Kid ran into Jack a few days later as he was taking a break from fixing the frame of one of the windows in Rachel's house.  Rachel had gone to school and the others were busy so the two men were alone as Kid walked around the side of the house.  Might as well not delay the inevitable confrontation, Kid thought.  It was time for him to get some answers.

Jack wiped the back of his neck and face with a handkerchief.  He looked up as he heard Kid approach.  Seeing the sullen and angry look on the boy's face, he prayed for strength.  "Ah, Kid.  I was wonderin' when we'd get around to the big confrontation," he said with slight sarcasm.

Kid gazed at the man before him and his first thought was that Jack was shorter than he remembered.  He was startled to see that he was older than Kid had ever remembered him looking.  Jed had gotten his height from his father and little else, favoring their mother more.  Kid, however was staring at himself twenty or thirty years from now.  It was no wonder his mother had confused them in her feeblemindedness.  "What the hell are you doin' here?" Kid asked bitterly.  "What do you want?"

"Well, you certainly don't beat around the bush, do you, John?"

"Don't call me that!"  Kid snapped angrily.  "My name's Kid; you're John.  I hate that name and I won't answer to it, not anymore."

Startled at Kid's vehemence, Jack actually stumbled.  Oh, God what have I done to my son?  He hates the name he was born with because he shares it with me.  Outwardly, he nodded.  "I guess I can understand that," Jack replied softly.  "There was a time when I hated that name as well because it reminded me of what and who I was when all I wanted to do was die."  He perched on the sawhorse he'd been using and offered Kid the canteen which the younger man declined.

"Company don't allow drinkin'," Kid said.

"Well, that's good 'cause it won't get you nowhere but in trouble," Jack said softly.  He held the canteen up and shook it.  "This is water by the way.  I haven't had a drink in twelve years."

"Well, you'll excuse me if I find that a little hard to believe," came the sarcastic response.  Kid crossed his arms and widened his stance defensively.  "After twelve years, why the hell are you back in my life?  You left us high and dry years ago and I've been perfectly happy gettin' used to life on my own.  Jed's dead, did you know that?  No, how could you 'cause you weren't there!"

Jack closed his eyes and raised a slightly trembling hand to cover them.  For a moment, Kid felt guilty for the obvious pain he'd caused.  His eyes narrowed, taking in the slumped, slightly rounded shoulders and the gray strands in Travis' hair and beard that made him look old.  But that don't excuse him for all the hell he put you through, Kid told himself.

"Your," Jack swallowed hard before continuing, "your Aunt Sadie's been keepin' me updated on you boys," Jack admitted with a sigh.  "I'd already started tryin' to find you when she wrote me about his death.  You know, not a day goes by since I got my head on straight that I haven't cursed myself for not bein' there for you all...for your mama.  I have missed so much. You've gotta understand that I never left you boys and your mother willingly.  I may have made some horrible choices in my life back then but I was always aware of my responsibility to my family.  In fact it was that sense of responsibility that made me start drinkin'."

Kid bristled at the mention of his mother.  "Leave Mama outta this!" he warned, his voice low and dangerous as he flexed the fingers of his right hand in agitation. "She thought you were comin' back ya know.  She watched for you to walk in that door every day 'til the day she died."

Jack extended a hand to him.  "Son, I can explain...."

"I am not your son!" Kid yelled, batting Jack's hand away.  "My father is dead."  He spun on his heel and took a few steps before dashing back around as a thought occurred to him.  He shok his finger in Jack's face.  "I don't know what kind of game you're runnin' now, but you've got Lou thinkin' you're some sortta misunderstood martyr bein' persecuted here.  I don't want you tellin' her anythin, you got that?  Even better, just stay away from both of us."

"You tellin' me I can't talk to her?" Jack asked, unable to keep his own anger from beginning to show.  It was one thing to denigrate him because of what he'd done in the past.  Lord only knew how long Kid had been storing all that anger.  But to tell him who he could and couldn't talk to as if Jack were the child and Kid the parent was going too far.  "Gettin' a little big in your britches to be tellin' me and your fiancee who we can talk to now, ain't ya?  Seems she won't take too kindly to bein' told what to do."

Probably not, Kid thought, but she'll just have to understand.  "I'll handle Lou.  Just you stay away from her.  I don't want her gettin' to like you, gettin' to think you're her friend, and then have you cut out on her like you did us," he said.  "If you don't...if you hurt her, so help me God, you'll wish you really were dead."

The two men were standing toe to toe and were so involved in staring each other down that neither heard the approach of the small shadow coming around the corner of the house.  Lou stopped in her tracks as she saw the two men staring at each other the tension and anger a living, breathing thing between them.  "What's goin' on here?" she asked curiously looking between the two men.

At the sound of her voice, both men took a step back from each other, Kid still glaring at Jack.  Jack felt ashamed at being caught.  He had no business acting like that.  How was he going to convince Kid that he'd changed when he continued to rise to the boy's challenges?  You need to be the example Jack, otherwise you may never be able to find a place in your son's life.  He suddenly began picking up the tools and wood scraps littering the ground, a smile on his face.  "Ah, Lou.  Kid and I were just talkin' about you, weren't we?"

"Nothin' goin' on here, Lou," Kid said quickly.  "I was just askin' Jack here how long he was plannin' on bein' in Rock Creek."  He knew she knew he was lying, but he didn't feel like getting into it with her at the moment.  Kid just hoped she'd save grilling him about the argument until later when they were alone.

Lou watched as Kid refused to look her in the eye.  His movements slightly jerky and nervous.  "Nothin' huh?  Then why do the two of you look like powder kegs about ready to go off any second?"

Jack tossed a hammer into the wooden box the tools were stored in.  "Oh, Kid and I was just talkin' about parents and children and how sometimes parents don't always make the right decisions for their children even if it seems the best thing at the time," he said with a small, sad smile.  He prayed that Kid heard the message beneath his words.  "Ya know, I think it woulda been real nice if God included instructions with children when they're born.  That way when parents messed up, they could just look up the proper way to make things right with their children."

Kid struggled to hold onto his anger.  It wasn't that he wanted to be hardhearted it was simply that the anger was comforting and secure.  It sheltered him from those deep feelings he'd banished from his thoughts so long ago.  If he was angry, he didn't have to face those feelings and deal with them.  Anger was the protective bandage on the raw wound that was his past, a wound he didn't want Lou to see for fear that she'd think him less of a man, less of a person, for its exsistence.

Kid looked away from the man who's words held the desperate plea for a chance to explain, a chance to be forgiven and for the first time in his life, Kid was unwilling to give that second chance.  "Sometimes parents wait too long to make things right," he murmured staring at a mourning dove resting in a small tree a few yards away.

Curiously, Lou looked at Jack as Kid spoke and watched the man's heart break.  The eyes so much like her Kid's lost their lustre as something died behind them.  She felt her own eyes misting as she saw the older man's last hope fade away.  Shakily he sat down on the steps leading to the small back porch.  In a matter of seconds, he looked ten years older than he had and Lou wondered how Kid could be so heartless.  She didn't know the nature of the men's relationship or their conflict but she could tell that in one soft comment, Kid had taken away Jack's whole reason for living.  And for that she found herself growing supremely angry with her fiance, so angry that she couldn't speak for several minutes.

In the several minutes of funeralesque silence that followed Kid's remark, Jack collected himself enough to stand.  Gathering his supplies, he murmured something polite to Louise and trudged off not hearing or seeing anything of his surroundings.  Kid didn't want any part of him, wouldn't even let him explain so he would pack his things and leave after finishing the room.  If nothing else he could at least give them that.

Jack was barely out of sight before Lou tore into Kid as she followed him into Rachel's house.  He'd made it to the sitting room before she caught up with his long angry strides.  "Just what the hell do you think you're doin'?" she shouted, pulling on his arm to make him face her.  "Do you have any idea what you just did to that sweet man?"

"Sweet man?" Kid scoffed bitterly.  "He's got you buffaloed already, don't he?  Trust me Lou that is no 'sweet man'."

"What happened to guilty until proven innocent, huh?  Jack Travis has done nothin' to prove to me that he's this vicious man you seem to think he is."

"You don't understand, Lou."

"What don't I understand?!" she shouted at him.  "You broke that man's heart, Kid!"  Lou looked at him, her eyes narrowing as if inspecting him.  "All he wants to do is to make peace between the two of you, he told me that much.  How can you be so cruel and...and vindictive to an old man?  You keep sayin' that I don't understand but you won't explain to me so that I can understand.  What is goin' on between you two?"

Kid was desperate to make her understand he was just protecting them both.  "He's a manipulator, Lou.  You can't trust him."

"Can't trust him?  I can't trust you!"  Lou looked up at him with hurt eyes.  "First there's this family member you never told me about.  Then, you won't tell me what's got you so angry at him you look like you're ready to call him out any day and I can't trust him?!  You're the only one who's lied to me so far."

"What do you want from me, Lou?" Kid ground out in exasperation.

"The truth!"

Kid's eyes hardened.  "He's my father, goddammit!" he shouted, his voice breaking slightly with the admission.  A part of him exulted triumphantly in the look of stunned horror on her face.  "Is that what you wanted to hear, Lou?  Jack Travis is the same man who, on my sixth birthday, beat the ever lovin' tar outta me and then proceeded to throw Jed up against the wall over and over again until he finally passed out.  A few years later, after gambling away all our money and even the land we lived on and the house we lived in, he decided to move on to greener pastures and left his dying wife and sons poorer than the dirt we called home.  That's who Jack Travis is!"  He was breathing hard and his body shook with the pent up rage he'd finally released on Lou.

Lou was stunned completely and totally.  As he'd ranted, she'd unconsciously backed up further and further until she was almost cowering against the wall of the house.  The hurt and rage he'd finally released had changed his face into something unrecognizeable and for the first time since she'd met him, Lou was afraid of the man she was to marry.  She couldn't help but understand his plight, however, she had a hard time reconciling the image he'd painted her with the real life Jack Travis.  Instinctively, Lou knew there was more but she'd never push him.  She watched him watch her and saw the anger deflate to be replaced by a deep-seated hurt she'd never seen that had Kid falling to his knees helplessly.

For Kid, his words had conjured up all those old feelings and images:  the beatings he and Jed suffered, the screams and breaking glass that woke them in the middle of the night, running away into the darkness as their father shot at them for letting the mule run away.

Looking back he could see how the abandonment he'd felt at his father's disappearance had tinged all his relationships including the one with Lou.  He'd been afraid from that point on that anyone he loved would abandon him, which was part of the reason he'd demanded that the two of them marry shortly after they'd consumated their relationship.  He loved her so much that he knew she'd leave unless he had that committment from her, a committment neither was ready for until now.  The hurt, the anger, the abandonment, and a childlike longing for his father all emerged in a strange muffled cry as he fell to his knees, his body shaking as uncontrollable tears tracked slowly down his cheeks.

Lou brought a hand to her mouth as tears she'd only ever seen him cry once before overflowed his tightly shut eyes.  "Oh, Kid," she whispered.  She fell to her knees beside him on the floor, slowly and gently pulling his head to rest on her shoulder, her arms wrapping tightly around him.  Kissing his head, Lou stroked his hair and felt her own tears fall on the sandy curls.

She could tell that everything he was feeling were things he'd bottled up inside and ignored for years and Lou knew he needed to get it all out in the open, out in the daylight for the healing to start.  "Let it go, sweetie, please," she soothed, rocking them both back and forth.  "You don't have to carry this by yourself anymore.  Just let it go.  I'm sorry.  I'm so sorry!"

They sat in the middle of Rachel's parlor on the floor for countless minutes.  Lou held him as he sobbed wholeheartedly for the first time in almost fifteen years, big bone-shaking sobs from the depths of his soul, sobbing out everything he'd felt then and since.  For long minutes, Kid cried on her shoulder, clutching the back of her shirt in his fists like a child.  As he calmed down, Lou lowered his head until it lay in her lap.  She continued to murmur--how much she loved him, that nothing that had happened was his fault, how she'd never leave him--even as she continuously stroked his head letting his soft curls run through her fingers.

Kid lay with his head cradled on Lou's lap, his eyes staring out into space in front of him.  He wasn't actively listening to her soft murmurings, but he clung to the comfort they gave, her touch tender and gentle.  Kid had only cried once since the night of his sixth birthday and that was when Jed had died.  Tears were unfamiliar to him.  He was the one who was always in control, the one people counted on for his level-headedness and now that man was gone, a crying, emotional heap left in his wake.  However, embarassment didn't exist where they were.  It was like the house had been insulated against the outside world just for this moment of closeness.  Kid had never been so honest, so broken in front of Lou before.  Here, in his moment of weakness, he could see how strong she really was.  Lou took it all in stride and deep down, he knew she'd never betray his confidence, she'd never hurt him intentionally and the knowledge was an epiphany.

"She thought I was him you know," Kid remarked suddenly.  He turned slowly until he was lying on his back with his head still in Lou's lap.  For some reason, it didn't strike him as strange that Lou's eyes were puffy, red and still wet from her own tears.

"Hmm?  Who thought you were him?" she asked gazing down at him.  Lou'd thought he was dozing.

"Mama.  After Jack left, she got even sicker.  She was sick in the head too and would think I was Jack because we looked alike and shared a name.  For a couple years, she thought she was seventeen again and she and Jack were courting.  I tried to tell her who I was but she always forgot.  After a while I stopped trying to correct her and just pretended.  It made her happy, only thing that did after a while."

"It wasn't your fault, what happened to your mama.  It may not have even been Jack's fault.  Sometimes people get sick like that and it might've even happened if he'd stayed," Lou asked curiously.

"How can you say that?  He'd come home drunk most nights and all she had to do was look at him funny and he'd hit her.  Next mornin' he'd sleep in late and then go into town and buy her flowers.  I used to hear him promise her again and again that he'd never hurt us anymore, and she took him back every time.  Every time, no matter how bad the bruises and welts were.  After he left, it took me doin' two jobs durin' the week and a third on the weekends just to feed the two of us.  I wasn't goin' to school.  Had to stop goin' after Jed took off to look for work somewhere else and escape the man's shadow," Kid said in dark reminiscence.

"After she died, it's no wonder you left Virginia," she finished.  "Do you have any other family left, other than Jack I mean?"

Kid was quiet for a few moments.  "An aunt and a couple cousins I don't remember too good, but they're just kin."  He looked up at her and reached out a hand to brush against her warm cheek.  "My family's here," Kid replied.  "Teaspoon's been more pa to me than Jack, Emma like my Ma, Rachel like the big sister I never had, the boys like my brothers, and you--the woman I wanna spend the rest of my days with.  I couldn't ask for more."

Louise sighed.  Kid's words had caused her own dark memories to surface.  Their childhoods had been very similar, too similar.  "Ya know, whiskey does different things to different people," she said.  "Some men have no control over what they do when they've been drinkin'."

"Boggs drank too, didn't he?" Kid asked, sitting up.  He suddenly realized that his own memories had probably stirred up Lou's painful childhood, a childhood she'd struggled even harder than him to forget.

She nodded.  "The big difference between Boggs and Jack is that Boggs hit Mama and me when he wasn't drinkin' too," Lou said softly.  She looked away for a moment, struggling not to get caught up in the memories but to remain the silent observer of her own past.  "I used to hide in my toy chest with my fingers in my ears, humming to drown out the sounds of him taking her by force.  He used to disappear for what felt like a long, long time and sometimes when he came back he'd bring us all sorts of presents.  'Nothin's too good for my girls,' he'd say.  Then, something would happen and he'd be mean again.  And Mama loved him."

Kid's eyes closed painfully as she spoke, picturing the pretty little girl he knew she'd been forced to hide in a dark trunk to escape the horrors of reality.  He didn't know how she could be so unemotional about something so horrible.  The story helped him understand her just a little more than he had, understand her fears and motivations.  Kid cupped her face in his hands and swallowed hard around the lump in his throat.  "Somehow, I know he loved you in his own way, Lou, but no little girl should have to go through that," he said softly, staring into her eyes.  "I swear to you I'll never be like that.  The day I raise my hand to you, honey, I want you to take my pistol and shoot me 'cause if I ever hurt you I know my life'd be over and done.  Our children will never have to know what it's like to wonder if they're loved.  I swear to God that we'll give them everything they need and enough love to last four lifetimes."

"I'm not gonna cry," Lou stated in response, even as her eyes brimmed.  She smiled at him, finding her anchor once again in his blue eyes.  "I don't care if we're dirt poor, Kid, and livin' in a cave as long as I'm with you and you love me.  Hell, we've been dirt poor all our lives, why change now?"

He couldn't help but chuckle at her reply.  "Good point.  Guess, it's a good thing I'm marryin' the best fire-starter in the territory then, huh?"  Lou could get anything to burn in almost any weather and her arsonistic talents had long been a source of teasing among the riders.  "We may starve but we'll do it warmly, at least," Kid teased.

He fell backwards as she smacked his chest hard in retaliation before giggling herself at the thought.
 

Chapter 6...