Cherokee Rose

by Judy Alter

  "Well," the colonel drawled, "I sure hope you're both adventuresome. I got an adventure for you."

  "Madison Square Garden again?" I asked with a smile.

  "No, Cherokee, something better. England." He said it with a straight face, and I knew instantly that he wasn't joking. Silence hung heavy over the dinner table, until finally his mother echoed faintly, "England?"

  "That's what I said. Maybe even France."

  "You're serious," Buck said, stating the obvious.

  "Never been more serious," the colonel told him. "We leave in March. Gives us from now till then to get a show ready that's fit for a king."

  England! Ever since the Buffalo Bill show went abroad, I'd dreamed of riding in England. And France! I remembered thinking I'd never get to use the French I'd struggled so hard to learn. Me, Tommy Jo Burns, from Luckett's ranch out in the middle of nowhere in Oklahoma, going to ride for the King of England. My heart did a flip-flop, and I suddenly discovered that I was shaking as though I were cold. Pure excitement.

  "How long?" Buck asked, and the tone of his voice told me he was not as enthusiastic about the prospect as I was.

  "Maybe a year," the colonel said. "See how it goes. We get the crowds I expect we will, we'll stay awhile. Costs a lot of money to get over there, so we better make it worth the getting."

  Buck said nothing but looked at his plate. Later that night, we didn't talk at all about the overseas tour, and I knew that we were both consciously avoiding it. Neither of us had to tell the other that we were on opposite sides.

  * * *

  Papa called the 101 about a week later. I was in the arena, working out Guthrie, so Mrs. Miller took the message and then sent someone to look for me.

  "It's your mother," the new young cowboy said. "You pa says you best come home right away. She's real poorly."

  At that moment I understood the urge to shoot the messenger, but I thanked him as politely as I could and headed for the barn. Buck was there, checking out some tack, and his instant response was to ask if I wanted him to go with me.

  "No," I said slowly, "I think I have to do this alone."

  "I'll ride most of the way with you," he said. "I never did like having you ride back and forth alone."

  "I'll be grateful for your company," I told him.

  But I was poor company myself. We rode in silence, not because of distances between us but because I was lost in thought, remembering Mama at various times in my life, wondering how serious "poorly" was, hoping Papa was being an alarmist.

  He wasn't.

  Buck rode with me until I was almost within sight of Luckett's, though for the last ten miles I'd been urging him to turn back, knowing he'd have to sleep on the road.

  "No," he said, "I'm gonna see that you're there."

  I almost gave in and suggested he come on to the house with me, but something held me back. If Mama was really bad, it was a time to be just the three of us. Maybe if it had been a few years earlier and I'd still been madly in love with Buck Dowling, I'd have felt differently. But this was now, and that was how I felt.

  With both of us ahorseback, Buck leaned over and gave me a peck on the cheek. "You can call if you need me, Cherokee," and he was gone, riding that horse too fast and too hard, considering all the miles it had already come.

  I walked Governor into the ranch, going at a snail's pace to delay the inevitable.

  Papa had seen me coming and was waiting on the porch, hands shoved into his pockets, the expression on his face unreadable. I dismounted and looped the reins over the hitching rail.

  "Papa."

  "Glad you're here, Tommy Jo. She's sleepin'. Been sleepin' for three days now."

  I went up the steps and into his arms. "What's the doctor say?"

  "He doesn't. Says she could leave us anytime. Or she could come out of it and outlive you and me both. Just no tellin'."

  I went into the bedroom where Mama lay sleeping so peacefully that I hesitated even to take her hand. But I held that limp hand loosely in my own rough one and spoke as softly as I could, telling her I was there and that I loved her.

  I sat an hour or more, with Papa creeping in and out of the room. I'd nod, and he'd leave as quietly as he came.

  But then Mama opened her eyes—kind of fluttered them open—and looked directly at me. "Thomasina?" she said in a clear voice.

  "Yes, Mama, I'm here."

  Papa must have been hovering outside the door, listening for our voices, because he was back in the room right away. He went to the other side of the bed and knelt down, taking her other hand in his and saying in the gentlest voice I'd ever heard from him, "Jess, I love you."

  "And I love you, James Burns," she said softly. Then she turned her head ever so slightly in my direction. "I'm proud of you, Thomasina. And I love you." As though the words had cost her a great effort, she closed her eyes.

  "Papa?" I asked, alarm creeping into my throat like bile.

  "She's all right," he said, and only then I saw that his fingers were lightly laid on the pulse in her wrist. "She's just sleeping."

  We stayed that way, both of us at her bedside, for hours. I heard Mama's prized clock strike midnight, then one and two. Still Papa and I barely moved.

  "She's gone," he said. Although his announcement was sudden, almost unexpected, it came softly, almost like a prayer.

  "Gone?" I asked, disbelieving.

  "Pulse kept getting weaker," he said, "and I knew there was nothing you nor I could do about it. I chose not to tell you, Tommy Jo, but I knew it was coming."

  I laid my head down on my mother's chest and cried bitterly, Papa standing over me and stroking my hair. When I looked up, I realized that he still held her hand tightly clutched in his.

  * * *

  Buck and Colonel Zack came for the funeral two days later. Louise was there—I didn't know how Mama would have felt about that—and so was Bo. Even Mr. Luckett came over. But beyond that, there were few people to stand at the graveside and mourn Mama—only the cowboys who worked for Papa and the Methodist minister from Guthrie who performed the ceremony because Louise had bullied him into coming, even though we were not his parishioners. We were nobody's parishioners.

  When he said, "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust," I looked around and saw not a tear, save on Papa's face. No one had known Mama, and she'd kept it that way. In spite of our differences, I clutched Buck's hand tightly. He knew me, and he'd have cried if it was my funeral. I found that a comforting thought.

  Louise had sent food ahead with someone from town, and I'd spread it out in the house, so we had the traditional open house after the ceremony. Everyone tried to say something nice about Mama, but since they hadn't known her, they were hard put, and mostly the men ended up patting Papa on the shoulder and saying nothing. Louise simply said, "You know where I am if you need me," and I thought it was probably the most helpful comment of the day.

  * * *

  Your mother's death doesn't leave you in a day or two. It was a burden I would carry around with me for months, even years. But Mama used to say, as she shelled those infernal peas or worked on a piece of quilting, that being busy was balm for the soul. She was right—getting ready for the "world tour," as the colonel called it, put my grief to one side, even if it didn't make it go away.

  We would leave in March—"First ship to cross as soon as the weather's clear," the colonel said, and I knew he'd have gone in January if he could have persuaded a ship's captain to brave the winter Atlantic. It would turn out that crossing in March was bad enough.

  Dinner-table conversation ranged from what acts we would perform to the size of the troupe we would take with us.

  "Can't just stick to Wild West subjects anymore," the colonel said. "Buffalo Bill's got all that eastern stuff in his show."

  "Eastern?" I echoed.

  "Not New York east," Buck said impatiently. "He's got Cossacks—you know, Cherokee, Russian soldiers—and a few years back he even reenacted that rebellion in China. Boxer Rebellion,
they called it, I think, though I never did understand why."

  I didn't want a history lesson from Buck Dowling. "I think we should stick to what we know," I said deliberately. "I don't want to ride in veils like I was in a harem. I want to do western things."

  Buck's temper flared—you could tell from the way his eyes flashed—and he opened his mouth, but the colonel interrupted him. "Now just wait, you two. How about meetin' in the middle? We can—and should—do American subjects, but we can put in something like Paul Revere's ride."

  "What's that got to do with the Wild West?" I asked.

  "If he hadn't ridden, there wouldn't be a Wild West," Buck said, but the colonel went right on, "It's got everything to do with America. And those folks over there-—they're not gonna be sure what's West and what isn't."

  "I bet they remember Paul Revere," I said dryly, "and not with good memories."

  In the end, we added Paul Revere's midnight ride in a skit that somehow also included Betsy Ross and the first American flag—I really did think that was waving our revolution in England's face a century and a half later and not good politics. But we also put in Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and the Alamo, and we agreed to do a massive reenactment of the Battle of Little Big Horn, involving about sixty soldiers and Indians.

  "We got to call it 'Custer's Last Stand,'" the colonel insisted. "Nobody will recognize Little Big Horn."

  I listened to all these discussions half in wonder and half in anger. What had happened to the colonel as a western purist? Where was that man who wouldn't even let Prairie Rose do any trick riding and who insisted on riding and roping as they were done on working ranches?

  The colonel wanted a big show fit for royalty, and he showed a certain intensity as he went about recruiting new performers. He didn't hesitate to court performers from the Two Bills Show—that combination of Buffalo Bill and Pawnee Bill and their respective troupes. When those shows were slowly sinking, the colonel seemed to be able to promise the glamour of a show that was thinking big, on its way up, bound for the glory of England. But there were few stars left in those shows, and even fewer who would desert for the colonel. In the end, most of his riders came from ranches in Oklahoma and Texas. That pleased me, for they were men and women who had grown up riding and grown up western—no more fake senoritas from Brooklyn, or even Annie Oakleys who'd been raised in Ohio. We could boast a certain authenticity.

  Then there were the Indians. They came from all tribes—Sioux, Comanche, Cherokee, and more—but the colonel would bill them all as Sioux. "They were the main ones at Custer's Last Stand," he growled. "Can't be confusing the audience with all those different tribes." I wondered if the Comanches knew he was passing them off as Sioux.

  We also had a few vaqueros who rode silver-studded saddles and wore elaborately sequined and beaded outfits. They also had the most wicked-looking spurs I'd ever seen, which made me leery of the men. Fortunately, the colonel still remembered the lesson of the senorita; these vaqueros had no female counterparts.

  The troupe was to number no less than seventy-five men, forty women, and fifty horses—not as big as Buffalo Bill at the height of his glory but much larger than the 101 had ever been, certainly large enough to give a spectacular show.

  The new girls who began to arrive at the ranch interested me. They called themselves cowgirls, which sent my mind reeling back across the years. But these cowgirls were young, most had never ridden in a show, and many had literally never been off the ranch. At twenty-four, I felt more like a mother hen than anything. They came to me for advice and information.

  "Don't you get scared when there's an audience?"

  Yes, I told her, but that makes you ride and rope better. If you didn't get a little bit scared, you wouldn't be any good.

  "What if your loop falls apart?"

  "You build it again," I told her with a smile.

  "Has that ever happened to you?"

  Laughing, I assured her it had. She was eighteen, a pretty but nondescript girl named Pearl, come from Sweetwater, Texas, because her pa heard about the show. Her ma, she said, absolutely forbade her to go, but her pa had helped her run away in the night.

  "I feel bad about Ma," she said, her lips beginning to tremble, "but I couldn't pass up a chance to ride for the King of England. I wrote Ma the nicest letter I could, but I ain't heard from her yet."

  I bit my tongue to keep from correcting the grammar and wondered what stories all these other girls brought with them.

  I was less interested in the cowboys. They were mostly eighteen or nineteen and looked amazingly innocent to me. They, in turn, apparently considered me too old, married, and the star of the show—they cut me a wide swath. I caught one, a slightly older fellow with blond hair that hung almost to his collartop, looking at me from time to time with laughter in his eyes, and once when I caught him, he raised an imaginary toast. I waved back and turned away, slightly embarrassed.

  The cowboys lived in tents that winter, and the girls in two makeshift buildings the colonel had thrown up. Buck and I, the only old-timers and the only married couple, stayed in the main house, a fact that increased my distance from the girls even more. I never did, that long winter of practice, become close to any of those girls.

  At Christmas, Buck and I went by carriage to see Papa and then took him down to Guthrie with us, where we all had Christmas dinner at Louise's generous dining table and afterward, with the few boarders gone back to their rooms, exchanged gifts in her parlor. It was strange to me that for the first time in several years I was part of a family at Christmas, and that was only because Mama was gone. I guess her shadow hovered over each of us in a different way, but we were quietly happy. Buck and Louise seemed to have signed some sort of truce, I guess out of deference to Mama's memory and Papa's grief—and mine. But it was only a truce. I knew that when I caught Buck watching Louise with real anger in his eyes, and by the way she ignored him except when she strained to say, "More turkey, Buck?" or "Another piece of pie?"

  Buck and I left Papa at Louise's when we headed back to the 101. It was a cold blustery day, with the wind sweeping across the prairie as though it came direct from the North Pole. I was wrapped in an old buffalo robe that Mrs. Miller treasured and had insisted we take in the carriage, so I was snug and warm and even a bit sleepy, though the bouncing of the carriage over the rough road kept me awake. It would be a long day.

  "Strangest family I ever saw," Buck said. He drove a team of horses with such a careless attitude that I sometimes wondered if he was in control as much as he should have been. Now he held the reins loosely and hunched down so that his elbows rested on his knees. He wore a warm greatcoat and had a blanket over his knees, but I knew he wasn't as warm as I was. Maybe the cold was making him philosophical.

  "Your father's mistress is more like a mother to you than your own mother was. Doesn't that make you feel disloyal?"

  I wanted to hit him. "No," I managed. "Mama understood about Louise."

  "You mean she understood about your father going to see her," he probed.

  "No," I said softly. I knew Mama had never understood that, and Papa had only chosen between them once Mama stopped trying to force him to choose, once she was too ill to care what he did. Then he had been a devoted husband, and this Christmas was the first time he'd been back to Louise's. "No, she only understood about what Louise did for me."

  "Would you understand if I were interested in another woman?"

  Would the man never stop? "Are you?" I asked wearily, wishing this interminable ride would end.

  "No, no," he said quickly. "I just wondered—well, you know, if tolerance ran in your family."

  I didn't know what to say. A year earlier I would have given him a stern warning not to test either fate or me, but now I wasn't sure if I cared if he looked at another woman or not. It might be a relief, and it might settle once and for all what was between us.

  We rode most of the rest of the way in silence. And it was indeed a long day.

/>   * * *

  It was also a long winter, from January to March. If I thought I'd worked hard before getting ready for past shows, I didn't even know the meaning of the word. The colonel was merciless, and I doubt I slept eight hours any night those three long months.

  We were up at dawn and in the arena by eight in the morning, no matter the weather. We rode and roped and paraded and raced in wind, sleet, and snow.

  "Weather's always bad in England," the colonel would say cheerfully. "Got to get used to it." He wore an enormous fur coat and a Cossack-style hat pulled down over his ears on cold days and seemed impervious to discomfort.

  I, on the other hand, was often miserable and prayed for that occasional bright day when the temperature rose almost to the sixties and you thought it wouldn't turn ugly again.

  We had two long practice sessions daily, morning and afternoon, and evenings were spent working on costumes—at least the girls worked on costumes, while the men built props, repaired wagons and tack, and painted backdrops.

  "I'd rather work on the tack than sew," I complained to Buck one night. "And I'd be a lot better at it." I had found him in one of the large sheds the colonel used for storing props. Buck had a hammer in his hand and three nails in his mouth, which he had to take out to talk to me.

  "Cherokee, all the other women are sewing. Can't you just for once act like everybody else?"

  Stung, I turned away from him and went back to my sewing in the house. I mended old costumes and put together new ones until my eyes were so blurry, I couldn't see the stitches, but I knew that my work was never neat enough to have satisfied Mama.

  By the first of March, the costumes were ready, the sets designed, and the props prepared, with most all of it loaded onto the special train cars the colonel kept on the 101. He called a general meeting.

  "We leave the 101 by train for New York City on March tenth," he announced. "We depart New York by ship on March twenty-first, arrive in England approximately ten days later. We will be there until late October, come home just before the Atlantic storms start in again. That's eight long months, folks, and I want each of you to think about that. Be sure you're prepared to be gone that long."