The First Dance

by Richard S. Wheeler

  He looked about the town, wanting to tell someone, anyone, what had happened and where he might be found. But the storefronts were black. No light slid from any saloon. The red lanterns at the bordellos were snuffed. None of the rickety boomtown houses leaked light. Miles City slumbered.

  Ah, God. At first light he would pursue the mystery. She was somewhere, and he would find her, and he would discover whether his dreams were shattered or whether this was just some odd setback, some fluke, something that would pass. He would not surrender to despair. It was not in him to do that. He could whistle a little, no matter how deep the dark.

  He had a small cubicle at Fort Keogh in quarters for civilian employees. The post was built on a broad quadrangle a mile west of the town, with civilian quarters close to the stables. The newly married man walked the worn road westward, over the Tongue River bottoms, and reached the post at some small hour. Here was the might of the army, little used now except to stabilize country that had been Sioux turf not many years earlier. Now it was merely a duty post, its ongoing task to pacify the countryside as settlers filled it up.

  Dirk had always felt malaise around the post. It was a white man’s place. Its purpose was to subdue the tribes, including his Crow mother’s people. Yet it was also a post that would keep the tribes from warring on one another, and it would help to turn the various peoples toward stock growing and farming, and to ensure they would have a reserve that would be off-limits to white settlers. The post was also there to protect the tribes from white predators, land-grabbers, and crooked traders, and perhaps that was why Dirk could reconcile himself to working there. It was also a wage, a rare paid vocation for mixed-blood people like himself.

  Dirk let himself into the row house, four small rooms in a line. It would not be a good place for a bride, especially a Métis one, but it would have to do. There were no affordable places in town, especially for people of mixed blood.

  He lit a lamp. She was not there, not lying on his bed, not awaiting him. She was nowhere, a name on a marriage register, a memory in white muslin. Here in his own bleak quarters sorrow fell upon him, and he sat on the bed, rubbing a hand over the gray army blanket, rubbing the blanket as if his hand were tracing her lithe figure.

  He pulled off his boots and stretched out on the bed, still in the suit that had seen a wedding and a loss in the space of a few hours. He tried to think what he would do in the morning. He would head for her parents. And if they hadn’t seen Therese, then … he didn’t want to think about that. She was there with them. Surely she was. Things would get better.

  He had friends there at the fort, and for a moment he thought to awaken them and share his misery with them. His aloneness was overpowering. But he pushed the impulse aside. No one in the post thought much of the Métis, and he had not invited anyone from the post to his wedding. The presence of blue-clad soldiers would have stirred bitterness in the breasts of the Métis.

  It was not far to dawn. He settled on his bunk and lay desolately through the small hours, making sense of nothing. At dawn he arose, washed, and headed into the morning. It would be an hour’s walk to the Trouville farm, an hour’s walk to Therese. He hiked the silent trail into town and continued downriver and then turned up a broad valley out of the north.

  The cottage was silent. A milch cow stood in a pen. Some chickens scurried away at the sight of him. A Red River cart, with its two six-foot wheels, stood empty. He knew he wasn’t presentable. He hadn’t scraped the darkness off his face. His wedding suit was rumpled, his shirt stained. It didn’t matter. There was only one thing in him: to find Therese, discover all the whys, and if humanly possible, claim her still.

  “Ah, you arrive,” said the voice.

  Dirk turned to discover Montclair Trouville standing in shadows.

  “I—Therese, is she here?”

  “Oui, she was here. She dishonored us, coming here after she was given to you. Helene, she was filled with sorrow.”

  “Is Therese—is she safe?”

  “Ah, monsieur, we must speak no more of her. We have turned our faces against her. She came here and shamed us.”

  “But is she safe?”

  “We will not speak of her.”

  “Where is she? I need to find her, sir.”

  “All honor is lost. She did not heed her vows for an hour. We will not welcome her, monsieur. We have lost a daughter.”

  “But I want to find her, talk with her.”

  Therese’s father stared into the dawn, stubborn and silent.

  “I need to talk with her, sir. Is she there, in the house?”

  “Again in my house, never.”

  “Please tell me what happened. I don’t know. She vanished. I spent much of the night trying to find her.”

  “The daughter I have disowned—I will not speak her name—came here, and sent her away I did.”

  “Did she say why?”

  “You are not Métis.”

  “Not Métis? But why does that matter so much?”

  “Ask her those things. Ask them, I will not.”

  Now he saw Therese’s mother in the doorway, smoothing her apron.

  “Ah, seigneur, I know nothing but shame,” she said. “To think that this has befallen you. Ah, I cannot look at you.”

  The farmyard was coming to life in the morning mists. A rooster flapped to a fence rail and crowed.

  “Madam, I am lost. I would like to find my bride. I’d like to hold her hand. I’d like to tell her that love…” That love abides, and love endures setbacks, and love transcends hurts.

  “Monsieur, I think maybe she went to the Desportes,” she said.

  Cousins, then. “I will go there,” he said.

  Now the household was awake. Francois hovered behind his mother. The sun topped the eastern horizon.

  “Wish me good fortune,” Dirk said.

  But Madame Trouville was dabbing her eyes.

  The Desportes were farther downriver. Therese had stumbled there through the darkest of nights. But now, at least, he knew where she was. He tried to frame some thoughts, some tenderness, but he could think of little to say. He hadn’t any idea why she had fled only a few hours after she had repeated her vows. Had he done something terrible? Was she afraid? Was the giving of herself to love something she could not imagine? Had she suddenly decided she didn’t love him? That marriage was a terrible mistake? That she must run? Was there suddenly another, a Métis youth? The very thought tore him to pieces.

  He had no answers, not even a clue or two. She was a mystery now; only hours before, she had been a friend with eyes that lit up whenever they stole a kiss. He set himself upon the path downriver, and found it oddly difficult to walk toward the next Métis homestead. There was in him a deepening thread of bitterness. He had been rejected by a fickle woman. Maybe he was better off. These were strange people. Maybe it was doomed, this marriage. Maybe they’d have it annulled. Maybe no one cared. Maybe it was a very bad joke. Some Métis peacocks who would tell the tale of the rejected Dirk Skye over many an evening’s brandy.

  He pushed bitter thoughts out of his head and continued his lonely walk along the bank of the great river, a walk that lifted him into the morning. He passed red-winged blackbirds in the marshes, and turtles sunning themselves on flat rocks.

  He had never been to the farmstead of the Desportes, though he had ridden past on the river road often enough. Their place lay back of a cottonwood forest, well hidden from river traffic. The less people saw of the Métis, the safer they felt, and their simple homesteads reflected their ever-present fear. He felt a certain empathy. He was alone. They were alone and without citizenship and at the mercy of any American who wanted their land.

  He turned up the two-rut trail and walked a half mile up a modest gulch, with a spring-fed trickle running toward the river. Ahead lay a low ranch house, part sod, part cottonwood log, and the usual barnyard, extensive gardens, and animals.

  She must have known he was coming, because she was standing on the
porch.

  three

  Therese clung to the door, ready to bolt inside, but she held her ground, watching him.

  “Therese,” he said.

  She didn’t respond at first. She simply stood there, still in the white muslin dress, soiled now.

  “I am glad you are safe,” he said.

  She eyed him softly. He saw the stain of tears on her cheeks.

  “I am glad your cousins have welcomed you,” he said.

  He stopped, a few feet away, sensing that if he stepped closer she would vanish into the gloomy interior.

  “Would you like to go sit under the tree and talk?” he asked.

  There was a towering cottonwood nearby, with thick sheltering limbs and giant roots. She glanced swiftly at it and shook her head. “Non,” she said.

  “I worried that you might be sick. Or wounded by some creature in the night.” He included human creatures in that, but didn’t wish to say it.

  “Monsieur, it is no good,” she said.

  He didn’t know how to respond at first. He didn’t know what was no good. “Therese, I hope someday it will be good,” he said.

  “I know,” she said. “It is sad.”

  “Would you come with me? Are we strangers? May we become friends?”

  “Non,” she said. “We are not strangers, not friends, not anything.”

  “Are we married?”

  She peered at him through doe’s eyes, liquid and brown, and didn’t respond.

  “What can I do?” he asked.

  “There is nothing you can do, monsieur.”

  “Am I monsieur now, and not Dirk?”

  She stared softly, quiet as a hare.

  “Have I done something to hurt you?” he asked.

  “It is who you are,” she said.

  “Who I am?”

  “I will go in now,” she said.

  “Therese—please don’t. Please talk with me.”

  “It is who you are,” she said.

  He sensed she was done; she was on the brink of vanishing into that little cottage. There was no one else in sight.

  “Therese, may I come see you tomorrow?”

  “Non,” she said.

  “May I come after a little while?”

  “It will not be good,” she said. “This marriage. It will not be.”

  “Would you come see me? In Miles City?”

  She slowly shook her head. “Now I have told you,” she said.

  “May I hold your hand, for just one moment?”

  She took pity on him, and held out a brown right hand with small and thin fingers. He took it and held it quietly, sensing the flare of feeling in her, feeling he could not identify. The thin silver ring still encased the ring finger of her left hand. She had not removed it.

  “I will come tomorrow,” he said.

  She slowly shook her head. “Non, non,” she said. “Do not torment me.”

  “I will come,” he said. “If only for a moment. Just to see you standing there.”

  She turned away, and slipped into the house. He stood staring at the doorway she had occupied only moments before, his bride, still in her marital gown, still wearing his ring on her finger, but now a thousand miles distant.

  He peered about. There was no sign of anyone. It was as if the Desportes had seen him, and fled somewhere to give Therese utmost privacy. He wished they were present; he wished they were beside her, smiling, welcoming him. But he grew aware of the silence, broken only by the cawing of crows, and the breezes toying with the large kitchen garden the Métis had planted even before they had built their house.

  It would be a long walk to Miles City. He started out, aware of a weariness that was new to him, a weariness rising out of his very bones. He hadn’t slept, but that was not new to him. This was new. He couldn’t put a name to it, but he knew it was sadness and it had invaded every particle of him. She had not found him worthy.

  He wasn’t angry. Maybe that would come later. But not now. He reached the riverbank trail and headed upstream while the anonymous Yellowstone flowed past. He kept on going, each step taking him farther from her, and after a while he reached town and the landing where the flatboats were beached.

  He had two more days of leave, days he had intended to spend in the sweetness and mystery of love. He didn’t want to return to Fort Keogh. Even less did he want to linger in town, where by now his wedding fiasco would be the gossip at all the saloons. He eyed the silent river, and chose to pole across it. He would head for the borrowed cabin where he intended to spend his first hours with Therese, and there he would sleep until it was time to report to the post once again.

  He dragged the flatboat into the water, along with the pole, pushed off, felt the current tug him downriver, and then he poled hard, feeling the long shaft strike bottom. Then he pushed powerfully, letting the pole’s purchase on the riverbed propel him. He reached the far shore, beached the flatboat, turned it over, and slid the pole under it. Then he hiked the obscure pathway up a long gulch that took him to the honeymoon cabin, and found it silent and welcoming in the midday warmth.

  Within, he instantly sensed something different. Then he saw the bouquets. There were few flowers in bloom this late in the year, but someone had gathered asters and daisies and chokecherry branches and cattails and a dozen other things, arranged them in vases made from whiskey bottles, and filled the small, sorrowful cabin with sweetness.

  He couldn’t imagine who. There on the hearth were two stately bouquets. And over in the kitchen area, where there was a rough counter, stood a smaller, humbler bouquet, a spray of brown cattails, and beside the bunk, with its buffalo robes, were small bright bouquets of daisies and asters, mixed with something blue. Someone had come here; someone had sought to lift his heavy heart.

  He couldn’t imagine who had come, or why. But what he saw was love, spread everywhere in that small place. He was overwhelmed with the weariness, and tumbled into the bunk, falling on top of the soft robes, and that was the last he knew.

  It was dark when he awoke. He hadn’t the faintest idea of the hour. Time had stopped. He arose, found a gibbous moon casting silver over the lonely valley. Whatever the hour, he was washed in silence. The moon seemed cold and distant this night, as if to rebuke him. He lacked a timepiece and didn’t know whether the night was young or old. But it didn’t much matter.

  The cabin was a place of broken dreams. It had been erected of cottonwood logs two years earlier by Jack Hopkins, who was attempting to build a small ranch there, little by little, and sell his beef in town. But it was doomed before it was started, by alkali, sagebrush, and thin forage. Then Hopkins vanished after a late-night poker session in Stiles’s saloon, and it was widely assumed his body had drifted down the silent river and the young cowboy would never be seen again. The cattle had vanished and the cabin stood empty. No one wanted a spread that could hardly support a dozen beeves. Dirk had cleaned out the cabin and turned it into a honeymoon haven, but the cabin that had jinxed Hopkins had now jinxed Dirk Skye. Or so he thought. He didn’t much believe in hoodoo, but there he was, on Sunday Creek, as luckless as the previous occupant.

  Dirk settled on the stoop and let the night breezes caress him. He wouldn’t give up on Therese, but now he was wondering whether he had really known her, and why he hadn’t seen this coming. How could he have missed it? He found himself less troubled by her sudden change of heart as he was by his own blindness. Somehow, the woman he had proposed marriage to was utterly different from the one he had married, and he had yet to fathom what was different. It wasn’t that he was a boy, inexperienced and full of heat. He’d been around. He was pushing thirty. He’d had two remarkable women in his life, his own mother Mary, or Blue Dawn, of the Shoshones, and his older Crow mother Victoria, or Many Quill Woman, both made of steel.

  But here he was, sitting alone on the stoop of an abandoned cabin in the middle of a late summer’s night, blindsided by a Métis girl who—he could admit it now—he didn’t know. He’d
always been haunted by beauty, and she was that, all right, the magical combination of France and Cree melding into a spiced woman.

  He pushed away a momentary bitterness. There was no very happy place in the world for two-blooded people like her, like her family and Métis relatives, and like himself. He had found something of himself in her; a mind juggling two ways, the way of the Cree and the way of the French. The way of gods, and the way of one god. A house divided cannot stand, he thought, puzzling at the source of that wisdom. Was it the Bible? Or Lincoln? But it was true. People like himself, pulled hard by differing beliefs, could not stand. She had fled. He, alone in this doomed cabin, had fled too.

  He would try to pull his house together for a while, and then if he failed, let Therese go. He knew that he had lost her and that any effort to reclaim her was doomed but he needed to try. He didn’t relish the foreknowledge that he would not see her, he would not kiss her, and he would eventually forget her, and she would drift away with her people only to marry a Métis someday, if the church would annul the marriage that never was consummated.

  As for himself, he didn’t care whether the marriage was annulled or not. His Indian side didn’t give a damn. He’d find a woman or two or three and live with one or another. It was only Europeans who nurtured the nonsense called love. He could never be like his English father, Barnaby Skye. Dirk had loved and admired his sire, but he was different.

  He felt a stone in his heart. His mind was leading him where he did not want to go. He wanted to be gladdened by the brightness of her smile, the caress of her hands, and a whispered promise in his ear, that she would never leave him, not ever, ever, ever.

  He studied the night sky, gradually realizing from the position of the Big Dipper as it arced around the north star that it was early evening. He had slept through the bitter afternoon and dusk. He decided to abandon this house of broken dreams, this alkaline place that had ruined a young cowboy, and this salt-ruined place that mocked Dirk now. There were nothing but busted dreams here. He stood, stretched, felt hardened and strong, and ready to face the world again.