by Win Blevins
Flare rubbed his noggin, but Skye had used the belaying pin lightly. “If this child had a been an Injun,” he roared with glee, “you’d-a lost your topknot!”
He could see Flare didn’t take to it, getting the sneak put on him right against his own cabin. Showed that civilization made a man careless, which would make him dead. Aside from that, Flare looked like he’d lost the pleasure in life. Skye wondered what happened. Didn’t make no sense—Skye liked the grand game every minute, even when he was hung over. Couldn’t understand those who didn’t.
They had a drink, Sima and Nicolette whiskey and Flare coffee. They had a fine supper, with boudins. Later, since Nicolette hinted that Flare was doing her no good, Skye did her plenty of good, and made her cry out with the fun of it.
Next morning Flare looked a little more cheerful.
Skye told Flare he had to be off. The emp hired him to take an express to Walla Walla. From there someone would hurry it on to Montreal. And the emp had told Skye to come up to Mission Bottom first and take whatever mail of the missionaries along, free on the prairie. The emp was generous these days, wasn’t the old rascal?
Then Skye remembered, “What you make of this, old hoss?”
He handed Flare a letter.
It was addressed to a woman, or girl, Flare had never heard of Miss Amanda Perkins, in Boston. The back said it was from Billy Wells.
Oh, Miss Jewel’s fellow—fiancé. Flare knew what it was. The letter Miss Jewel demanded. To his former fiancée.
“So?” Flare handed it back to Skye.
“So the chap gave it to me, quiet-like, and asked what it cost to send it to the States. Naught, says I, courtesy of the Honorable Company. Well, says he, I’ll give you two dollars to take it down the road and…”
Mr. Skye walked to the fire theatrically and set the letter on the flames. The edges began to brown and curl.
“…throw it on a fire. Be sure it burns, he says, every bit of it. And tell no one here. Bugger give me the two dollars, too. What do you make of that?”
“I make it we’d best mind our own business,” said Flare.
Flare knew what else to make of it. Billy Wells was cheating Miss Jewel. But why?
When Skye was gone, Flare went for a walk and thought it over. Decided he’d best have a talk with the lad. Which would be enjoyable. Flare didn’t like Billy Wells anyway.
Chapter Eighteen
Flare gave it a week, a most enjoyable week. He rode the countryside. A most beautiful countryside it was, forested and rolling. He liked it—when he wasn’t thinking that it would grow crops like weeds, and so would attract farmers, and so attract those who wanted to sell them things, save them, bank their money, and keep them in line, and the other maggots of civilization.
At night he played seven-up with the Frenchies and lined his pockets with coins. When it came to gambling, Frenchies were as childish as Indians. Besides, he was sober and they were drunk. He contemplated how easy life might be from now on. Go to rendezvous, gamble with drunkards, and fill your possibles sack. After the card games, since he didn’t have to listen to Skye and Nicolette making the beast with two backs, he slept wonderfully. Nicolette was considering marrying someone else, she said, and he could have her cabin for twenty-five dollars. Why not?
He thought of Billy Wells’s puppylike face a lot.
Nothing like having one up on your enemies to make a man feel better.
So, on the day after their Sabbath, he rode over to Mission Bottom. He didn’t want to catch them all together, at church services or at dinner after. He wanted to catch Sima alone after school. And see Miss Jewel a tad. And have a fine and private talk with Billy Wells.
Billy shook Flare’s hand eagerly, a tad obsequiously, as was the fellow’s manner. “Billy,” Flare said cheerfully for openers, “you’re a rotter, a liar, and a cheat.” He grinned hugely into Billy’s stupefied face. “And I mean to put an end to it.”
Billy got the damnedest look and lost his fatuous smile and turned back to marking some boards. This lad’s manner was that everything and everybody were wonderful. He was having trouble fitting Flare into that scheme of things. He needed a moment to think things over.
Flare decided to help him out. “What are you making, Billy?”
“A coffin, Mr. O’Flaherty.” He spoke wanly and didn’t look up. “Seems like the main use of a carpenter here in Oregon is making coffins.” He took a quick half glance up at Flare, like he hoped it wouldn’t be noticed, and picked up one of his saws. “God’s will, I guess.” He started to work.
Flare put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. Twenty-five years old, maybe, but not grown up, as most American men weren’t. He supposed some American women liked it that way.
Billy slipped away from Flare’s hand. He made a crosscut. Finally he glanced up. “What is it you want, Mr. O’Flaherty?” He put the board into a miter box.
“I know, lad,” said Flare. Said it pointedly but gently. Billy pretended to pay no attention.
“You’re two-timing Miss Jewel.” He let it sit.
“I think you’d best say whatever it is you’ve got to say,” said Billy with his back half turned, “and then go along.”
“You promised Miss Jewel you’d write back to Boston and withdraw your proposal of marriage to the lass there. Making you free to marry Miss Jewel. She’s waiting to hear from the Boston lass, Miss Amanda Perkins. But that won’t be happening.”
Flare waited for a response. Billy sawed through a board in the miter box. Without looking at Flare, he reversed the board and started on the other end.
“You wrote the letter, or a letter. I wonder if you even showed it to Miss Jewel, and shed a theatrical tear. Then you gave it to the express to go with the other mail to the States. And gave the express two dollars to take the letter away from here and burn it.
“Too bad for your rotten scheme the express was my friend Mr. Skye. He did burn it. Right after he showed it to me.”
“I think you’d best go on now,” said Billy in his way of pretending to be calm. Flare could see the disturbance in one eye, which warmed Flare’s heart. “I don’t take kindly to your lies.”
Billy kept his back to Flare, fussing with the coffin boards. He wasn’t even going to look at Flare straight.
Flare restrained himself. “Tell ye what, lad, I’ll make you an offer. I’ll give ye a week. You tell Miss Jewel what you’ve done. You tell her and squirm and make it all right somehow, if you can.
“I’ll be back next Sunday. If you haven’t told her, I’ll do the job myself.”
Flare turned and walked away.
Billy Wells began to hammer nails into the coffin. Flare could feel the anger in the blows whacking out at him.
It felt lovely.
Ah, but didn’t things turn out sweet sometimes?
Sima was drilling on his writing, and then spelling, so Flare watched from the back of the room. The four students did lots of repetition, like a chorus: “Act, a-c-t. Apple, a-p-p-l-e.” It was the part of school Flare had hated, doing the same thing over and over, like you’d mistook yourself for a clock, forever repeating tick…tock…tick…tock. His father had put poetry into learning, teaching the great lines of the Bard, and Gaelic songs.
Flare thought it would be even harder to bear rote learning when you weren’t a child anymore, but on the threshold of being a man, like these lads. He felt sorry for them, and for Miss Jewel, who had the job of drilling them.
What would it all come to? he wondered. You could teach an Indian to read, but what would he do with that?
Flare wanted Sima to learn to read and figure, and draw if he wanted, but he honestly didn’t know what his son would make of that in his life. No engraved invitations would be coming from Buckingham Palace. A Shoshone wouldn’t be offered a job on a newspaper. Maybe he could be a clerk in a trapping brigade. If there were any trapping brigades five years hence.
He was proud that Sima was ahead of the other lads in spelling, though he’d started just
a few months ago. The lad was sharp. But was it not a false pride?
The West was a place of wonders and strangenesses. Life would do a crazy dance on its stage, surely. And the craziest would be through the children Flare and his like had got, white and red at once.
He watched the back of Sima’s head in a swirling eddy of feelings.
“Three plus four is seven. Three plus five is eight. Three plus six is nine….”
Ah, my son.
Sima was distracted. “It’s all right, Flare.” He shrugged and repeated, “I guess.”
Was the lad beginning to see through the missionaries? But he would have to see thoroughly and be convinced. He’d have to want Vancouver or somewhere else. And then, lad, I’ll have a story to tell you about your old dad.
“Let me see your notebook,” Flare said. Sima handed it over and sat on a stump—the missionaries had cleared a lot of trees. “This is the worst part,” Sima said, gesturing at the drawings.
He opened a book of Bible stories and pointed. He was copying the illustration onto his sheet. “Dr. Full won’t let me draw what I want. I have to ‘learn from the masters.’” He rolled his eyes. “It’s no fun.”
Actually, Sima was not copying the book’s illustration. He was re-creating it in his own way. It was some disciples casting a net into the sea, and Jesus showing them how, or drawing a moral from it, or something. Instead of sketching the whole, Sima had started in one corner of the sheet and was filling in that corner with complete detail, and giving it all a kind of fanciful touch.
“That’s nice,” Flare said.
“I hate it,” Sima said hotly. “He won’t me let work on my Thousand and One Nights drawings. He won’t even let me draw from nature. And when he saw I’d done sketches of Coyote some, he got really mad.” Sima’s English was fast but not always right.
“Dr. Full is not a liberal-minded man,” said Miss Jewel, coming up behind them, “but we’ll get what we want.” She mimicked a dependent, flirting woman with her voice: “Oh, Mr. O’Flaherty, would you help poor little me and Sima?”
Flare chuckled. You couldn’t not like the woman.
He watched her coach Sima a little. Not coach, really, but ask, and learn from him. Flare always liked watching her, and hearing her voice.
She liked the kids. Right now she was teaching the boys and girls, separately. When the man teacher got well, she’d be back to girls only. Teaching them to cook, sew, clean. She wanted to teach them to read—she’d been trained to teach Indians to read—but the deacons said no. Studies useful to women only, they said.
She said she had to go to the girls now.
“How long will you keep them, Miss Jewel?” asked Sima.
“Why?” Miss Jewel asked back. She had a tickled look on her face.
Sima said, “Oh, nothing,” and pretended to concentrate on his drawing.
My, lad, but aren’t you embarrassed? thought Flare.
“The girls will be out in five minutes if they’ve done their work,” Miss Jewel said.
“Hey, Flare, wait, will you?” said Sima. “I want you to meet someone.”
“Aye, lad.” He’d wait if Miss Jewel didn’t come back, too. Flare wasn’t going to be comfortable around her today. Billy’s rotten scheme was poisoning things. Flare couldn’t tell her, not for one bleeding week.
Funny, he didn’t think he was going to feel good telling her then. But he would do it.
The lass came running up enthusiastically, then stopped short and looked at the ground and across toward the mill and everywhere but at Sima and Flare. Flare kept his face straight. He thought, And after running toward us, lassie. -
“Flare,” Sima began eagerly, “this is Lisbeth. My friend.”
Ah, well, social graces would come later for the lad, after reading and writing.
Yes, Lisbeth McDougal, daughter of Heather and Alexander. “I knew you when you were younger,” he said, “and not yet so very beautiful.” He gave her a small bow. “Michael Devin O’Flaherty,” he reminded her.
She smiled and nodded with embarrassment, and murmured something, her knees rubbing nervously together.
She was truly beautiful, fairer than Sima, but reddish, like mahogany. A lithe figure, not yet as full as would come. A face to break your heart, long and slender and grave, with huge eyes.
No wonder Sima was attracted. Which the poor lad was, and didn’t know what to do about it.
“Lisbeth lives at French Prairie,” Sima said. Flare should have known. “But her father and mother gone now are. Trapping.”
“Her father is a good man,” said Flare. “A Scot. Her mother a good woman, a Sioux. Lisbeth has traveled the country and seen more than you, boyo.”
“She’s my friend,” he said unnecessarily.
And perhaps can teach you about living with a foot in each world, thought Flare.
“I must be heading back to French Prairie,” he said. He didn’t say “home.” Nowhere was home but Ireland, and he’d never be back there.
“We are going to walk down by the river,” Sima said awkwardly.
“Good day to ye,” said Flare, “and good walking.”
“Until Sunday,” he called after them.
Mounted, he thought of his own first affair of the heart. He’d been sixteen, she the same. She hawked fish in the street where the family print shop was. Flare would carry tea out to her, and they’d sit on the dirty cobbles and drink it. Kathleen Quinlan, her name was, and she was black Irish, raven-haired, skin fair as cream, and eyes blue as the sky you never saw in the west of Ireland.
They’d met a few times on the sly. Once they’d taken half a day and walked out along the seacoast, on the high, grassy cliffs overlooking the pounding waves. They’d held hands and looked at the great waves, and Flare had wondered if they could stay forever and never move but always touch in this small way that made him feel what he’d never felt before. They didn’t move for the longest time, until he had to excuse himself to go behind a rock and pee.
Later they’d sat propped against a boulder and talked and fidgeted and kissed once, exactly once, briefly, tenderly….She broke it off and said she had to get home, right away.
When he’d left Ireland, in the autumn of that same year, he hadn’t been able to face her. He’d just sent a note. He wondered what had happened to her. He didn’t want to know. Just wanted to think of that one perfect day.
Their romance had been naught but feeling. One kiss, that one but a light caress. All feeling and no more happened.
Unlike his later experiences, which were the opposite, all doing and little feeling.
Unlike Sima, because that damned Skye had put him with a whore.
Flare suddenly thought, But you’ve lain a-plenty since with lasses of sixteen—Kathleen’s age, Lisbeth’s age. Have you not, my boyo? A bit of cloth, and few bells handed over, and then a lot of the old rub. Aye. With mere lasses, often as not.
The first wave was guilt, the second shame, and after those only a poignant sadness, and longing.
It was Billy who answered the door.
“Did ye take care of it, lad?”
Flare hadn’t been able to wait until after church services. He came early to the cabin Miss Jewel shared with Billy, the rotter, and rapped on the door sharply. He wondered if Billy would still be here—maybe Miss Jewel gave him the heave-ho, as the rat deserved.
Billy gave Flare that damnedest look, again.
“Yes, Mr. O’Flaherty, I spoke with her about it.”
“And?”
“You’d best hear it from Miss Jewel herself.”
She came to the door, looking uncommonly lovely. The only virtue of church, as far as Flare could see, was that the women made themselves look fine for it.
But she was angry. He gawked at her.
“Mr. O’Flaherty,” she began stiffly, holding back. “I must ask you not to come here again, or in any way to approach me or speak to me. As far as I am concerned, you are unwelcome in this communi
ty. If you continue to come here, I will tell Sima what you’ve done.”
She whirled away from the door and tried to slam it. But Billy Wells held the door with one hand. He gave Flare a sloe-eyed look of triumph, and closed it gently in Flare’s face.
Chapter Nineteen
Flare stood there for perhaps half a minute, stupefied. Then he banged on the door with the butt of his pistol. It would be bloody hell before he stood still for the likes of this.
He held his tongue and banged. Hard. On the fourth or fifth whack he splintered one of the boards of the door facing.
Billy Wells yanked the door open. He locked eyes with Flare. “She knows,” he said softly, mockingly. And started to close the door.
“I’ll see her or I’ll tear the cabin down,” Flare said. Billy gave Flare a long look and a half smile.
“Sounds like you,” he said softly, but not giving an inch. “By God—” started Flare. “Tell Mr. O’Flaherty I’ll be right out,” came Miss Jewel’s voice. “We’ll talk to him. Together. In the open.”
“The terms of this conversation, Mr. O’Flaherty, are that you hear me out, all the way through, until I’m finished. It would be best then for you to say nothing and leave. I suppose if you must put in one sentence, or two, I’ll hear it.”
Flare waited.
“Do you agree?” she demanded.
Flare nodded. The three of them stood, stiffly. Miss Jewel held to Billy’s arm for support or protection or whatever may be. Protection by the man who was deceiving her. Protection from Michael Devin O’Flaherty, who loved her.
He waited because he had to know what the goddamn bloody hell…
“I don’t mind saying I’m not only terribly angry, I’m terribly hurt by what you’ve done. I was fond of you, even attracted to you. Now this betrayal…”
She fought tears.
Maggie, my love.
“So. Let us enumerate the facts.” She looked Flare full in the face. “You came to my fiancé last Monday, in his shop, and in the guise of friendship reported to him falsehoods. You and I, you claimed, were lovers on the trip across the Oregon Road and at Vancouver.”
