Softly Falling

by Carla Kelly

  “Why is it called LC?” she had asked. Brands interested her.

  “McMurdy’s wife is named Elsie,” he said. “Come spring, I’ll take you up there to meet her. She’s a great cook. Better’n Madeleine, but you didn’t hear that from me.”

  There now, he had softened himself and set her at ease a bit. He told her what the Bar Dot boys and the LC hands had found that day by the drift fence, the main one located south of the Bar Dot. He described the cattle piled against the fence so deep, frozen and dead, that the cattle behind walked over them and kept struggling south into the whiteness that extended for a thousand miles. “They’ll die against someone else’s fence,” he said and couldn’t help his shudder. No need to tell her how many of them staggered on hoofless stumps or describe the low moan of dying cattle. He knew he would hear the sound in his dreams for the rest of his life.

  If he felt either brave enough or miserable enough, he put his head on her shoulder. Her arm invariably went around him, and they sat together like that until the room was too cold, and he had to leave, even though it was the last thing he wanted to do.

  Whether it was the last thing she wanted him to do, he did not know. He suspected it might be but did not force the issue. This winter was proving to be more complicated and problematic than any he had lived through since Petersburg and the works before Richmond in 1865. Throwing his heart into the ring would have only been one more challenge. Or so he thought.

  A little bit of sky in the face of endless winter surfaced in mid-December, when the earth struggled to warm itself. One night a chinook blew through their valley, bringing warming southern winds that melted some of the snow and brought the blue sky.

  Even the children seemed more cheerful over breakfast. Chantal kept going to the window, where the ice had melted, just for the pleasure of looking out, until her mother had to remind her to take the coffee pot around again.

  He looked at his ranch hands. Even Will knew what was coming.

  “Well, boys, let’s cowboy up and use every inch of this weather.”

  He told Madeleine and Lily not to worry if they weren’t home tonight. “Likely we’ll be close to the LC and we’ll bunk there,” he said, accepting a sack of hot potatoes for lunch, and more of the everlasting raisins Madeleine had insisted on getting early in the summer.

  “What will you do?” Lily asked, reminding him that she knew so little about cows and ranching.

  “McCurdy said he knew of a draw where there might still be some live cattle. We’ll check it out and trail them toward the LC,” he told her.

  What he didn’t tell her was that if it was even possible when they finished, he was going to bolt for his own property to check on Manuel and Bismarck. He’d go by himself, unless Pierre felt like taking his life in his hands for another day.

  They found the cattle where McMurdy had predicted, a respectable-sized herd that had started milling in a circle. The ones on the outer edge were dead. The warming wind had blown away some snow, revealing heads and horns. The men cut a path through to the center, where there was still life. They nursemaided the wobbly animals closer to McMurdy’s holdings. Preacher and Will bedded down for the night, and Elsie McMurdy tried to convince him to stay. When he wouldn’t, McMurdy walked him and Pierre to their blanketed horses, who were eating the generous amounts of hay that their good host provided.

  “Be careful, boys,” was all McMurdy said and then, “First good day next week, I’m putting Elsie on the train to Cheyenne. She can winter there with her sister. You might pass the word on to Mr. Buxton to think about that for his own woman and kid. Maybe even the others and that mulatto gal.”

  Jack nodded. Where would she go? he thought as he gave McMurdy a little salute and took the blanket off Sunny Boy.

  Jack and Pierre rode to the little fenced ranch where Jack’s future herd took it easy in the barn. The snow was treacherously deep in the slopes and gullies, but they plodded on, silent to conserve energy. The snow covered the barbed wire fence now, except in spots where the wind had blown it away. They found the fence and followed it to the gate with the crossbars where last summer he had tacked Sinclair Ranch, which Pierre had painted for him, since he knew how to spell ranch.

  They found Manuel as placid as ever, knitting, and they laughed to see a knitted creation draped over one of the cows. Since Manuel had never specified any particular color of yarn, Jack had bought all colors. The cow sported a green, red, and yellow afghan, tied in place with braided yarn. Manuel had thoughtfully made allowances for the heifer’s expanse, as one of Bismarck’s offspring grew inside her.

  “What do you think, señor?” Manuel asked, his eyes bright.

  “In Georgia, we’d say ‘you’re the beatinest.’ ”

  Manuel’s face fell. “I do not understand, señor.”

  “It means you’re better than anyone else. Beatinest.”

  They stayed the night with Manuel in the barn, crowding with him for warmth in the little stall he had roofed over. They arrived at the Bar Dot at the same time his hands rode in from the LC, all of them scooting in just before the chinook ended and another blizzard hit. For two days he paced up and down in the cookshack.

  Madeleine’s X’s on the calendar were marching toward December 25 when a worn-out McMurdy stopped at the Bar Dot for the night. He flipped a telegram across the table to Jack. “It’s for your boss. I took Elsie and the young’uns to Cheyenne. The postmaster flagged me down before I left town.” He accepted the mug of coffee from Madeleine with thanks in his eyes. “The talk in town is that the consortiums are gathering for a meeting,” He looked at the telegram between them. “What do you bet?”

  Jack nodded. “They usually get together about now to plan how many head they’re going to overstock the range with in the coming year.” He couldn’t help his cynicism, but McMurdy understood. “I wonder if that’s it. Fothering’s coming to take Luella to the big house for the weekend. He can deliver it.”

  McMurdy was as good as any man at discerning what was unsaid. “Not feeling the love, eh?” He sipped his coffee. “Sometimes it’s good to be the little man out here. I’ll probably lose my shirt, come spring, but I’m doing it on a scale a whole lot smaller than the outfit you ride for. Merry Christmas, Jack. Maybe things’ll look up in ’87.”

  Sure enough, the long-suffering Fothering brought back a message the next morning for him to come to the house at once. Jack knew Fothering was a reader of moods. “What’s in the air? Trouble for me?” he asked.

  “Sir Oliver the Great and Mighty is packing,” Fothering said, then dropped into Sam Foster–Ohio. “He didn’t look like the first dandelion in spring, if that’s what you’re driving at.”

  “I’ll walk you back.”

  Heads down against the roaring wind, they trudged the few hundred yards to the house. Fothering had called it correctly. Mr. Buxton was doing his own pacing in front of his window.

  “If the weather holds tomorrow, you and I are riding to Wisner and I’m catching the train.”

  Jack felt bold enough. “Why do you need me? You can just leave your horse in the livery stable and get it on your return here.”

  Mr. Buxton turned red. “You’re not going to be here much beyond this spring, if I can help it,” he snapped. “I . . . I . . .”

  If he wasn’t going to be working for the Bar Dot—praise Almighty—beyond spring, Jack reasoned, why not say it? “You don’t think you can get to Wisner by yourself, do you? But it doesn’t matter to you if I have to return alone.”

  He waited for the explosion, but it didn’t come. Mr. Buxton just narrowed his eyes and continued his pacing. “Tomorrow, hear me?”

  The ride to Wisner, only four miles, was longer because of wind, snow, and silence filled with animosity. It might have been fear. Jack couldn’t tell what drove Mr. Buxton lately. Fothering’s comments about Mrs. Buxton’s “fragility” seemed to be a code for “instability” that had nothing to do with the body. Will Buxton used to spend evenings wi
th his relatives in the comfort of their parlor, but lately he had been staying in the cookshack, playing poker with Preacher and a surprisingly adept Nick, with broomstraws as the stakes. According to Lily, Luella was more and more reluctant to leave on weekends. Jack rode in his own self-contained silence, grateful he wasn’t Oliver Buxton and happy to put him on a train.

  He waited in the depot for Mr. Buxton to buy his ticket. The warmth indoors seemed to unlimber his boss.

  “You’re not real curious about my trip to Cheyenne,” Buxton said.

  “You’re the boss. You’ll tell me what I need to know,” Jack replied with a shrug.

  “There’s been talk of putting the press on you small-time ranchers. The Cheyenne L&C wants its property lines straight. The consortium might want me to make more of an . . . effort to get you to sell. And there’s that big bull of yours.”

  “The land’s not for sale and neither is Bismarck,” Jack told him.

  “We’ll see about that. Be here for me on Christmas Day.” He turned away.

  Jack couldn’t leave the depot fast enough, wondering if he had been threatened. He knew his deed for both land and Bismarck were secure, but the Cheyenne L&C, like the other consortiums, had the ear of the territorial governor. They owned Wyoming as sure as if some cosmic force had wrapped a big red bow around the whole territory. Merry Christmas, he told himself.

  After the Cheyenne Northern pulled away from the depot, he went to the Great Wall for chop suey and saw a morose Mr. Li, who shook his head over slow business.

  “Nobody want chop suey,” he mourned. “How is a man to make a living?”

  “We’ve had tough winters before, Mr. Li,” Jack reminded him. He thought about the hard-working little men from China who ran the restaurants, washed the clothes, and built the railroads. “You’ll be here, come spring.”

  Mr. Li nodded. He handed Jack a sack of almond cookies. “For that pretty lady?” He giggled like a girl. “You maybe marry her some day?”

  “She’s a lady, Mr. Li,” he said, feeling his ears burn and not from frostbite. “It’s a nice idea, though.”

  Mr. Li just giggled and retreated behind the beaded curtain, the subject closed.

  He stopped at Watkins’ Mercantile, hopeful, even as he looked at bare shelves.

  “Food’s gone,” Watkins said.

  “Had something else in mind,” Jack said, putting down four bits. “What about a lace collar? Have anything like that?”

  Curiosity was stamped all over Watkins’s face, but Jack ignored it. The merchant rummaged in one of the deep drawers behind him and pulled out a lace collar. “What do you know, fifty cents. Want a box for it?”

  “Sure.”

  Watkins drummed up a slim white box with cotton padding. He set the collar inside and handed it to Jack, a question in his eyes.

  “Merry Christmas,” was all Jack said.

  He tucked the box into his coat pocket and took the snow-covered road to the Bar Dot, a narrow trail now, with the snow even threatening to close it behind him like a sprung trap. He wished he had enough money to put Lily on the Cheyenne Northern, like McMurdy had done with his Elsie, and keep her safe in some hotel for the winter. He wondered if Lily would leave if he offered to take her to the train.

  “Would you, Lily?” he asked the wind. Sunny Boy’s ears perked up. Something told Jack she wouldn’t. He wasn’t really an optimist, but as he rode home, he thought of Lily’s comments about reordering her opinions, as she put it. Maybe it was time to reorder his own.

  CHAPTER 40

  The cold came back, turning the slush to ice. Preacher’s horse went down and became another casualty. Lily’s brown eyes filled with tears when Jack shot the horse because Preacher couldn’t.

  “I used to ride, back in England,” she said, when he came into the cookshack to explain the rifle shot.

  “We’ll go riding this spring,” Jack told her.

  Over his men’s protests, he directed them to start moving the huge woodpile even closer to the cookshack and horse barn. When the Sansever children volunteered to help, Lily did too, taking her place in line as they handed firewood from person to person while Will stacked it.

  “You don’t have to,” Jack told her.

  “I do too. I live here,” she said. She stopped when the wind whistled up her skirt and petticoats and set up a shiver she couldn’t control. Jack made the Sansever girls stop too. White patches had appeared on Chantal’s face, and she was rubbing the spots.

  “They itch,” she told Jack, who led her away from the woodpile.

  “You too, Amelie and Lily,” he said, and it wasn’t a suggestion.

  In the cookshack, Madeleine scolded her youngest, and then she cried and dabbed white crème on the spots.

  “Frostbite,” Jack whispered to Lily.

  She took a good look at his face, with its own patches of blistered white skin. When Madeleine finished and sent her girls to bed to keep each other warm, Lily dipped her finger in the salve and dotted Jack’s blisters.

  He smiled his thanks and started for the door. “I’ll tell the others to stop now. We’ll go at it in the morning again.” He touched her sodden and icy skirt and shook his head. “Lily, I hate to ask this, but you’d be a whole lot better off in trousers.”

  “I couldn’t possibly,” she said. “The very idea!”

  “Lily, don’t be a knucklehead,” he said. “You can’t stop shivering and that’s a bad sign. Madeleine?”

  The cook came to the kitchen door.

  “What can you do for Lily?” he asked.

  Madeleine crooked her finger. “Come here. We’ll close the kitchen door and you’ll take off the skirt and petticoat. I can dry them in front of the stove.”

  Lily opened her mouth to protest, but they were both looking at her, each equally capable of enforcement. “Very well,” she grumbled.

  Madeleine closed the door behind them, but not before she heard Jack’s laughter.

  “I am a source of amusement,” Lily said as she stripped off her skirt and both petticoats. She drew the line at removing her two layers of union suits and Madeleine didn’t object.

  Madeleine gathered up her clothing and draped it over the makeshift clothesline she had strung near the stove. “Amusement? You think that is all you are, mon cher?” she asked.

  “Well, no, but . . .”

  “When was the last time you heard Jack Sinclair laugh?”

  Lily couldn’t remember a time. She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Madeleine.”

  The cook patted her cheek and pointed to the lean-to where her daughters crowded together. “Three will fit. Keep warm.” She chuckled. “He called you a knucklehead.”

  By the time her clothes were dry, the men were drinking coffee in the dining hall, and Madeleine was serving stew. She dressed and joined them, grateful for the warmth of her dry clothing, grateful for the small things, which was all anyone had now. Her fingers itched and burned, but scratching didn’t help.

  Jack took her hand. “Chilblains. I’m going to go through Stretch’s trunk and see if he has some wool socks. You can put them on your hands at night.” He gestured to Pierre. “We’re also going to your father’s house and see what clothes of his we can salvage for you. You two are about the same height. I’d loan you mine, but I’m wearing most of them. Now don’t you go blush about that! Anything else you want from the house?”

  “Paper. Check his desk. I need paper,” she said.

  She walked with them to Jack’s old house. The last wind had knocked the True Greatness sign crooked. She put the least amount of firewood she could manage into the stove, thinking that each stick was precious and that even little Chantal paid a price for it.

  They returned an hour later with her father’s wool trousers and shirts, plus a shapeless, thick sweater that suddenly looked like heaven to her. After they left, she thought about Miss Tilton’s proper school for the last time and put on her father’s pants. She found a belt and cinched it tight, t
hen pulled on the blessed old sweater, the one she had been planning to throw out while he was gone to Cheyenne.

  Gone to Cheyenne. “Papa, how could you desert me?” she said out loud.

  It was easy enough not to think about Papa as Christmas approached. She had chosen psalms for each of her children to memorize and prepare for a recitation on Christmas Eve. Praise Providence, the paper was dry, thick vellum that Jack had scrounged from Papa’s old house.

  Her plan to fold several sheets of paper in half and turn them into a journal for each child nearly died aborning, when she found she couldn’t even thread the needle to sew the sheets together at the spine because her chilblains made her hands too clumsy. Jack found her in tears two nights before Christmas when he stopped by after Luella was asleep.

  Tears streaming down her face, she held out the needle to him. He couldn’t thread it either. “What’re you making, honeybunch?” he asked.

  She knew he couldn’t have meant that. It must be a Southern expression, because he had said that to the Sansever girls before. Better just ignore the slip.

  “I wanted to sew six folded-over sheets of this heavy paper together to make journals for my children,” she said, wishing her chin didn’t quiver, because she hated to cry in front of this strong man. She flexed her fingers and winced. “It’s much nicer in Barbados.”

  He laughed at that. “I don’t doubt you! Tell you what: let me go get the man who can help.” He fingered the folded sheets. “Were you going to make a cover of something?”

  Lily shrugged. “I don’t have anything.”

  “Hold that thought. And don’t scratch your hands! That makes it worse.”

  She waited until he left to rub her red and swollen knuckles that itched and burned with no relief. She had spread four separate stacks of six pieces of paper each on the table, folded and ready for the needle she couldn’t thread. “I haven’t anything else for them,” she said to the closed door. “I hope you have a good idea, Mr. Smart Stuff.”

  He came back with Pierre, who pulled out waxed thread and a needle with a big eye. “I use these to fix my moccasins,” he explained. “Thread that one.”