Softly Falling

by Carla Kelly

  “I believe we have learned a great deal, Luella,” Lily replied. “Here we go now: three plus four equals . . .”

  “Seven!”

  “They fear we frightened off the Little Man,” Lily told Pierre that afternoon, after the children had marched down the hill in what had become their everyday pattern. He had walked up, giving her a little nod as she stood in the doorway, watching her charges as she always did, and keeping an eye out for Freak. When she glanced toward the cottonwoods, Pierre looked too.

  “Do you ever just stand still and wait for Freak?” he asked.

  “Quite often. He’ll come out from the trees, but that is about all for now.” She felt her face grow warm, wondering what he would think of this next piece of information. “I’ve started calling him Francis instead of Freak. It seems more polite.”

  So much for stoic Indians. Pierre threw back his head and laughed loud and long. His laughter was irresistible and made her smile.

  “How would you like to be called Freak?” she asked, when she thought he was through. “You already know how we feel about True Greatness at the Bar Dot School. We look for the best in everything, not just children.”

  He smiled at her then, and she saw nothing but admiration in eyes as dark as her own. “Francis it is then.” He reached in his vest pocket and pulled out a twist of paraffin paper. He unwrapped it, exposing what looked like meat pellets.

  “I like to trap rabbits and chipmunks now and then.” He touched a little beaded bag on the leather thong around his neck. “I make medicine bags with the hides, and I dry the meat. Here.”

  He handed her the paper of meat. “Set it on the rock for . . .” His lips twitched, but he managed. “. . . for Francis.”

  She accepted the dried meat as politely as she could, whooping inside when she imagined what starchy Miss Tilton would think, if she could see her less-than-star pupil. Lily set the meat on the rock for Francis and turned back to Pierre.

  “Thank you, Pierre.” She stared down at her shoes a moment, still caught up in the peculiarity of this social situation. “Give me some advice: What if Francis decides to come closer and be my friend?”

  He considered the matter more seriously than she thought the problem warranted. “I think he will not, because cats never do what you want.” He chuckled. “If he does, pet him carefully.”

  “You’re mostly no help,” she joked.

  “As Jack would tell you, free advice is worth what you pay for it.” He stood there in thought again, but she was getting used to his pauses. Maybe that was the Indian way. She waited.

  “Jack said you’re ready for me to talk to your children about winter counts.”

  “I do. What I want is to have each of them start a winter count. We’ll do it by months instead of years.”

  He nodded his approval. “I like it. For the next two days, we are moving cattle.” He made a disgusted sound and looked up at the cloudless sky. “Pushing cattle, more like, because they know something is coming.”

  Lily felt again the little chill she remembered from the river bank when Jack showed her the thick muskrat lodge. “How do animals know?”

  He shrugged. “Will Friday be all right for you? Jack said I can have some canvas in the tack room that you can use for the counts.”

  “What, you cannot find me four middling-sized buffalo hides?” she teased.

  “I cannot even find you buffalo now,” he replied, deadly serious, and with sadness in his eyes. “They are all gone, and the people are on reservations, eating flour, lard, and thin beef.”

  “There isn’t much in the world that is fair, is there?” she asked, understanding him perfectly.

  “Very little.” He looked toward the trees, nodded, and lowered his voice. “I think I see Francis.” He tipped his Stetson to her. “I’ll go.” He took off his hat, which sent the cat farther back into the trees and underbrush. “Lily, thank you for calling me Pierre, and not Indian.”

  “It’s your name,” she said simply. She looked at him. “Do you have another name? A . . . a Lakota name?”

  “My mother’s family call me Blue Hat.” He held up his hand, evidently seeing the question in her eyes. “I’ll tell you sometime.”

  “Say it in Lakota.”

  He did, guttural sounds that she knew she couldn’t reproduce easily. “I’ll stick with Pierre,” she told him.

  “Blue Hat is all right too.” He started down the hill, walking backward to watch her. “Maybe you will get a name before this winter is over.”

  “I’d like it to be ‘Teacher,’ since that is what I have become.”

  “No word for that in Lakota,” he said. “Besides, it’s not up to you. Maybe it’ll be She Who Pets Wildcats.”

  “Oh, you!”

  He started up the hill again until he was close. “I promise you it will be right and true.”

  Lily nodded, feeling as shy as Amelie. “Does Jack Sinclair have a name?”

  “Oh, yes. His name is Determined.”

  “There’s a Lakota word for determined?” she asked, skeptical.

  “Well, no. It is ‘He Stands With Feet Planted.’”

  Lily nodded. I can see that, she thought, impressed.

  “If a better name comes along, I will know.”

  She felt that chill again and clasped her hands together. “I think you’re telling me that this winter is going to change us.”

  He didn’t reply. Maybe she was wrong to ask such a question. What did she know about Indian ways? Pierre looked at the sky and held his hand up to the wind that blew stronger now from the north and west.

  “There will be snow by morning.”

  She couldn’t help the catch in her throat. Drat him and Jack for frightening her with vague suspicions. And what did muskrats and woolly caterpillars know, anyway? He noticed her agitation, because he touched her arm so lightly.

  “Just a little snow this time.”

  Lily nodded. His finger went to her frown line and he shook his head.

  “Do not worry. A man named Determined doesn’t bend and fold. If you want to worry—Lakota women do that too—worry for the other ranchers.”

  “Maybe I’ll worry for Francis and the Little Man of the Prairie,” she said, hoping to lighten the moment.

  He looked toward the trees and there was the cat, his tail twitching. “He wants me to leave. And the Little Man? He’ll be back.”

  “You’re so certain?”

  “I am. What rat in his right mind would leave such a place as you have created here?”

  “Thank you, Pierre.”

  He tipped his hat again and started walking Mrs. Buxton’s healthy distance from the school house to the main buildings of the Bar Dot. She started to worry a wisp of hair that had escaped her bun, wishing that some magic hand would suddenly pick up the school and move it closer to the ranch.

  “I am an idiot,” she said out loud, but not loud enough for the retreating Indian to hear, she thought.

  “Far from it,” he said, waving his hand behind him.

  Shaking her head, she went inside the school, peering out the window as she swept the floor, pleased to see Francis on the rock, making short work of the dried meat. She watched, pleased, as he groomed himself.

  Letting our guard down, are we, Francis? she thought as she put the broom in the corner by Little Man’s front door. She stood there a moment, wishing a rat to appear, of all things. Then she put her shawl around her and closed the door with a decisive click, irritated with pouting pack rats.

  At the sound, Francis leaped from the rock. She waited for him to vanish into the tree line, but he held his ground, eyeing her. She took a step toward the cat and he backed up, flattening his ears.

  “That attitude will not do,” she told him. “Good night. Kindly sweeten up by morning, since you just had a free meal you didn’t have to work for.” She laughed, which made his ears go up. “And I am talking to cats.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Lily thought her fathe
r might object to her evening plans that involved him, but he did not. She explained the matter to him over supper, Madeleine’s usual beef and beans, livened this time by dried apple pie.

  The special occasion was a cookshack full of hands from other ranches, everyone hungry and expectant. Their eyes serious with the task of refilling bowls and lugging around the heavy coffee pot, Amelie and Chantal hurried from table to table.

  Lily wondered why the extra hands were there. Like all cattlemen, they ate with no commentary beyond thank yous to the girls, and pass this or that to their fellow diners. Steel forks clinked on heavy white china and someone had a nagging cough.

  “Papa, do you know I had a lesson once in proper dinner conversation?” she told her father in a low voice.

  He smiled at her, that smile she saw more and more often, and ducked his head close to hers. “Would have been a true waste here, eh?” he whispered.

  “Do you know . . . do you have any idea why these men are here?” she asked.

  “I might. Jack came to the office this morning to tell Mr. Buxton that several ranchers had agreed to join together to gather their drifting cattle,” he told her and reached for another slice of bread as Amelie hurried by.

  You are eating better, she thought, grateful, and almost let his words pass her by. “He told Mr. Buxton?” she asked, paying attention again. “How did he fare?”

  “Mr. Buxton called him a fearmonger, among other things which I will not repeat,” her father whispered. “They went at it hammer and tongs, and I am surprised Jack wasn’t told to draw his wages, as they say here. Jack didn’t back down.” He gave a disgusted snort. “All Mr. Buxton wanted to know was that it wasn’t going to cost him anything.”

  Lily thought of her afternoon conversation with Pierre. He Stands With Feet Planted didn’t seem to fear unemployment. She remembered her brief visit to his little ranch and her introduction to Bismarck, and how Jack draped his arms over the corral fence and watched his three-cow herd with shy pride. “I think he really likes cows, Papa. He cares.”

  She looked around at the men of the Bar Dot. Pierre sat close to Jack, listening to a conversation growing more intense by the minute. Stretch had his own little circle of friends, laughing and smoking. Preacher had tipped his chair back, perhaps the better to hear several conversations, while Will Buxton sat alone playing solitaire, belonging nowhere.

  She saw exhaustion on many faces and a certain uneasiness that had no real name. Over conversation, she heard the wind outside, rattling the panes of glass as though wanting to join the gathering too. If there had not been so many warm bodies in the room, it might have felt colder. She was already not looking forward to their walk back to Papa’s quarters.

  “Would you mind staying here a while?” she asked her father. “Nick Sansever is doing so well with his addition and subtraction. He is ahead of the others, and I wonder if you would help him along with multiplication. Just for a little while.”

  He considered her request. “It will be noisy here,” he said, but it was a feeble objection.

  “Just for an hour. And look, here is Fothering with Luella,” she said as the door opened and the wind blew them in. “She will help the Sansever girls with their alphabet.”

  “How can I say no?” her father teased. “Are you managing me?”

  “I suppose I am,” she said, grateful for his light tone. “I was thinking, a few nights a week . . .” She nudged her father’s shoulder, then kissed his cheek. “And here is Nick with his slate.”

  “I wonder how he knew?” Papa gave her an arch look and then loosened his cravat, that article of clothing that set him off as a stranger in a strange land of cows and ranchers. The dingy cravat was as shabby as his collar, but it touched Lily’s heart to see his own brave struggle to stand his ground and remain a gentleman. “Thank you, Papa. Just one hour.”

  She went to the girls, who had gathered at a table closest to the kitchen. In a few minutes, Luella and Chantal and Amelie had their heads together over small words. Pleased, she watched them, enjoying Luella’s confidence.

  “And who, miss, are you?”

  The gravelly voice boomed out over all the talk, and all conversation ceased. Lily turned away, uncertain. She put her hand on Luella’s shoulder, because the girl had half risen from the bench, startled. “Just keep working,” Lily whispered. “I doubt he means any harm.” She pointed at Amelie’s slate. “Very good. If you add an E you have . . .”

  “I mean you, Miss High Yaller. Putting on airs?”

  Mortified, she heard a chair hit the floor and another scrape back, and then Jack’s familiar voice, except there was menace in it. “That’s enough, Mr. Ledbetter.”

  “Just wondering, that’s all.”

  Lily turned around. Ledbetter was a big man, taller than some, but no taller than she was. He looked like the others with his shirt that had probably been white in better days, a vest probably greasy enough to stand on its own, and jeans. He needed a haircut and a shave like the others, and he was regarding her with more than interest. He looked her up and down.

  “I am Miss Carteret, the schoolteacher here,” she said, suddenly finding a purpose for those lessons in precise diction she had learned in Bristol.

  “She is my daughter,” her father said as he stood beside her, swaying a little because he was never steady.

  “On purpose?” the big man said and threw back his head to laugh.

  “Here now . . . ,” her father began.

  “I, sir, am a gentleman’s daughter,” Lily said.

  “How in tarnation can that be? You’re a—”

  The click of a hammer pulled back stopped the man right there.

  “Just one more word, Ledbetter,” Jack said. “You rubbed my last nerve.”

  Lily deliberately stepped in front of the man who had taunted her, the man who was now ghostly in complexion. “I am not worth a life. Not over this.”

  “Oh, you are. What’s it to be, Ledbetter? If I don’t get you tonight, since this lady”—he said it with emphasis—“. . . this lady is far kinder than you are, I’ll get you later. Count on it.”

  “It won’t happen again,” the man said behind her, his voice so high and strangled that some of the other men chuckled. He put on his hat. “Past my bedtime,” he said as he started for the door. “Bunkhouse?”

  “If they’ll have you there,” Jack said, easing back the hammer and holstering his gun. “If they won’t, there’s a tack room next to the horse barn.”

  Ledbetter nodded and left. Everyone in the room seemed to take a deep breath. The children went back to their studies. His own face pale, Fothering took her arm.

  “That was a bit too much like the old West,” he said as he sat her down. “My dear, would you care for some tea?”

  “I would,” she told him, hoping her own voice was in its proper register. She clasped her hands to stop their shaking and looked around the room at the cowhands, the ones she knew and the strangers. “I must confess, gentlemen.” Chuckles here and there. “No, gentlemen,” she insisted, but mildly. “When I knew I was coming to Wyoming, America, I read what I hear is called a dime-store novel.”

  Stretch slapped his forehead. “I’m crushed you would stoop so low!”

  Everyone laughed, and the air seemed to start circulating again.

  “Which one?” Preacher asked.

  “Let me see . . . it had an obnoxious title,” she replied, going along with the more friendly tide now. “Oh, how could I forget? It rejoiced in the name of The Train Robbers, or Lucy in Peril.”

  More laughter.

  “It was set in Texas.”

  Groans followed the laughter.

  “What did you learn?” This from Pierre, who had just slid what looked like a filleting knife back into its beaded pouch.

  She looked around again at friendlier faces and understood just what she had learned. She stood taller. “I learned that the West is colorful, and that . . .”—her voice faltered—“. . . that
cowboys are kind to ladies.”

  “Have to be, ma’am,” said a cheerful voice. “Scarcer’un hen’s teeth. By the way, I know Buxton is a skinflint. I’ll double whatever he’s paying you to teach my kids.”

  “I’m not really a teacher,” she said.

  The cheerful man—he must have been a rancher, rather than a hand—looked around at the children, who had returned to their tasks. “You could’a fooled me.” He tipped his hat to Lily. “If you change your mind, my ranch is the Bar Lazy M and I’m Pete Marquardt. I’m off for your bunkhouse, Sinclair.”

  “No need,” Jack said. “I have room at my little place. You know where it is.”

  The rancher opened the door, and a gust of wind nearly blew the knob out of his hand. “Woo-wee! Colder’n a well digger’s . . .” Marquardt closed the door behind him.

  Fothering stood up. “What say you, Luella? Might this be an opportune time to leave?”

  Lily thought the butler looked as though he expected an argument. “Morning comes early, Luella, and the Temple of Education awaits,” she added.

  The child nodded. She looked at Fothering, then at Lily and declared in her forthright way, “A few weeks ago, I probably would have said that I will catch my death in this cold and surely die before the week is out.” She appeared genuinely puzzled. “What happened?”

  Lily exchanged a glance with the butler. “Perhaps you are discovering how resilient you are.”

  “Resilient?” Luella asked. “Define it, please, for my benefit.”

  “Strong and mighty, but able to bend,” Lily told her promptly, trying not to smile at Luella’s quaint ways. “It’s an excellent quality in Wyoming ladies, so I am learning.”

  The men in the room laughed. Some returned to their cards, and others poured more coffee. Jack grinned at her, relaxing again.

  Pierre got to his feet. “Fothering, let me walk with you. Between the two of us, we’ll keep Luella from blowing away.”

  “I would greatly appreciate it,” Luella said. “Mr. Fontaine, will the Little Man return?”

  “He is probably in your classroom already,” Pierre said as he shrugged into his coat. “It’s a cold night.” He smiled at Lily. “He has probably pouted enough.”