by Gary D. Svee
Max wiped his forehead with his sleeve.
“Sometimes, it seems that way with people, too. Start running one way and you can’t turn back, not even if you know what’s waiting up ahead.”
Catherine’s eyes searched the horizon, looking for the bluff.
The country was not much different from what they had traveled through that afternoon. A range of hills topped by a slab of sandstone and painted dark here and there with trees and shadows lay like a wall to the north. The creek nourished a meandering stream of green, struggling against the heat. Off to the west, the land had been broken and planted in wheat, stubble shining gold against the sun. And just over the lip of the hill that marked the course of the creek stood a massive cottonwood. It stood alone on the prairie, and Catherine couldn’t help but wonder what had caused it to grow here, so distant from any of its kind. The branches, some of them thick as a fat man’s waist, spread in regal welcome.
But then Catherine’s attention was turned from the tree to an inverted, galvanized tub sitting on the prairie. And poking through a hole in the tub’s bottom was a stovepipe.
“Mr. Bass, what is that?”
But Max didn’t answer. Instead, he unhitched the mare, more intent on his task than there was any reason to be.
“Taking the mare down to the creek to water. Want to come along?”
Catherine nodded and a moment later they were edging down the steep hill. Catherine’s shoes were designed more for sidewalks than sidehills, and she reached for Max’s arm. He walked stiffly, as though he were carrying something very valuable, or very dangerous.
When they reached the creek, Catherine gasped in delight. The giant cottonwood and the tall cut that marked the course of the creek shaded a park with grass as green as any that graced the fields of Ireland. A wall of sandstone marched along the opposite side, as though God were bent on shielding the beauty of the place from the harshness of the sun. And down through the middle of the bottom ran the creek, water kicking up its heels on a sandstone stage.
“Why, it’s beautiful, Mr. Bass.”
Max said nothing, thinking the bottom paled in comparison to the look on Catherine’s face.
“Oh, look!”
Catherine was pointing to the cottonwood. About twenty feet up, a massive branch butted sideways forming a canopy over the creek bottom, and hanging from that branch by two long chains was a porch swing. Catherine ran to it like a little girl. She stood there a moment, admiring it, then sat down on the double chair and began pumping the swing into long slow arcs through the cool air and out over the creek.
Max stood on the bank, holding the mare’s reins, while she drank. His eyes were fixed on Catherine, and the flash of her hair as she swung through ragged patches of sunlight streaming through the shadow.
Catherine felt Max’s eyes, and looked up. She was embarrassed then and stopped pumping until the swing settled to a stop. She stepped down, walking across the bottom to Max.
“Did you make that for me?”
Max nodded, and her smile was bright as the sunlight shining on her hair.
“I shall ride out here every day to sit in it beside this brook.” Another flash of smile and then, “Do we have time for me to explore this place?”
“We have time,” Max said. He waited then, stiffly at attention as an accused man awaits the jury’s verdict. Still he jerked a bit as her voice floated back to him.
“Oh, Mr. Bass, come see what I have found.”
Max followed a faint trail through the bottom. Catherine was just past a bend in the creek. The walls were steep there, opening into a broad sundrenched bottom of ten or so acres.
“Look,” Catherine said as she heard Max approaching. “Someone has dug a hole.”
And indeed, someone had, straight back into the hillside. Steps roughly formed from sandstone led steeply to the blanket-draped entrance ten feet or so above the bottom.
Catherine had already climbed the steps and was waiting by the blanket.
“Do you think it’s all right to look inside?”
Max swept the blanket aside, and she stepped in. It was cool there and dark, but Max’s hand brushed against the bail of a kerosene lantern, and he lit it, the pale light casting the dugout in heavy shadow. It was obvious that the dugout had been lived in. There was a bed of sorts—a straw-filled mattress on a frame of rough-hewn lodgepole pine—against one wall. An equally rough-hewn, blanket-draped table stood in the middle of the room.
The floor was wall-to-wall canvas; muslin hung from the ceiling to catch any falling dirt. There was nothing deceptive in the scene. It was an obvious attempt to make the best of a bad situation.
“Do you suppose someone is actually living here?” Catherine asked in a whisper.
“People have lived in worse.”
“But not in America, not even in Ireland. This must be what you call a squatter. What will you do now? Will you tell him to move on?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“I wonder what kind of man—he must be a man, no woman would stay here—would think about digging a hole to live in.”
“Timber is scarce around here,” Max explained. “In the summer the sun makes ovens of most houses, and winter winds blow right through a cabin. Some people build soddies. This is better than a soddy—warmer, anyway.”
“But it’s dark, even on a day like this, and closed in. There is nothing to see here but shadows, and the air is musty and dead. It’s more like an animal’s den than a home.”
“Suits some.”
“Look, a trunk!”
And then before Max could say anything, Catherine had lifted the lid. Inside were clothes: long Johns, flannel shirts, and denim pants. There was a rawhide lariat, a .44 Colt, letters, and mounted in the inside of the trunk lid, a picture.
“Mr. Bass, please bring the lantern closer.”
Max did, and with the light shining full on the photograph, Catherine could see that it was her own picture!
The realization struck her then, and she turned wide-eyed to Max.
“No!” she said, her voice filled with dread.
Max couldn’t look her in the eye. He stood accused by that single word—no! And then in a voice drained of all emotion, all hope, Max whispered, “Yes.”
The anger rose in Catherine and she spat out her fury. “Mr. Bass, if you had lived in Ireland, Saint Patrick would have kept the snakes and driven you out!” Then her anger broke like the North Sea against the Irish shore, and her head sank to her breast.
“Go now. Leave me alone in this snake pit you call home. Leave me to consider my foolish pride and ambition. Leave me alone.”
Max walked toward the blanket door of his dugout, attempting to put some pride into his step although he could find none in his soul at that moment, but the effort was more than he could bear. He slunk toward the door.
It was bright outside, as though a curious world had focused a light on this devious two-legged creature to probe the depth of his perversion. Max’s breath left him in one long sigh, and he had no more energy than a deflated balloon.
But there was work. Always there was work, and Max fled to it for refuge.
In town, the banker was still at work. The two tellers and the bookkeeper stayed nearly half an hour after the five o’clock closing time, waiting for Phillips to emerge from his office. Phillips usually left the bank at two, never later than three, and then set up shop at Millard’s. He had never before been in the bank at closing time, and his employees didn’t know now if they should leave or wait until he dismissed them.
But finally, they pulled the shades and slipped quietly out the door. Phillips had been in a miserable mood this afternoon, and it was safer for them to take a chance he would be feeling better tomorrow than risk intruding tonight.
The banker was singularly occupied. In his office, he pored over every account, every loan for mention of Maxwell Bass as borrower or even cosigner. But there was none.
That son of a bitch
had never borrowed a penny from the bank and never deposited a nickel in it. As impossible as that seemed, the proof was in the books.
Phillips gritted his teeth. If Bass had owed money, the banker would have a stick to poke him where it hurts—in the pocketbook. But there was nothing.
The banker sat at his desk, grinding his teeth. Bass had a soft spot—everyone does. But where was it?
And then the corners of Phillips’s mouth twitched into a perverse smile. Bass had accounts with the merchants in town. He had to. Paychecks come in twice a year for ranchers, not twice a month. And all the merchants owed the bank money. The banker would cut Bass off at the pockets and then wait with relish for that son of a bitch to come in, hat in hand.
Phillips was chuckling to himself as he stepped out of his office into the empty bank. His eyes narrowed for a moment when he realized his employees had sneaked off at the stroke of five o’clock, leaving their boss to labor alone. He’d teach them a thing or two about a full day’s pay for a full day’s work. He’d wait until the bank was full of customers tomorrow before he told those shirkers what he thought of them. Word would spread through town about how the bank president dressed down his malingering employees. That thought coaxed another smile to the banker’s face, and the smile widened as Phillips realized that he had time for a beer before Mrs. Harris put on dinner at the boarding house.
It wasn’t a bad day at all, when you could go home at night looking forward to the next morning.
5
Max took the mare downstream to the natural corral carved out of the sandstone slab lining each bank of the creek. He had run posts and poles across either end of the enclosure, leaving a fifteen-foot gate on the near end. It was there he had put up the tall grass that grew along the creek, cutting it and waiting until the sun dried it before he built the haystack. Stack hay too wet and it burns—spontaneous combustion. Stack it too dry and the leaves and seeds and food value leach out of it. Max’s hay was just about right.
The mare nickered when she smelled the other horses downstream from the corral. After the wheat was harvested, Max had turned out his pair of Percherons to graze on the grass that grew along the creek and the windswept hill to the north. Most of Max’s homestead of 640 acres, a square mile, was still in grass and would remain that way.
But the horses had become accustomed to the daily feedings of hay and oats, and they lingered around the corral, awaiting Max’s ministrations.
Instead, he picked up a couple of rocks and chucked them at the animals, yelling and waving his arms until they reluctantly trotted away. There was precious little hay and rolled oats for the winter. Foolish to feed horses now when they could just as well feed themselves.
Max tried to bury himself in his work, but there was too little to do today, and his mind skipped back to the scene in the dugout. He was leaning against a pitchfork, thinking about that, when he heard her voice, hard against the sound of the creek.
“Mr. Bass!”
She was standing at the road beside the creek, dressed for travel with her trunk at her feet. Max wondered how she had managed to drag the heavy trunk that far by herself, and then he was filled with dread. He didn’t want to look into those eyes again, hear the pain in her voice.
The day was cooling. It was that special time when the day surrenders to the night. Big, brassy, and bright under the sun, Montana turns magic at twilight, sighing contentedly before retiring.
But Max was not content as he walked to Catherine.
“I’m ready to go.”
“Ma’am?”
“I’m ready to take you up on your offer. I would like a ride back to Prairie Rose and fare back to Boston.”
“You didn’t take that offer. We’re married now, for better or worse.”
“What?” Catherine snarled, the anger bubbling out of her. “You brought me here on a lie. If you think I will honor this … this marriage, you are even slower of wit than you appear. Do you really think I will live in a hole in the ground like a snake? Do you think that I am content to spend the rest of my life denning up with the likes of you? Perhaps you find the thought of that acceptable, but I do not. Neither do I, Mr. Bass, find you acceptable.”
Max could feel the color rising in his face. Twice this day she had done that to him. When he replied, his voice was low and taut. “Madam,” he said, his anger overriding his soft drawl, “before you get too high and mighty, you might remember a few things. I did lie in that newspaper ad, and I lied in those letters, too. That doesn’t come easy to me. But you didn’t marry a ranch or a coal mine or money. You married a man. After you saw me in town, I gave you a chance to go back to Boston, but you chose to stay here. I was acceptable to you then. You stood before a priest and swore that. You didn’t tell the priest that you would marry me if I had a ranch and a coal mine. You said you would marry me, and by God, that’s what you did. You made your bed, and now you’re going to lie in it!”
Catherine gasped. “Mr. Bass,” she hissed, “if you bed me tonight, so help me God, I will kill you. The first time you turn your back on me, the first time I catch you asleep, I will kill you!”
The unleashed vehemence drove Max back a step. Never had he seen unbridled anger like that without blood being shed.
“Now, you wait a minute,” Max said. “I didn’t say anything about bedding you, although you are my legal, lawful wife, and I have the right.”
“No!” Catherine barked. “I have the right,” and she swung it, smack, against Max’s face.
The blow took Max by surprise, and he was surprised, too, at how much it stung. His anger rose like a winter storm.
“Madam,” he said low and deep and ugly, “if you were a man, I’d … I’d.…”
“If you were a man,” Catherine interrupted, “you wouldn’t have to order your women through the mail.”
“And if you were a lady,” Max growled, “you wouldn’t run halfway across the country at the first scent of money. There is a name for women who choose their men by the thickness of their wallet.”
Catherine cocked her fist.
“If you hit me again, I will likely forget you are a woman.”
This time Catherine backed off a step. They stood there glaring at each other, hearts hammering. And then the anger left Max, and he looked away, ashamed of himself: for losing his temper and threatening Catherine, for lying, for asking a woman to share his pitiful existence. When he looked at Catherine she was as pale as he felt. She wouldn’t meet his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Max said, and he was. “I think we need to talk this thing over.”
“We can talk it over on the way back to Prairie Rose.”
“I can’t take you back to Prairie Rose tonight. It’s too far. You’ll spend the night here.” When Catherine bridled, he continued, “Now I didn’t mean anything by that. I won’t bother you.
“I have to take care of the chickens. If you would fix us dinner, it would be a big help. There’s an ice house just up that little side coulee above the dug out. There’s some potatoes and some lard and some deer in there.…”
“Mr. Bass, I will fix you dinner. That much. Nothing more.”
Max nodded and climbed toward the wagon on shaky legs. Marriage sure as hell wasn’t all it was cut out to be.
There was nothing really that Max could do for the chickens. They were as safe as he could make them in the wagon bed, but he wanted to be alone, away from the lies he had told and the hatred in Catherine’s eyes. He jury-rigged a roof over the wagon box, hoping it would keep coyotes and skunks off the chickens until morning when he could build a proper chicken house and pen.
Max climbed into the wagon and sat there waiting for the day to die. The afternoon sun was painting the sky with colors subtle as a young woman’s blush. There is a serenity that settles over the land then, drawing animals from the cover that hides them during the day. Deer edge from coulees and browse onto sidehills clothed with sage and juniper. Coyotes, always on the run to fill their bell
ies with mice and rabbits and chickens, sing to themselves and their prey: Hear me, rabbit. Shake in your hiding place, for I am coming to fill my belly with your quivering flesh.
Max slid off the wagon seat. It was time to deal with Catherine now. He wouldn’t tell her everything. She would likely run if he did, but he had best tell her something about his goals, his dreams, if he wanted her to stay in Prairie Rose. He took a deep breath and walked toward the dugout through the deepening darkness.
Catherine had found the icehouse. It had double doors, leading to an interior, rough, but in many ways built better than the dugout. Max had lined the walls with sandstone slabs hauled down from the rimrock. The roof was made of rough lumber, lined with tarpaper. The back of the icehouse was stacked roof high with blocks of ice that had been cut the preceding winter from the creek and covered with dark sawdust. There were sacks of potatoes stacked on the near wall, away from the ice; hanging from a hook in the middle of the ceiling was a hind quarter of venison.
Catherine didn’t realize the luxury of having fresh venison in the summer, of having an icehouse in which to store fresh meat. She left the quarter hanging, cutting deeply into the chilled flesh with a knife she found there, ringing the thigh bone for two round steaks. The meat smelled wild, like the sage that painted the prairie silver in the sun, like the sage leaves Max had crushed between his fingers a hundred years ago that afternoon and offered to Catherine so that she might sniff their pungency.
This was not the first time Catherine had prepared venison. The master of the Boston home fancied himself a hunter, and when he downed an animal, he offered the carcass to the staff because he didn’t fancy the taste.
Catherine carried the steak and a few potatoes back to the dugout where she coated the meat with flour and salt and pepper and shaved the potatoes into thin slices.
There was a bucket of kindling and a box of coal beside the stove. Catherine tossed the kindling into the stove and threw in a scoop of coal. Next, she spooned lard into a frying pan and set it on top. Within moments, the lard was smoking, and Catherine shoveled steak and potatoes into the pan.
