Martha said, “Such young’uns as I do have.” And then she wept while the youngsters looked on, horrified that their present had made their mother cry.
Dan said, “Hold her. Both of you. She has too much happiness to be contained.” He got up from the bench, stood the rifle against the back wall, turned his back to give the McDowell family some privacy. The cribbage players folded up their board, packed away their pins and cards. They were going to the Melodeon Hall to celebrate Christmas. The couple at the opposite wall had already left. Dan hoped they had settled their business and would be happy now. Mrs. Hudson wordlessly refilled his coffee cup. “I’ll hang out the closed sign.”
After a while, Mrs. Hudson said, “Tabby, do thee please cut the pie. We’ll eat it now.”
Martha raised her tear-drenched face. “No, please, we need to sell that pie. For Tim’s speculation.”
“Speculation?” Dan wanted to give her his handkerchief, but he was not sure how clean it was. Tabby handed Martha a towel, and she buried her face in it.
“Yeah,” Tim said. “I ain’t going back to that dratted claim, neither. I want dust to invest in a shipment of goods Mr. Dance ordered from Mr. Sheehan. He’s leaving soon after the New Year, and Mr. Dance said I could chip in if I got myself a hundred dollars.”
“Why a hundred?” Dan asked. Walter Dance might as well have invited the boy to help himself to a piece of the moon.
“He said it would cost that much to spread out the risk among several things. Much less than that might not yield enough of a return to make it worthwhile.” He spoke carefully, like someone learning a new language and anxious about saying it right.
Dan thought about that. He knew little about the economics of investing, except the simple mathematics of buying and selling: buy low and sell dear. It would depend on supply and demand, but it sounded right that the boy would be better off to invest in several commodities rather than a single commodity that might or might not sell. Walter Dance’s thumb would never rest on the scales.
He was still pondering a decision when Tim said, “Deputy Gallagher’s right, what he said last night. There’s easier ways of making money than slaving in a mine.”
Dan’s arm jerked and he spilled a few drops of coffee. As he wiped at it, he heard Martha McDowell say, “Deputy Gallagher’s ways ain’t our ways. Don’t you be listening to him, now.”
“I ain’t, Mam, but he’s right. I don’t mean robbing people, or gambling with marked cards, but the kind of work Mr. Stark does. Or Mr. Dance. Educated work. Work you can do when you can read and write and cipher. Dry. Warm. Even in winter.”
“Your Pap don’t want you speculating, you know.”
She was speaking to her son, but it was Dan she was watching as she said it. Warning him.
“Pap don’t have the say-so over me.”
“He’s your Pap and he does as long as you’re under his roof.”
“Then maybe I’ll live somewheres else.”
“Where, then?” His mother’s voice was tight.
“I don’t know where. Somewheres.”
Dan cleared his throat. Both of them turned to him. “I’ll loan you the hundred dollars, Tim. You can pay me back, plus another ten, from your profits.” He added the extra ten percent because he didn’t want the boy to know it would be a gift. That ten dollars he would quietly tell Mrs. Hudson to slip into Mrs. McDowell’s poke.
The boy’s mouth dropped open. Dotty clapped her hands and hugged him around the waist. “Oh, Mr. Stark! Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!”
“You shouldn’t ought to do this.” Martha groped for words. “It ain’t, it ain’t fittin’.”
“Mrs. McDowell, this is business. Your son has given me an opportunity to invest, and I stand to make ten dollars simply by lending him a little more than six ounces of dust.” He hoped his face did not give him away, because she was very intelligent even if she had no education, and her moral compass pointed true north. He was doing this for her. To win, if not her, to win her children’s hearts. Which he had no business doing. Another man’s children.
“I was going to give Timmy some dust for this,” she said.
Dan smiled. “You can invest next time. Please, I’d like to earn a bit extra.”
With one more searching look from those big luminous eyes, that saw so clearly into him, she nodded and turned back to her son. “All right, but you be careful, now. You know what he can be like.”
Dan hid his relief behind the coffee mug. He had a feeling she was not fooled one bit. He could not have done anything this Christmas day more calculated to drive a wedge between McDowell and his family. Thinking that, he nearly choked on a swallow of coffee, that burned all the way down. What secret planner was at work in him, that he would do this, that he would act so as to win the children over when he would not be staying in Alder Gulch? By the shining in the boy’s eyes, the sister’s delighted hug around his chest, he knew he had fooled himself into offering the dust because he had hated how Grandfather bent Father’s life, his own life, to his own wishes. He would give anything to be able to take it back, not to raise their expectations, but it was too late. Much too late. And while the children celebrated and their mother thanked him, he was engulfed in shame. They must not be taught to count on him, because he could not stay and come between another man and his family.
“Thank you, Mr. Stark,” Tim’s mother said.
Her smile made him cringe.
7: Alder Gulch: Virginia City
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Martha paused outside the Eatery door. “W. W for word. W for was. W for water. W for with.” She pursed her lips and made the w sound: “Wuh.” She’d learned four words for W in this reading lesson, and she couldn’t hardly wait to tell the young’uns. Watching her footing so as not to step in fresh manure, she crossed Wallace – another W! – waited to pass behind a dray pulled by six shaggy draft horses with feet the size of plates. She glanced up Jackson, and the hazards at her feet, and the alphabet, vanished from her mind. Darkness loomed ahead. She stopped on the corner to pull up her hood and wrap her cloak snug around herself with the Good Book safe inside. She had almost crossed Jackson when the wind attacked.
Snow bit at her cheeks, the sudden dropping cold made her gasp. She staggered, leaned against the wind. It shifted, and snowflakes swarmed at her from the side, a thousand thousand frozen bees. She fell, got up again, fought the pummeling wind up to the Melodeon Hall, around the corner, onto Idaho Street. Her cabin was gone. The wind wasn’t that strong, surely? She huddled against the saloon’s long shivering wall, maybe it was her, so cold, but no it was the building, the wind made it shake, and the wind’s shriek snuffed out the fiddles, the piano, the stomping boots. The cabin showed itself, and she launched herself toward it, but it disappeared before she had gone two steps.
Don’t be letting me lose it, Lord. Her hood snapped back, but she dared not pull it on again, kept her hands inside. The dog was barking. She heard him, but the wind slewed around and she lost the sound, the wind veered and she heard it, changed her course toward it, and stood at her own door as the wind hit her from behind. She kicked the door, kicked again, then a third time.
“Mam!” Timmy held the door from flying all the way open. The shivering dog whined. Martha let him run in ahead of her, then leaned on the door to help her son force it shut. He dropped the bar, and the wind beat at the door.
Martha made out Dotty, wrapped in a quilt, curled on her bed. The child whistled and opened her arms. The dog ran over to her, and she pulled the quilt around them both.
“Thank the Lord, you’re to home.” Martha pulled up a chair as close to the stove as she could and hunched inside her cloak. She couldn’t stop shivering, and her ears hurt something fierce. Timmy pulled a quilt off the bed and bundled it around her. He drew her hands out and rubbed them. She felt tears on her cheeks.
“You’ll be all right, Mam. We’re both here. We’re safe.
I brought in enough wood to last till summer, and boarded the window tight, and I strung ropes to the outhouse and the woodpile and the well so we can find them. There’s water and I emptied the slop pail.”
“How’d you know to do all that? This storm just hit!”
“Canary started in to bark when we were at Dance and Stuart, and I couldn’t see no cause until Mr. Dance said it felt like a storm coming, and it could be a bad one. So we come straight home and I did what he said.”
Dotty piped up, “One of the miners told me to go home because a blizzard was coming. He could tell by the rim of cloud behind the Tobacco Root mountains.”
Tim set water on the stove to boil. “We should have come for you, Mam, but we thought you’d be to home.” He looked at the toe of his boot, and his voice was very small. “I should have gone looking as soon as I come home and saw you wasn’t here.”
“It’s all right,” Martha said through her chattering teeth. “You fixed things so’s we’ll be fine.” They had food, if the storm didn’t go on too long and they didn’t have to go for more meat. “We’ll just hunker down and wait it out.” They’d make it through, she knew they would. “The Lord’ll see us through.”
But where was McDowell? Lord, keep him safe. For this storm was a killer, and she didn’t want to lose none of hers. Daniel Stark. Lord, hold him safe in your hands, do. Please.
“Water’s boiling,” Dotty said.
Tim threw tea leaves into the pot and let it boil while he watched it. Martha laid the Bible on the table. Her ears throbbed something awful, and her skirt was wet near to her knees, but her hands were warming, and she laid them over her ears. Could they be frostbit in just that short a time? She didn’t know. Tim gave her a mug of hot, strong tea, and she cradled the mug in her hands, and warmed her cheeks with it. After a few sips her innards felt warmer, and the shivering stopped. She shrugged off the quilt, hung up her cloak, and wrapped herself up in her thick winter shawl. Timmy poked up the fire and added two more rounds. If they had a big stove they could build a bigger fire.
“You and I have to tend the fire tonight,” she told her son. If the fire went out while they slept, they could freeze to death.
“I can do it, Mam.” As he spoke, his voice dropped into a new, low pitch. He stared at her, as surprised as she was, and the man he would be looked at her out of eyes that two minutes before were a boy’s.
Dotty giggled. “You sound like a man.”
Timmy set the bowl on the floor for the dog, that crawled out of Dotty’s grasp to drink, then pulled a chair around to set close to the fire. So close to his Mam that their knees would have touched except that his were inches higher than hers. Dotty, maybe a little bit jealous, shrugged her quilt aside and came to sit on her Mam’s lap. Martha pulled the shawl around them both.
Martha sensed her ideas rearranging themselves, because her boy was growing, no, had growed into a man or mostly into a man and she hadn’t seen it coming, the little signs that gradually come on him and added up to a deep, low voice she’d never heard before, not out of anybody, but something different from any man she’d ever heard, or maybe would hear again. The sound of himself. Resting her cheek on the top of her daughter’s head, smelling the child’s hair needing a washing and warm sunshine, she looked at her son, her Timmy, Tim, maybe not hers no more, but his own, where he leaned his elbows on his knees, and stared into his mug of tea like he would get his future from it.
“You purely do,” she told him. “You got a man’s sound.”
Without raising his head, he slid his eyes toward her, but said nothing. Maybe he wasn’t quite trusting his voice yet. They had a tendency to crack sometimes, early on, she recollected McDowell’s done that when they was young’uns. He’d whispered a great deal in them days, being too embarrassed and shy to talk much. Martha sighed. “What say we have a sing?”
“You sing, Mam,” Tim said. “I don’t know’s I can.” He opened his arm and let his sister come over and straddle one knee. Just like he’d played horsey with her not so long ago.
Martha, opening up the trunk to bring out the dulcimer, bit her lip to keep tears back. She felt something coming to an end. Little Dotty had got her monthlies, and now her boy was a man, near enough.
With all this, though, the music held the comfort of a familiar forgetting. She began with one of their favorite tunes, and sure enough, Tim couldn’t resist joining in. His new voice startled them all, it was a sort of squeaky rumble that after a while leveled out deep and low like his new speaking voice, except when it broke and embarrassed him. After two breaks, he shook his head and was silent.
Martha and Dotty sang two more songs, but it wasn’t the same without Tim, and besides they needed to eat. Setting the dulcimer aside, Martha said, “Don’t you worry none. That breaking won’t last. Your Pap’s voice did the same as I recall.” It hit her then with the force of the storm that McDowell ought to be here, he ought to be the one to help the boy turn into a man, be easy in himself. She put a hand on the table to steady herself for a second before she went to heating up yesterday’s stew for them.
Come bedtime, she piled all the quilts off the bed just as close to the stove as they couldn’t turn over and burn themselves, and all three of them laid down together, Dotty next the stove, with Canary curled in the crook of her body, and Martha between the young’uns, dressed as they’d been, even to shoes. She argued with Tim about being on the outside, but he wouldn’t hear of her being there. “I’ll be warmer’n that creek water, Mam.” It didn’t matter about his voice breaking, she yielded to his man’s insistence.
Sometime in the night, Martha awoke to hear him poking up the fire and putting in more wood. Dotty snored softly. After he’d laid down again, she recalled something he’d said.
“You were at Mr. Dance’s store?”
“Yup. Learning what I’ll be doing come Monday.” His voice, like hers, was hardly even a whisper, though Dotty wouldn’t have heard a blast.
“You’ll have trouble with your Pap, you know.” Here she lay in the dark beside her son, while the storm shrieked about the house and the cold did its best to freeze them where they lay. Talking of disaster.
“I know, Mam, but I can’t go on thisaway. Besides, he don’t need me.”
His body stretched out so much longer than hers, maybe a foot, and his whisper come from somewheres deep in his chest, and when she reached out to touch his cheek, stiff hairs chafed her fingers. A man, sure enough. Martha’s heart stumbled, then took up its steady da-thump, da-thump.
She murmured, “I reckon you’ll do what you have to.” Like a man would.
The bristles on his cheek rasped up and down against her hand, like he nodded, and before she took her hand away, she felt a drop that escaped the corner of his eye. “Yes’m.” She hardly heard him, and then his breathing steadied. But Martha lay awake for a time, trying to see in the dark what might happen.
Round about midday, Canary growled just before someone made a commotion at the door, and McDowell shouted to open the damn door. Tim leaped to open it, and McDowell stamped in, grumbling that it took them long enough to let a man in and he could’ve froze out there, dammit. He huddled by the stove while Tim forced the door closed and kept it shut with his shoulder while he fumbled with the crossbar. “What’s that goddam dog doing in the house?”
Dotty had her arm around the dog. “Same as us, Pap, trying not to freeze to death.”
“Good luck to him.” McDowell said. “You’re all safe.” He stripped off his coat, hung it up.
“Yes.” Martha’s heart opened a little to joy because he’d come home to check on them.
“We got any beer?”
Martha poured him some. He drank it off like he hadn’t had none in weeks, never mind she’d smelled it on his breath as he come in the door. “How cold is it, do you know?”
He shook his head. “No one knows. The mercury in the thermometers has done froze up.” He took a deep drink of beer. “This can’t last v
ery long. Then you can be back on the claim.”
“No, Pap.” Tim, leaning his back against the door, spoke in his new voice, that McDowell didn’t even seem to hear.
“Whaddaya mean, “‘No, Pap?’” McDowell sneered. “You ain’t got no choice. I’m your Pap, and in my house what I say goes.”
Tim cleared his throat. Martha sensed the struggle he had to keep his man’s voice. “Come Monday, I’m going to work for Mr. Dance.”
“Like hell.” McDowell swung around on his chair and half rose. He shook his index finger at Tim. “Goddammit, you’ll work the claim. I ain’t hiring no help what’ll cheat me worse’n my own family does.”
“Dammit, Pap, we don’t cheat you!” Tim’s voice cracked and he went on in his boy’s falsetto, “I ain’t going to work that damn claim no more.”
Martha held her breath and prayed something would turn aside McDowell’s wrath. “How about I make some more tea?” The question squeaked out of her tense throat. Feeble.
God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana Page 29
