Softly Falling

by Carla Kelly

  “I thought that’s what he was doing,” Chantal said. She fingered one of Luella’s braids. “Thank you for helping us.”

  “Thank you for forgiving me,” Luella said softly. “See you tomorrow.”

  After they left, Lily turned to her father. “Papa, perhaps we should go now.”

  Papa looked up from Nick’s slate. “Wait a while, my dear. Nick and I are not quite done, are we, lad?”

  “Not yet, Miss Carteret,” Nick said. “Just a few more minutes.”

  “He’s doing so well, I would hate to stop right now,” Clarence Carteret said. He smiled then, and his smile took her breath away. “Oh, please, Miss Carteret,” he teased.

  Lily let her breath out slowly, wondering—perhaps like Luella—what had happened. This felt surprisingly like a tender mercy, except that it had been years since she had petitioned the Almighty for anything since she knew He wasn’t all that interested in little girls of partial color stuck in boarding schools.

  “I can wait, Papa,” she said.

  “No need,” Jack said, standing up. “I’ll be your escort.” He looked around. “I have room for two more of you bandits, if you don’t mind Marquardt’s snoring. There’s a reason why no one likes to sleep near him at cow gathers.”

  Two men stood up. “Ready, Lily?” Jack asked.

  She nodded, already bracing herself for the wind outside.

  “Put your head down,” Jack said outside. He held her arm with one hand and his hat with the other. One of the cowhands linked her other arm through his, and the second man walked in front of her, trying to block some of the wind that roared down from the north and west, always from the north and west.

  Although she had also learned how to carry on a conversation to gentlemen walking home a lady, Lily knew that everything she said would be snatched from her mouth, so she was silent.

  “I’ll get her the rest of the way,” Jack shouted over the wind as they passed his quarters. He stopped a minute, looking at his roof. Then he pulled her closer and continued the short distance to Papa’s place, where the wind, impatient to enter, rattled the doorknob. When he opened the door, the wind blew her in. Jack followed her and shut the door, after leaning against it.

  “I’d hate to run into that wind in January,” he told her. “You all right?”

  “Certainly. It’s only wind. I may need more lead shot for my skirts,” she replied. And I will never tell you what else I need, she thought. Her English undergarments were no match for Wyoming, but she didn’t see a remedy for that dilemma from the foreman of the Bar Dot. Maybe Madeleine would have a suggestion before her legs fell off.

  “Well, then, good night.” Jack pulled his Stetson down more firmly. “We’ll be gone for the next few days pushing cattle.” He leaned against the door and regarded her seriously. “Lily, this winter is already unfolding like I thought it would.”

  Yes, he had told her, but it frightened her anyway. “Pierre said it would snow tomorrow.”

  “I wouldn’t doubt him. He’s staying here, so you’ll have your winter count lesson.”

  “Surely you need him,” she protested. “I wouldn’t dream of letting my puny plans stop him from important work. The winter count can wait.”

  “No. Some of the boys don’t like Indian cowhands, and I don’t take chances. He stays.”

  Lily nodded. She took off her coat. “I understand that better than you know.”

  “Thought you might. Sorry about that fool in the cookshack.”

  She shrugged. “It’s happened before and it’ll happen again.” She did have a bone to pick with him. The wind had made her forget for a moment. “Don’t you ever take a chance like that again! He could have killed you.”

  “He’s a bully, and I know bullies. All hat and no cowhand,” Jack said with a shrug. “It won’t happen again. Not on the Bar Dot, and not while I’m in charge. ’Night, Miss Carteret.”

  “Have we been reading too much Ivanhoe and Unknown Knight?” she joked, wanting to lighten the moment because he looked so serious, and heaven knows he had enough burdens already. “Do I have a champion?”

  He nodded and waited a long moment before he replied, almost as if mulling around whether to say anything at all. “I decided that at some point after you got off the train and maybe before we ate chop suey at the Great Wall. Don’t sell yourself short. Chapter twenty-four when I get back? Good night.”

  CHAPTER 25

  There was snow in the morning, just as Pierre had predicted. Lily watched it fall so lightly, now that the wind was probably blowing its way across Nebraska, or maybe one of those states farther east that she couldn’t name.

  She held up her mittened hand so the flakes fell on the dark wool. Enchanted, she stared at the little dots of white, each one with its own design. They melted soon enough. She could probably scare up more paper from Papa’s office so her children could draw snowflakes. Each one would have to be different. She wished she knew why snow did that.

  That was the problem with teaching, she decided, as she waved to Fothering and laughed to see Luella on his back as he trudged up the hill through the ankle-deep snow. The more I learn, the more I want to know, she thought, waiting for them. My children probably think I know everything, but I don’t.

  The Sansever children were already there and practically leaping about in their excitement.

  “The Little Man is back!” Chantal said. She started to dance around the room. She grabbed Luella’s hand when Fothering set her down. “Look! The yarn is gone.”

  Hand in hand, the two girls—no, friends now—ran to the corner. They knelt and tried to peer into the tiny hole, which made Lily turn away in laughter. She walked to her desk, nodding to see the hairpins gone too. The Little Man had left a pebble in exchange, which Pierre had said he might do.

  Nick’s smile was as broad as his sisters’ when he came in with more wood, tracking in snow. Lily swept it out the door while he thundered the logs in the woodbox by the stove, where Fothering had just finished lighting a fire. Soon the room was warm enough for the children to take off their coats. Lily noticed that Amelie was now wearing the coat Jack had procured from the faro dealer. Madeleine must have cut it down because the sleeves were perfect.

  “Your mother did a lovely job altering the coat,” Lily told Amelie, who blushed.

  “Ma maman can do nearly anything,” she whispered. “And look, my old coat fits Chantal just right.” Amelie paused, perhaps wondering if she should say anything else.

  “Go on, my dear,” Lily said.

  “Did someone ever give you hand-me-downs?” Amelie asked.

  “So that’s what they are called here? No, my clothing was always new,” Lily told her. No matter what her uncle had felt about his younger brother’s ill-advised marriage to an island lady, he had never shied from putting the best of everything on her back. Madeleine had remarked only last week that her clothes were so well made.

  “Your uncle was a wealthy man,” Amelie said.

  “He still is,” Lily said.

  Chantal had been listening. “Then why is your father . . . Ow! Amelie, you don’t need to poke me.”

  “Maybe we are asking private questions,” Amelie told her little sister. “I’m sorry for her prying, Miss Carteret.”

  “Not at all,” Lily said. She realized how little she had told the children about herself. Papa had probably said nothing. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to tell them where she came from, especially after the tense scene in the cookshack last night.

  She knew Pierre was coming to the school in a little while, after the riders left to work the cattle that were so relentlessly moving south. She had watched Jack this morning during breakfast. He had a perpetual frown line now that she feared would only deepen as winter came. “We’re trying to convince Texas cows that they can’t trail over the next rise or the next, and find warmth along the Nueces or the Brazos rivers,” was how he put it. “Cows are not so smart.”

  He had given her shoulder a litt
le squeeze as he passed her table where she sat with her father. His hand still on her shoulder, he had leaned closer. “That man who harassed you last night? Someone gave him an amazing black eye.”

  “It had better not have been you or Pierre,” she warned.

  “We’re pure as the driven snow,” he said.

  “Since when?” she retorted without thinking.

  He lifted his hand from her shoulder. “I mean it, Lily. You have more champions than you realize. Don’t know how it happened, but word is spreading about the Bar Dot School.”

  She had basked a moment in the security she felt when Jack was around, or Pierre. Maybe every girl needed an Unknown Knight or two. She felt suddenly self-conscious as he stood so close to her, so she looked around, hoping no one noticed. Her father was finishing his coffee, correcting Nick’s late night math. Everyone else was gone, except for Pierre, who looked at her with a half smile of his own.

  “Champions?” she teased, hoping to lighten the moment. “Every lady needs one! Thank merciful providence that I didn’t decide to read Tom Brown’s Schooldays to you, instead of Ivanhoe.” There. That was friendly and nothing more.

  “I was your champion before Ivanhoe,” he said and put on his Stetson.

  “Miss Carteret, you are not paying attention to us.”

  Lily laughed and turned her focus to Luella. “And I apologize. Amelie said something made me think that you might like to know more about me.”

  Nick raised his hand. “I do, but it’s more than that.” His eyes were troubled. “That man in the cookshack was rude to you.”

  “He was,” Lily agreed, wondering in her heart if everything in life belonged in a classroom for discussion. “You know I am darker than you, but my father is light.” She went to the wall where the map of the world hung, complete with the Braxton Bitters nymph in her diaphanous robes. She pointed to the Caribbean Sea and touched the small island in the Lesser Antilles that still held such a chunk of her heart. She pointed to England and located Bristol.

  The children squinted to see, so she called them forward. Besides, it was getting colder, and they could warm themselves closer to the stove.

  “My father is the youngest son of a prominent family here in Bristol,” she explained, tapping the map. “Since he could not inherit his father’s estate, he went here to manage a sugarcane plantation.” She ran her finger from England to Caribbean waters to Barbados.

  “Sugarcane?” Chantal asked.

  “It grows in tall stalks and tastes sweet. That’s one way sugar is made,” Lily explained. “Papa met my mother there. She was the daughter of an apothecary.” Lily held up her hand before Luella had a chance to raise hers. “What is an apothecary? My grandpapa made potions and pills to cure people of their illnesses. He was from Spain. My grandmama was the daughter of a former slave and a French plantation owner.”

  “Slavery?” Amelie asked, her eyes wide.

  “Yes. My abuelo—my grandpapa—actually freed my grandmama. They married, and my mother was born about a year later.”

  “You’re pretty,” Luella said in her forthright way. “Was your mother pretty too?”

  “She was beautiful,” Lily said simply. “I’ll bring a photograph of her tomorrow.”

  “Is she in England?” Amelie asked. She looked down. “This isn’t going to end well, is it?”

  Her heart went out to the quiet child who held back so much. Lily picked up her chair from behind her desk and set it in front of the students. She wondered if she had been hiding behind her desk, not feeling confident, unsure of herself. The moment had come and gone, and she knew it would never return.

  She heard a small sound in the corner, and there was Pierre. He had come in so quietly, and now he was squatting by the door. He nodded to her, encouraging her to continue.

  “No, it isn’t, Amelie,” she said, her voice soft. “It’s a sad story. Mama died in Barbados of yellow fever. It comes and goes on the islands, and it came to her.”

  Amelie’s head went down on her desk. Lily rested her hand on the child’s hair. “It came to me too, but I survived. I was five.” She glanced at Pierre. “What this means is that I can never get yellow fever.”

  She couldn’t sit still. A few strides took her to the blackboard and she wrote i-m-m-u-n-e in big letters. “Immune. This means I can never get yellow fever.”

  “If it comes to the territory, you’ll be safe,” Luella said.

  Lily couldn’t help her smile, and it relieved her heart. “Yes! Of course, yellow fever doesn’t come here.” She sat down among her children again. “None of you need to fear it.”

  “What happened then?” a voice asked from the corner.

  The children looked around in surprise and relaxed to see Pierre.

  For a small moment, she wanted to be angry with him for forcing more of the story, but it passed; he was right. Besides, Nick wanted her to explain someone like the man last night.

  “My father and I went to England, where I shivered in the cold and cried because I wanted to go home,” she told her little audience. “My Uncle Niles sent me to a very nice school nearby and saw that I had beautiful clothes.” She sighed. “But I didn’t look like the other girls and they made fun of me. Called me names, like that man last night. I tried to ignore them, but it hurt.” She glanced over her shoulder at the word on the blackboard. “Immune means to be protected from something. We are never immune from hurtful words, so it’s best never to say them in the first place.”

  “If I see him again, I will fight him,” Nick said, barely suppressing his anger.

  She touched both his hands that were balled into fists on his desk. “No.” She felt her face grow warm. “I have plenty of champions. All I need you to do is study and learn and promise me that you will never say hurtful things about people’s color.”

  The boy held out his arm and rolled up his shirt sleeve. He looked at her, and she unfastened the little mother of pearl buttons at her wrist. She pushed up her sleeve and turned her forearm up, too, next to his.

  “You’re not much darker than I am, not at all,” Nick said. He watched her face, and Lily could see what a fine-looking man he would be someday. “I think Luella is whiter than we are.”

  The little girl rolled up her sleeve and moved closer. “True,” she said, “but you know, I’m not really white, not like teeth or snow.”

  “What are we then?” Lily asked, loving these children in the Temple of Education with all her heart.

  The children looked at their arms. “Maybe beige,” Amelie suggested. She glanced back at the Indian. “Mr. Fontaine, what do you think?”

  Pierre rolled up his flannel sleeve. “I am a little lighter than Miss Carteret. My mother was Lakota and my father was a French fur trader, with maybe a little Ojibwa.” He rolled his sleeve down. “You are beige. Miss Carteret and I will be tan like a buffalo hide. This one.” He pointed to the winter count with its spiral and colorful figures.

  What a perfect change of subject, Lily thought with admiration. She rolled down her sleeve and had Chantal fasten the two buttons at her wrist.

  “Mr. Fontaine is here to tell us about winter count,” Lily said. “We can make our own, because I think he found some canvas.”

  “Jack Sinclair found it,” Pierre said. He opened a stiff, vividly painted hide shaped roughly like a box, but flat. “This is parfleche, Miss Carteret. I store things here.” He pulled out five squares of canvas, each about the length of a yardstick. “One for you too.”

  “Tell us first, and then we will do as you wish,” Lily said.

  He stood beside the buffalo hide, touching it lovingly, smoothing his hand over the ever-widening spiral. “We tell time in stories,” he said. “We begin at the beginning.” He pointed to the center of the spiral. “Every year, after we are in our tepees and winter is roaring outside and trying to get in, the elders decide what is the most remarkable thing that happened all year. The winter count keeper draws it.” He gestured to the children.
“Come close and tell me what you see. You too, Miss Carteret.”

  Forceful as always, Luella went nearly nose to nose with the winter count. She put her finger on spotted people lying down. “What’s this?”

  “A visit from smallpox, brought upriver to Fort Union Trading Post. Many died,” he said. “You would call that year 1837.”

  Nick pointed to a picture nearer the outer ring of the spiral of blue-coated men falling from their horses and body parts here and there.

  “You might call it the Little Bighorn. We call it the Greasy Grass battle,” Pierre told him. He moved his finger to the next portion, which had a flag Lily recognized.

  “That’s the English flag, the crosses of St. George and St. Andrew,” she said to her children. “And look: tepees.”

  “A year after Greasy Grass, Sitting Bull and his nation crossed to the Grandmother’s Land, Canada.”

  Amelie, ever the observer, pointed to several scenes with the same drawing. “Here, here, and here.”

  Pierre tapped the blank space on the hide, the next spot to draw on, for 1886. “I might add that here, too. It means long winters.”

  Lily rubbed her arms, looking at the representations of snow and the bare trees bending. She looked closer on one of the later drawings, which had the snow, plus two thin figures with tears gushing from their eyes.

  “Winter and a starving time,” Nick said simply.

  CHAPTER 26

  You know, Pierre, I should feel some guilt at abandoning my entire day’s plan, but this was better,” Lily said as she sat on the doorstep after school with the Indian, who had returned from adding more nails to roofs, his orders from Jack Sinclair before he rode off the place. “Month by month instead of year by year is perfect.”

  “Chantal is only six,” Pierre said. “Think how small would be her winter count of what she remembers. And your idea of May to May was best. It still gives them much to think about.”