by Carla Kelly
Too much, she thought, drawing up her knees to rest her chin on them. It was vastly unladylike, but she was tired. She turned to Pierre. “The Sansevers each drew such sad pictures for March! Come, I’ll show you.”
He followed her into the classroom, looking where she pointed at the individual winter counts spread on each desk. His smile looked wistful to Lily as he ran his finger above each sad picture, as if to touch it would invite ruin. “But look how true to character, Lily. Nick has drawn Jean falling off a horse; Amelie’s picture is a headstone; and here is a little girl in tears for Chantal.” He looked away and Lily saw his shoulders rise and fall. “We all cried except Amelie.”
“She does hold things inside,” Lily said as she traced the outline of the tombstone.
“What is this?” Pierre asked, touching Luella’s February. “Two arms with red dots? She does have an imagination, but we didn’t have smallpox last winter.”
“It’s not that simple,” Lily told him, wondering how much to say and fearing to betray the child. “You mustn’t say anything, but her mother pinches Luella’s arms and leaves welts.” She touched the little picture of pain. “Could it be that our winter counts are ways to say things we cannot say?”
Pierre took several audible breaths, then touched June on Luella’s winter count, which showed a girl in braids gathering flowers. “We have pretty wildflowers.” He moved back to the Sansever drawings for June and tapped Chantal’s drawing of a girl washing many dishes. “It was the cow gather, and there were so many consortium members going from ranch to ranch. Jack even drafted Preacher and Stretch to help Madeleine and the children in the kitchen. You should have heard them complain!”
“My dears lead different lives on a ranch where they are so close,” Lily said.
“They are your dears, aren’t they?” he asked.
Lily nodded, unable to speak. She went to the board to erase i-m-m-u-n-e, which had stayed there through a perfunctory arithmetic lesson shortened so everyone could return to their winter counts. “I didn’t plan for them to become my dears,” she said, happy that he couldn’t see her face. “It’s only been a few weeks! How does this happen so fast?”
She heard his chuckle. “I know I’m being silly,” she said.
“No, not that. This picture you drew in . . . in August. Jack will be impressed.”
She turned around to see him pointing at the big animal with the white forehead and red body. “I cannot draw cattle, and it’s rude to laugh,” she told him, which only made him laugh more.
“Maybe I’m amazed that Bismarck was more important to you than anything else,” he said. He shrugged. “But that is winter count: people notice different things.”
“You should have seen him with his arms on the fence, just staring at Bismarck,” Lily said, putting down the eraser Stretch has made for her out of an old chamois he claimed was just lying around. “You know how determined he can look. He’s staked everything on that bull.”
“I know. Remember that his name is He Stands With Feet Planted.” He pointed to Lily’s September. “There are two more days in this month and you have already filled it in?” He looked at her, delight on his face. “That’s me drawing the Little Man of the Prairie!” He looked closer. “My nose is not that big.”
“ ‘People notice different things,’ ” she echoed. “It happened to me too. Look here at Luella’s drawing, and Nick’s, and . . . oh, what they have done.”
She pressed the bridge of her nose to stop any tears as Pierre tapped each little picture of her in September, a tall and slender woman with big brown eyes, round like a child’s, and tan skin. Nick’s Lily was drawing numbers. Chantal’s Lily knelt by Little Man’s hole to look in. Amelie’s Lily was laughing. Luella’s Lily was unbraiding her hair.
“You really got down on hands and knees to look in the hole?” Pierre said.
“I really did,” she confessed.
“You worry too much. I told you the Little Man would return.”
“You were right. This afternoon we put out a sliver of a mirror for grooming purposes, and some wheat from Madeleine.”
“Would you mind if I bring her here to see her children’s winter counts?”
“If it doesn’t make her too sad,” Lily replied warily.
“No harm in tears for a good man,” he said. “Also, she’s your best source for wheat. Which reminds me: Freak. . .”
“Francis,” she corrected.
“Francis followed me here, just sort of gliding along the tree line like he does. If it were warmer, I’d tell you to sit on the rock and wait.” He shrugged. “Cats.”
He left with a wave of his hand over his shoulder. Lily watched him go into the side door of the cookshack. Thinking he wanted to show Madeleine the winter counts by himself, she put on her coat, wished it were warmer, and tied a muffler around her neck. She stood by the Little Man’s hole and left a few bread crumbs she had remembered to stuff in her pocket after breakfast.
“Thanks for coming back,” she told the hole. “Look out for Francis.”
She closed the door behind her and stretched her shoulders, feeling pleasantly tired. She walked to the wagon road that ran past the school and gazed at the empty prairie. The dried grass made a whooshing sound, reminding her of small pebbles in a rattle. She knew it was only a few miles to her father’s former property—Jack’s now—and four miles to Wisner. Maybe if the weather held this weekend, she would walk to the little ranch with the fences and take a look at Bismarck by herself. She wondered if Manuel got lonely, with no more company than an impressive bull and his pregnant harem.
Lily had decided that tomorrow, after completing the lessons so neglected today, she would ask the children what they thought about writing a letter to Mr. Wing Li at the Great Wall of China café, inviting him to the Bar Dot Temple of Education to tell them about China. They were nearly through with Alger’s little pot boiler about Ragged Dick the shoeshine boy. She knew Stretch was from Connecticut, somewhere back there by New York City. Maybe he could be prevailed upon to tell the children—her children—about big cities.
There would be more class tonight in the cookshack, all to keep Luella a little safer, and Nick moving ahead on his math, and her father occupied. She looked in the direction the men had gone this morning, but the prairie horizon remained empty. She saw mountains in the distance, big brooding things with snow already on top from last night’s storm.
The snow at the ranch had melted during the day, where the sun had struck it. Snow remained only in the more shaded areas. And there was Francis, peering at her. She patted her pocket and felt the piece of cheese in paraffin paper that she had forgotten about yesterday. She unwrapped the cheese and held it in her outstretched hand.
Nothing. She waited, her hand out, holding her breath as he started toward her. Two hesitant steps, then one back, and then three forward, standing sideways with the ruff on his back high.
“It’s just cheese and you probably won’t even like it,” she told Francis. “Don’t get so exercised. It’s rag manners.”
His ears went back and then forward as he dropped the pose that surely intimidated little creatures like the pack rat. She could have reached out and touched him, but she held still, remembering Pierre’s words.
As she watched, holding her breath now, Francis delicately took the cheese from her palm. She waited for him to bolt for the tree line, but he rubbed his cheek against her hand for a split second. Up close, his battered and frostbitten ears were testimony to a hard life. His one eye was big and green and beautiful.
Another rub, and then he was gone. “My goodness,” she said. She looked down the road again, wishing for Jack to materialize. She would share the news about Francis with her father over supper, and the children tomorrow, but she wanted more than anything for Jack to know. Why, she wasn’t sure, except that he would probably say something stringent and pithy in his slow-talking way, and she liked the cadence of his Southern speech.
She
kept her eyes on the road a little longer as she closed her eyes and sent a silent message to the foreman. I am planning every day now, Jack, she thought. True Greatness requires it.
Jack pushed back his Stetson and tried not to glare with envy at Will, Stretch, and Preacher, who still looked lively after three days of pushing around cattle that didn’t want to be pushed around. As they passed through Wisner, Will and Stretch had tried to talk him into stopping at the saloon, but he vetoed their plea. “Praise the Lord,” Preacher had said, looking heavenward with what could only be called a smirk on his face.
“Gents, Oscar has standards at the Back Forty, and to put no bark on it, we stink,” he said. “I’ll let you loose early enough tomorrow night.”
I do need a bath, he thought. The range was so dry that generous helpings of dust had been their appetizer and main course. That was bad enough, but the dust also settled in crooks and crevasses unused to such indignity. He hoped he wouldn’t see Lily or Madeleine before that bath, because he was walking funny. He knew that Lily’s impression of cowboys in the American West had been informed by the larger-than-life heroes in dime novels. He doubted those cowboys ever had painful crotch problems.
“What you grinning about, boss?” Preacher asked.
“Nothing much. Just thinking about what a jolt it must have been for Lily Carteret to find out what real cowhands are like.”
“What? You mean that we smell bad and should’ve taken along our toothbrushes?” Preacher joked in turn.
“Yep. That.” Jack pointed west. “We’re takin’ a detour to my ranch.”
Stretch groaned. “We can’t visit the saloon in Wisner, but we have to look at your bull?”
“Healthier and cheaper for you,” Jack replied, laughing when the others groaned.
As he rode onto his property and hallooed for Manuel, Jack found himself wondering, as he always did, whether Manuel preferred company or not. Manuel had been a sheepherder since his childhood in Mexico, a lonely occupation. Jack had come across him in Cheyenne, out of work and hungry, and happy to find a simple-enough job for his old bones, since he admitted to at least seventy years, but looked older.
It was short visit, just long enough for his cowhands to shake out their kinks and throw in a few more barbs about vast ill-usage. With Manuel’s slight help, Jack unloaded a hundred-weight bag of potatoes and more pinto beans from the light wagon holding their own food and bedrolls for the past three days. He stacked them against the other bag of potatoes and beans in the board shack with the elegant wallpaper. Hands on hips, Jack stared at Manuel’s supplies—onions, green coffee beans, sugar—without which Manuel had stated firmly that he would not work.
“You have enough cornmeal for tortillas?” he asked the old man.
“Si, and flour too.”
They walked to the corral together in silence, to be met by Bismarck himself, who seemed to enjoy an audience. Jack’s cowhands were already leaning on the sturdy fence, admiring the bovine lover as he stared back at him, his massive jaws working.
To Jack’s surprise, Will Buxton appeared the most interested. “These two cows you bred him with—will their calves look like Bismarck?”
“That’s my hope,” Jack said. “The closer cow there has some Herferd in her already. I’m hoping for heifers, naturally. I’ll breed them to Bismarck too, and we’ll see what we see.”
“It’s better beef?”
“Will, it is far beyond what we bring up from Texas. In a few years, I can guarantee you a great steak.” The trick is getting through the next few years, Jack thought. But you don’t need to know that, Will.
“No quick profit now, eh?” Will asked, sounding annoyingly like his uncle, who thought he ran the Bar Dot.
“That’s the gamble,” Jack said, hoping he didn’t sound too short. It wouldn’t do to irritate someone named Buxton, even though Jack had no idea how close the connection was. Mr. Buxton had a knack for keeping his employees off kilter and concerned for their own future. Trust him to set a spy among them to keep everyone reeling. “Once people start tasting the difference between Herferd beef and scrub cattle, you’ll see.”
“Providing your uh, herd, survives this fearsome winter you say is coming,” Will said, with a prissy sort of smile that might have resulted in a mere cowhand without the Buxton name being invited to change employment. “Three cattle and a fearsome winter, or so you say.”
Jack swallowed his irritation because he didn’t have a choice. “It’s coming, Will,” he said quietly.
CHAPTER 27
With a wry look on his generally inscrutable face, Pierre met them by the empty schoolhouse, sitting so casually with a leg crossed over his saddle, a better horseman than any of them, with or without a saddle.
“The Big Boss wants to see you right away,” he told Jack with no preamble.
“I’m pretty rank,” Jack said.
Pierre shrugged. Jack doubted that pleasing bosses was ever in the Indian’s greater plan.
“He might mind if I sit within smelling distance of him,” Jack said as he motioned the others forward and rode with Pierre. “Everything all right here?”
“The Little Man of the Prairie returned to his home in the school, and there was general rejoicing, as Lily would put it,” Pierre said.
“She has a funny way of expressing herself,” Jack said. I’d rather listen to her than anyone else I know, he thought.
“I’d rather listen to her than anyone else I know,” Pierre said. “Everything sounds better when she says it.”
“Clarence Carteret has that same accent,” Jack replied, laughing inside at himself and men in general. “You feel that way about him?”
They both laughed. So that’s how it is, he thought, with a glance at his top hand and friend. He tried to visualize Pierre Fontaine as a lady might. Beyond noting long eyelashes and a certainty dignity of carriage, Jack came up dry.
When he arrived at the Buxton house, he waved off Pierre and looped his reins through the hitching post. Fothering answered the door.
“My, aren’t we a sight for sore eyes,” the butler said. “If you look this fraught, how did the bovine fraternity fare?”
Jack smiled, used to Fothering. He was reminded of something Preacher had read from the New Testament when they hunkered down a night or two ago in slush and mud.
“ ‘A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways,’ ” he quoted to Fothering. “That’s somewhere in James. It pretty well fits cows too. Slap me if the whole bovine fraternity on the northern range isn’t dead set on moving south.”
“What can you do about that?” Fothering asked.
Jack gave him a long look, knowing that the butler had asked a question Buxton would probably never even think of. “If it’s the winter I am expecting, not a single thing. They’ll drift south until they freeze to the ground, fall into air holes, or land in the rivers. If we have even half our herd left come spring, I’ll be amazed.”
They stood in silence for a moment until Fothering knocked on the office door.
“Send him in,” came the voice within. Trouble was, with Oliver Buxton you never knew whether he was angry or calm or downright wrathful. It all sounded the same.
Hope he has the windows wide open, Jack thought and then brightened. If not, then it would be a short interview, no matter what the problem.
“Well?” was all Buxton asked. He didn’t gesture toward a chair, but Jack told himself he didn’t want to sit down anyway, not after days in the saddle.
At his own desk, Clarence Carteret gave Jack a sympathetic smile, one not in Buxton’s line of sight.
“We pushed’um back and wondered how on earth we’re going to manage this winter.”
“I can’t believe that the other ranchers around here actually agree with you about this winter,” Buxton said, brushing off the catastrophe to come with a dismissing chop of his hand.
Believe, you ninny, Jack thought. “The signs are all there.” He glanced out the window. “Ne
ver seen snow this early on the mountains, and it was snowing here when we left.” He slapped his gloves from one hand to the other, which was better than beaning Mr. Buxton with them. “We did what we could with the men we have. Now, if you don’t mind, I really need—”
“Just a moment, Sinclair,” Buxton said. He indicated Clarence. “I should have mentioned this sooner. I had cash here ready to pay the commissioning agents’ fee for the cattle that we didn’t sell this fall.”
He gave Jack a look that blamed him for the drought and the overgrazing, but Jack maintained his neutral face, the one reserved for the boss and consortium members.
“Got a telegram from Cheyenne while you were away. Seems four or five of the consortium members want that money in a Cheyenne bank as soon as possible. There’s wind of a big deal in Texas for more cattle.”
“Mr. Buxton, this range can’t even support what we have right n—”
“I don’t pay you to comment on consortium business.” Buxton bit off every word and threw them at him like pellets. “I’m sending Clarence to Cheyenne with the cash. I want you to go with him and make sure it ends up in the consortium office and not on some poker table.”
You could have said that in private, Jack thought as acute embarrassment for Clarence washed over him like stinging nettles.
“I’d go, but Mrs. Buxton is certain she is dying this week.” He glared at Jack as though daring any commentary.
“You can trust Clarence,” Jack said quietly. “I have too much to do here, and so do my hands. I can get him on the Cheyenne Northern, telegraph ahead, and have someone from the consortium meet him at the depot. Nothing simpler.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
Of course not, you pea brain, Jack thought. One more year here, one more year. Bismarck, do your duty. The idea of his placid Hereford servicing a territory-full of heifers, just so he could quit the Bar Dot one minute sooner made Jack smile.
“What is so amusing, Sinclair?”
Might as well be honest about part of the matter. “Sir, that’s not a smile, it’s a grimace. I’ve been riding in grit and dust and my crotch is killing me. If I don’t get to a tin tub soon . . .”
