“You have been the family I lost,” he finished. “I thank you for the offer of college, but I think we all know I am no student. It is time for me to find my true place in this world. I will miss you two and Ben and this house. I love you in my heart. Thomas Brodie Culhane.”
The letter to Ben was harder.
“You are the brother I never had and the best friend I will always have,” he wrote. “You and Isabel have your future planned out. Right now, I have no future. There is nothing here for me in Eureka. I will leave Cyclone at the sheriff’s office. I’m sure Buck will bring him home. Take care of him for me. He’s the first thing I ever bought with my own money that was worth a damn. I leave this place to take on the world, Ben. I know you will understand. If you ever need anything- anything — I’m sure you will find me and I’ll come running. Have a good life, and thanks for taking care of me all these years. Brodie.”
The letter to Isabel was impossible. He wrote and rewrote it a dozen times, crumpling each one and throwing it on the floor.
“Dear Isabel,” he finally wrote. “You and Ben will be going back East to start a new life in a few weeks. He is the man for you. He loves you dearly and will bring magic to your life. It is time for me to leave here and look for my future. I will remember you forever. Brodie.”
He rode down the pathway and tied Cyclone to a tree, gave him an apple to munch on, and looked up at the Hoffman house.
The light was on in the corner room.
She had sneaked out and was waiting for him.
He decided to wait until she went back to her house and leave the note for her in the greenhouse.
Then he thought better of it. Her mother or father might find the letter.
Even worse, it was a cowardly way to bow out.
But he approached the secret hideaway fearfully. Thirteen years of poverty and the loss of two parents he adored had left him emotionally barren. He had learned affection and self-respect from the Gormans, had found in Ben a brother figure in whom he had confided his fears and his joy.
But Isabel.
Isabel was different. Isabel had been his first love. She had awakened emotions he had never felt before. Each eagerly had surrendered their virginity to the other. She had revealed in Brodie a gentleness of spirit that both awed and terrified him.
How can I say good-bye, he wondered, when my heart aches at the thought?
He knew what he had to do, knew he had to dig deep down inside himself, to reach back four years, to search for and rekindle the cynicism, the toughness, the solitude of the kid who had grown up in Eureka and who, when his mother died, had cowered alone in his bed in the corner of the laundry until Ben had come and found him and taken him to the Gorman mansion and a new life that was far beyond his wildest dreams.
Payback time.
He entered the greenhouse resolutely.
She rushed from the darkness before he was halfway to the back. She was wearing a nightgown and a silk robe covered with tiny embroidered roses.
His throat closed. He couldn’t swallow.
“Daddy told me about Mr. Eli. Isn’t it wonderful! It turned out so perfectly,” she said joyously.
She threw her arms around him, hugging him, and her hair swept his face. He kept his hands at his sides.
She stepped back and looked up at him, and saw something she had never seen before. There were tears in his eyes.
“Brodie…” The first hint of apprehension.
His lips moved but no words came.
“Brodie,” she said, lowering her head a trifle, staring at him, her head cocked slightly to one side.
He touched her cheek and realized his hand was shaking.
“Something’s bad,” she said, and tears flooded her eyes. She put two fingers against his lips. “I don’t want to hear anything bad. Please.”
“Isabel… I’ve got to… I have to go away.”
“What do you mean, ‘go away’? Where? Where are you going?”
He looked at the ground. He could not stand to look at her face, at the tears edging down to her chin.
He shook his head. “I don’t know. But it’s not fair for me to stay here.”
“Fair! Fair! ”
“Look at me, Isabel. Please. I got nothing. All the clothes I own wouldn’t fill the corner of a closet. I got four hundred dollars in a cigar box and that’s all I got in the world…”
“Stop it!” she said.
“Ben loves you. He can give you everything you want.”
“I don’t care!” she cried, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I love you, and I know you love me.”
“I left a note for Mr. Eli and Miss Madeline, and one for Ben. I’m leaving, Isabel. I’m leaving San Pietro valley for good. It’s best for everybody. Especially you.”
“It is not best for me,” she said, anguish accenting every syllable. “You care about Ben, you care about the Gormans. Don’t you care about me?”
“We’re just kids,” he said harshly. “It’s puppy love.”
“That’s what you think? Puppy love? ” She was crying hard now. “Is that all I mean to you?”
He couldn’t stand the hurt. He reached out to her but she backed away, into the shadows at the back of the greenhouse. She sat down on the hard earth.
“You’re just throwing me away.” Her voice was like a whispered wail, a cry in the night, her grief so deep that Brodie did not know how to respond.
“I gotta go,” he said in a voice he didn’t even recognize. “It’s best for everybody.”
“How do you know what’s best for me?” she moaned. “I thought you loved me. I thought you would protect me and…” Her voice dissolved into more tears.
Jesus, he thought, why won’t she understand?
“My heart hurts,” she sobbed. “It will never stop hurting. You’ve turned my dreams into nightmares.”
“Isabel…”
“If you’re going, then go. Get away from me.”
He stood his ground for a few moments and then backed down the aisle to the door. He couldn’t tell her there was a crushing hurt in his heart, too.
As he turned the doorknob, her voice came to him from the darkness.
“I read a poem once,” she said in a voice tortured with misery. “It said ‘First love is forever.’ And I believed it.”
He ran from the greenhouse, ran to Cyclone, jumped on his back, and rode down the path, away from the Hoffman house and around Grand View and down the precipitous cliff road from the Hill to Eureka.
The town had gone crazy. It was like New Year’s Eve. The bars were full, men were staggering in the street, shooting their guns into the air. Some of the girls were dancing on the wooden sidewalk. The news was out about Riker.
Light from town spilled out on the beach, and Brodie leaned back and smacked Cyclone on the rump. He dashed off down the beach.
“Go, boy, go!” Brodie yelled, as the stallion galloped in and out of the surf as he loved to do. They raced past the town, and then Brodie wheeled him around, and they trotted back to the swimming beach. Brodie slid off his back and for the next two hours he talked to the horse, emptying his heart out, explaining to him why he was leaving.
He understands. I can see it in his eyes. He knows I gotta do this.
The wagon to end-o’-track left at 5:00 a.m. And the weekly supply train to San Francisco left at seven. The sun was a scarlet promise on the horizon when he led Cyclone up to the sheriff’s office and tied him to the hitching post. He threw a saddlebag over each shoulder and went into the office. The deputy was half-asleep at his desk.
“What you doin’ down here this time a day?”
“I gotta go out of town,” Brodie answered.
He laid an envelope on the desk.
“My horse is tied up outside and I got a note here for Buck. I’m asking him to take the horse back up to the Gormans for me.”
“Hope the hell nobody steals him,” the deputy said, looking out the window at Cyclone. “I’ll keep an eye on him.”