Mountain Solo

by Jeanette Ingold

  Uncle Joe had gone to a meeting in the lower valley, or Frederik might have asked him what to do. As it was, he couldn't decide, couldn't even settle on exactly what the choices were. He brought in stove wood, mended a piece of harness, and looked around for another job: anything to keep his mind off matters he couldn't help.

  He picked up his violin, or fiddle, as Maureen called it, and then abruptly put it back down. He climbed the loft ladder Come morning, he'd ask his uncle for advice.

  But he couldn't sleep, not with his mind circling around the same questions: What should I have done? Brought Maureen hack here? To do What? Be what?

  He was still awake when the cabin door opened around midnight. Frederik was surprised to hear voices, until he realized it was just his uncle talking with a neighbor.

  He raised his head from his pillow so he could hear better.

  "I'm giving up" Uncle Joe said. "The others can keep fighting if they want to, but I'm done with lawyers and with throwing good money after bad."

  "So will you try to rebuy this place?"

  "No, by Gott, that is not what I'll do. Why didn't anybody say, I'd like to know, that the railroad had already been granted this land, back before the Middlers started working it? Or when they so|d it to me? They thought they had a legal right, and I believed they did. So, no, by Gott, I won't pay for my own land again or wait to be evicted."

  "But if the Middlers were squatters..."

  "No!"

  Frederik had heard all this before but never heard it said with such finality. When the neighbor left, he untangled himself from the bedcovers and climbed down the ladder "What's happened?"

  "Just another lawyer's letter but I've had enough. I'm going to pull out while I've still a bit of money to get a new place with a solid title."

  "Where?" Frederik asked, his mind running over the homesteads up and down the Rattlesnake.

  "There's good land at cheap prices in the Bitterroot, and the river there keeps the climate good. An apple orchard, I'm thinking."

  "But..."

  "We'll plant trees." Suddenly Uncle Joe looked weary and old. "We'll talk in the morning, nephew, but I've made up my mind. I aim to move within the month. Sooner if I can."

  Leaving his uncle sitting at the kitchen table, Frederik returned to the loft. Sometime later he awoke with his heart thudding and his insides feeling sick with shame. Maureen trusted me, and I failed her. I got her in trouble and then left her to face the consequences alone.

  No matter what tale Augie would or wouldn't volunteer Naill O'Leary would see Augie's banged-up face and demand to know what had happened. He would be furious when he learned that Frederik had been with Maureen in the O'Leary cabin, and Frederik didn't even want to think how Naill might take it out on her.

  With no clear plan in mind—just a conviction he had to try to help Maureen—at first light Frederik saddled Patch. He hurried to the O'Leary place on Rattlesnake Creek, only to find it already deserted. Looking through the cabin's single front window, he could see that Maureen and Augie had taken some of the cabin's meager furnishings. They'd left the table with the tablecloth still on it, but the candleholder Maureen had made was gone.

  Maybe Maureen thinks she's going to have to live up at the mine, Frederik thought. Or I guess in that shack she said they have just below it.

  "Come on, Patch," he said, urging his horse into a fast trot.

  When Frederik got to the gulch the O'Learys had taken over he scanned the hillsides until he spotted a pile of raw earth high up He marked the spot by a large rock outcropping a short distance away, and then he hurried along the gulch bottom, taking a trail that followed a small stream.

  A blast of dynamite karoomed out, making Patch shy and balk.

  "It's okay, Patch. Okay there," Frederik said. If Naill and Augie are doing mining work already, things must be all right, he told himself. I'm going to find Maureen doing chores, cooking breakfast maybe.

  At last he reached a tiny, makeshift shack built directly on dirt. Augie O'Leary's big roan and Maureen's and Naill O'Leary's riding horses skittered nervously inside a barbed-wire pen. Frederik slipped off Patch and tied him to a tree.

  "Maureen?" he called.

  No one answered, and when Frederik opened the door he didn't see anything but a couple of straight chairs, messy pallets, and an old stove.

  Another karoom echoed through the gulch. They must all be up there, Frederik thought. He located the rock outcropping and angled up the hillside toward it until he came on a pack trail. Moving quickly along it, he glimpsed the earth pile ahead, and then, suddenly, he was standing on a narrow shelf of land almost completely taken up by a pit with the timbered entrance to a mine tunnel at its bottom.

  The first person Frederik saw was Naill O'Leary, looking up from the floor of the pit. Shouting in an unintelligible bellow of rage, Naill started up a ladder.

  Then Frederik saw Maureen backed against the hill on one side, her face battered. Sounding frantic, she called, "Frederik, go away!"

  Augie appeared from the brush on Frederik's other side, veered away, and pushed past a loaded packhorse. He bumped against the animal, and a blanket-wrapped bundle fell off and broke open. Items tumbled across the ground.

  "Augie, I just want to talk," Frederik called, starting after him. He turned back and looked toward the pit. "Mr. O'Leary!" he called. "I want to talk."

  Naill, his face appearing at the edge of the pit, shouted something Frederik couldn't understand.

  Maureen yelled, "Watch out! Frederik ... Augie, no!"

  Frederik spun and saw Augie leaning around the packhorse, aiming a rifle. Frederik dived for the ground as Augie fired. Maureen began screaming, and Frederik, rolling in a desperate effort to reach cover saw Augie's expression turn to horror.

  "Pa!" Maureen ran to the edge of the pit as Augie turned and began running down the hillside. She cried out, "No!"

  Frederik, hurrying to her, saw Naill O'Leary lying at the pit's bottom, all blood where one eye should have been. Augie's shot his own Pa, Frederik thought, hardly able to take it in. He was aiming at me hut I moved ... and his bullet hit Naill.

  LATE THAT AFTERNOON, Uncle Joe and Frederik helped a sheriff's deputy load Naill O'Leary's body onto a horse. Then they again offered awkward words of comfort to Maureen, who was holding herself in stiff control.

  Frederik struggled to grasp all the problems facing her. Bad as Maureen's father and brother had been, they had taken care of her But with Naill dead and Augie run off maybe soon to be arrested for causing Naill's death—the sheriff's deputy hadn't been much interested in taking it as an accident—what would Maureen do now?

  Even if her father had left a good tide to the O'Leary place on the creek, which he hadn't, she couldn't live on it by herself. Not anymore than she could live in the shack down in the gulch.

  "Do you know what you'll do?" Frederik asked her.

  "Go to my aunt's in town, if she'll have me."

  "Of course she will," Uncle Joe said, appearing relieved. "And we'll see you're settled in before we leave." At her questioning look, he explained, "Frederik and I are moving to the Bitterroot Valley. I'd already decided that, and after this violence today, I'm all the more ready to be done with the Rattlesnake."

  "I'm not!" Frederik heard himself say. He wanted to live in these mountains the rest of his life. And he didn't want to go anyplace too far from Maureen. Still, he had a hard time not sounding scared when he said, "I guess I'll stay here. Maybe move up to the line dugout and do some trapping come winter."

  Uncle Joe let out his breath in a little puff of frustration.

  Frederik promised Maureen. "I'll get in to town to see you when I can."

  "Please," she said, and her face kind of crumpled in. She bent down to pick up something from among the items that had fallen off the packhorse. Frederik recognized the punched can candleholder as she flung it away.

  "Why'd you do that?" Frederik asked.

  She answered, "I don't want the
reminder If I hadn't made it ... hadn't wanted to show you..."

  He thought, It wasn't a candleholder that brought us here.

  Frederik, arriving in town for the first time since Christmas, looked forward to seeing Maureen. He hoped her aunt would invite him to have dinner with them in their small, rented house. She had the last time, and she'd even thawed enough to make Frederik feel welcome.

  First, however he had to sell the bundle of pelts he'd brought with him.

  At the hide and fur exchange he watched a purchasing clerk count over $112.50 for furs from a dozen ermines, eight marten, three mink, two bobcats, and two beavers. A winter's worth of catching and skinning animals and then fleshing, stretching, and drying their pelts.

  The earnings were a disappointment, although he'd probably done well considering the late start he'd gotten on the trapping season. Snow had blocked Patch out of the high country before Frederik could finish hauling supplies to his line huts, and that meant that by January he was using precious time to snowshoe down to valley cabins where he could trade pelts for as much food as he could carry.

  And it hadn't helped that a few weeks ago, back in February, a wolverine had run his line, chewing up a half dozen animals before Frederik got to them. Still, to come out with just $112.50! And he'd have to use some of that to pay the people who'd boarded Patch for five months.

  As he walked along residential streets on his way to Maureen's, he calculated his needs and how much he might make hiring out as a ranch hand come spring He'd be glad to take that kind of work as long as he could get on someplace close. He'd live in a bunkhouse, be fed with the other hands, and put away every penny he made. And if he could get on with a logging outfit next winter and save those wages, then, maybe...

  ALTHOUGH THE weather was freezing, Maureen came running out to meet him. He knew, even before he saw her expression, that something was wrong Behind her her aunt's house had a FOR LET sign on the door AND the windows were bare of curtains.

  "What's going on?" Frederik asked.

  "She's leaving," Maureen said. "Because of Augie. He's in jail, and..." Maureen broke off. "I'm sorry," she said, straightening her body into proud, straight lines. "This isn't the way to explain things."

  "Let's get your coat," Frederik said. "We can go down to the park and talk."

  Not until they were settled on a bench brushed clear of snow did he say, "Now. Start with Augie. He got picked up?"

  "Just after New Year" Maureen answered. And now he's been tried and found guilty of manslaughter I guess the jury thought that even if his killing Pa was an accident, it happened because he was aiming the gun at you."

  Frederik nodded. That was in the statements he and Maureen had given the sheriff's deputy.

  "The newspaper reported the trial," Maureen said, "and that's -why my aunt's moving to Seattle, where her daughter lives. She says she can't ever again hold her head up here."

  A leaden feeling spread through Frederik. Are you going with her?"

  "No. I'm not invited. My aunt says she's sorry but she's had enough of the O'Leary family, with my pa driving off her sister and now Augie a criminal. She said she won't take bad blood to her daughter's."

  Maureen looked away. Anyway," she said, "I wouldn't leave here."

  "Do you know what you'll do?" Frederik asked. In his mind, the question sounded like the echo that it was. He'd asked the same thing back in September.

  Maureen answered, "I'll have to find work. Rent a room someplace."

  What kind of work? Frederik wondered. There were few enough jobs for women, and Maureen, sixteen years old, with no high school diploma....And if her own aunt didn't want an O'Leary around, maybe others wouldn't, either.

  THREE DAYS LATER, he and Maureen stood in an unheated church and were married by a priest. All through the hurried service, the cleric looked at them with angry pity, seeming provoked that he had no better choices to offer.

  Then, with Maureen behind Frederik on Patch and with her horse laden with food supplies, they rode across the bridge over Rattlesnake Creek and then north past the boarded-up house that no longer belonged to Uncle Joe.

  They went by the abandoned O'Leary place on the creek. The door hung open, and snow lay in mounds inside.

  They passed trails into the high country where Frederik had wintered, but a trapline dugout wasn't a place for a bride.

  They went to the only place they could think o£ to the shack below the O'Leary mine. As far as they knew, no one had laid claim to the land along the gulch bottom and certainly no one else would want that old shack.

  When they pulled up in front, the depressing place was already in deep shadow. Frederik kicked through a snowdrift, pushed the door open, and stepped back. The inside stank of animals: mice and probably something bigger maybe whatever had knocked the stovepipe loose and scattered soot. The few household goods had been chewed to tags of litter and rodent droppings were everywhere.

  Frederik quickly closed the door before Maureen could see.

  "You know," he said, "a ways back I noticed a spruce with a clear space under it the size of a room. I wonder if Mrs. Bottner would like to spend her wedding night camping out?"

  Tomorrow would be time enough to face what they'd come to.

  Tessie

  On my first morning at my new academic school—earlier in September than my music school would start—I stood before a bulletin board and tried to get my bearings. All around me kids who hadn't seen one another since June were trying to cram a summer's talk into the few minutes before classes began. The school was only for professional kids and kids working toward careers in the performing arts, and it went from the upper middle grades through senior high, so the voices around me ranged in pitch from little-kid thin to almost grown-up.

  I'd hoped the bulletin board would have a map of the school's layout, but instead I found tacked-up notices of concert programs and playbills from shows where students had parts. Wow, I thought, spotting one from a new hit musical. A cast member's name was highlighted in yellow. Someone from this school is in that?

  A teacher called, "Time to get to your rooms, everybody," and I turned just as a boy came up to me.

  "I've been watching for you," he said as I recognized the cello player who'd wished me good luck with my music school audition. "I wondered if you'd be one of the new wunderkind here."

  I started to draw back and then realized he wasn't hassling me. He was teasing, sure, but he was also welcoming me to a place where special talent was what everyone had. At that instant, I understood I was at last in a school where I belonged. It was an idea so overwhelming that it made tears fill my eyes and spill over.

  "Hey, don't cry!" he said. "I didn't mean anything bad." He fumbled in a sweatshirt pocket and pulled out a cloth that had been used for cleaning rosin dust. "Here. Blow your nose on this."

  I found out that his name was Ben and that he was an eighth grader like me.

  BEN TOOK CHARGE of me those first weeks, kind of the way a nice big brother might take care of a little sister.

  He made sure that I met everybody—dancers and actors and singers, as well as other kids who wanted to be classical musicians. I got to know a girl who played world-class chess and a boy who played pro golf.

  My school seemed to me to be the most extraordinary place, filled with kids leading double lives. Individually we each had our commitment: an instrument to practice or ballet routines to learn; a music or dance school to attend or a coach to work with. But here, although we carried our commitment with us—identified ourselves by our art—here we went to math classes and wrote book reports and gossiped in the school cafeteria just like kids did in schools everywhere.

  At first it surprised me how teachers worked around whatever came up. When I heard my science teacher reviewing material for a kid who'd have to miss class during rehearsals for a new show, I remembered Ms. Watkins, my sixth grade teacher who hadn't wanted me returning from lunch late because of my violin lessons.

 
; And I could just imagine what she'd have to say about theater kids regularly taking off Wednesday afternoons to perform in matinees.

  Sometimes kids would even disappear for weeks at a time, like when the golfer went on tour Or the models. This girl who was really, really stunning was forever taking off to do fashion shoots in places like Frankfurt and Tahiti. Mostly the kids didn't make a big deal about it, and our teachers didn't, either In fact, they went out of their way to help everybody keep up.

  I heard one of them explaining it to the parents of another new student. "When you consider how stressful adolescence is anyway, and then you layer on all the responsibilities these kids carry, it makes you wonder how they handle things as well as they do," he said. "Sometimes I think our most important job is giving them some space."

  I got to know a couple of dancers best, Kiah and Eleni, who went to ballet school on Saturdays the way I went to music school. And sometimes I hung around with two other dancers, both named Amy.

  And there was Ben, of course. After a while he stopped treating me like a little sister We didn't exactly become boyfriend and girlfriend that year but we didn't exactly not, either.

  That year zoomed by, and soon I was into another, and I thought I must be the happiest freshman in all New York. I still loved my academic school, and Saturdays...

  On Saturdays I'd set my alarm for 5:00 A.M. SO I could get in my practice time and still leave early for music school. I wanted to be the first to arrive so that I wouldn't miss anything, not even one minute of being together with the friends I had there. I'd wait on the nearby plaza knowing somebody would call, "Hey, Tess!" and come over.

  Pretty soon there'd be a small group of us laughing and gossiping Early-morning tourists would stare at us, because of the instruments we all carried, and their curiosity made me feel special instead of odd.