Memory Weaver: A Novel - Softcover

Kirkpatrick, Jane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0800722329 ISBN 13: 9780800722326

Verlag: Revell, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Eliza was just a child when she was taken hostage by the Cayuse Indians during a massacre in 1847. Now her husband wants to make a new start in another territory--the land of her captivity. Can she lay the dark past to rest and move on? Or will her childhood memories always hold her hostage?

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jane Kirkpatrick is the New York Times and CBA bestselling author of more than twenty-five books, including A Light in the Wilderness and A Sweetness to the Soul, which won the coveted Wrangler Award from the Western Heritage Center. Her works have been finalists for the Christy Award, Spur Award, Oregon Book Award, and Reader's Choice awards, and have won the WILLA Literary Award and Carol Award for Historical Fiction. Many of her titles have been Book of the Month and Literary Guild selections. You can also read her work in more than fifty publications, including Decision, Private Pilot, and Daily Guideposts. Jane lives in Central Oregon with her husband, Jerry. Learn more at www.jkbooks.com.

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"Jane Kirkpatrick puts flesh and blood on the bones of history. Set against an authentic nineteenth-century background, this is a superb story of a woman's struggle to triumph over time and place. . . . A memorable book."--Sandra Dallas, New York Times bestselling author


Eliza Spalding Warren was just a child when she was taken hostage by the Cayuse Indians during a massacre in 1847. Now a mother of two, Eliza faces a new kind of dislocation; her impulsive husband wants to make a new start in another territory, which will mean leaving her beloved home and her mother's grave--and returning to the land of her captivity.

Haunted by memories and hounded by struggle, Eliza longs to know how her mother dealt with the trauma of their ordeal. As she searches the pages of her mother's diary, Eliza is stunned to find that her own recollections tell only part of the story.

Based on true events, The Memory Weaver is New York Times bestselling author Jane Kirkpatrick's latest literary journey into the past, where threads of western landscapes, family, and faith weave a tapestry of hope inside every pioneering woman's heart. Get swept up in this emotional story of the memories that entangle us and the healing that awaits us when we bravely unravel the threads of the past.


Praise for A Light in the Wilderness

"Kirkpatrick exercises her considerable gift for making history come alive."--Publishers Weekly

"This heart-stirring new historical novel has romance, mystery, and adventure."--RT Book Reviews


Jane Kirkpatrick is the New York Times and CBA bestselling author of twenty-seven books, including A Light in the Wilderness and A Sweetness to the Soul, which won the coveted Wrangler Award from the Western Heritage Center. Her books have been awarded the WILLA Literary Award and Carol Award for Historical Fiction and have been finalists for many others. Jane lives in Central Oregon with her husband, Jerry. Learn more at www.jkbooks.com.

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The Memory Weaver

A Novel

By Jane Kirkpatrick

Baker Publishing Group

Copyright © 2015 Jane Kirkpatrick, Inc.
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8007-2232-6

CHAPTER 1

In the Beginning

My earliest memory is of laughter inside a waterfall of words. I'm in a half-barrel that once held flour. Tree rounds act as wheels. My bare feet tease the knots of rope bored through the barrel's end; my dress covers my legs stuck straight out. My hands grip the smooth sides of the half-barrel. A Nez Perce boy, with shiny hair as black as a moonless night, tows the rope over his shoulder, pulling me in my makeshift wagon across the rubbled ground in front of our cabin-school-church. I lay my head back, close my eyes, feel the sun on my face, let my child belly jiggle over the rutted earth, laughter joined to theirs. Ecstasy.

A sudden jolt. The wagon stops. Eyes pop open. Before us stands my father, hands on hips, elbows out, eyes black as turned earth. Absent our laughter I can hear my mother's distant voice speaking to her Nez Perce students inside the school, then Nez Perce voices repeating as a song: English. Nez Perce. English. Nez Perce. I let the words wash over me, as comforting as a quilt.

I found no such comfort many years later at the grave-digging of my mother. I was thirteen. I didn't know then that the healing of old wounds comes not from pushing tragic memories away but from remembering them, filtering them through love, to transform their distinctive brand of pain. That frigid January day in 1851 I wanted to forget my mother's dying and so much more. Then laughter interrupted my sorrow as the chink, chink of the shovel hit dirt. Laughter — that made me wonder about my first memory. Perhaps it wasn't true that I was comforted by Nez Perce words mixed in with my mother's those years before. Maybe I didn't even hear what I thought I did. Emotions wrap around memory. We don't recall the detail in our stories; we remember the experience.

Deep in the pit, pieces of ice floated in shadowed puddles. I had slipped out of a grieving house in Brownsville, Oregon Territory, leaving my brother and two sisters behind, with my father holding his head in his hands. I ought to have stayed at our cabin for my sisters and brother, comforted as an older sister should, been a shoulder to let them cry on. We all ached from the loss. But I'd had enough of tears.

The laughter came from one of the grave diggers. He stopped when I approached. A light rain pattered against his felt hat, dotting the brim. I took his sudden silence when he saw me as respect while Mr. Osborne, the father of my one and only friend Nancy, continued to dig. I hadn't minded the sound of laughter.

Mr. Osborne looked up in the silence. He introduced us. "Andrew Warren, meet Eliza Spalding."

Mr. Warren's eyebrows lifted. "But I thought —"

"Same name as her mama, Eliza Spalding, who we're working for here." Mr. Osborne nodded at the grave hole they dug for my mother.

Mr. Warren's smile when he gazed at me from the pit was a clear drink of refreshing water that, when I swallowed, soothed a throat parched from tears. I noticed his shirt had a scorch mark against the white of his collar and wondered if his mama ironed it for him or if he did it himself.

"Wishing it wasn't so, Miss Spalding. A mother's love can't be replaced, only remembered."

"Thank you, sir."

"No need to call him sir. Not much older than you, he is." Mr. Osborne winked.

Andrew Warren seemed much older and wiser, his observation of my loss and memory wrapped together a profundity to me at such a vulnerable time. His brown eyes looked through me, and when he removed his hat to wipe his brow of sweat, a shock of dark hair covered his left eye. He had a clear complexion, his face free of whiskers, revealing a young man who chewed on his lip. I'd learn later he was nineteen.

He did not attend the burial or at least I didn't see him. My eyes and heart were focused elsewhere, and my hands were occupied with my siblings — Martha, four, but a year older than Baby Amelia, and Henry, named for my father, eleven — as we listened to one of my father's preacher colleagues read the Scriptures. It was his intent to give us comfort and to try to capture my mother's story at the grave site. Her amazing story. He failed, in my opinion. But who could capture the fleeting life of a woman who gave her all to the Nez Perce people, Indians who later sent us away.

I saw Mr. Warren next that same spring. Muck still marked the Territorial Road, but rhododendron with their red and yellow hues edged the dark fir forests. My mother never lived to see spring in this new town my father had moved us to.

That May morning I walked to Kirk's Ferry with Nancy Osborne to pick up needles and thread at Brown and Blakely's store. I could have asked my father to bring needles home since that's where he worked as a postmaster, but in truth, I loved the walk with my friend. Nancy understood my quirky ways, my wanting to stop and inhale blossom fragrance or seeking tiny trillium that peeked through the dense forest shade. I had to point out deer hooves that had crossed our path and sent her eyes upward at an owl gazing down at us from a fir. It took forever to walk to the store, I stopped us so often.

Out of nowhere, Mr. Warren appeared, sitting astride a horse, wearing brogans, heavy duck pants with shiny pocket brads, a white collarless shirt, a sweat-stained hat. His hands rested on the pommel, reins loose, as though he waited for me and had not a care in the world.

"Like a ride into town, little lady?" Andrew's soft drawl warmed like honey on a johnnycake. I couldn't let him know of such thoughts, though. But neither was I one to be coy nor play those games I'd seen other girls tease at with boys.

"I prefer my own two feet." I looked up at his sable eyes shaded by his hat. "And I already have a companion. Miss Osborne, meet Mr. Andrew Warren."

"So you remember me?" He sat a little straighter on his horse. "Well, I am memorable."

"For such things as you may not wish to be remembered for. Free-speaking to young girls could be a caddish act." I stifled back a grin of my own.

"Hmmm. Well, my horse could use a rest. Any objection to my walkin' beside you precious ladies?"

"The road belongs to everyone."

Nancy giggled as the May warmth gathered around us, puffy white clouds like cottonwood fluffs drifted across the sky. The pleasant weather gave me strength enough to deal with my father should he learn of my walking down the road with any young man. My mother could have tempered him. But she wasn't there.

His horse clomped along the dirt path and stopped us once or twice to tear at grass. Mr. Warren — I thought of him then and later, too, in that formal way — talked to us about a model of a revolver he hoped to buy one day, "a cap and ball firearm Samuel Colt called a Ranger, but they changed the name, call it Navy."

"You like guns, then, Mr. Warren?" Nancy asked the question. She'd turned eleven but was wise beyond her years. Tragedy does that to us.

"I like the feel of them, their smooth barrels and the weight in my hands. I'm partial to the smell of gunpowder too. I plan to defend as needed against any old Indian uprisin's that might come my way."

"There's a certain alacrity in your voice, Mr. Warren."

"Don't know the meaning of that word, Miss Spalding." He frowned. I admired his ability to express his lack of knowledge.

"Eagerness," I said. "Or maybe enthusiasm might be a better word."

"Ah, that alacrity...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Revell
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0800722329
• ISBN 13: 9780800722326
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: alles-meine.de GmbH; 4935210000000; rene@alles-meine.de; ; Am Spitzberg 1; Bannewitz; Sachsen; 1728; Deutschland