Softly Falling

by Carla Kelly

  She did, delighted to guide the waxed thread through easily. She picked up the first stack of folded sheets, but Pierre stopped her.

  “I brought some smoked deerskin. Let me use those scissors.”

  They watched as Pierre deftly measured the deerskin against the papers. He cut confidently, then sewed through the paper and hide, creating the journal she wanted. He cut three more rectangles of skin and nodded his approval as she sewed the remaining journals. When she finished, she handed back the needle and thread.

  “I wish I had gifts for you and the others,” she told them.

  “Just read to me,” Jack said. “Well, uh, all of us.”

  Pierre just smiled.

  School on Christmas Eve consisted of recitation practice, followed by “Silent Night” and “Joy to the World.” The wind had died away to a small breeze, and Lily sensed more than felt a rise in the temperature. They could see their breath in the Temple of Education, same as always, but even traitor Francis, who had abandoned Lily for Madeleine’s kitchen, had followed the Sansevers to school, confident enough for an outing. Maybe there would be another welcome chinook.

  Lily had borrowed Pierre’s needle and waxed thread to string great handfuls of Madeleine’s eternal raisins into garlands for the pathetic tree that Will Buxton had located. She had wanted to use the ranch’s tin snips to make ornaments from cans Madeleine had saved, but her hands were too clumsy. Raisins would have to suffice.

  In the early afternoon, the children, Luella included, walked back to the cookshack, carrying the raisin ropes. Lily debated whether or not to wear a dress for the festivities and decided against it. Her father’s pants were a reasonable fit and she knew the temperature was already dropping as night approached. Better to be warm. Jack had found a nearly new red-and-black flannel shirt among Stretch’s few possessions and had presented it to her with a flourish. Next year will be better, she thought as she buttoned the shirt that morning. I will be somewhere else. Where, she didn’t know, but she had the rest of the winter to make plans.

  The cookshack was still a sow’s ear, but Madeleine had pulled out that white tablecloth again. Someone had painted “Marry Crismuss” on the wall in one foot tall black letters, which made Luella, hands on hips, stare at it a long time.

  “Someone can’t spell,” she said finally with a sorrowful shake of her head.

  Supper was everlasting beans, but Madeleine again managed a miracle by seasoning them with the last of the pork from the Thanksgiving pig. There wasn’t any flour for bread, but Jack provided a box of Pilot crackers. The little bit of strawberry jelly remaining didn’t help much, but it didn’t hurt, either.

  When they finished, the adults drank coffee while the children strung the raisins around the tree. Lily watched their animation, touched at their pleasure in something so nearly pathetic. Fothering joined them. He nodded to Luella, who whisked out three shiny glass balls. She handed one to Chantal and one to Amelie and they hung them on the tree, which suddenly looked less pitiful.

  “I’m glad you could get away,” Lily whispered to Fothering.

  “Mrs. Buxton’s poor, cowed maid is there.” He shook his head. “A bad business. I wish Mr. Buxton had taken his wife along to Cheyenne. There must be doctors there . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “Maybe in the spring,” Lily said quietly, struck by how often she had started sentences just that way. Come to think of it, everyone did.

  The chief entertainment was a reading of A Christmas Carol, which Fothering had purloined from the big house. With a cup of tea at her elbow, Lily settled herself into a rumpsprung chair from the bunkhouse and started reading. Dickens’s timeless tale of redemption worked its own magic in her heart as she read, taking turns with Fothering and his peculiar English accent. If enough time passed, perhaps she might be able to forgive her father for this last betrayal. Maybe in the spring, she thought as Fothering took his turn as the Ghost of Christmas Past.

  “Silent Night,” sung in parts, made Madeleine dab at her eyes. When Amelie sang the last verse by herself as her classmates hummed, the cook gave up all pretense and cried into her already overworked handkerchief. “Joy to the World” brought them all to their feet to applaud, and then sing along as Nick started the song over.

  Presents were minimal. Lily reached for her own handkerchief when her children opened their presents from her, presents that began in tears and finished with Pierre’s capable assistance. “For your deepest thoughts,” she told them, then chuckled. “I only had a little of the lovely paper, so they’ll have to be really deep thoughts.”

  To her surprise, her children came forward with a present for her. With clumsy fingers, she opened the newspaper-wrapped package and pulled out a finely polished piece of wood, the edges nicely sanded.

  “It’s to set your teacup on,” Nick said, his eyes lively. “You know how Luella always scolds about rings on the table.”

  Lily put the little gift under her teacup. She thought of lovely presents through the years, given with no particular thought. “It’s a perfect fit, Nick. How kind of you,” she said. “I will never need another.”

  Jack dropped a present in her lap. She looked up, startled, and then watched in amusement as a blush spread up Jack’s neck and into his light-colored hair. His crew looked away with smiles of their own.

  She opened the narrow little box. Chantal gasped and sighed with pleasure as Lily took out an exquisite lace collar.

  “My goodness, Jack,” Lily said. She held it up to her neck. “Think how nice this will look against flannel.”

  “That’s all your ensemble lacked,” Fothering told her.

  “Where in the world . . . ?” she started.

  “Tell you later,” Jack said. He covered his embarrassment by reaching into a small burlap sack and pulling out four bags made of cheesecloth and tied with colored thread. “All right, you kids. Merry Christmas from all of us.”

  Chantal opened hers first and exclaimed over Mr. Li’s almond cookies and little squares of bittersweet chocolate, probably hacked from Madeleine’s larger block in the kitchen, but made special because it was Christmas Eve.

  Chantal held the bag and her leather-bound journal for deep thoughts close to her chest. “This is the best Christmas ever,” she exclaimed, and everyone reached for overworked handkerchiefs.

  They sang “Silent Night” again, then the only thing left to do was pull on sweaters, mufflers, more sweaters, and coats. Lily looked around, laughing inside to see these bundled up monsters, and all for a quick trip to the bunkhouse next door. Jack had already lifted Luella onto Fothering’s shoulders for their slightly longer walk to the big house where Luella did not want to live. Still, Luella had whispered to her that her father would be back tomorrow and he had promised a Christmas doll.

  Lily tucked her lovely present back in its box and shoved it deep in her coat. There appeared to be an intense conference by the door between Jack and Pierre, the outcome of which meant both of them took one of her arms each and escorted her to the Temple of Education.

  “Nice evening, Lily,” Jack said. “I have to go get Mr. Buxton from Wisner tomorrow, but Madeleine agreed to hold dinner until I return. She hinted at a raisin pie, but I think all the flour is gone.”

  “Madeleine has an uncanny knack for holding back things,” Lily said as they strolled along, not even needing the rope because the wind had stopped. At her door, she looked up at the stars, remembering a song from her childhood. She glanced at her companions, knowing them not to be too critical about entertainment, and started to sing, “ ‘When in bed awake I lie, watching stars up in the sky, how I wonder, can there be, a Little Child up there like me?’ ”

  “Don’t stop there,” Jack said.

  “ ‘Does he watch the stars go by, in the river of the sky? Is the moon a smiling face, reflected in the sea of space?’ ”

  The words seemed to hang on the magic air of Christmas Eve. “That’s all I remember,” she said softly.

&nbs
p; “Maybe you’ll remember the rest in the spring,” Jack said, his voice low.

  Both men wished her Marry Crismuss, and Lily stood in the doorway watching them return to the bunkhouse, where a few lights shone. When Jack turned back to look at her, she raised her hand and blew him a kiss. It was dark and he couldn’t have seen her.

  She stood another moment on the doorsill, happy in a way she wouldn’t have imagined this time last year. Nothing had gone right, really, except that it had. She patted Jack’s little present, figuring he must have paid a visit to Vivian at the Back Forty. He would probably never approve, but maybe in the spring she could meet the faro dealer and thank her for a chair burned up to save their lives, and a present from a shy man who hadn’t enjoyed a much happier life than hers.

  “Deep thoughts, indeed,” she said out loud. “I should have made myself a journal.”

  Content, she looked at the sky again, and the smile left her face. As she watched, each star winked out one by one, snuffed by clouds moving in fast.

  CHAPTER 41

  The blizzard struck just as Lily was snuggling deep into her blankets, augmented by the blankets from her father’s bed, the mound so heavy that she had trouble turning over.

  “Drat and blast,” she told the ceiling. Didn’t the cosmic forces that governed the universe realize that tomorrow was Christmas Day? What would be the harm in two nice days in a row?

  She knew self-pity amounted to nothing, so she burrowed deeper into her nest of blankets and closed her eyes with a deliberate snap. The sooner she slept, the sooner spring would come.

  Sleep didn’t come, mainly because she was getting colder by the minute, despite her blankets. She lifted up her head as much as the weight of the blankets allowed and sniffed the air like Francis. The hairs in her nostrils froze, something she always expected outside, but not in her little house, no matter how poorly insulated it was. This was a deeper cold.

  Lily pulled her legs closer to her middle, thinking of Stretch in his frozen ball and the other dead men in the unused tack shed that had become the Bar Dot’s morgue. She wrapped her arms around her legs and shivered as the wind roared overhead and snow thundered down with the speed of rain.

  Blizzard after blizzard had already acquainted her with sounds that ranged from a distempered shriek to a low moan. This sound seemed to mimic the Cheyenne Northern, rumbling along and gathering steam. She decided the eerie noise must have some relation to the fact that three days ago the men had taken manure rakes from the horse barn and scraped off the snow from the roof. Time for a new tune, she supposed, at least until the snow piled overhead again. Better to ignore it.

  She couldn’t, not when the building began to shake as though the wind had decided to lift the house off its foundation. This can’t be happening, she told herself sternly. No wind was that strong.

  Lily had pulled her flannel nightgown over her two union suits and two pairs of wool socks. She lay there, knowing she should snatch up her trousers and baggy sweater from the foot of the bed, except that it would require more effort and let in too much cold.

  Maybe she was dreaming. She listened as the wind seemed to be coaxing the very nails out of the eaves, one at a time. She raised her hand to shake her fist at the wind and say what she thought when a screaming vortex lifted the roof entirely from the structure. Snow poured in, followed by deeper cold than she could even imagine.

  The roof was gone, leaving nothing but the trusses, and they creaked, as if trying to decide to go or stay. In her terror, she screamed and screamed, coming in a poor second to the wind. She might as well be standing outside her front door, waiting to die.

  “No, you don’t,” she said. She leaped from her bed and slipped and slid into the front room, with its table and bench—her dear school. She knew Pierre had nailed his winter count to the wall this time, but fear gave her strength. She yanked twice and the robe enveloped her into its generous folds. As the wind roared inside now, both windows in the front room exploded outward.

  Terrified, she towed the buffalo robe back to her bed and threw it on top of all her blankets. She pulled on the trousers and sweater and then crawled back into her blanket cocoon, certain now that death was going to be her extra special Christmas gift, but equally determined to fight as long as she could. Someone had to teach the children and read to Jack Sinclair.

  She lay there in terror, nearly smothered by the combined weight of blankets and buffalo robe and snow. Pierre had told her how buffalo hunkered down in winter and turned their nose into the wind, rather than away from it. They faced the storm, unlike cows that drifted.

  The wind screamed at her and the snow fell heavier and heavier on top of the already great weight. Claustrophobic, she wanted to throw everything off and stagger outside and let death come. It was going to get her anyway. Why prolong it?

  In the end, she decided it would take too much effort to move. Her pillow was soft, and the bed saggy in all the right places, because she and its former occupant were nearly the same height. At least her death might be comfortable. Maybe they would dig out the house in a day or two and find her looking as though she slept.

  “Oh, bother it,” she muttered and closed her eyes, weary of winter and trouble, sorry that she wouldn’t know what it was like to fall in love and marry, and have a child or two. There wouldn’t be any anniversaries to celebrate, or triumphs to share with anyone, or even just the simple comfort of sitting on a couch, reading out loud to someone who liked her accent.

  She did have that memory, at least. Lily resigned herself to death and decided that on the whole, perhaps death wasn’t going to be all that bad. Death was going to require a massive reordering of her expectations, never high anyway. She could cope.

  But that wasn’t fair to anyone—not her, not the children, not Jack Sinclair. I have to stay alive, she thought, and then she said it out loud to the wind and the storm and the cold. She said it louder until she could hear herself, then drew herself into as small a ball as she could manage. Pierre’s winter count had kept five people alive through one blizzard. Maybe its powers would extend to her alone. She closed her eyes and prayed.

  “Lily, I know you’re in there.”

  “Leave me alone. It’s cold and snowy.”

  “I know! I’m not paid seventy-five dollars a month to leave you alone.”

  Lily opened her eyes to total blackness, the same as before. She felt cold and wretched, with only the distant memory of toes. Surely death would have been more pleasant. Maybe she was alive. It was certainly a prospect to consider.

  The blackness grew briefly lighter, and then a whoosh of cold air socked her as though the selfish wind wanted her winter count robe too. She fought for it, which brought her in contact with a flannel shirt that wasn’t hers. She patted it, felt arms with ropy muscles, and stopped struggling as relief poured over her, right down to those toes that did still have some blood flowing through them, because they hurt like blazes.

  “Jack?”

  “The very same. I know this is the height of impropriety, but I don’t really care. I’d hold you tight like this even if you were Mr. Wing Li. I’m going to pull you closer. You can slap me later. No, no. Keep your hands in front of you. I want them between us because, boy howdy, they’re cold.”

  He reached down to her toes, sticking his hand inside the sock layers. “This little piggy?” he said.

  “Ow!”

  “Music to my ears. How about this pig?”

  “Stop it.”

  “You’ve got your parts, Miss Carteret.”

  What he was telling her penetrated the fog of her mind. At least she wasn’t going to die alone, and if the two of them could warm each other, maybe she wouldn’t die at all. She wanted to say all this, but maybe he knew.

  “Going to sleep,” she muttered. “Don’t stop me.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it. You can’t die, though, because we haven’t finished Ivanhoe.”

  She woke up to faint snoring right in her ear. Th
e air in their cocoon had been breathed in and out for far too long a time, so she raised one corner of the buffalo robe, letting in the cold, which woke up Jack too. He protested and tried to roll over, but she patted his face until he paid attention.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “I’ve never felt it drop so cold, so fast,” he said. “You know that thermometer in the cookshack? It registers to forty below, but the mercury was crowded down in the bulb, last time I checked.”

  “The others?”

  He let out a lengthy sigh. “Bad news, Lily.”

  “Please, not my children,” she said, struggling to sit up and failing.

  He pulled her close again. “They’re alive, but, oh, Lily . . .”

  She prepared herself for the worst, something she had been doing since the first blizzard, so it had no real meaning any more. “Better tell me.”

  “The Buxtons’ roof caved in with all that snow on it.” Another sigh, but this one sounded frustrated. “We planned to rake off the snow tomorrow.” He fumbled for her hands, sandwiching them inside his own. “Mrs. Buxton and her maid are dead.”

  “Luella? Fothering?”

  “Hey, hey, steady, Lily. Fothering has a broken arm, but Luella is fine.” He turned onto his back, pulling her close so her head rested on his chest. “Do you know she’s been sleeping under her bed? That probably saved her life.”

  “Good heavens.”

  “It must have been a scary, grim house. Not even Fothering knew. A joist fell on his arm and broke it, but he managed to get Luella out and make it to the horse barn. Pierre was there, and he carried Luella the rest of the way. We never heard anything above the storm.”

  Lily digested his words, thinking of Mr. Buxton, probably stuck in Cheyenne now. There wouldn’t be any Christmas doll, only sad news for him, one more layer of misery in a winter unlike any other. “Poor, poor man,” she said.