The First Dance

by Richard S. Wheeler

  “I’m sorry you were so unlucky, sir. We can’t choose our parents. They’re ours whether we want them to be. But you escaped, which says something for you. You’re not living your life penned up in some rotten jail; you’re here.”

  “Skye, you’re a naïve idiot. There’s not a word of truth in what I just told you. Not one damned word. I made up the whole story, just to see what sort of bloke ye be, and truth is, you’re so gullible you’d believe anything. You’re lucky I’m not some confidence man, because you’re a natural victim. Anyone with a hard-luck story, you’d be their first mark. You’re nothing but a mark, Skye, and anyone with a little cunning can see that.”

  Dirk didn’t reply. Reilly was rubbing him raw.

  “Take this bunch here, Skye. You’ve been had. They saw you coming and played you for a sucker.”

  “No, sir, I witnessed their tragedy.”

  “It’s a racket, finding someone to take care of you.”

  “Then don’t.”

  “Oh, a little edge on ye, eh?”

  Reilly steered his wagon through the night, ignoring the deepening rancor that was exuding from Dirk, on horseback beside him. The women sat quietly. The men paced silently. They were far away from the saloon where they had met.

  “The true story, me lad, is that I’m a bounder,” Reilly said. “I fled Waterford with the law on my heels. I was a purse-snatcher, a cut-purse, plying the cobbled streets. I could outrun any old bummer out at night, and I had me a sharp razor to slice the bag away before the old cob knew what hit him. My pa—ma was dead—he gave up on me, told me to get away from little house and not come back. I snitched my way onto a freighter lying to, and went across as a stowaway, having cut what I needed to keep alive. It was cold, living in a lifeboat, but pretty quick Boston Harbor rose, and I crept off in the dark, inside a packing crate, eh? Pretty quick I cut me a pile of cash—hardly any cut-purses in Boston, so it was easy. Then I bought me a ticket west and stole a few sheep, eh?”

  “Can you prove it, Reilly?”

  The man laughed. “By Gawd, I’ll make a skeptic of ye, yet.”

  Reilly sat comfortably, holding the lines, and then asked a question. “Every man has a story, Skye? What’s yours?”

  Dirk scarcely knew whether to say anything. Whatever he said was going to be as plain and true as he could make it.

  “My father was a deserter from the Royal Navy. Jumped ship at Fort Vancouver. He took my mother, Blue Dawn, as his second wife. She was Shoshone. He called her Mary. I’m his only child. I had a Crow mother, he called Victoria, as well.”

  “After the queen?”

  “Barnaby Skye was a good Englishman all his life, and became an American citizen only when he was old.”

  “There’s no such thing as a good Englishman, Skye.”

  “My father was a good Englishman.”

  “So, then what?”

  “Not much. Schooled in St. Louis. Taught at an Indian school on the Wind River reservation. Buried all my family. Worked for the army as a translator until I got into trouble. Married for about one hour to a Métis woman.”

  “Ah, now there’s something worth telling, Skye.”

  “She vanished that very hour.”

  “Did ye get yourself into a rage and do her in, lad?”

  Dirk started howling. Of all the possible conclusions one could draw from his confession, that was farthest from mind.

  “She decided she didn’t like me, Reilly.”

  “Well, she’s one smart woman. I’ll give her that. You’re too gullible to be marrying anyone.”

  Dirk didn’t have a reply, so he focused on riding his buckskin through the cold night, while his travel companion snorted and cackled.

  Reilly slowed the wagon suddenly, hunted about in the darkness, found what he was looking for—faint ruts off to the right—and turned onto them. The palest of sliver moons was finally yielding a ghost-glow to the night.

  “Another half mile, laddie, and we’ll put these refugees to work.”

  “To work?”

  “You don’t think I’m going to give them a free pass, now, do ye?”

  “In the morning, then.”

  “No, right off, my boy. They can night-herd my livestock and keep the coyotes off.”

  “They’ve lost everything, Mr. Reilly. I’ll do the night-herding. That woman beside you’s far gone with child. The others have come on foot for most of twenty miles.”

  “You’ve got no sense of humor, Skye. You absolutely would not qualify as an Irishman.”

  “You’re right. I haven’t got a funny bone in me, Reilly. I’ll night-herd, and then I’m taking these people off your hands. We’ll be gone at sunup.”

  Reilly wheezed and snorted and spat a few times. “By gawd, Skye, it’s the English in you.”

  The awful truth was that Reilly amused Dirk, but he was damned if he’d let the man know it.

  A substantial log house loomed out of the gloom. Dirk saw some sheds and a rail-fenced paddock of some sort, but nothing else.

  “Here now, laddie. You put my nag out in the paddock, along with yours, and I’ll take these refugees inside and get a fire going and some patooties heating.”

  Reilly helped the woman and the girl step down, and motioned the men to follow, and took them all toward the bleak, dark building. Apparently Reilly lived alone.

  “Now you come along, here, you elves. This is Tara, home of Irish kings, and I’m the King of the Universe,” Reilly said.

  The Métis couldn’t understand a word, and Dirk thought that was just as well.

  In the moonglow, Dirk led Reilly’s dray to the gate, unhooked it from the tugs, and led it through the gate. He could find no rag or brush to wipe down the horse, but he did see a runnel leaking from a spring; the horse would find water. He brought his buckskin in, unsaddled it, wiped it down with his hands, for want of a brush, and turned it loose. He hunted for hay, found none, but did see some thin grass still standing. He carefully latched the gate behind him and headed for the cabin. Lights shone through the two small windows now.

  He entered.

  “Did you find the hay, laddie?”

  “No, but if you show me—I’ll take a bait to each.”

  “I’ll do it. You get these people settled.”

  Reilly vanished into the night. Dirk found himself in a comfortable one-room structure. The new-laid fire in the stove would soon drive away the cold. A single kerosene lamp cast orange light onto the weary faces staring at him.

  He tried French, which was closest to Michif of anything he knew.

  “There will be food and shelter for us, mes amis. This man is from Ireland and he raises a few animals. I think he will offer you food and shelter, for some work.”

  “Bien,” said Antony. He translated that for his people.

  The woman, Marie, blessed herself and sank to the floor, collecting her daughter. They sat, backs to the wall, relief and weariness etching their faces. The men joined her, their backs to the wall. They were worn down to nothing.

  Reilly returned, shook some loose hay off, and examined the stew, which was in a Dutch oven on the stove.

  “Pork stew,” he said. “Some tooties, some pork, some turnips.”

  “Pork?”

  “What did you expect? Mutton? Laddie, you don’t get the twist of it. I raise hogs. I confess to raising sheep down there at the saloon. Cowboys don’t like sheep, but they respect a sheep man. Hogs! Now, if I told them I raised porkers, they’d not sip a glass of redeye with me. So in Lewistown, it’s sheep. Here, it’s hogs.”

  “Why hogs?”

  “Mean devils. A catamount or a wolf thinks twice about going after a hog. I’ve got about a hundred, maybe twice that—who knows?—and mostly they root up a living for themselves, and I don’t have to do much except haul one to the butcher now and then. I’ve got a prize boar too. Meanest in the lot. His name’s Richard. Don’t ever trust Richard.”

  “I never did,” said Skye.

&nb
sp; “This boar, Richard, he keeps an eye out. He’d eat that little girl.”

  “You should find a way to tell her parents, Reilly.”

  “You still calling me Reilly? How do you know that’s my name, eh?”

  “That’s how you introduced yourself.”

  “Well, it’s not. It’s something else. A name that’s well kept from cops and constables.”

  “Reilly, or whoever you are, you belong in that stewpot,” Dirk said.

  “By Gawd, Skye, you’d make a good Hibernian.”

  The Métis sat wearily, waiting for the stew to heat. They hadn’t eaten that day. But soon they would.

  twenty-four

  Therese made herself useful. Not only did she have a stew ready each evening, when the weary woodcutters returned, but she fashioned a broom of reeds gathered on a stick and swept the cabin daily. She began washing their clothes as well. They had no tub, but she heated water in a kettle and scrubbed their britches and flannel shirts and drawers as best she could. She mended the clothing too with some stout black thread and needles Armand got for her at the mercantile.

  Armand also brought some rope, which she strung in the wood yard, and hung the washed duds on it. She was well aware of the passage of days and the steady advance of cold that often slowed down drying the clothing she’d scrubbed. Sometimes she would drape the clothes around the wood stove on whatever was handy.

  This toil wasn’t leading her anywhere, and least of all toward the great task she had been commissioned to do. And the days were long and lonesome. Sometimes all three men were out in the hills collecting wood. Other times Armand sent his sons out and stayed close, sawing and chopping mountains of wood into stove lengths. Other times he loaded a wagon with his wood and delivered it somewhere. Even a small place like Lewistown seemed to consume mountains of cordwood.

  It was a mean life she was living; lonely and weary. Beau and Martin were usually too worn from their long days of hard work to do much more than devour their supper and fall into their bunks. But now and then Martin hovered about, curious about her, eyeing her small cubicle, his yearnings plain to her. Sometimes he was sullen; other times he was bold and opinionated and given to bragging. Once he put a hand on her hip; she firmly removed it.

  “I am married,” she said.

  He laughed smartly at that. She wished she had deterred him in some other way.

  But he was helpful too. He fashioned clothes pins from sticks he cleverly channeled, and after that she could entrust her washes to a windy day. The others barely noticed her face and figure, except to puzzle her solitude in their minds.

  Nothing more was done about the church. That agitated her, but she was helpless to make things move. She apologized to all the saints in heaven for letting them down. She wondered if she had been given a false task, a delusion she would laugh at someday if she ever escaped this drudgery. Her people always worked hard, but the time always arrived when they tuned up their fiddles, poured some fiery drink, and danced the night away.

  Then one day work found her. Arnie Campbell, who owned the Lewistown Mercantile, saw scrubbed clothing hanging from a line in the wood yard and came calling. Fortunately Armand was present, because Therese could understand very little of it. But Armand soon translated the whole meeting for her.

  Campbell wanted her to wash his clothing. There wasn’t any washerwoman in Lewistown. The only ones who washed anything were the sporting women, but they didn’t wash for others, just for themselves. The men of Lewistown wore clothes so foul they got stiff with grime. If the little lady would wash Campbell’s clothing, he’d give her a metal tub, some soap, and a good corrugated washboard, and she could repay him out of her services. If she’d wash other men’s duds, he would act as her agent; collect the stuff and get it to her, and pay her two cents a shirt, one cent for britches, and one cent for underdrawers. And if she could mend, he’d pay her one cent for each rip she sewed up. He’d charge his customers more, of course, but she would get business and he would profit from the trade.

  Armand didn’t press her, and she was grateful for that. “If you do, the money’s yours,” he said.

  “What money?” she asked. It would take a long time to earn one dollar.

  He laughed. “Firewood is better. We’re doing pretty good.”

  “I will do it,” she said. “I’ve never been afraid of work. I do good work.”

  Armand walked over to Campbell’s store and returned a while later with a galvanized metal tub, a washboard, an orange box of Fels Naptha, and more clothesline.

  Then he pulled a heavy item out of the tub. “He sent this along too. For his shirts, even if no one else wants it.”

  He handed her a small flat iron. “One extra cent to iron each of his shirts,” Armand said.

  She rubbed a hand across the smooth bottom of the iron and clasped her hand around the wooden handle. She would need to be careful with it. But it would earn a little more toward the building of her church.

  She immediately had more washing than she could handle and spent her days scrubbing and rinsing and twisting water out of clothes. Each day, Campbell brought her loads of clothing, sometimes in a burlap bag, other times loose. On good days they went outside; on the cold, dark, snow-spitting days, she draped them over every surface in the cabin, which often annoyed the men. But they didn’t object. She was earning a little. Pennies, dimes, and two-bit pieces began to fill her spare moccasin. But it wouldn’t buy a church.

  Martin teased her, usually after he had demolished more of her stew.

  “You should have stayed married,” he said. “Now you got three men to feed and five hundred to keep clean.”

  “Well, you could wash your own clothing,” she replied.

  “I like for you to wash mine. I’ll keep you plenty busy.”

  There was something possessive in his tone. She thought that when she could, she would move to a cabin of her own. She lived with three men in the same room, and she was depending too much on their restraint.

  One sunny November day she grew weary of the endless toil, wrapped a shawl over her, and headed into a pleasant day. Her feet took her to the churchyard. The stakes were still present, but the small cairn with the claim in it had been demolished. She looked for the jar with the claim in it, but it was gone, and the rocks were scattered. Did someone want the land? It was well west of town. On the other hand, someone had trenched the foundation, so that there was a rectangle cut into the soil, and the rectangle was level. Fieldstone could be laid into it for the foundation of the church. So someone had been busy. But who? Beau and Martin? She didn’t know. They seemed so busy harvesting and cutting dry wood to feed the town’s appetites that she scarcely imagined they would find the energy and will to proceed.

  She sat down on dry grass, directly over the point where the altar would be.

  “Madame,” she said. “Someone builds your church. And I have earned a little. But I don’t have the means to build an entire church. I can only do a little. I do not know what you wish of me, but I am willing to do whatever I am directed to do.”

  She heard only the rustle of dead leaves.

  Almost immediately, she grew aware of a commotion of hooves and discovered a two-horse ebony carriage toiling slowly up the grade from Lewistown. This carriage had a folding top that formed a hood, and that was up this day, even if the November sun warmed the afternoon. There was a sole driver, dressed in a long winter coat of gray wool, and a wide-brimmed felt hat, also gray. The carriage shone in the wan sun, as if it had not a speck of dust or mud on it. And the matched bay horses were perfectly groomed, with roached manes. They were in a handsome harness.

  The man saw her lying just there, upon the place where the altar would be, and tugged the lines. The carriage stopped quickly. The bay horses heaved a little, having pulled the heavy carriage up a long slope.

  The man didn’t get out, but studied her for some while, saying nothing. She saw he had great wealth and thought maybe Saint Therese might
have heard her pleas and was sending someone. But no, this probably was the same man she had met on the trail when she was coming to this place. She did not like him.

  The man seemed very distant and probably didn’t speak her tongue. She arose slowly, dusted off her long coarse gray skirt, and drew her shawl close around her. She didn’t like being inspected, but that was what was occurring. It seemed rude of him.

  “I don’t suppose you speak English,” he said.

  She knew only what he was asking: did she speak the Anglais?

  She shook her head.

  “Then, madame, we will converse in French. You are a Canadian, is that not so?”

  “Long ago,” she said, reluctantly.

  “From Saskatchewan, then.”

  She marveled that he could know so much.

  “And you and your family arrived in 1871 or so.”

  “Oui, monsieur.”

  “And what is your name?”

  “Therese Trouville.”

  “And your husband?”

  “I am not married anymore.”

  “I’ve heard all about you,” the man said. “You are the laundress.”

  She nodded.

  “And this is the churchyard.”

  “It was given to me,” she said.

  “Ah, so I have heard, madame. You received a vision. A French saint came down an ivory stairs and there was the scent of roses in the air, and you were commissioned to come here and build a church.”

  “She is not a French saint, monsieur. Therese of Avila is Spanish, and she was given the great task of reviving the Carmelite Order.”

  He smiled. “Forgive me my error. I do not know anything about these things. I’m not even a Protestant, having abandoned all thought of religion from the age of twelve or so.”

  He was conversing easily with her, and she knew most of the French, even though it was not quite her tongue. He seemed at peace, as if he were the lord of all creation here.