Deep in the Heart Read online

  DEEP

  IN THE

  HEART

  DEEP

  IN THE

  HEART

  A Novel

  GILBERT MORRIS

  DEEP IN THE HEART

  Copyright © 2003 by Gilbert Morris.

  Published by Integrity Publishers, a division of Integrity Media, Inc., 5250 Virginia Way, Suite 110, Brentwood, TN 37027.

  HELPING PEOPLE WORLDWIDE EXPERIENCE the MANIFEST PRESENCE of GOD.

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Scripture references are from the King James Version of the Bible (KJV).

  Published in association with the literary agency of Alive Communications, Inc., 7680 Goddard Street, Suite 200, Colorado Springs, Colorado 80920.

  Cover Design: The Office of Bill Chiaravalle, www.officeofbc.com Interior Design/Page Composition: PerfecType, Nashville, TN

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Morris, Gilbert.

  Deep in the heart / by Gilbert Morris.

  p. cm. — (The Lone Star series)

  ISBN 1-59145-112-4

  1. Texas—History—1846-1950—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3563.O8742D44 2003

  813'.54—dc22

  2003015528

  Printed in Canada

  03 04 05 06 07 TCP 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  DEDICATION

  To Johnnie, a beloved wife—from Gilbert, a devoted husband.

  Almost fifty-five years ago I stood at the altar of a small church and watched a young woman with dark hair and dark eyes come down the aisle—and she was beautiful.

  She gave me her hand and I took it, and have never let it go.

  The hair is more beautiful than ever, though it’s silver now. The eyes are still fresh and sparkling, and she is more beautiful in my eyes now than she was at that moment so long ago.

  Thank you for more than half a century of love and joy and faithfulness. Most things in this world change rapidly and are lost; but you are the same as you were when we joined hands and hearts.

  The old Book says of the daughters of Job, “And in all the land were no women found so fair as the daughters of Job.” In my heart I always read that verse a little differently: “And in all the land was no woman found so fair as my beloved wife, Johnnie.”

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE: ARKANSAS TERRITORY MARCH-JULY 1831

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  PART TWO: EL CAMINO REAL JULY—SEPTEMBER 1831

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  PART THREE: ROOTS SEPTEMBER 1831

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  PART FOUR: THE TEXICANS 1833—1835

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  PART FIVE: THE ALAMO 1835-1836

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  PART ONE:

  ARKANSAS

  TERRITORY

  March-July 1831

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  A stiff March wind from the Midwest swept down through Missouri before dropping over the lip of Arkansas’s Ouachita Mountains into the river. Each night, transparent layers of ice crusted the serpentine river but melted during the day as the pale sun reached its zenith. Now at midafternoon a gunpowder gray sky hung over the land, and the hoarse barking of a dog broke the utter stillness of the woods.

  A fat gray possum scurried along the riverbank, headed for a large chinquapin oak. But mortality caught up with him as a huge red hound dashed out of the woods and, without breaking stride, opened his enormous jaws and clamped them on the possum’s neck. One quick shake of the dog’s head, and the neck broke with a distinct snap. The dog dropped the limp body and sat down, his jaws open, his pink tongue lolling out as he panted.

  Two boys emerged from the woods, and the shorter one yelped, “Look at that, Brodie! Ol’ Anthony Wayne done caught our dinner for us!”

  The taller of the two did not speak but came and stood beside the dog and the dead possum. At fourteen, Brodie Hardin stood an inch over six feet and was as lean as an oak sapling. His auburn hair poked out from under his limp black felt hat, and his light green eyes glowed with pleasure as he leaned down, roughly caressing the dog’s head. “You done good, Anthony Wayne—real good!” He stood for a moment, watching as the smaller boy nudged at the possum’s fat carcass with his toe, then shook his head. “It’s gonna be a pain to carry this varmint to the house, Clinton. He must weigh at least twenty-five pounds.”

  A stubborn expression settled on Clinton Hardin’s face. He was ten years old, stocky and strong with brown hair, brown eyes, and a stubborn cast to his lips. “You carry him, Brodie, and I’ll take the gun. Maybe we’ll get lucky and see a deer.”

  “Shucks, you couldn’t hit a deer if I tied him down!”

  “Could too!”

  Clinton continued to squabble with his older brother, but finally Brodie groaned, “Clinton, you’d argue with a rock. We’ll tie this here possum’s feet together and put a stick between them and tote him home like that, but I’m carryin’ the gun.”

  Ignoring Clinton’s protests, Brodie selected a sapling and, with some effort, cut it down with his pocketknife. After trimming off the branches and tying the possum’s feet with string from his pocket, he centered the animal on the pole and nodded. “I’ll go in front in case some more game comes along.”

  “No, I’m going in front!”

  “All right, just get moving.” The two lifted their catch, with Brodie carefully pointing the double-barreled shotgun at the ground as they walked along. He was silent, but Clinton, never at a loss for words, commented on what a sorry hunting trip it had been. Brodie inwardly agreed, for he had hoped for a deer or even a coon. He hated the taste of possum, but at least it was better than going back empty-handed.

  Within twenty minutes Clinton was already complaining about the sapling cutting into his shoulder. Brodie ignored him for as long as he could, then said impatiently, “All right, I’m tired of listening to you yap! You’d talk the legs off a stove! I’ll tote the durn old possum by myself.” Dropping his end of the stick, he stepped back, allowing the possum to slide off. He’d thrown the animal over his left shoulder, keeping his right free for the shotgun, when he heard a sharp buzzing sound.

  “Snake, Brodie!” Clinton yelled.

  Brodie’s flesh seemed to turn to stone, but his mind was racing. He heard the rattle on his right. Jumping to the left, he frantically tried to aim his shotgun in the direction of the buzzing. As he fell to one side, he caught a glimpse of a gray blur—a movement so fast his eyes could scarcely take it in. He felt
a bump against his right shoe, and fear coursed through him from his toes to the top of his head.

  The snake was enormous! It stretched out a full six feet, and Brodie’s heart skipped a beat at the sight of the large triangular head and the rapid flickering of the forked tongue. The rattler started to draw back into a coil, and Brodie fell down full-length, fumbling to find the trigger. His hands seemed to have no more life in them than the shotgun he held. He willed the gun to sweep around, but it moved so slowly he wanted to cry out. Finally, as the snake coiled itself tight, Brodie thumbed the hammer back, making a sharp click in the air. As the snake’s head started to rise for the strike, Brodie pulled the trigger. The gun roared and reared up, the recoil pointing it up at the sky.

  The sound filled his head, and he was momentarily stunned, not knowing if he had hit the snake or missed it.

  “You got him, Brodie—you got him! You got the ol’ scudder!”

  Brodie sat up carefully, light-headed from the effort, and stared at the body of the snake thrashing around wildly. Anthony Wayne barked frantically, circling the writhing reptile.

  “You shot his whole head plumb off!” Clinton exclaimed. He grabbed up the sapling they’d used to carry the possum and poked the snake with it, yelling like a wild Indian. Slowly Brodie got to his feet. His legs were unsteady, and for a moment he thought he was going to throw up. Mastering himself, he walked over and stared down at the headless, twitching creature.

  “Look at ’im! The biggest ’un I ever seen!” Clinton yelled. “Let’s count them rattles.”

  Brodie’s stomach lurched at the sight of the large rattler head lying several feet away on the ground, a mangled mess. He waited, unable to speak, then after a moment said, “Well, let’s take him home, Clinton.”

  “We’ll skin him and hang his old hide up over the door.”

  “Reckon as how we’ll do more’n that. We’ll have him for supper.”

  Clinton whirled and stared at Brodie, his eyes wide with disbelief. “We ain’t neither eatin’ no snake!”

  “Yes, we are. I heard Pa say one time that snake was good eatin’.”

  “It’s a sin to eat a snake! The Bible, it says so!”

  Clinton had been baptized by a traveling Baptist evangelist the previous summer. Since that time he had considered himself the spiritual leader of the Hardin family. He had, in fact, become quite unbearable, and Brodie threw up his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “A sin to eat a snake? The Bible don’t say that!”

  “You don’t know nothin’ about the Bible, Brodie,” Clinton pronounced dogmatically. His face grew stubborn, and he added, “It was an ol’ snake that got us into all this here misery and trouble we’re in right now.” Thinking for a moment, he added, “A blamed old snake and that woman Eve. It was her and that snake that did it all!”

  “You keep your mouth shut, Clinton,” Brodie said sharply. “Now help me load that possum back on the stick! We’ll tie this snake on too, ’cause we’re gonna eat both of these critters, no matter what you might have to say about it.”

  For the rest of the journey home, Clinton mouthed dark prophecies about the fate of those who ate snake flesh. Brodie gritted his teeth and said nothing, except once when he groaned, “I wish you hadn’t ever gotten baptized, Clinton. You used to be a pretty nice fellow, but that baptizing ruined you for shore!”

  “You get back there and take your turn, Tarleton!”

  Jerusalem Hardin sat on a three-legged stool, her hands busy milking a nanny goat. She reached over and thumped the nanny’s kid on the nose, pushing it away from its mother’s teats, then laughed as the little billy goat squealed. “You’ll get your turn when I’m through here.” Turning back, she continued to aim the stream of rich milk into the tin pail. She had jokingly named the nanny Esther, for she had always thought the name was beautiful, while this particular goat was singularly ugly. Esther had the most evil-looking eyes Jerusalem had ever seen, and her coat was a mismatched conglomeration of dirty gray and reddish ochre. But for all her hideous looks, Esther was easy to milk, content throughout the process to nibble greedily at the forage Jerusalem had thrown out for her.

  An insistent cry caught the woman’s attention, and she turned to her own baby, who was lying flat on her back kicking her hands and feet. “Why, Mary Aidan, you look like a turtle on its back that can’t flip over.” Jerusalem squirted a few drops of the rich milk into her left hand, then using the fingers of her right, applied the warm liquid to the infant’s lips. The baby began vigorously sucking her mother’s fingers. “I swan, Mary Aidan, you’re a caution! You like this nanny’s milk better than you do mine.” She patted the baby on the stomach and ignored her cries as she continued to milk the goat. She had drawn off all she dared, leaving enough for the billy goat, named Tarleton after a British officer in the Revolutionary War. Her grandfather had often spoken of Sir Tarleton as the most hated man in the British army, and he thought it made a fitting moniker for the already cantankerous little goat. He had also named the hound Mad Anthony Wayne after another of his notorious commanders in the Revolution.

  Stepping back with the pail of milk held securely in her right hand, Jerusalem turned to retrieve her baby, and at once Tarleton butted his way in and began feeding. In one deft motion she swept up Mary Aidan, threw her onto her left shoulder, and left the barn. The cold March wind bit through her thin linsey-woolsey dress, and she made her way quickly across the chicken yard.

  A black-and-white-speckled rooster with a ragged comb shot out from the group of hens and made for her feet, pecking sharply at her ankles. Jerusalem kicked him, sending him fluttering away. “You’d better pick up some manners, Judas, or one of these days I’ll cut off your head and eat you!” Her daughter had named the annoying animal Judas, and Jerusalem had hated him for years. Yet he had filled the chicken yard with his progeny and had managed to evade foxes, skunks, hawks, and other predators. Her eyes ran over the chickens. She knew each one of them by name, for her twelve-year-old daughter, Moriah, had named them all. Some of them had odd names, biblical names, such as Jemima and Sheba. Other names, such as Shushi and Beetle, simply came out of Moriah’s active brain.

  The house she approached was a common dogtrot cabin, consisting of two large rooms separated by a covered passageway. It was made of walnut logs and covered with cedar shakes. Jerusalem knew every inch of the cabin and had chinked the gaps between the logs three times in the twelve years since Jake had built it.

  She stepped into what all of them called the big room. Her glance went at once to her grandfather, Josiah, who was sitting in front of the fire, his head bobbing and his eyes closed. Jerusalem took pleasure at the sight, as she did almost every time she entered the cabin with its smooth wooden floor. For three years she had lived on a dirt floor, with Jake promising her constantly that he would put in a real one when he had time. He had gotten as far as ordering the rough lumber from the sawmill. But in the end, it had been Jerusalem who had hired Abe Simmons, the black carpenter, to come plane it and sand it until it was as smooth as glass.

  She moved past the room’s sparse furnishings—a table, two chairs, and several stools. She passed by the ladder to the loft, where the children slept at night, and noticed how quiet the house was this afternoon with the boys out hunting. Laying Mary Aidan on her stomach in a wooden cradle, she stood for a moment watching the baby’s arms and legs kick. “You’d better learn how to crawl pretty soon,” she said sternly and then smiled, a smile her husband used to adore. She was not beautiful, though most people thought so, due to the liveliness of her expression. When she was courting Jake, he had told her, “You can say more with your eyes, Jerusalem Ann, than most women can say with their mouths.”

  Jerusalem opened the cabinet over the table and removed the lid from a glass jar. She poured the goat’s milk into it, capped it, and stared at it, then shook her head. “I wish I hadn’t lost them two nannies,” she murmured. The wolves had taken them during the winter, and the cow had gone dry, so
Esther’s milk was all they had. She knew she had to get another cow or more goats somehow.

  Jerusalem Ann Hardin was a methodical woman; she’d had to be to raise six children and do the demanding work of the farm. Jake had been gone for almost a year and a half trapping furs, except for one short visit last summer, so most of the planning and work fell on her. She would keep a mental checklist of all the things she had to do, ticking things off one by one as she accomplished them.

  For a time she stood there in front of the larder, studying their meager store of food—two jars of blackberry preserves, one of plum, two of figs. Some flour and meal, but not enough of either to feed her family for long. She reached out and touched the sack of potatoes and shook her head. Not enough. She thought then of the smokehouse, which had been raided by foxes that ruined much of the meat they had put up. Little was left by the end of the winter—just a little salt meat, a hard end of ham, and a few other remnants. For a moment she stood there adding to her mental list of things to do. She knew that during the coming months before winter returned, she needed to raise a garden, fill the smokehouse with fresh meat, store potatoes, and gather herbs and hang them from the ceiling to dry. It all seemed overwhelming, but then the vein of humor that lay in her caused her to smile again, and a small dimple appeared on her cheek. “Lord, I don’t reckon as how I have to fret. We’ve never missed a meal yet.” Then she chuckled and said, “’Course, we did have to postpone a few!”

  She worked quietly preparing what little food she had for the evening meal. Hearing her grandfather coughing, she looked over at him. He straightened up and blinked his eyes. Walking over to him, she reached out her hand and stroked his hair. A sense of relief washed through her as he looked up at her with recognition. It’s one of his good days. He knows me. She patted his cheek and said, “How are you feeling, Granddad?”

  “I feel fine.” Josiah Mitchell did not get up but reached out and touched Jerusalem’s hip, as if to reassure himself. “Where’re the boys?”