by Lauran Paine
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Excuse me, I got to bring in some more bottles.” The bartender moved swiftly around the end of the bar and disappeared through a door beyond. Shan was left alone. He looked at himself in the backbar mirror. His big black hat was dust- and sweat-streaked, its brim curled a little at the outer edges, a real up-and-at-’em Wyoming cowman in that mirror, shaggy head and all. He turned away. Sarahlee would cut his hair. No, not anymore. No more haircuts. No more nothing, just squaws. From now on just copper bottoms. Big ones, little ones, fat ones. When someone shook his arm, spoke to him, he didn’t recognize the face or understand the words. He pulled away. “Who do you think you’re pushing around, mister?”
“Shanley, you’re drunk. It’s kind of early in the day for serious drinking, isn’t it?”
“Sure is. By golly, I know you now. The lawman. How are you anyway?”
“Well, I’m soberer than you are. Why don’t you come down to my place and sleep it off?”
“I’m not sleepy.”
“Come on. We’ll get something to eat then. I’m sort of hungry myself.”
He let the deputy marshal steer him to the dingy café where they sat and ate, drank coffee, talked, and drank more coffee. Shan was nearly sober when the lawman put a hand on his shoulder and got up.
“Take it easy, Shanley,” he said quietly. “I don’t know what’s bothering you, but take it easy, pardner.”
“Wait a minute,” Shan said, getting up quickly. “Listen, I need some help.”
The lawman walked toward the door with Shan trailing him. When they were outside, the deputy stopped. “Shanley,” he said, “I’ve handled my share of drunks and I can read them like a book. The kind of help you need I can’t give.” He walked away.
Chapter Nineteen
Shan got his horse from the livery barn and rode out of town northward. The ground was iron-hard underfoot, the sun kind of milky-looking. He went past the Muller place without looking in. He rode straight up the road to his own ranch like he had a hundred times, but he no longer felt like a king crossing his private empire. When he crossed the yard, he heard the cabin door open, but didn’t look back. By the time he hung the saddle up his heart was beating almost normally. He peeked past the door, but she wasn’t there, so he got the pitchfork and began feeding again, although it was scarcely noon. When he was finished with everything he could think to do, he went to the doorway and stood in it.
“Shan?”
He was startled because the voice hadn’t come from the cabin area at all. She was standing over by the spring house.
“Hello, Sarahlee.”
“Come over here.”
The grayness of the wintry day didn’t conceal any of her. All her bigness and her beauty were there for him to stare at. You wait, he told himself harshly, you wait all your life for something like that, then you destroy it all in one blurry summer. He crossed to her.
“Sit down here, Shan.”
He sat on the edge of the spring box and said to himself: Now she says I’m going home, Shan. You can have the ranch and the cattle and the horses and the little squaw …
“I talked to Mary, Shan.”
Sure you did, Sarahlee. Please pull the damned trigger and get it over with because I’m bleeding inside …
“We’re going to keep her baby, Shan. We’ll raise her child and mine both. I don’t know of any other way.”
“You hate me,” he said. “I don’t care about the kids. I really don’t. I might, if things were different. Right now I don’t. All I know is that you hate me.”
She reached out and ran her hand up his shoulder to his cheek, smoothed the hair that hung down. “No, I don’t, Shan. I don’t hate you. I don’t know exactly what I feel for you but it isn’t hate.”
He turned toward her. “I don’t give a damn what happens. I love you. I’ll always love you.”
She drew her hand back. “We aren’t thinking about ourselves now, Shan, we’re thinking about the children.”
“Sure,” he said, getting off the spring box.
“Mary and I had a long talk. We’ll teach our children together. Teach them all the things mothers know and you’ll teach them what fathers should teach them.”
“Sure.”
“Come on, Shan, supper’s about ready.” She led him by the arm, and just before they got to the cabin she said: “Act natural with Mary. She’s frightened, Shan. Be pleasant with her.”
He was. He was pleasant and polite and avoided her every chance he got, did not look into her face if he did not absolutely have to, and the next day he went silently to work on the porch, stayed with it until it was completed, then he began to make a long tier of firewood along the cabin wall under the porch’s roof. He worked hard for days on end until he had all the wood they could possibly use for the entire winter, then out of sheer desperation and loneliness he rode down to the Muller place.
Otto was the same toward him as always. Mrs. Muller, who he didn’t want to face but did, seemed only slightly less talkative than before but in all other ways the same. She had never been a loquacious person anyway. He rode down to see them often, and on one of those trips he met Tim O’Brien who was slogging up the road with some mail he’d picked up in Tico for the Mullers.
Shan didn’t want to ride with him but he had no choice. Tim was polite. At the house Otto came out to greet them and his breath was like steam when he spoke. Tim didn’t say ten words. When he left, he smiled down at Otto and Mrs. Muller and gave Shan a little nod.
After he was a dark speck on the road, Shan said: “What’s eating him now? I ate crow, didn’t I?”
Mrs. Muller made a clucking sound. “Come on in by the stove, Shan, I’ve got some hot beef broth.”
But he turned to Otto with a scowl and Otto nodded at his wife who closed the door softly and disappeared. Otto said: “There’s a lot of talk going around, Shan.”
“Don’t these people have anything to do but mind other folks’ business?”
“It isn’t just Mary, Shan.”
“What else?”
“The Blessing cattle, for one thing. Mary for another. A lot of the cowmen out here live alone, Shan.”
“What of it?”
“Well, here you come along, a newcomer, and you got not one woman but two. It makes them hot under the collar thinking of you up there all winter with two women, boy.”
Shan rammed fisted hands into the pockets of his big sheepskin coat. “Otto,” he said quickly, “do you know what it’s like up there with two women? They look at me like I’m a butcher’s steer and at one another like they wished the damned floor’d open up and swallow somebody. They’re so polite it makes me want to yell at them. You know who the luckiest person up there is … that buck Indian buried in the yard. He doesn’t hear or see a damned thing. Sometimes, when I’m in the cabin, I feel like the top of my head’s going to explode. Otto, I’ve got to do something about this.”
But he never did. He never had to because when the first big blizzard came Mary had a miscarriage. Shan was frightened sick while Sarahlee worked behind the curtain to save the girl. Then, when his terror dissolved, he noticed something. The tension was gone. The air inside the cabin was clean and pure again like it had been long before. For three days while Mary lay motionlessly in their bed, he and Sarahlee were close again. She even smiled at him as though she knew a solution to all their troubles had come, and she even cradled his head against her shoulder in Mary’s pallet when they retired at night.
But that was a phase and Shan didn’t know it. Sarahlee didn’t, either. On the fifth night, Mary’s condition reached a peak. Her dark eyes shone, hot and dry, and her lips were shriveled and cracked. Then the mirage collapsed, dissolved.
It was late the fifth night. They were in bed but not asleep. Shan heard her very plainly and it made his flesh crawl. The
words were very distinct. Sarahlee, beside him in the narrow bed, stiffened. Mary was reliving her moments with Shan aloud. She was repeating the things they had said. It was terrible, lying there hearing it all so vividly.
Finally Sarahlee got up and said: “She’s delirious.”
Shan didn’t move. He watched Sarahlee go to the water bucket, then back beyond the curtain, carrying a basin of water.
The words kept rising and falling until Sarahlee broke the fever with cold water. For a while there was utter silence, then Mary began speaking again, mumbling, but this time in her native tongue and Shan wanted to yell at her: Why didn’t you use that a half hour ago, damn you!
Sarahlee laid down beside Mary on the bed behind the curtain. Shan heard the bed groan under the added weight. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep, but it was useless, so he crooked his arms under his head and stared at the ceiling, heard the coyotes, caught the rise of a little wind that whimpered along the pole rafters, rustled over the roof, and fled southward. Sarahlee did not return to his side that night.
At 5:00 a.m. the next morning, when it was bitter cold in the cabin and as dark as pitch, Sarahlee spoke to him. She hadn’t been asleep, either. Each word was as clear as struck glass. The longest night in their lives had come to an end.
“Shan. Mary is dead.”
He laid there with an echo that didn’t exist repeating itself in his mind.
Then Sarahlee spoke again: “Go outside, Shan.”
He got up, pulled his clothes on, and went out into the freezing darkness. He saw the clear, merciless stare of a million stars and began walking across the yard to the barn. He forked feed to the animals, that looked at him, round-eyed and blank. Forked more feed to them than they’d need all day long. It was movement. It was action. A solitary bead of sweat ran down his nose and hung there until he shook his head.
Then he got the pick, the crowbar, and a shovel, and went over where the unknown buck Indian’s grave was and began to tear at the frozen ground. The pick made a high sound when he drove it into the earth, high and flat. He worried up chunks of earth and sweat burst out all over him. He got past the frost at six inches. After that it was easier and he kept right on digging. When it got light in the sky, there was a sickly pale iridescence to the world. Snow weather.
The grave grew steadily deeper. Finally he pulled himself out of it and stood there with his teeth chattering and sweating at the same time. The world was absolutely without sound. He went to the cabin and pushed the door inward. The first thing he noticed was that the blanket that had always formed the partition around the bed was gone. Sarahlee was sitting by the stove in a chair. She was fully clothed. Mary lay on the bed. Her hair had been brushed until it shone glossy black and she was wearing the beaded buckskin dress. The curtain was wrapped around her, all but the face and shoulders.
From over by the stove Sarahlee said: “So you could see her face. Did you make the grave?”
“Yes.”
“Carry her out.”
He gathered Mary into his arms and didn’t look at her face. At the door he hesitated.
“I’m going to stay in here,” Sarahlee said. “I’ll pray.”
He buried Mary. It took a long time, more sweat, but he didn’t notice this time. The clouds scudded, low and heavy, overhead. When he was finished, he put the tools away, and lingered in the barn for a little while, walking around, looking at the animals, listening to them eating. He stopped in front of the yellow-wheeled buggy for a moment, then he went across the yard to the cabin, stooped to pick up an armload of wood and take it in with him, dumping it into the woodbox by the stove. He used the lifter to open the firebox, saw that the embers were glowing low, and put in more wood. After he’d closed the firebox door, he looked at Sarahlee. She hadn’t moved. He crossed to the table and dropped down there. Her chestnut hair lay softly wavy down the back of her head, past her shoulders.
“Shan, that’s between us. I guess I knew it always would be. I guess I just wouldn’t face it because I loved you. It’s there between me and my love for you … I told myself you couldn’t help yourself, that you were so big and strong … that you had to have release. That might have stood up for me over the years, Shan, I don’t know. But it was wrong, of course, and we both knew that. Maybe she did, too. I thought it might come out all right, though. Not now. Not with her death between us. We couldn’t do it now, Shan, no matter what we told ourselves.”
Sarahlee got up. Until then he hadn’t noticed that she had their Bible in her hands. She put it back on the shelf by the bed, then she went to the stove with her back to him.
“Go hitch up the buggy, Shan.”
He went without a question, harnessed the mare, backed her between the shafts, buckled her in, and stood beside the buggy in the wintry yard while inside him something crumbled away. When he heard the cabin door open and close, he looked up. Sarahlee had her heavy hat and coat on. Her hands were buried in mittens. She passed in front of him, climbed up to the seat, and took the lines.
“Where will you go?” he said.
She didn’t answer the question. “You can get the buggy in Tico. I’ll leave it at the livery barn.” She said other things he hardly heard. It was like they were being shouted to him from an impossible distance; things like having her child born in a hospital among people she knew, that her child would have things, find opportunities. Finally he broke into the flow of words, tried to move and stand so that she would have to look at him.
“I want our baby to have everything, Sarahlee. I’ll send you all the money I can as soon as I sell some cattle.”
“No, the greatest favor you can do this child is never come into its life. If you do, it will have to know about you someday. That would be the worst thing a child could know.”
“I’m its father, Sarahlee.”
“It has no father,” she said, lifting the lines. “Its father is dead. He was a soldier and he is dead.” She flipped the lines and the mare began to crunch over the frozen earth.
He stood in the yard until she was lost to sight, then he went inside without looking at the tamped clods, the raw upturned earth, poured a cup of whiskey, and drank it. The cabin shrieked with silence, with emptiness, with pain, and finally with death. Life in Wyoming had blinked out that quickly.
THE END
About the Author
Lauran Paine who, under his own name and various pseudonyms, has written over a thousand books, and was born in Duluth, Minnesota. His family moved to California when he was at a young age, and his apprenticeship as a Western writer came about through the years he spent in the livestock trade, rodeos, and even motion pictures where he served as an extra because of his expert horsemanship in several films starring movie cowboy Johnny Mack Brown. In the late 1930s Paine trapped wild horses in northern Arizona and even, for a time, worked as a professional farrier. Paine came to know the Old West through the eyes of many who had been born in the previous century, and he learned that Western life had been very different from the way it was portrayed on the screen. “I knew men who had killed other men,” he later recalled. “But they were the exceptions. Prior to and during the Depression, people were just too busy eking out an existence to indulge in Saturday-night brawls.” He served in the US Navy in the Second World War and began writing for Western pulp magazines following his discharge. It is interesting to note that all of his earliest novels (written under his own name and the pseudonym Mark Carrel) were published in the British market and he soon had as strong a following in that country as in the United States. Paine’s Western fiction is characterized by strong plots, authenticity, an apparently effortless ability to construct situation and character, and a preference for building his stories upon a solid foundation of historical fact. Adobe Empire (1956), one of his best novels, is a fictionalized account of the last twenty years in the life of trader William Bent and, in an off-trail way, has a melan
choly, bittersweet texture that is not easily forgotten. In later novels like The White Bird (1997) and Cache Cañon (1998), he showed that the special magic and power of his stories and characters had only matured along with his basic themes of changing times, changing attitudes, learning from experience, respecting nature, and the yearning for a simpler, more moderate way of life.
