Montana Dreaming

by Nadia Nichols

  “Stubborn and prideful just about sums the two of ’em up. But I’m with you, Bern. Seems foolish of them to throw all them years of friendship over this ranch sale. Still and all, so long as Guthrie stays away nursing his wounds, there ain’t no chance in hell of us hearin’ any wedding bells. Didn’t he take a job up near the North Pole somewheres?”

  “Valdez, Badger.” Bernie sighed with exasperation. “That’s in Alaska. And the job was just seasonal. My guess is he’ll be hauling back into town any day now.” Bernie topped off his coffee, did the same for Charlie and went briskly about her business.

  “Well now,” Badger said. “Seems to me Guthrie’s probably going to have a lot of competition when he gets back.”

  “How’s that?” Charlie emptied two sugar packets into his mug. “Jessie hasn’t looked at another man since she was twelve, unless you count that Indian lawyer, but I didn’t see no sparks flyin’ there.”

  “That don’t mean much. Injuns keep their sparks hid pretty good, and lower your voice, you old fool—he just walked in the door! Anyhow, sparks or no, every available gonad-packin’ money-grubbing bundle of testosterone in the county’s going to be courtin’ that gal, now that she’s a wealthy woman. Don’t hurt none that she’s prettier’n a speckled pup, either.”

  Badger finished the last of his pie and pushed his plate away, carefully smoothing his white mustache. “Jessie can separate the wheat from the chaff, but if I was Guthrie Sloane, I don’t guess as I’d have pulled foot and run off to Alaska after that big fight they had. A woman’s heart is kind of like a campfire. If you don’t tend it regular, you’ll lose it, sure enough.”

  STEVEN BROWN DID NOT return directly to Bozeman. After reading over the final papers with McCutcheon, he went to the little diner that Katy Junction supported in a big way and ordered an early dinner, keeping to himself and ignoring the gossip circulating in the small room. When he had finished his meal, he requested a large container of soup to go. Bernie raised her eyebrows questioningly. “Don’t you even want to know what kind of soup you’re ordering?”

  “Whatever it is, I’m sure it will be good.” He nodded politely.

  Bernie smiled, in spite of her resolve to remain aloof. After all, Jessie’s friendship with the Indian lawyer was one of the reasons she and Guthrie had parted company. “Today was the closing on the ranch, wasn’t it?” she inquired. “I was hoping she might stop in afterward. Is she all right?”

  He said nothing, his stoic demeanor a wordless reprimand.

  Bernie’s shoulders drooped and she shook her head. “No, of course she isn’t. Stupid question. Poor girl, my heart goes out to her. You wait right here and I’ll get the soup. I have some fresh sourdough bread, too. How about a loaf of that and a big wedge of apple pie? It’s still warm from the oven.”

  She gathered the components of a good, home-cooked meal and packaged them in a small cardboard box, not deluding herself that the lawyer was taking the meal back to Bozeman with him. No; he’d be delivering it to Jessie, to make sure she had something to eat after the traumatic event she had just endured. It was kind of him, but Bernie wished he wasn’t doing it. She ladled the hearty soup into the two-quart container and silently but heatedly summoned her absent brother: Why aren’t you here, Guthrie? Didn’t you get my letter? Jessie needs you right now! Why aren’t you here!

  STEVEN DROVE to the Weaver ranch wondering how he would find Jessie, and if she would resent his presence.

  Jessie drew him in a way that no other woman ever had. It seemed as if all his life he had been unconsciously waiting for her, and on that fateful day when she had walked into his Bozeman office, he had sat back in his ergonomic padded executive chair, struck speechless by the sight of her. She was possessed of the same strength and beauty of spirit as the wild, mountainous expanse she loved and had fought so hard to protect. She swept through the door and brought into his cluttered space all the freshness and freedom of the wind that blew across the lonely mountain valleys and the high, snow-crowned peaks.

  “I need your help,” she had said, standing before his desk with her hat in hand, dressed in faded denim jeans and a white cotton shirt open at the throat, sleeves rolled back, her long black hair drawn into a thick plait that hung clear to her waist, her dark eyes lustrous with turbulent emotion and her lithe figure vibrant with life.

  He had risen from his chair, compelled by her very presence to leave off the frittering details that comprised his logically structured and suddenly stifling lifestyle. The urge to tear off his silk tie, suit jacket and vest, to take her hand and flee the office he had worked so hard to get, flee the tangled city streets, the noise and the chaos of the white man’s world and return with her to the place of his ancestors, became really overwhelming. She had reawakened in him the mystery and wonder he had felt as a young boy on the Crow Indian reservation when counting all the colors of a Rocky Mountain sunset.

  “I need your help,” she had said, and with those four powerful words she had altered the very fabric of his carefully constructed life.

  The ranch house was dark. He parked where he usually did and walked up the porch steps, bearing the small box of food in his arms. Knocked on the door and heard her little cow dog moving about, but nothing else. He looked toward the pole barn. Had she gotten back all right? He was about to set the food down and go check for her horse, when the door opened.

  “Jessie?” he said. “It’s Steven. I brought you some food.”

  The silence stretched while he waited patiently and then she said in a low, weary voice, “Thanks, but I’m not hungry.”

  “Hunger will come. This isn’t the end.”

  “It feels like the end.”

  Steven stepped past her then, not waiting for her to invite him inside. The room was cold and dark. He fumbled for the table he knew was there and set the cardboard box down. “Light the lamps,” he said.

  She did so reluctantly as he went about the business of kindling a fire in the kitchen’s woodstove. While it caught he found a pan and poured the soup into it, then laid the sourdough loaf atop the cast-iron stove to warm. “I’ll come back Sunday morning. Early. I’ll bring help. Pete Two Shirts manages the Crow Indian buffalo herd. It’s the largest herd in the country—over fifteen hundred head. Remember? You said you’d like to see the buffalo someday. Our bi’shee, grazing over the land, like the old times.

  “Pete’s a good man with horses. We’ll ride up and find your mares for you,” he said, reaching down a bowl from a shelf and setting it on the table. “I’d come tomorrow, but Pete works at the agency. I’d come alone, but I’m not good with horses. Anyway, there’s no rush. McCutcheon says to take all the time you need. We’ll get your truck fixed, too.”

  Eyes grave, he took her ice-cold signing hand in his. He turned it over and saw the shallow cut she had drawn across her palm. “When I go, you eat something. Tend to yourself. Get some sleep. This isn’t the end. It is a beginning.”

  He left her then, because he knew she needed solitude in which to grieve for what she’d lost.

  CALEB MCCUTCHEON couldn’t sleep. He lay in his bed, fingers laced behind his head, and listened to the rain. The luminous dials on the bedside clock read 2:00 a.m. No traffic passed the little motel some twenty miles northwest of Katy Junction. He had chosen to stay close to the ranch rather than return to Bozeman, and had brought a bottle of champagne with him from the city, planning to celebrate after the signing, but he felt no desire to celebrate now. All he could think about was that girl.

  He hadn’t expected to meet Jessica Weaver and be completely swept up in her turmoil. Steven Brown had told him bits and pieces about her—that she’d lost her mother when she was seven years old, that she’d inherited the ranch when her father died a year ago, that he’d left her with insurmountable debts and that she’d struggled to make ends meet, waitressing at the local diner nights, working the ranch by day. She’d raised fine bloodstock—Spanish horses—and sold the foals before they hit the ground
, but it hadn’t been enough. Too big a ranch, too much work, way too much debt. Too much for one woman alone.

  He’d waited several months to sign, and now the historic Weaver ranch belonged to him…and he didn’t feel the least bit good about it. Could he have done things differently? Would anything have made it easier for her? The money certainly hadn’t eased her pain. That much was obvious when she fled the lawyer’s office without the bank check.

  McCutcheon sighed. Jesus, he was getting soft, pitying a woman he’d just made wealthy even after all her enormous debts had been settled. “She chose to sell the ranch to me,” he’d said to those gathered for the signing. “She could’ve kept it by selling off parts to developers—they’ve been after it for years. She could’ve kept the house, the outbuildings, enough land to run a small herd of horses. But she didn’t. She chose to sell.”

  The words had echoed in the room and sounded false even to his ears, for he was fully aware that Jessica Weaver had made the greatest of sacrifices. Rather than see the land divvied up in lots, she had ensured that it would remain whole for eternity. She had done this the only way she’d known how: by writing numerous conservation restrictions into the deed, thereby taking a tremendous loss in land value.

  On her own, in a last-ditch move of sheer desperation, she had approached a local chapter of the Rocky Mountain Conservancy with her plight, and there she had found Steven Brown, a full-blooded Crow Indian and an environmental advocate, whose legal knowledge had made him a perfect choice for the Conservancy’s chairman. Brown had phoned him to ask if he might be interested in looking at the property, since the Conservancy did not have the funds to purchase it outright. Through previous contacts, Brown had known of his interest in buying a big ranch. He explained that the land holding was a watershed of great ecological value embracing critical plants and wildlife. As well, it provided an important buffer to the Greater Yellowstone system.

  Were there any buildings on the property? he had inquired of Brown. Oh, yes, he was told. Some of them dating back to the 1800s. Brown’s description of the ranch had intrigued him enough to schedule a flight within the week to view the property. One look and he was sold on both the ranch and the girl, Jessie Weaver. That she loved the land was apparent to anyone who watched her gaze out upon it. That she would give it up in the manner she had only proved the depth of that love. It must have been a terribly difficult thing for her to do.

  As if that weren’t enough, just before the signing she had broken her arm. How would she fix her truck, load her things, round up her little band of broodmares all by herself? She’d ridden ten miles in that rainstorm to make it to the property closing. She was tough, but she needed help. Maybe he could arrange for some for her. Or maybe… Maybe he could provide it himself. Hell, why not? He’d fixed his share of beaters in his teen years. He could repair her truck easily enough. He could do a lot for her. Maybe then he’d feel the joy he thought he’d be feeling right now.

  In the morning. He’d go in the morning, first thing. Somehow, he’d make things right with Jessie Weaver.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE RAIN BROKE at dawn and a stiff wind blew out of the west, driving the wet with it and bringing a chill out of the mountains that crisped the grass and glazed the water buckets with ice. Jessie poked up the fire in the kitchen stove and put the coffeepot on to boil. She didn’t bother to light a lamp. The murky darkness suited her mood. The little cow dog, Blue, sulked at her heels, sensing her disquiet and misery, and tried to dispel it with frequent displays of affection that went unnoticed, unreturned. Her arm ached, but she welcomed the pain. It was a distraction she needed.

  This place had always been her home. This place was her mother and father, her grandparents, her great-grandparents and a handful of loyal hands long dead now and buried with the family in the plot up on the hill. All of them would remain on the land they had so fiercely loved and slaved over and fought for and defended. All except her. In a few short days she would walk out the door, never to return.

  This was McCutcheon’s place now. Perhaps he would bring in grid power from the main road. He might even pave the dirt track that paralleled the creek. He most certainly would throw parties here, grand parties, and he and his wealthy friends would drink and laugh and look out at the valley and the mountains for a day or two before returning to their rich and sophisticated lives in the city. They would never know of the immense struggle that had shaped this land. They would never know of a man with a dream who had driven a herd of longhorns up from Texas in another century and made a life for himself here, back when the West still had enough snap and snarl in it to give a body pause.

  Jessie fed a few sticks into the woodstove and pumped water into the sink. Everything her family had fought so hard for was for nothing. Over one hundred and forty years of mighty struggle upon the land was gone, signed away forever with the sweep of a pen.

  She didn’t eat breakfast. Wasn’t hungry. Hadn’t been hungry for weeks. Hadn’t slept well for months. For the past year a part of her had been dying, and now it was time for the funeral, time to bury the past and get on with life.

  But how could she bury the very best part of herself? How could she possibly leave all this behind? This beloved room, this warm homey kitchen. Damn that Guthrie Sloane! Damn him for running out on her when she needed him the most!

  She sat down at the table and dropped her head into the cradle of her arm, her body rigid with pain. She was so absorbed in her wretchedness that she didn’t hear the dog bark. Didn’t hear the rattle of the diesel engine until it was right outside the ranch house. A car door slammed and she jumped to her feet, smoothing her hair back from her face. Who?

  She opened the kitchen door—and visibly recoiled at the sight of the Mercedes and the man mounting the steps. Caleb McCutcheon, and he was carrying a toolbox.

  “Hello,” he said, apologetic. “I hope I’m not too much of an intrusion. I know it’s early, but I figured you for an early riser.”

  Jessie was completely taken aback. “I had until Tuesday. That was the agreement!”

  “Yes, ma’am, it was.” He nodded. “Though you can have ten years if you want. I thought I’d give you a hand with your truck. I was a pretty fair mechanic way back when.”

  “When what?”

  He paused, looking very much like a chastened little boy. “When I was a lot younger than I am now,” he said.

  “I don’t need your help, Mr. McCutcheon. I can fix my own truck.”

  “Well, with that broken arm, I just—”

  “Come to think of it,” she interrupted, “if I can’t fix that old junker I guess now I can buy myself a new one.”

  He nodded again. “I guess you could, though I didn’t figure you were that type.”

  “What type might that be?”

  “Extravagant.”

  “Have you seen my truck?”

  “I passed it on the way in. Ford, 1986-ish? Flatbed, supercab, four-wheel drive. Sweet old girl. The fuel pump’s gone—isn’t that what you said?”

  Now Jessie nodded. “I’ve had the part for weeks. It’s out in the barn.”

  “Right. Okay, then.” He stood there for a few moments, uncertainty flickering in his eyes, then shrugged in a what-the-hell manner. “Well, I suppose if I search long enough I’ll find it.” He made to go.

  “Mr. McCutcheon, I surely wish you wouldn’t.”

  He stopped, half turned and considered what he wanted to say. “I didn’t sleep at all last night, thinking about things. After what you did to save this ranch, to keep it whole…” He raised the toolbox. “Fixing your truck is the least I can do.”

  “You don’t owe me anything. All I ever ask is that you respect the land. I would have done anything to keep it, anything at all…except sell it off piecemeal to pay off debts until nothing of it was left.”

  McCutcheon lifted his gaze to the glaciated summits of the mountain range that towered to the east. “I understand that, and I respect you for what yo
u’ve done. But to tell you the truth, the way I’m feeling right now I almost wish I hadn’t bought it.

  “When Steven Brown called me out of the blue, I had pretty much decided that maybe my wife was right—buying a ranch was a foolish dream. Then he started describing the place to me, and suddenly I wanted to see it. See if it was the way I’d imagined it in my dreams. If the mountains looked big enough, the cabins looked honest-to-God real, the creek had just the right bend in it.

  “I cut out a picture once when I was a kid living in the middle of a Chicago slum,” he said. “Cut it out of a magazine. I’ve kept it all these years. It was a picture of a ranch, a real working ranch. The house was like this, all weather-beaten and silvery, with a long porch fronting it and facing the river. There were log cabins in the background, a bunkhouse, a pole barn, corrals. Big mountains. Just like this. This is the place I’ve imagined all these years, right down to the bend in the creek that passes by the old homestead cabin.”

  The smell of boiling coffee permeated the cold morning air. “I should shift the pot,” Jessie said, glancing behind her into the kitchen. She paused, then ducked him a shy glance. “Whyn’t you come inside and have a cup.”

  McCutcheon’s face brightened. “Gladly. Maybe you could tell me a little more about the history of this place. We didn’t have a whole lot of time for that when I was last here.”

  She ushered him into the kitchen, poured two chipped ironstone mugs full of hot black brew, and they sat down at the table together. She put her hand on the table, felt the smooth irregularities of it. “My great-grandfather made this,” she said. “Hewed it from one thick plank of a big old cedar felled up in the mountains. He made it for my great-grandmother. She was the daughter of a Crow medicine man and she was given to my great-grandfather in thanks for the cattle that kept them alive through a very bad winter. He was also gifted some of the tribe’s finest horses. Those horses became the founding bloodlines of one of the purest registries of Spanish Barbs in the West.