Softly Falling

by Carla Kelly

  “If Bismarck ever makes me a wealthy man, I want a butler,” Jack said.

  Fothering returned quickly and gestured to them. “Courage, dears,” he whispered as he opened the door.

  Jack had been in Oliver Buxton’s office many times, often bearing good news, sometimes to be yelled at for some misdemeanor, but more likely to receive stupid orders from a man who didn’t know the first thing about cows. Never before had he cared so much about the outcome of an encounter with his employer. He had always known he could walk away from the Bar Dot and find work, because his reputation guaranteed him a job anywhere in the territory. This was different; this was Lily. Women existed at the whim of men, even in this territory where they had the vote.

  Silent, he handed Buxton the telegram and waited for the explosion.

  Not surprisingly, Buxton did exactly what Jack had done in Cheyenne. He cursed with a fluency that made Lily take a step back, her eyes troubled. Jack did nothing to stop the foul language that spewed from his employer’s now beet-red face, simply because he did not want to call any more attention to Lily’s presence, which he knew would be the man’s next target. He moved closer to Lily, not quite touching shoulders with her, because he dreaded what Buxton would say about that. Better to keep this as professional as possible.

  When he ran out of filthy words, Buxton turned to look at Lily. His eyes narrow and mean, he raked her up and down as she stood there, head high, remembering to breathe now and then, her own face a curious mottled color that made Jack wonder if he ought to slide a chair behind her.

  Silence. Lily swallowed. Buxton just stared at her, dissecting her down to the marrow. Jack felt his throat go dry. Somehow, the silence was worse than the swearing.

  “Get. Off. This. Ranch.” Buxton delivered his ultimatum in a low voice more menacing than shouts.

  Jack watched Lily, ready to intervene, because the air fairly crackled with Buxton’s animosity. What he saw amazed him, humbled him, and assured him that forever after he would know that women were strong.

  “I have nowhere to go and I am your daughter’s teacher,” Lily said. Her voice was no louder than Buxton’s, and she did not plead. She calmly stated the issue, making no apology because nothing that had happened was her fault, even if Buxton’s venomous helping of vitriol had accused her of everything her father was.

  If he had expected her to grovel, Buxton must have been sadly disappointed. He stared at her. “Leave.”

  Without a word, Lily Carteret turned on her heel and left, closing the door quietly behind her. Anyone less polite would have slammed it into the next room.

  As Buxton staggered to his chair and sank into it, Jack listened to the sound of Lily and Fothering conversing quietly in the hall. In another moment, he heard footsteps on the stairs, Lily’s and Fothering’s. He began to breathe again himself. He had underestimated Lily’s courage in facing someone as hopping mad as Oliver Buxton, and he had no intention of underestimating Fothering. Without an invitation he sat down in the chair opposite Buxton’s desk and waited.

  He didn’t wait long. Buxton flinched and ran his hands across his face when Mrs. Buxton began to scream. Jack felt the hairs on his neck rise as the scream turned into hysteria. He felt sudden pity for Luella, who had to live in this house that had probably never been a home. He looked at Buxton, seeing a man in torment, someone who had probably turned his wife into the fragile woman she was, or at least had a major hand in the matter. The tragedy was, Buxton probably had no idea of his own culpability.

  The hysteria died finally, subsiding into noisy tears, then sobs, then the sad weeping that seeped though the ceiling and almost rained down on them in the room below. Jack said nothing.

  He heard footsteps then, a man’s tread. Fothering must have left Lily to console a woman so mentally fragile that she couldn’t be left alone.

  Fothering tapped on the door and opened it. Sedate as always, he approached Buxton’s desk and said with no emotion, “Mrs. Buxton is not dealing well with the news of Miss Carteret’s dismissal.”

  “And what else is new?” Buxton said with vast sarcasm.

  “This, sir,” Fothering replied. “I am tendering my resignation and will leave on the same train with Miss Carteret, should you choose not to require her services as a most excellent teacher.”

  Good show, Jack thought, with admiration and actual hope.

  All color left Buxton’s face with this calm announcement. “You wouldn’t,” he said. The threat had gone out of him.

  “Alas, I just did.” The sorrow on Fothering’s face seemed almost genuine. “Take heart, though. That will leave you, Mrs. Buxton, and Luella with a maid who will learn to cook any day now, providing her reading improves. Excuse me, sir, but I should go pack.” He executed a perfect turn and started for the door.

  “Don’t be so hasty, Fothering,” Buxton said, a beaten man. “You will, uh, remain here if Miss Carteret is allowed to continue teaching?”

  “I will consider it, sir,” Fothering said with more aplomb than found in entire small countries. He put his hands behind his back. “Sir, it’s a harsh thing to visit the sins of the father on the daughter.”

  Careful, Fothering, Jack thought and held his breath.

  But Oliver Buxton was beaten, and he knew it. “Very well,” he said, his voice a perfect monotone as he looked at neither of them. “Until spring, and then she goes.”

  Fothering bowed. “Excellent, Mr. Buxton! By then, I am certain the maid will know how to cook. Excuse me, and I will give the good news to your wife and Miss Carteret.”

  Buxton leaned back in his chair, his face a study in bewilderment, as though wondering where everything went wrong. More steps on the stairs and Lily came into the room with Fothering this time. She looked to Jack like a woman on her last nerve, but she stood there as calm and dignified as the butler.

  Buxton stared at her again until Jack stirred in his chair, bothered by the man’s insolence. Slowly Buxton raised his finger and shook it at her.

  “If I learn that you and you father are in cahoots about this two thousand dollars—two thousand dollars!—there’ll be room in that prison in Laramie for you too!”

  “I am here to teach,” she said. “By spring, I will have other plans.”

  Buxton deliberately turned his chair around and faced the wall. Lily slowly let out her breath and left the room. She was on her knees in the foyer, head touching the braid rug, when Jack and Fothering closed the office door behind them.

  Jack helped her to her feet. “I thought you were about done for in there,” he said. “Can you stand on your own?”

  She flashed him a rare and lovely smile that made his heart stop for one cosmic moment in a universe that had not always been kind to him, either. “I’m not standing on my own, anymore, am I?”

  “Nope,” he said, then was too shy to say anything else.

  Fothering cleared his throat and handed back their coats, mufflers, hats, mittens, and everything needed to survive in brutal cold between the Buxton’s house and Jack’s place. Jack helped Lily into her coat and felt his own equilibrium return. “Suppose he had called your bluff, Fothering?”

  “Who says it was a bluff?” Fothering asked in turn as cool as the best card shark Jack had ever gambled with at a table. “It’s been overlong since I visited my home.”

  “All the way to England?”

  Fothering and Lily looked at each other. “Cleveland, Ohio,” he said, and Lily giggled. He held out his hand. “Sam Foster’s the name.”

  Jack gaped at them both, especially since Fothering’s English accent had disappeared. He opened and closed his mouth, feeling like a trout tossed onto the bank.

  “Be generous, Jack,” Fothering said. “I’ve heard your tales about starving out here and working piecemeal to squeak by. Surely you don’t think you’re the first man to tweak matters to suit his situation?”

  “I won’t ever again, um, Foster? Fothering?”

  “Let’s keep it Fotherin
g until such time as I do blow the dust of this wretched sty off my impeccably shined shoes and, uh, beat it for greener pastures.” He unlimbered so much as to kiss Lily’s cheek. “It’s late. Good night.”

  Jack helped Lily down the steps. The snow came down harder, but the pellets of ice chips had turned into big flakes, the kind that might have interested him when he was a child. He watched, amused, as Lily studied the snowflakes on her dark coat. How snow could still be a wonder to her, he couldn’t imagine.

  He plucked out some courage from a forgotten source. “You’re not alone, Lily.”

  Again that sunny smile. How was a man proof against that?

  “I know.”

  CHAPTER 37

  In the fraught and frigid weeks that followed, Jack asked himself many times how one person—Lily Carteret—could be so cheerful about the prospect of makeshift school in a ramshackle classroom, with cold air seeping in and wind moaning like a cat in heat. Somehow she was, and everyone on the Bar Dot knew it, except the Buxtons. Everyone benefited, including the Buxtons—Luella, at least.

  Jack had some small idea what it cost Lily to move ahead, even though her faith in her father had crumbled into the dust. He only hoped that her faith in men in general hadn’t evaporated after such betrayal. More than almost anything, he wanted to offer her a shoulder to cry on, but he hadn’t the courage. He could only guess what it cost her each morning to make her way cheerfully to the cookshack, hand over hand on the rope, even when it wasn’t snowing, and then teach all day.

  As he lay awake in the bunkhouse, tossing, turning, and cursing his inability to help the one person who probably needed more kindness than them all, he wondered how her nights passed, alone. He understood solitude and knew that too much of it could turn a person inward and bitter. True, Francis the cat had taken a liking to Lily, but the independent little beast was not a cuddlesome creature. Am I? he dared to ask himself when the other guys around him were snoring. He doubted it. The life he led wasn’t designed to create sympathetic men.

  He asked her about Francis—a harmless topic—over mush and coffee one morning, when the wind howled and the snow blew sideways. “Is Francis a good enough companion?”

  “You would be amazed,” Lily replied, her eyes crinkling in good humor. “He crawls to the foot of your bed and stays there.”

  He wished later she had said “the bed” instead of “your bed.” He decided that the advanced age of thirty-five was proof against nothing. He was a young man still, at least until ten hours in the saddle with cold boring into his head like an auger convinced him that not even a young man could survive such torment forever.

  The cattle suffered beyond belief, drifting in bunches, dying together. In Jack’s mind, because he really was sympathetic, even sadder were the solitary deaths, a cow wandering off, trying to put cold and snow behind her, perhaps with a memory of the plains of Texas. How did anyone know what a cow thought? Did a cow even think?

  The worst horror came at the rivers, where somehow the forces of nature created air pockets where bank met water. After a blizzard just before Thanksgiving—Madeleine crossed off each day on her calendar—the Bar Dot crew and McMurdy’s LC hands came across scores of cattle trapped in snow that had melted slightly, then frozen again into ice.

  Jack roped one cow, getting an easy loop over its neck because the trapped animal could only look at him with hopeless eyes. Another loop from Pierre, and they started to pull. The cow bellowed in pain, and they flinched at the gruesome sound and sight of hooves separating from legs as they pulled. They watched in horror as the cow tried to stagger away on bloody stumps, still turned south toward warmth so far away, hopeful when hope was gone. Without a word, Jack shot the cow and it sank onto bloody snow, free at last.

  The other hands pulled out their rifles and shot all the cows mired in the air pockets, which earned Jack a blistering ream-out from Mr. Buxton when he reported the day’s work to him. Jack listened, his heart sore, and then just walked out of the office as Mr. Buxton screamed, “You can’t just walk away from me!”

  He could and did. Only one thing could possibly ease his pain and he was beyond propriety now. Jack wallowed through snow to his old house, knocked on the door, and came inside before Lily even had time to admit him. She sat on his old sofa, a book in her hands, her eyes wide at his intrusion. He flung the book aside, dropped to his knees, and sobbed his misery into her lap. When he managed between gasps to tell her what he had seen at the riverbank, she cried too, her hand gentle on his head.

  “Forgive me,” he said finally, when he was seated beside her, handkerchief to his nose and eyes, which seemed to run in tandem. Glory, how appealing was that? “I just couldn’t manage another minute of this winter.”

  Manage, manage? It was only November. He railed then against the sins of the ranchers visited upon the helpless cattle, his voice rising to be heard above the wind, and she just listened, tears on her face. He stopped, mortified. “These are just animals,” he said, his voice a bare whisper because his throat hurt now. “You’re probably in more pain than I am.”

  He watched her lovely face, the face where so many nations had played a role in creating such beauty. He saw nothing in her eyes but great compassion for him, and it humbled him right to the ground.

  “In pain? I would be, if you hadn’t given me a school and children to love like my own.” It was quietly said, but he could hear her even above the roar of the storm.

  Jack had described the whole incident to Preacher later that night as they lay in their sterile bunks. He had heard the rustle of paper, then Preacher’s voice, “First Kings, nineteen, twelve: ‘And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.’ ”

  The thought of Lily’s still, small voice sent him to sleep with something resembling peace. Maybe a theologian would consider his comparison of a mere woman’s voice to deity as blasphemy of the grossest sort, but it hadn’t bothered Preacher.

  All the men of the Bar Dot were used to the grinding sameness of Wyoming winters of watching cattle, getting them out of trouble, and patrolling for the ones that drifted. The winter of 1886–87 was a different sort of grind, because they knew their efforts were hopeless. The storms were too strong and cold, the snow too deep for foraging, the range overcrowded. Jack endured another mighty scold from Mr. Buxton when he told him their efforts were futile and he was only endangering the men who rode.

  Stretch’s death—probably because, unlike Lily, he panicked—was bad enough. Now the stories began to circulate of cowhands dead who had been forced by bosses to ride into blizzards to search and rescue cattle. He duly reported them to Buxton, who just as duly discounted them all as rumor until the morning two LC hands rode up in the teeth of a blizzard, seeking shelter, and bearing two frozen dead men strapped on behind their saddles.

  Jack led them directly to Mr. Buxton’s warm office in his house, flung open the door, actually took his boss by the arm, and dragged him outside to see the bodies, frozen into u-shapes. Mr. Buxton shook off his arm and stormed back inside, muttering what sounded like, “Sinclair, you’ll draw your pay tomorrow.”

  “Go ahead, Mr. Buxton,” he had said. “Do what you must.” Then he helped his friends to the tack shed where they had stored Stretch. It had required the effort of all the few Bar Dot hands to get the bodies off the horses and into the shed. The two survivors spent the night in the already overcrowded bunkhouse. No Bar Dot hand made a single comment about the tears they heard when the LC men must have thought everyone was asleep. It could have been them frozen and waiting burial in the spring.

  Jack needn’t have worried. When he worked his way through snow and wind to the Buxton’s the next day to either get his orders for the day or his pay, Buxton made no comment about his threat.

  “What’ll you have us do today, Mr. Buxton?” he asked.

  “Stay close to home,” Mr. Buxton said, without looking up from papers he shuffled from one pile to t
he other. “Save the riding for a clear day.”

  Since the boss seemed to be a mellow mood, he decided to raise a subject that had been on his mind since Lily had received the gut punch about her scoundrel father. For one day too many, he had watched her droop, flag, then rally and teach, at what personal price he didn’t know.

  He leaned against the doorsill. “Mr. Buxton, would you consider letting Luella stay in my old place with Miss Carteret? Fothering could get her to you on weekends. It’d be safer for Luella and I think Miss Carteret would enjoy the company of an evening.”

  Mr. Buxton looked him in the eyes finally. He raised his eyebrows in obvious thought and nodded. “I’m in agreement. I’ll tell Mrs. Buxton.”

  “You don’t think she’ll mind?”

  Buxton ran his hand over his face and then exposed a bleakness in his eyes that exceeded anything Lily could have come up with, even on a bad day. He began to understand his employer and felt a small surge of pity, which passed.

  “My wife is troubled,” Buxton said, biting off each word as if dragging them from his throat hand over hand. That seemed to be all the honesty he could manage, and he turned back to his useless paperwork, dismissing Jack.

  Luella couldn’t pack fast enough. Fothering helped.

  “Wish I could take you along, Fothering,” Jack said as Fothering handed up Luella to him to perch on the front of his saddle, and then her bag of clothes.

  “I’m needed here,” the butler said with little conviction. “You’re doing a good thing, Jack.” He stepped back and regarded the foreman. “What rank did you achieve in the Civil War?”

  The question surprised Jack, coming at him out of the blue. “I started as a private at age thirteen, then moved up the ranks. I was commissioned a lieutenant about three weeks before Appomattox. Why?”

  “If the war had lasted long enough, you’d have been a major general,” Fothering said. “You’re a leader. ’Bye, Luella. You be good to Miss Carteret.”

  Flattered, Jack waved and walked his horse carefully through drifts to his old house. School was about to begin, but he came inside anyway with Luella, carrying her bag. He nodded to the Sansever children and tugged Lily aside while Luella took her spot on the bench.