by Ruth Glover
Still the neighbors lingered, unable to grasp the totality of the destruction, the rapidity with which it had happened, the finality of the life snuffed out—Aunt Tilda’s, not of much importance to anybody, but certainly not deserving of this.
“Who,” someone asked, voice loud in the silence, “who was here last? Who was the last one to see her?”
Face looked at face, heads shook, eyebrows raised.
“Ellie.”
Vonnie, half hidden by the form of her mother, said again, “Ellie Bonney. Ellie was here.... She was the last one here.”
Ellie. A dozen and more pairs of eyes swung to peer down at her.
Stung into responding, Ellie blurted, “It was out; the fire was out when I left!” And with a sob, “I’m sure it was out!”
The crowd shifted uneasily; there were a few murmurs, a few indrawn breaths, a muted “Ellie Bonney! Ellie... responsible.”
Standing beside her father in the evening’s shadows, Ellie looked—for the first time but not the last—into a ring of shocked faces.
And heard—for the first time but not the last—the whisper, “The child... a murderer.”
The Mounties arrived in due time. Questioning various people, walking around the burned-out cabin, they did their best to bring some conclusion to the matter and to determine how and why Mrs. Beam had perished. The Mounties, after all, were the law of the land. They had brought order and sanity to the territories when it seemed chaos would surely prevail; they did a superior job of keeping the peace. Folks rested in their beds more easily because they were on the job.
No matter where the Mounties went, fascinated people stopped what they were doing and turned their eyes to the Red Coats as they rode by, admiring and honoring them, hearts swelling with pride in such a police force.
When two of these men, resplendent in their distinctive uniforms, entered the Bonney residence to question the last person to see the deceased woman alive, Ellie thought her heart would burst with feelings of favor. For hadn’t she, along with the rest of the school’s children, rushed to the windows or to the fence whenever a Mountie rode by?
Sitting down after introductions and explanations, turning their attention to the child before them, the men invited, “Tell us about your visit with Mrs. Beam, Elizabeth. Why you went.”
Ellie explained about the Busy Bees and their devotion to serving others, Mrs. Beam among them.
“And what did you do for Mrs. Beam the day of the fire?” one Mountie asked kindly.
“Well—” Ellie’s eyes sought her mother’s. Serena nodded encouragement, her thin face wanner than usual.
“I cleaned up... the cat’s mess,” Ellie confided faintly. Surely that was a flicker of humor on the square-jawed face. At any rate, Ellie took heart and continued.
“I washed Aunt Tilda—”
“Mrs. Beam, she means,” her father interjected.
“And then I rubbed her with olive oil, and combed her hair, and fed her some soup...”
“Tell us about the stove, Elizabeth. The fire. Was there a fire in the stove?”
As best she could, Ellie explained that she had lit the fire to heat the soup she had brought from home. She described the smoke, the plugged chimney, and how she had let the fire go out.
“It was out before I left,” she whispered. “I know it was out.”
“Tell us,” the Mounties said, “did you light a candle? Or the lamp? Did you leave a light burning when you left?”
“The lamp,” Ellie said. “The room was so dark, and Aunt Tilda kept fussing for light, so I lit it and set it on the table beside her where she could blow it out when she wanted to. Then I filled a glass of water for her, and... that’s all.”
A few more questions, and the Mounties thanked Ellie and the family for their help and took their leave.
Ellie, both proud and anxious, stood beside her father and mother as the Mounties rode out of the yard to make their rounds of the community, gather what information they could, and compile a report.
“They’ll get to the bottom of it,” her father reassured. “I’m sure they’ll find some reason, locate someone other than you who was there, someone who was careless with fire, perhaps...”Bran’s voice died away uncertainly.
Looking up into her father’s face, Ellie’s eyes, for the first time, filled with that haunted look that her parents came to recognize and to dread. “Papa, did I do it? Am I a murderer?”
Bran and Serena dropped to their knees in the yard, putting their arms around their child, assuring her, both angrily and pathetically, that she was, indeed, no murderer. “Never think it!” they said.
“The Mounties,” Bran said more than once, “will find the truth. You’ll see.”
Even then, they had a reputation for “getting their man.”Would it, in this case, be a girl? Serena and Bran pushed away the panic that threatened and put their faith in the law, relieved because the Mounties were on the job. It hadn’t always been so.
Early days in the West had been fraught with wildness and wickedness. It had been a wide-open, free-booting, brigand-plagued time in the history of the territories. There was no law, and there certainly was no order.
Before immigrants were wooed and won to homesteading by the government, and while the Northwest was still considered empty, the Indians and the Métis became the victims of Montana-based traders, men without consciences, who crossed the unmarked international border to barter “firewater” for buffalo hides.
Firewater—the heart and soul of the whiskey trade—was a rotgut mixture of watered-down whiskey, India ink, tobacco juice, tabasco, and even vitriol. This diabolic drink rapidly demoralized the natives and disintegrated their culture; the order of the day was arson, rape, and murder—lawless abandon.
Word went rapidly from the frontier to the Canadian Parliament that the American “wolfers” had perpetrated a massacre of Canadian Indians. Although few episodes in the past have had so lurid a history with so little established fact as the “Cypress Hills Massacre,” still it was the catalyst that prompted the organizing of some sort of police protection.
When it seemed the Indians would certainly seek their own justice, the government hurried into action, resulting in the establishment of a mounted police force for the Northwest. Aside from the fact that they would be under civil control, they would function like cavalry. Their uniform would be scarlet—a happy choice, reminiscent of the British uniform already recognized by the Indians as representing the Great Queen, and commanding respect.
These men, soon to be called Mounties—discreet, resolute, persuasive—managed without too much trouble or time to impose law with a minimum of disruption and, simultaneously, gain the confidence of the Indians. Before long they would preside over the change that made a wilderness into an agricultural community. Eventually, of course, they made a name for themselves across the country and around the world, with a reputation for patient diplomacy and firm action.
In their red uniforms and on their handsome steeds, the Mounties represented law and order wherever they went. The Northwest—white and Indian alike—learned to trust them, to depend on them.
Brandon and Serena Bonney had full confidence that after the investigation a report would be forthcoming that would clear their child of all culpability in the sad Beam affair.
The report, when it finally filtered down to Bliss and the Bonneys: “Accidental death.”
“It’s not good enough!” a disappointed Serena said to her husband. “They should have explained how it happened. They should have cleared Ellie of all suspicion. I know people! They’ll say Tilda Beam certainly wasn’t responsible for the accident, and so somebody else was. And I’m afraid that somebody will always be thought of as Ellie.”
“She’s just a child, Serena,” Bran said gently. “People will be kind—”
Some were. Some were not. Some meant to be. Well-meaning people gave consolation that was condemnation: “After all,” they said kindly, “no one thinks that
Ellie did anything on purpose. Heavens, no! We all know what a helpful, caring child she is. Good as gold, really.”
Or, “Fires happen! And no one, especially a little girl, can be held responsible for a fire.”
Perhaps missing the mark the most: “Ellie will get over it. She’ll forget it. Give her time, and life will go on as though it never happened. You’ll see.”
But glances that were too sympathetic, pats of consolation, cheery words when none were called for, a few gibes by spiteful children, all kept the tragedy, and the uncertainty, alive for Ellie.
Those, and the dreams...
Ellie was making potato salad—the eggs and potatoes had been boiled and the dressing made, and there was no use letting them go to waste. She and her father would have a picnic meal all by themselves.
But there was Tom.
She had gone to the picnic with Tom ever since she finished school at fifteen and considered herself a woman; certainly lots of girls were no older when they married, even began raising a family.
And Tom had offered marriage, right away.
At first her answer had been a light, “I’m too young, Tom! And so are you!”
Tom, grudgingly, had accepted that. By the time she was eighteen, he was more urgent. “I need you; I want you,” he had whispered enticingly, snuggling in the buggy or under a willow tree in the evening’s shadows.
And though her lips and her heart responded, her mind, her guilt-ridden mind, had put excuses in her mouth. “Not yet, Tom. We’re both young—”
“Not too young,” he said insistently, pressing to overcome her reluctance with the only means he knew—the pulsing need of their healthy young bodies, the approval of their parents, the passing of time, his need of a partner in the great adventure of setting up his own place.
When Ellie turned twenty-one, her mother died. Tom, called upon to be patient once again, accepted the new excuse: “I can’t... I just can’t leave Dad right now, Tom.”
Accepted it for a time. Finally even Tom—good, patient Tom—grew impatient with the delay, began prodding into the situation and Ellie’s continual objections, thinking, struggling to come to some conclusion.
“It’s because you don’t love me,” he accused, to be met by a fury of denials.
“How can you say that! I’ve loved you for years, ever since that day when you first came to school—”
“Well, then, what’s the problem? Ellie,” Tom studied his fingernails, “are you... afraid? Afraid of marriage? Afraid of me, perhaps?”
This Ellie strongly denied. And surely she had all the earmarks of a normal, loving, eager young woman. Until marriage was mentioned.
Two Christmases ago, riding home together in the cutter after the Christmas Concert, when it seemed the joyousness of the season was filling all hearts, Tom’s hopes rose once more. And once more Ellie—her face rosy with the cold, and the moon making mysterious shadows around her eyes—turned his proposal aside. No longer able to say they were too young, she treated the idea lightly. “Oh, Tom—we have such fun, you and I. It’s special whenever we get together. Can’t we be happy this way for the time being?”
Tom was not to be cajoled; Tom was not about to settle for friendship. Tom said, his brow furrowed and his tone more serious than at any time before, “Ellie, does your refusal to consider marriage have anything to do with that fire? The death, over a dozen years ago, of that old woman?”
“Why would you say such a thing?” Ellie asked tightly, almost angrily.
“Because I’ve thought of every other reason, and nothing else makes sense; I keep coming back to the fire. As I think about it, about you, Ellie, you’ve been different since that time. At first I believed it was natural, considering the shock of that experience, and that it would pass. But I see now that it hasn’t; it’s become a way of life with you. It’s that, isn’t it?”
The cutter’s runners squeaked over the packed snow; the harness jingled rhythmically; the moon kept pace with them, laying a shiny, silvery path across the snow as they moved along. A night for love and romance.
Ellie’s voice was low when she said, “You don’t want to be married to a murderer, Tom. Think of trying to explain to your children that their mother—”
“Hey! What’s this foolishness!”Tom pulled the horse to a halt and there, in the middle of the road and bundled as they were, took her in his arms, shaking her, rocking her, holding her.
“Never let me hear such rot again!” he demanded. “Anyway, that’s all in your head, Ellie, not mine!”
Ellie wept a little—from the force of her feelings. And from the force of his.
“Hey!”Tom said again, watching the tears shine in the moon-glow, “None of that! Those’ll freeze, you know. And I don’t want any frozen ice maiden!”
Even though Ellie managed a weak laugh and Tom wiped away the tears, her heart, deep down inside, remained cold, cold, cold. And his not much better, for nothing had been settled.
Two more years passed; several more proposals and as many refusals.
At times Ellie’s heart quailed. How long would Tom—a perfectly healthy, normal young man—agree to wait? She knew it wasn’t fair; she knew she was being desperately, terribly, unexplainably unfair to Tom.
When he came bounding to the door, dressed casually for the picnic, ready for a full day of fun and frolic and good food, cheerful and expectant, his eyes full of determination—and ten years older than when he first asked her to marry him—Ellie knew what she had to do. Somehow, in her heart of hearts, she knew.
God help me! she breathed.
“Tom,” she said, backing away from his reaching arms. “I’m not going to the picnic.”
“Not going?” he repeated blankly. To miss the picnic was to miss half the year’s fun, it seemed.
“Dad’s not feeling well, and I won’t leave him.”
“That’s a shame—”Tom began sympathetically.
“I need to talk to you, Tom,” Ellie said, and her tone was serious enough for Tom’s eyes to widen. Bran—was he seriously ill?
“It’s not Dad,” Ellie said, avoiding Tom’s eyes. “Please stop by on your way home. And we can... talk.”
“We’ll talk now,” Tom said, and in view of their past association and his uncertainties, who could blame him if he spoke roughly? Was he too feeling what she was? And was he prepared? Ellie hoped so; she hoped so desperately.
And looking at those steely eyes, that firm mouth, Ellie thought it might be so;Tom other than sweet and loving and kind, she had never known. Had God, in His loving kindness and great wisdom, planted a seed of doubt about their future in Tom’s heart, too?
Ellie washed her hands and wiped them, took off her apron, and stepped toward the door, Tom, silent now, on her heels.
Automatically Ellie turned toward the bush and a favorite hideaway, Tom following. Pushing aside the limbs and branches, they reached a small bushy enclosure filled with objects that had been of interest to a child in years past. Glancing around and finding no place to sit that was not leaf-littered, Ellie remained on her feet, turning to face Tom.
“Tom,” she said steadily, without preamble, “I’m giving you your freedom.”
Shocked silence, stunned silence. “What do you mean?” Tom asked slowly, his eyes searching hers.
Turning, pacing the small embrasure, Ellie talked rapidly. “I’m not free to love, to marry. Yes, it’s the fire, as you asked me once. Something, something inside me burned up that day. That’s the only way I know how to explain it. I... I feel like a murderer—”
“How would you know how a murderer feels? How could you possibly know? There was no such thought in your heart—ever!”
“I mean, I feel like a destroyer. I feel guilty, unworthy.”
Tom made a rude noise.
“I don’t expect you to understand,” Ellie said, and she stopped her pacing and faced him, her face pale, her eyes darkly earnest. “I only know it seems right, hard as it is, to tell you not to w
ait.”
Tom clapped both hands to his head, shaking it as though to fend off something unbelievable.
“Maybe it would help,” Ellie went on, bravely, “if I told you about the nightmares.
“They consume me, Tom. Like a message from the pit they take me into the very bowels of that fire. I am the one in the bed; I am the one helpless, terrified. I am the one catching fire, burning, shriveling, screaming...”
“Ellie—it doesn’t matter. Together we can—”
“No, Tom. It hasn’t gotten any better, though I’ve waited and hoped. I’m so helpless against it. I don’t understand it! And through all of it, I can’t make myself believe we should marry; I just have this inner hesitation. You mustn’t spend any more time waiting for me. Would it help, Tom, if I tell you I think this is best—for you as it is for me?”
And though Tom pleaded, earnestly at first, then heatedly, finally arguing bitterly, Ellie had made up her mind. Across days and months and years she had made up her mind; she saw that now. White-faced she stood her ground: She could not marry him; Tom should not wait.
With the truth finally reaching him that she meant to stand firm, Tom whirled and strode away through the encircling bush. But not before he gritted out roughly, astonishing Ellie and, in the long run, assuaging some of the misery she felt: “If you think I’m going to spend any more time mooning around—you couldn’t be more mistaken!”
Careless, careless... couldn’t care less. Standing in front of the mirror, getting herself ready to go to the picnic, Birdie saw herself far differently than she had that morning two weeks before when she had prepared herself for church and the possibility of confronting an unknown admirer. There had been an air of adventure, a rare lifting of the spirits on that morning. Even so, she recalled bitterly now, her head had warned caution. But her heart—her foolish heart—had demanded anticipation. Her eyes, in spite of herself, had reflected a certain sparkle, her cheeks a rare flush; her mouth had been softer, as though lingering on the edge of a smile. She had loosened her hair, if only for a moment, as an experiment; she had decorated her hat and dressed with care.
