spend her hard-earned dollars on clothes instead of useful supplies like a new spoke for her bicycle wheel. As she looked herself over and groused over her soiled dress, a kind voice interrupted her.

"Aunt Jack? What happened?"

Jack looked up to find the pale, freckled face of her eldest niece, Corrie. "Why, Corrie! I, uh, didn't see you there. That ninny in his automobile nearly killed me!"

Corrie stifled a laugh, covering her mouth with a small hand. "I saw. In fact, I quite think all of Irvington observed your near-collision with misfortune."

Jack harrumphed, a hand on her hip. "Today has not been my best day."

"Perhaps you'd like to come in for a cup of watered-down coffee? I'm afraid it's all I can offer," Corrie said, smiling.

In an effort to save food and supplies for their boys overseas, many families chose to ration delicacies such as coffee and tea, and Jack had to confess the watery substance hardly tempted her.

"I should be getting home, Corrie. I'm quite sorry. Do say hello to Alex and Hannah for me, though, won't you? And that new fellow you took in, what's his name? Private Buchanan?"

Corrie assisted her husband, the town doctor, in his work in caring for the injured soldiers who returned from the war, and during Jack's visit, she'd taken a shine to a middle-aged sailor with a waxed mustache and a faulty lung.

Her young niece laughed softly, her green eyes crinkling in a smile. "I'll be sure to pass along your greetings. But perhaps you'll accompany me as I walk back since it's on your way?"

Jack glanced around her, getting her bearings. Only a few blocks remained between their position and the doctor's practice, and she saw no harm in a short dalliance.

"I suppose I can spare a few moments," Jack said with a sigh.

Pushing her bicycle beside her, Jack joined Corrie on the sidewalk, giving a sassy wink to a small boy who laughed at her besmirched dress and jaunty hat.

"I see you were delivering mail from the war office again," Corrie said, gesturing to the infamous messenger bag. She released a sigh; though the girl was young, she was no stranger to death thanks to her work at the medical practice. "To whom must we say goodbye now?"

Jack hesitated; she knew telling Corrie the ill tidings would only incite her kind-hearted curiosity, but for once, Jack desired the intimacy of a close friend. Though Corrie and Christina were her nieces, the large gap in age between Jack and her elder sister, the girls' mother, and Jack's perpetual singleness brought a closer affinity between the aunt and the nieces than between the two sisters. And though Jack did not need comfort, she could not spurn the comfort of a listening ear.

"Roy Hunt," Jack confessed.

As many times as she had said the words today, they still impacted her anew though the relationship was ten years ended. The impact this time, however, was different. As she contemplated his death, the sorrow and regret faded and instead she felt her pity for another wasted life. Roy had wasted his life, indulging in food, drink, and misdeeds, and he had little to show for it but a few final moments of valor.

If Roy wasted his life, then what have I done with mine? What have I done that has made my life worth living?

And Jack found herself none too satisfied with her own answer.

What did you think of Jack's second chapter? Are you surprised to hear about her relationship with Roy? And what about Margaret--will she cause more trouble? Let me know what you think in the comments and be sure to vote if you're enjoying the story!