Bittersweet

by Nevada Barr

  At nine o’clock the next morning, Sarah and Karl, with Matthew between them, holding his mother’s hand, walked from the hotel to the courthouse. Sarah wore her finest dress, a sage-green gabardine suit with a fitted jacket that flared gracefully over her hips, and a cream blouse that tied at the throat in a soft bow. Karl’s clothes were worn and common, but as clean as soap and water could make them, and freshly pressed.

  From beneath a glossy cap of hair, parted exactly in the center and combed wet so it was plastered to his skull, Matthew glowered at the world. He had been squeezed into the somber black traveling suit his grandmother sent him west in. It was far too small and pinched under the arms.

  They stopped at the foot of the courthouse steps and gazed up at the intimidating structure. The heavy doors swung open and the dark, polished wood flashed as two men, stiff and proper in black broadcloth suits and rigid collars, came down the steps. Karl and Sarah drew back respectfully to let them pass.

  “Reno’s become such a city,” Sarah whispered. Matthew, knowing only Calliope, Pennsylvania, and Round Hole, goggled at everything.

  “Sarah?” Karl smiled, his gray eyes warm. “Shall we?” He gestured toward the open doors.

  She hesitated, the color deserting her cheeks. Several dark-suited men passed, going up the steps and closing the doors behind them. “Maybe we’d better not.” She was suddenly afraid and rested both hands on her son’s shoulders to stop them from shaking.

  “I love you, Sarah. I want to be with you always, in the sight of God and man.”

  Sarah nodded shortly, her lips pressed in a determined line, and took his arm.

  The foyer was dark and cold, with high vaulted ceilings of burnished oak collecting gloom over floors of the same dark hue. The heels of Sarah’s shoes clicked and echoed. They hurried to the less imposing offices beyond. In a drafty little room smelling of stale cigars, Sarah Ebbitt and Karl Saunders were married.

  The justice of the peace was dry and papery, with the look of a man who has spent his life indoors. He fumbled a pair of spectacles from his vest pocket and read the ceremony without inflection, tired already, though it was not yet ten o’clock. An old clerk, hard of hearing and nearly blind, was the witness and he mumbled and chuckled to himself all during the vows.

  Sarah had taken off the jade ring Imogene had given her, and handed it to Matthew to hold. Karl slipped it back on her hand as the justice said, “With this ring…”

  The justice pronounced them man and wife and closed the book with a sigh. For a moment he blinked at them from behind his spectacles. “You may kiss the bride,” he remembered.

  “Oh, no, I couldn’t!” Sarah protested and looked at the justice, the clerk, and back to Karl. He looked as uncertain as she.

  “Kiss her,” cackled the old clerk imperiously.

  Karl tilted her chin and studied the lines of her face as though reading a long sweet story. Then he kissed her gently and the old clerk smacked his lips with satisfaction. Karl pulled Sarah’s arm through his, and held his hand out for Matthew. “Son?”

  The three of them left as unobtrusively as they had come, quiet and plain in their simple dress, but as they passed, people turned to look after them and smile.

  “Can we go to the Broken Promise? Or the Bishop’s Girls?” Matthew asked as they reached the hotel, repeating names he’d heard his mother and Karl mention.

  “No, honey, we’ve got to be heading back as soon as we get our things together. Next time,” Sarah promised.

  “There won’t be a next time,” Matthew grumbled.

  Their hotel rooms were across the hall from each other, Sarah and Matthew’s overlooking the Truckee, and Karl’s facing east, toward the mountains. In the hall, Karl knelt beside Matthew. “I’d like to be alone with your mother for a few minutes. Do you think you could find something to do in your room for a while?” Matthew agreed to try, and Karl ruffled his hair. “Good boy.”

  The door closed, and husband and wife looked at one another. “We did it,” Karl said, and expelled his breath in a long sigh.

  “Yes.” Sarah laughed shakily and sat on the edge of the bed to unpin her hat.

  “I have something for you.” He pulled a chair up near the bed where he could sit facing her. “Something I memorized from one of the books your old-maid schoolteacher had. It’s my wedding gift to you.” He took her hands and began:

  “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes

  I all alone beweep my outcast state,

  And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

  And look upon myself and curse my fate,

  Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

  Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d,

  Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,

  With what I most enjoy contented least—

  Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

  Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

  Like to the lark at break of day arising

  From sullen earth, sing hymns at Heaven’s gate,

  For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings,

  That then I scorn to change my state with kings.”

  Sarah leaned over and kissed him. She was crying, and his eyes were moist. “I have nothing for you,” she said.

  “You are everything to me, Sarah.”

  40

  THE DAY AFTER THEY CAME HOME TO ROUND HOLE, MATTHEW RAN three-quarters of a mile to meet the Reno coach so he could be the first with the news to Liam and Beaner. “Karl and Momma got married,” he puffed as Liam hauled him aboard by one arm.

  “It’s about damn time,” the taciturn old driver replied, but he was pleased and paid his respects with his hat in his hand when they arrived at Round Hole.

  The weeks passed and Sarah grew as quick to answer to “Mrs. Saunders” as she had been to “Mrs. Ebbitt.” Karl was slower, and suffered the good-natured teasing of the old customers when he referred to his wife as Mrs. Ebbitt.

  The weather turned cold in late September, and life moved indoors. Sarah or Karl would leave the guests after supper and find a quiet corner where they could teach Matthew his lessons. Sometimes they held hands or sat close, but Karl still absented himself from the stop on nights when Sarah raised the calico flag.

  The Saunderses saved enough money over the winter so that the following spring they were able to buy a bull. They hoped to have a healthier crop of calves the following year. Coby’s pay was raised to two dollars and a quarter a day. He took better than half a week off, and rode to Elko to pay his debts. When he returned, a free man, with some money left over, he settled back into the tackroom and showed no inclination to move on.

  Several more of Sarah’s hens disappeared and she reinforced the wire fence around the coop. There were no more raids for a while; then, early in November, Matthew forgot to latch the gate behind him after gathering eggs for supper and in the morning three hens were gone. One was Sarah’s best layer.

  Karl and Coby had gone to Standish to buy hay and firewood for the winter. Sarah, enjoying the solitude, whistled breathily to herself as she checked the roost one more time, peering into the gloomy recesses of each box and poking her arm in to feel behind the messes of straw nesting. Her missing hens were nowhere to be found, but she inadvertently discovered an egg so old it broke when she touched it and the smell drove her out into the open. The sharp November air cleared her lungs of rotten-egg smell. Wrapping her arms in her apron for warmth, she took a last look around the henyard. Her flock, small and brown-and-white-speckled, scratched complacently. Corn kernels from the morning still littered the ground near the fence. Two snow-white feathers blew by her feet, catching her eye. She picked one up and turned it over in her fingers; the end was mangled and there was rust-colored matting near the tip. She let the wind take it, left the chicken coop, and hurried across the yard. Under the porch steps, out of sight from a distance, were more feathers—half a handful. Sarah knelt by the steps
and stuck her head under the porch. Shadowy and indistinct, something crouched behind the feathers.

  “Moss Face,” she called, “come here, fella.” Slowly the shadow crept forward, hunched down, his chin low over his paws. Sarah reached in, ducking her shoulder under the porch floor. Moss Face stopped, his brown eyes bright in the dimness. Small white feathers were stuck to the fur around his jaws. “Come on now, come here, boy, attaboy,” she cajoled. The coyote crept forward another few feet and she grabbed at his neckerchief. “Gotcha!” she cried as she dragged him out into the light. All around his mouth the fur was spiky with dried blood. Holding on to his collar, Sarah smacked him. “Bad dog!” He growled and bared his teeth. “Don’t you growl at me! And don’t you go killing my chickens!” She spanked him hard. Writhing in her grasp, rubbery lips pulled back in a snarl, Moss Face twisted to bite. His teeth grazed her wrist, barely breaking the skin, but it scared her and she let him loose. He was around the corner of the house and out of sight before she recovered herself.

  “It’s Moss Face been killing the chickens,” she told Karl that night as she brushed out her hair. He sat on a chair beside the bed, his heavy workboots neatly side by side under the window, sewing a button on one of his shirts.

  “I thought it might be,” he replied. “I guess no one wanted to know it for sure. Did you catch him in the henhouse?”

  “No. Almost, though. He was under the house, too full to do anything but sleep. I got him to come out. He had feathers and blood all around his mouth.” She pulled back her sleeve. “I spanked him and he turned and bit me. I think he’s going back to being wild.”

  “Maybe. I remember Mac said he might. I guess we’ll have to get rid of him.”

  Her hand flew to her cheek as though he’d slapped her. “That’s Matthew’s dog!”

  “He’s killing chickens. Today he bit you.”

  “We can’t kill him.” She brushed her hair vigorously for a hundred strokes. Adjusting the lamp, Karl squared up his spectacles and pulled the thread around and around the button before tying it off. With the light so close, his face showed the years, the lines chiseled through the flat cheeks and fanning out over the high cheekbones.

  “We can’t kill him,” Sarah said again.

  “We can’t keep him, if he’s killing chickens.”

  Sarah put the brush down and tied her long hair back at the nape of her neck with a faded blue ribbon. “Couldn’t we take him somewhere and leave him? Let him go wild again?”

  Karl thought for a moment. “We could do that. I’ll do it tomorrow. Coby and I planned to ride south of here, toward Tohakum Peak. I think the cattle may be ranging too far; I’m afraid to let them get too near the Paiutes or we’ll lose them.” He smiled. “I don’t want them eaten before they’re paid for.”

  Sarah came to kneel between his knees. She still slept in the old flannel gowns Imogene had given her when she’d left Pennsylvania with nothing but the dress on her back. The fabric was yellowed with age, the hem frayed. She put her arms around Karl’s waist and rested her head on his chest. “Oughtn’t you be getting ready for bed?” she asked. “I laid out your nightshirt.”

  He let her bound hair slip through his hand, long and silken. “Mrs. Saunders,” he said, and smiled.

  “Mrs. Saunders.” Sarah turned her face up to be kissed. “You need a haircut,” she commented. “Put it off much longer and we’ll have to get out the hairpins.”

  He touched her lips softly with the tips of his fingers. “Sarah, do you ever miss Imogene?” he asked.

  She was quiet a long time, and when she replied her voice was warm with remembering. “A little. I miss the small things mostly, I think. Pushing in hairpins before any big jobs—things like that.”

  “Sometimes I miss her too.”

  In the morning he was ready to go before sunrise, before Matthew was awake. Moss Face had not been in his usual place in the boy’s room, but under the porch, and he was uncharacteristically suspicious when Karl called him. He would only crawl into the light and whine, but wouldn’t come close enough to be touched. Finally, Sarah came out in her nightgown and slippers. She put a piece of venison left over from supper on the ground, and when Moss Face came out to eat it, Karl grabbed him. They fashioned a leash out of twine, the coyote’s neckerchief serving as a collar. He slipped out of it twice, but the third time they tied it as tight as they dared, and he couldn’t wriggle free. Karl swung into the saddle and started out, but Moss Face would not follow; he braced his feet and fought the lead until, afraid he would be choked, Karl bundled him into a gunnysack, taking him out of Round Hole the way he had come in.

  He leaned down from the saddle to kiss his wife. “Tell Coby I’ve gone out early to lose Moss Face. He can meet up with me at the bluff just south of Sand Pass.”

  “I’ll send your lunch with him. It slipped my mind till just now.” Sarah folded her shawl more closely around her, and held the neck of her nightgown shut. A lantern burned on the ground at her feet; in its uneven light, her breath steamed.

  “You’d better get inside.”

  She nodded and picked up the lantern. “What shall I tell Matthew? First thing he’ll look for is that dog.” She laid her hand on the warm bundle by her husband’s knee. Moss Face stirred inside, whimpering, and Karl’s horse shied and sidestepped.

  “Easy.” Karl gentled the old gelding with a touch. “Tell him the truth, Sarah.” A ribbon of light appeared around the porch door as it was opened a crack. “It looks like he’s up. Do you want me to tell him?”

  She glanced over her shoulder. “No. You go. Quick, before he comes out. You’ll be at Sand Pass—south side—around noon?”

  “That’s right—don’t forget my lunch.” He touched her hair lightly and turned the horse’s head to the southwest. Behind him the night sky was just beginning to lighten, stars paling into the day. The air was cold and still in the windless calm before sunrise. Karl turned his collar up around his ears and, looping the reins around the saddlehorn, shoved his hands in his coat pockets.

  Where the desert began its ascent to Sand Pass, the road started winding, snaking up through the sage to a notch in the rounded mountains west of the stage stop. Over the pass, Karl turned his horse from the road and struck out through the sage, the eight-thousand-foot peak of Tohakum Mountain on his left and the ragged brown Pah Rah Range on his right. Moss Face lay quiet in his burlap prison. Occasionally he would shift or whine, and Karl would reassure him with soft words.

  The sun was well above the horizon when Karl approached the pyramids at the north end of the lake. There was still no wind, but he rode with his coat buttoned high. The lake glittered a hard deep blue, the dark cobalt blue of the sea. He swung free of the saddle and threw the reins over the horse’s head. It began cropping the sparse dry weeds with a tearing sound. Karl lifted the gunnysack from the saddlehorn and crouched to untie the mouth of the bag. Both his knees cracked. “I’m getting to be quite an old lady,” he said, “creaking like her rocker. Come on, Moss Face, you’re home.”

  On wobbly legs, the coyote ventured halfway out, the sack draped over him like a cassock, and looked around. He closed his eyes and pointed his nose at the sky, his nostrils quivering as he took in his new surroundings.

  “There’s water here, and even such a hearth-dog as you should be able to find enough to eat.” Karl stroked the rough fur, then untied the neckerchief and put it in his coat pocket. “Come all the way out. I want my sack back.” He upended the bag, poured the rest of Moss Face out, and scratched him behind the ears. “Good-bye, old fella, you’ll be fine.” He looped the sack over the saddlehorn, gathered up the reins, and, digging his heels into the horse, started off at a stiff trot.

  Moss Face sat where Karl had dumped him, looking around with the confused air of a sleepwalker awakened in a strange bed. As Karl rode past the first hillock, Moss Face shook himself vigorously and started out after him.

  Karl turned for a last look and saw him. “Go on!” he yelled. �
�Git!” Moss Face stopped and sat down, but as soon as Karl rode on, he trotted along behind the same as before. Karl dismounted and picked up a handful of rocks. “Go on!” he shouted. Moss Face sat down to wait him out. Karl threw a rock at him. It landed short and the coyote nosed it curiously. “Scat.” Karl threw another, closer this time. Moss Face tried to catch it in his mouth. The third rock struck him in the shoulder and he stopped cold to stare at Karl. “Go on! I mean it.” Karl threw another rock, striking Moss Face in the side.

  The coyote retreated a few feet, then turned back. The next stone struck him hard in the face, and Moss Face turned and ran. Karl threw rocks as long as the dog was in sight.

  “Damn,” he said when the dog ran out of view, and let the rest of the rocks fall from his fist. “Karl Saunders just lost a good dog.”

  The men got in late, after sundown; both were tired and cold to the bone. Coby’s face was chapped raw from the wind. Sarah turned down their offers to help with dinner, and the four of them dined simply on bread and beans. The milk was still warm from the cow and there wasn’t much of it. Karl and Coby cut theirs with coffee so Matthew could have the rest. He asked them if they’d seen his dog. He wasn’t really worried, he said, Moss Face had gone off before for a day, and once he was gone overnight.

  Karl shot Sarah a hard look and she avoided his eye. “Sarah, tell—” he started.

  She shushed him, and the conversation was strained for the rest of dinner. Coby excused himself early and retreated to the tackroom.

  By the time Sarah finished up her chores and came to bed, Karl was a formless lump under the bedclothes. The sheets were cold and Karl’s back was warm, but she didn’t snuggle close. She was afraid he was still mad at her. For a few minutes Sarah tossed and turned, hoping to wake him. “I’m being childish,” she thought, and let herself drift off to sleep.