Black Hills (9781101559116)

by Thompson, Rod

  “Oh!” Lainey cried, running to hug him. “You’re wonderful! Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you!” Mr. Schwartz just stared at him as if he’d seen damnation. Later, when Cormac had gone to bed, he heard the Schwartzes voices as they passed outside his window.

  “I never seen nutten in my life move that fast,” Mr. Schwartz was saying. “The gun yust appeared in his hand and his von shot tooked the head cleand off.”

  It had taken Cormac as much by surprise as it had Mr. Schwartz, and he wasn’t too sure what to think about it his own self. All that practicing hand movements to pick taters as fast as he could had apparently come in handy in more ways than one.

  “That’s the second time he has saved her life,” Mrs. Schwartz responded. “She would have died if the snake had bitten her. His folks would have been mighty proud of him.”

  Cormac liked that thought and hoped that his parents were somewhere, somehow, proud of the man he was becoming. He hoped Becky was, too.

  CHAPTER 4

  Neither of the Schwartzes was much for education, but Cormac continued the study habits his mother had given him, reading and rereading her books.

  “Cormie,” his mother had told him one evening while selecting their next book, “you should never stop reading and learning. You are going to get an education if I have to pour it into you.” She hadn’t had to do much pouring. He had learned to love reading at an early age. His pa agreed with his mother and wished that he, too, had more “book larnin’,” but he said there were many places from which to get an education.

  “Watch how the trees and plants grow,” he told Cormac one day when they were tracking a deer. “See how animals react to each other and what their trails and droppin’s look like. Study people and be aware of how they move and when their mouth says one thing and their eyes another, or when the smile on their lips doesn’t reach all the way to their eyes.”

  Lainey’s mother had also been educating her, and she missed it. It only followed that she would slip into studying with Cormac. It gave them something to do on evenings and days when it was too cold to do much of anything outside other than make sure the stock had food, keep the ice broken off the stream and water tanks so the stock could get to the water, keep the cows milked, the hogs and chickens fed, and repair wagons and harnesses in preparation for spring planting. They read, talked, and argued over their opinions on what they had read.

  Lainey had been after Cormac to teach her to shoot. For her fifteenth birthday present he agreed and found her to be a good student, only needing to be shown something one time. He began teaching her to shoot with his pa’s pride and joy: the rifle he called GERT. Lainey was somewhat intimidated by it, but got over it quickly enough. The gun had been given to Cormac’s father by a German gun-maker to repay a debt. Most of the name had been gouged off a few years earlier by a bullet that ricocheted off it instead of killing his pa. All that remained of the name was GERT, so the rifle became a she, and his pa affectionately called her GERT.

  “She looks funny,” his pa had told him. “But she was made slowly and with pride by the hands of a skilled craftsman taking pride in his work. It was made to use the new cartridge ammunition and will put the bullet right where you aim her at a range bordering on the unbelievable. She’s one of a kind.” Then his eyes lit up. He was not school educated like Cormac’s mother, but he dearly loved the turn of a good phrase or yarn.

  He had pulled GERT up to his shoulder and followed an imaginary moving target. “Man, man, man,” he said, shaking his head with feeling. “You could scare up one of your rabbits, let him run all day and shoot him at night.”

  “With a pistol,” Cormac reminded Lainey one Sunday morning, teaching her as his pa had taught him, “you just point it like pointing your finger. A rifle is a whole different ball of wax; it needs to be held very steady. If at all possible, a rifle needs to be rested on something solid. If that’s not possible, lay down. Never shoot from a standing position if you can kneel down, and never kneel if you can lay down.” She learned quickly and after just a few lessons, unflinching from the kick or the noise, was hitting most things she aimed at.

  Cormac had been noticing that Lainey’s body was getting right comely in a full-blown way, and with her fire-red hair, green eyes, and an uncommonly bright-white smile, she was downright eye-pleasin’. When they were sixteen, Cormac peeked under the blanket dividing their room when they were getting ready for bed one warm night, but was very nearly caught at it and doing so made him feel guilty. He never repeated it.

  He and Lainey did chores together, studied together, played together, and had snowball fights, and once, under the pretense of trying to wash her face in the snow, he kissed her while he was holding her down and she couldn’t resist—or so he thought. Sometimes on Sundays when the weather was warm, they went for horseback rides. Cormac would saddle the grulla for Lainey, and he would ride Lop Ear bareback. Only one of the saddles was large enough for either of the big horses, and a too-small saddle would give them saddle sores on their backs. The grulla was a pretty and well-behaved mare with a smooth ride, which was good for Lainey. On those occasions, they sometimes took a lunch and ranged far.

  On one such occasion after removing a rock from Lop Ear’s shoe that left the big horse limping slightly, Lainey said he better ride behind her on the way back to rest the foot. She emptied one stirrup and he stepped up to sit behind her saddle.

  “Oh, this is scary,” he said as they started back. “I might fall off.” He promptly wrapped his arms tightly around her waist.

  “Oh stop it, you phony!” she exclaimed, and pushed his arms back. “You behave yourself, mister, and don’t get any ideas or you can just walk back.” She smiled half the way home thinking maybe she had been too hasty.

  Then, shortly after they turned seventeen, everything went wrong, and Cormac and Lainey began fighting. It was the darndest thing. One day they were getting along just fine, and the next they were squabbling about every little thing, tormenting each other at every opportunity, and Cormac got on a first-name basis with her Irish temper.

  She asked for no quarter and gave none . . . giving as good as she got. And when she had her Irish up and her green eyes were flashing, it was time to head for the hills. When he intentionally neglected to tell her how much the shotgun kicked before she fired it for the first time, the kick knocked her on her keister, and he laughed and made fun of her. Seeing the look on her face while she was getting up, he realized he had made a mistake and ran like the devil, but not fast enough. She bounced a frozen dirt clod off the back of his head, and he bled for ten minutes.

  “Serves you right,” she told him when he complained about it later. “Next time I’ll throw harder and then turn you over to the wee people.”

  The “wee people,” Lainey had told him, were mischievous Leprechauns that could only be seen by the Irish, but they all had a pot of gold, and if one could be caught, he was obligated to give it to the person who did the catching. She swore it was true, but to Cormac, it sounded like a pa-story.

  “Dinner’s ready,” Lainey had called to him in the barn one day when he was cleaning stalls. Before going into the house, he washed up in a wash basin sitting on a small stand outside the door. The route to the table took him past Lainey bending to put a pan on the bottom shelf in the kitchen. Taking advantage of the situation without thinking it through, Cormac slapped her a good one across her bottom-side. Instantly her face clouded with anger and she stood up with flashing eyes, rubbing her backend.

  “You nincompoop!” she screamed, and threw the pan at him, but Cormac only ducked and laughed at her, which only served to make her more angry. Yelling and screaming, she chased him out of the house with a cast-iron skillet held high with both hands. Mr. and Mrs. Schwartz exchanged looks, and the next day Mrs. Schwartz had them building Lainey her own bedroom. Cormac would have gone without dinner had Mr. Schwartz not stolen a piece of beef for him.

  Trips to town, though rare because of the
distance, were something to which they all looked forward. Just before Lainey’s eighteenth birthday on March seventeenth, Mrs. Schwartz declared it to be time to go for supplies, and then in secret reminded Cormac that it would be a good time for them to get presents for Lainey.

  During their first year living as a family, Lainey had told him that her parents had been special people in Ireland and all of Ireland celebrated her birthday with the wearing of the green with her favorite shade being kelly green.

  “Mrs. Schwartz,” Cormac began as he sat down at the table with a cup of coffee. “What kind of special people were Mr. and Mrs. Nayle? Lainey told me that on her birthday, all the people in Ireland wear her favorite shade of green to celebrate her birthday because her parents were important, but she didn’t say why they were important.”

  Mrs. Schwartz stopped churning the butter to look at him incredulously and then she looked at Mr. Schwartz. He was sitting straddle on a wooden bench, braiding two pieces of a broken rope together. They looked at each other for a long moment and then began to smile. The smile turned into a loud laughter and an accompanying loud guffaw by Mr. Schwartz.

  Cormac could only stare at the two in confusion, but knowing something was not right and Lainey had probably been stringing him along in some way, he felt his anger rising and his face turning red. “What?” he asked. “What are you laughing about?”

  They couldn’t answer with other than more peals of laughter. Cormac couldn’t sit still and got up from the table, knocking over the cup of coffee he had just poured for himself in the process, which only made the Schwartzes laugh harder.

  He didn’t understand what was going on but he was embarrassed and knew that somehow he had been made a fool of, Lainey was at the bottom of it, and he was darn well going to find out what it was all about. Cormac slammed the door on the way out, causing another round of loud laughter from the Schwartzes.

  It was at that moment that Lainey came around the corner of the house not ten feet away. “Uh oh,” she said, reading the look on his face in an instant and realizing she was in trouble. She had no idea what was the problem, but she knew Cormac well enough to know she had better get out of there real quick. With him hot on her heels, she ran for open spaces where the snow wasn’t so deep. She being the faster and could outrun him if she could just stay out of his reach until then.

  She was leading Cormac easily until snow that looked level on top was covering an eight-inch indentation in the ground below caused by a hog that had escaped the pen during the rains months earlier and had wallowed in the mud. Lainey’s feet broke through the snowy crust and sank to the ground, and she fell face first into a snowbank. Before she could regain her footing, Cormac was on her, turning her over onto her back and straddling her with a firm grip on each of her arms. Other than turning her head from side to side or kicking her feet into the air, she was pinned for fair.

  “All right, Miss Nayle!” he spit at her. “What is so dadblamed funny about Ireland wearing kelly green for you on your birthday?”

  Wide-eyed, she looked up at him. “Oh no!” startled out of her, and she struggled hard not to laugh. “Oh no!” Holding in the laugh turned out to be impossible and it burst out uncontrollably.

  Cormac was astounded and began babbling utterances that made no sense in furious anger. When shaking her arms proved to be a worthless effort, he grabbed the lapels of her heavy coat and bounced her up and down in the snow.

  “I’m sorry,” she got out through the laughter. “It was just a joke. Honest. I was going to tell you later, but I forgot to.”

  “So you made a fool out of me and now you think it’s funny. See if this is funny.” He let go of her arm, grabbed a scooping handful of snow, and began roughly pushing it down her neck and washing her face with it.

  Lainey tried to turn away. “Cormie, I’m sorry. Stop, please! That’s hurting me.”

  He paid her no attention and grabbed more snow and pushed it more roughly across her face. If he could have seen her eyes or the look on her face, he might have changed his plan. With her free hand, she made a fist and smacked the side of his head with as much force as she could muster. From the position she was in, a good swing was impossible, but it was hard enough to get his attention. He jumped to his feet, grabbed her from off the ground like a sack of flour, and pitched her into a deep snowdrift beside them.

  “Don’t do that again,” he said angrily, and stomped off toward the barn.

  Lainey Nayle was angry. Cormac had made her mad before, but never like this. Face and ears red and burning, her freckles standing our fiercely, and her green eyes flashing, she seethed as she watched him disappear into the barn. She climbed out of the snowbank, and after wiping as much of the snow as she could from the neck of her clothes, she strode purposefully into the house.

  “Maybe we should head for the storm cellar,” Mr. Schwartz whispered when they saw the look on her face.

  Without a word, Lainey helped prepare supper and, instead of placing the food bowls on the table as usual, she set out the plates of individually dished-out food, making it obvious that she had made a plate especially for Cormac and set it before him. Making it a point of watching him all the while, she filled her own plate and ate hungrily.

  Cormac had been repairing broken fence posts away from the farm buildings and missed dinner. “I’m starving,” he said as they finished saying grace. But when he saw how Lainey was watching him, he was afraid to eat. He knew she had done something unusual to his food. Without touching it, with a deep sigh, he finally rose from the table and went outside, catching his coat from its hook on the way.

  “Vut did yoo do tooo his food?” Mrs. Schwartz wanted to know.

  “Nothing,” Lainey answered sweetly. “Absolutely nothing. I don’t know whatever gave you that idea.”

  Reaching with her fork, the self-satisfied redhead angelically took a bite of food from each of the items on his plate before happily finishing her own supper. With tiny smiles, the Schwartzes could only look at each other and shake their heads hopelessly. Cormac went to bed with no supper that night.

  He was sleeping soundly and dreaming of a big plate of liver and onions and mashed potatoes and corn on the cob and still-warm fresh-made bread with a tall glass of milk to wash it down when suddenly the skies in his dream opened up and a blizzard was dumping snow in clumps on his head and something was rubbing it into his mouth and eyes. He sat bolt upright to find Lainey had been rubbing his face with snow and waiting with another bucketful. Cormac grabbed for her unsuccessfully as she emptied the bucket in his face and all over his bed before running out the front door. He climbed quickly into his pants, slid his feet into his high-topped shoes, and ran out after her. She was standing patiently waiting for him about fifty feet away.

  By darn, he would show her not to mess with him, and ran to get her. When he was about halfway there, she suddenly began throwing snowballs at him. There were many, well made and hard packed, and she was throwing fast and hard. When they hit, they hurt, and most were hitting their targets. He tried to get some snow with which to return her fire but got hurt by three more painful hits in the process and quickly gave that up as a bad idea and ran for the house.

  Lainey waited with a snowball in each hand for whatever he was planning but nothing happened. Happy and proud of herself, she waited long enough to calm down before going in to go to bed, but she found the door locked. Laughing a satisfied snort at his weak response, she went to the other door, with the same results. Very nice, she thought, and began beating loudly on the door.

  “Stop it,” Cormac called through the wooden door. “You’ll wake the Schwartzes.”

  She didn’t hear the last of it because she was running for the front door. She pounded loudly until she heard the Schwartzes angry voices going into the front room from their bedroom. At that point, she ran for the barn and let him deal with them. Lainey could hear the angry German voices when they opened the door to find nobody there and the words, “the tooo of
yooo” cut off by a slam of the door. By the time the voices finally quieted, Lainey had been asleep under a horse blanket in the hay for five minutes.

  The next morning, Lainey woke to find Cormac making ready to milk the cow. “Hey, sleepyhead,” he called to her when he realized she was awake. “Mrs. Schwartz made pancakes. You better get in there before she throws them to the pigs.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said sheepishly.

  “Yeah. Me, too,” he answered good-naturedly. “That was a good one, though. The side of my head still hurts from where you hit me.”

  “Well, you were too rough. That’ll teach you. My face is still raw.”

  “Here is a nice warm cow. I’ll squirt some of her nice warm milk on it if you want.”

  She didn’t.

  They had converted the wagon to a sled by replacing its wheels with runners after the first snowfall of the year. Going into town was to be an all-day affair. They left at first light with Mr. and Mrs. Schwartz sitting on the blanket-covered bench seat, bundled in their heaviest coats against the bitter cold. Facing the rear, Lainey and Cormac piled into the back under some blankets. The ride was smooth, and the sound of the sled runners cutting through the snow relaxing. After talking a little about the backward view and what book to read next, they began to doze off and on.

  A bump jostled the sled and Lainey fell against him, somewhat surprising Cormac. He hadn’t believed it to be that much of a bump, but there she was, leaning against him with her head resting on his shoulder. His first reaction was to shove her away, but instead, he found himself being reminded of how nice her hair smelled and its softness against his cheek. It occurred to him that it might be fun to put his arms around her and kiss her a little bit.