“I’m not doing my share, and with Linc gone…”
“What do you think we’re doing?” Rand frowned.
She half shrugged.
“In the last two days we’ve pulled three live animals out of the mud, rounded up ten more that might not make it. Thanks be to God that the grass is growing, but it can’t come up fast enough. We’ve stripped the trees of branches, the sagebrush is grazed down to the ground, and…” He spun around at the thunderclap that rocked their ears. A roar like ten freight trains bearing down on them made him mount up and ride back around the barn. The river ice was breaking up.
“Get back to the house!”
She could barely hear his shout over the roaring and grinding. She raced up the slight rise and, once beyond the barn, looked back to see the iced-over river bucking and surging with huge chunks of ice piling, then tilting and disappearing under the surge. Dead cattle floated on the ice, spun in the frothing water, flipped up, and went under. Water covered the ice along the shore and flowed out onto the bottom land, splintering trees, always with the roar, be it of agony or a cry for freedom from winter’s solid lock.
Rand nudged his horse to a gallop to herd the cattle in the bottom away from the flooding water.
Opal stood watching, unaware of the tears pouring down her cheeks. All that death now choking the river that usually brought life. Most years the spring breakup was a celebration, but this year’s was an ear-pounding dirge. She turned at the hand on her shoulder. Ruby stood just behind her, Per on her hip and leaning against her shoulder.
Together, tears streaming down their cheeks, arms around each other’s waists, the sisters held each other up.
“‘The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away: blessed be the name of the Lord.”’ Ruby muttered the verse over and over until Opal wanted to clap her hands over her ears and scream at her to stop.
“If He loves us so much, why does He keep taking away?” The cry wrenched from her heart, leaving a gaping hole.
“No matter what, He is right here with us. He promised, and our Lord God never breaks a promise.” Ruby rocked her son, who had started to whimper, a small cry turning into the cough that had never left him. “‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, thou art with me….”’
The valley of death. The ridges of death and a prairie that stank of death to high heaven. Opal reached over to take Per. “I’ll get his medicine.” What she really wanted to do was start running and not stop until there was clean air, clean grass with cattle grazing, and clean rivers flowing with spring runoff, not winter death and coughing children with runny noses.
Maybe Atticus chose the wiser move by heading west. Surely a place where the winters weren’t so terrible was better than here in the Little Missouri River Valley. Whatever had she seen in the badlands anyway?
CHAPTER NINETEEN
April
Hanging the wash out on the clotheslines made her feel that winter was indeed past.
“Amethyst?”
She turned at Pearl’s call. “Out here.”
“Is Carly with you?”
“No.” Amethyst dropped the clothespins back in the basket and turned toward the house. “She was playing with her baby on the back porch.” Where could the little girl have gone? Out to her father’s workshop. She picked up her skirts and ran toward the shop.
“Here she is,” Carl called from the door of his shop. “She can play in here for now.”
Ah, such welcome words. Amethyst patted her heart back into its normal pace and returned to finish hanging up the diapers. The sheets were most likely dry now with this warm wind blowing. If March came in like a lion, which it had, it certainly went out like a lamb, leaving room for burgeoning April.
You haven’t written to your father. That inner voice could be a nag at any time, but on a day like this, it seemed particularly offensive.
I wrote once.
I know, but that’s not enough.
I don’t know what to say.
Just say what is true.
What? That I’m never going back there? That I am happy here, working for someone else, which he always said was a fate worse than death. She stopped shaking out the diapers, twisted to get most of the water out, and took a moment to look around. The bluffs across the river and to the north glowed red and rust with a line of gray, as if a giant painter were trying out new colors. The tops of the cottonwoods along the river sported apple green fuzz, and the willows waved wands of yellow green that glistened in the sun. Puff clouds, white as the flapping diapers, set off a blue so dense that only God could dream up the color.
Carl had identified the birdsong that made her smile as a meadowlark. A pair of them dueled back and forth, each trying to out-concert the other. Darting swallows attached daubs of mud to the eaves of the barn, building their houses new every year. Sparrows flitted in the brush that backed the barn going up the hill, and two jays fought over a hole in a dead tree.
When spring came to the badlands, it didn’t wait around on polite but rolled in on laughter and singing.
Amethyst checked on the sheets—dry, as she’d surmised, and smelling of new life and clean. As she took them down and folded them, she watched huge Vs of ducks quack their way overhead, heading north to their nesting grounds. The haunting songs of the geese took her heart with them. Where did they go so high and free in the blue expanse of sky that went on forever? The hills and forests of Pennsylvania didn’t begin to prepare one for the Dakotah sky that arched in a celestial bowl overhead.
Amethyst folded the last of the sheets, her mind going back to a time she and her brother Patrick lay in the spring green grass and watched the clouds sailing on invisible courses overhead, shaping and reshaping into figures of fairy-tale proportions. They’d tried to outdo each other in the stories they created until Pa came looking for them, chivying them back to endless work.
Carrying the basket under her arm and on her hip, she returned to the tubs simmering over fires in the yard. Washing all the bedding, the curtains, towels, and winter long johns worked better outside. She stirred the caldron of work clothes bubbling in the soapy water and added another bucket of fresh water to the rinse.
Carl had built a bench to hold the tub with the scrub board where Pearl labored, rubbing her husband’s work pants up and down on the rippled board, soaping the stains and rubbing some more. She wiped a lock of hair from her forehead with the back of her hand and went back to the scrubbing.
“Why don’t you let me do that?” Amethyst set her basket down and dipped shirts out of the rinse water into another tub on the bench where she could wring them out. She and Pearl worked together on wringing out the sheets and heavy things, each taking an end of the garment or sheet and turning in the opposite direction.
“I will. At least we’re not hanging things on bushes like years ago. Or pounding the clothes on rocks at the river.”
“You didn’t really wash that way?” Amethyst stared at her friend.
“Not I, but those before me did. They had a scrubbing board at Dove House, and Daisy did most of the washing. Cimarron was and still is a beautiful seamstress, and keeping white tablecloths on the dining room tables kept Daisy at the ironing board a good part of the time. We held school in one room and used the dining room on Sunday mornings for worship. Then afterward everyone stayed for hot rolls and coffee. Ruby did her best to provide comfort and culture in a hamlet—not big enough to be called a village as far as I was concerned—that really didn’t want or appreciate her efforts. Little Missouri had a sordid reputation, still has for that matter. Marquis de Mores started Medora, named after his wife, and wouldn’t allow drinking and gambling into town.”
“Life here must have been a shock for you after living in Chicago.” Amethyst poured the water from her wringing back in the rinse tub steaming over the fire and added more wood to both fires. Then she used a sturdy stick to stir the clothes in the soapy water. She walked over to the bench and nudged Pearl
to the side. “My turn. You rinse and wring.”
“It was a shock but refreshing too. And after I met Carl—I can tell you, my father had no good things to say about that.”
“But you married him anyway.” Soap, shove, and rub. The rhythm was easy, but the lye soap ate at the skin on one’s hands.
“I’ve never once regretted it.” Pearl gave the shirt she was wringing out an extra twist. “Carl knew how to laugh, and he loved books and music.” She paused for a moment, staring into space. “I am so blessed.” A smile curved her cheeks. “Perhaps there’s a fine man for you here, just like there was for me.”
Amethyst ignored the last comment. “What about your father?”
“Oh, he came out here to get me, but I was in love with Carl by then and had no intentions of returning to Chicago. Carl and Rand stood up to him, wouldn’t let him take me back.”
“My land, but you were a brave one.” Amethyst could feel a trickle of perspiration down her back. Scrubbing dirty winter clothes on a scrub board was about as warming as chopping wood. She’d done her share of both.
“What about you? You traveled farther than I did, with only a glimmer of where you were going and no guarantee your nephew would be here—in the middle of the worst winter ever.” Pearl dropped the last of the washed things into the rinse water, then added more men’s pants to the wash water and pushed them all under with the stirring stick. She studied the brew for a moment before carving more soap into the pot.
“My father said I had to do it—had to come for Joel. And it was all for nothing.” She lifted her face to the sun and caught a view of the buttes across the river. “Well, as far as Pa’s concerned, that is.” She puffed out her cheeks on a sigh. I have to write to him again. Guilt was as bad a burden as icy snow. Both left you feeling weighted down and wanting to give up.
“He’s not written to you?”
“No. I’m sure he’s waiting to hear me say I’m on my way back to the farm, groveling and pleading for his permission to live there again.” She shook her head. Just the thought gave her the shivers.
She’d given up that day in the blizzard, and God had sent an angel to rescue her. He’d sent His Son to rescue her from guilt. She understood that much from her years of sitting in church on Sunday mornings. Albeit she understood more about hell and the dangers thereof than of heaven and a God who loved her. But who else had sent the angel to save her if not He?
Two meadowlarks dipped and trilled overhead. Other birds sang from the thicket. Every day she heard new birdsongs. Water ran off the hill and joined that from the spring, gurgling and dancing to the river that still raged but now without ice floes. Carcasses of cattle could be seen floating, along with trees and brush. Overhead, ducks and geese heading northward all sang wild songs of their own.
“This is my favorite season, when winter is banished with its howling wind and spring returns with songs from brush and sky and land. The peeper frogs that sing in the evening always make me know that spring is here.” Pearl handed Amethyst the legs of a man’s pants, and they began twisting again.
“I better go check on the bread,” Amethyst said when the pants were dry as possible. “Can I bring you anything?”
“A glass of buttermilk would be a fine treat.”
“That it would if we had any. When is the cow due to calve?”
“Mid-April, so it won’t be long.” Pearl looked around to check on her daughter. “Cookies would be good.”
Amethyst headed for the back door. She’d set the bread to rising between starting the fires for the wash water and cooking breakfast.
She punched the dough back down and set it to rise again in a patch of sunshine with a cloth over the bowl, checked on the beans baking in the oven, and looked in the cookie jar to find only three cookies left. Another job needing doing. At breakfast Pearl and Carl had discussed digging up the garden. The men had pulled the straw and manure banking away from the house and scattered it on top of the snow that had still covered the garden spot, and now it needed to be dug in and the peas and potatoes planted Pearl had started some seeds in the house to get a head start on the garden.
With the cookies in a napkin, she returned to the outside, giving Carl one, then Carly, and the last to Pearl.
“Are we out?”
“Yes. I should have baked last night.”
“There is no law that says the cookie jar must always be full.” Pearl broke her cookie in half and insisted Amethyst take a share. “The bread won’t be ready for dinner, so perhaps I should make biscuits.”
“Or corn bread. Once the ground dries out enough so we can take the wagon out, we’ll go get staples at the store in town.” With the melting of the snow, Carl had taken the runners off the wagon and set the wheels back on, but as the frost melted out of the ground, the prairie turned into a quagmire that trapped wagon wheels and sometimes the horses.
“Ma?” Carly joined them. “Baby crying.”
“I know. I heard him. Thank you.” Pearl had set Joseph in a basket in the shade of the shop, and he had been sleeping peacefully. “You didn’t wake him, did you?”
The little girl shook her head. “Hungry.”
“You had a cookie.”
“More?”
“Sorry, all gone.”
Pearl glanced up to check the sun’s position. “Dinner will be soon.”
The warm wind tossed the clothes on the lines and tugged at skirts and aprons. In spite of hairpins and her remaining comb, Amethyst had to stop often to repin the hair that insisted on partying with the wind. Tomorrow I’m going to braid it, she promised herself. This is silly. Back home she had frequently worn a triangle of cloth over it, but the feel of the sun and the wind was like a tonic after being housebound for so long.
“Comp’ny,” Carly sang out.
Pearl shaded her eyes with her hand, the better to see the rider heading their way. “Oh no.” Her groan made Amethyst look up. The man wearing a cape of skins looked vaguely familiar, seeming to dwarf the pony he rode.
“Why the groan?”
“Jake Maunders. You can always recognize him by his smell. That and the hides he wears.”
Since he was downwind of them, his odor didn’t precede him, but Amethyst recognized him as he drew closer. “He came into the station when I was trying to decide what to do. The stationmaster said had it been anyone else, he’d have asked him to bring me here.”
“Wise man. Jake is one of the best guides for hunting and fishing, but his morals leave something to be desired. I wouldn’t trust him any farther than I could throw him and his horse.”
The man stopped his horse and crossed his arms on the saddle horn. “Fine day, ain’t it, ladies?”
“What do you want, Mr. Maunders?” Pearl continued dipping clothes from the boiling water.
“Just tryin’ to be neighborly.” He nodded to Amethyst. “And greet our newcomer here.” He paused as if waiting to be introduced. He tipped his felt hat, a feather in the band. “Howdy, miss. Jake Maunders is my name.”
“Don’t say anything,” Pearl muttered under her breath.
“You in need of fresh meat? I got here a string of grouse.”
“Thank you, but we have sufficient.”
“No charge. Call it my welcome gift.” He rode closer and held out the birds, their feet tied together with a leather string.
Pearl sighed and shook her head. “Thank you.” She took the birds and stepped back. “We’ll enjoy these.”
He tipped his hat again. “I’ll be seein’ you.”
Amethyst caught a whiff of rank skins, stale booze, and unwashed human. It reminded her of her father. A shudder started inside her, and she breathed through her mouth. As if she would ever be interested in a man like him.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Now that the winter’s broken, we—I mean the folks around here—would be pleased if you would lead the service on Sunday.” Charlie looked up from the hat brim he’d been mangling.
I’ve
done two funerals and a wedding, so I guess the secret that I’m a pastor is pretty much out of the bag. It would be churlish to refuse his request. But how can I lead the service when…how can I not? Jacob did his best to keep his face neutral. Lord God, is this from you, or am I running ahead again or behind?
In order to serve here, would he have to tell them everything? True, he’d told Rand about his less than perfect past, but that was some different than confessing to an entire group of people.
But I’ve been forgiven! So why do I feel like a pile left by one of the cows? He thought to the Scripture he’d read after another night of nightmare attacks. If he’d had more self control, if he’d loved enough to wait, if he’d not run. You know better than to be assailed and defeated by ifs. He tried to talk sternly to himself, but he could chalk up another in the failure column. The verse. Hang on to the verse. “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.” He repeated it to himself again. If there is no condemnation to those in Christ, why did he feel so condemned? Some days he rose above it, and others, like now…
He sighed. “I don’t have time to prepare a sermon.” What a flimsy excuse. “But I could use one written from before…I mean, from a long time ago.”
“Jacob, we are so hungry for the Word of God to be taught and preached…” Charlie paused. “You know I been leading the services. We sort of take turns reading the Scripture and singing and praying, but other than reading aloud, I got nothin’ to offer. We need a pastor here, especially now when everyone is so dunked in despair after this winter.”
Including me. I need to write to Melody’s folks…. All the letters I wrote up at the line shack, I didn’t include one to them. They deserve to know that Joel is doing great out here. And about the aunt who came to get him.
“Look, Charlie, I’ll lead this service, and then we need to call a meeting to officially form a congregation and see if everyone would like me to become their pastor.”
“We got no money to pay you.”
“Did I say anything about pay?” I owe some people here such a debt, I’ll never get it paid off.
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