Cherokee Rose

by Judy Alter

  "They paid us fairly well for the horses," he said. "We'll lose the income of an extended run, but then we won't have the expense either. No, the show's not bankrupt yet. But this war is going to be felt in our country, too, Cherokee. Nothing is ever going to be the same again—and that probably applies to Wild West shows as much as anything else."

  When the horses had been gone eight days—and our sailing date was exactly a week away—I began to despair. In fact, I spent one whole day in bed.

  "Cherokee?" Pearl asked in the softest voice she could manage. "You all right?"

  "Yes," I muttered, and pulled the covers over my head. "Just leave me alone."

  "I could bring you something to eat—maybe some tea."

  "I hate tea!" I said rudely. "Just leave me alone."

  "It's them horses, isn't it?" she said, mostly to herself.

  Within minutes of her departure, the colonel was knocking on the door. "Cherokee? Can I come in?"

  "If you must," I said, pushing up to a sitting position and covering myself with the blankets.

  "What's the matter with you?" he demanded.

  "I just don't feel like getting out of bed," I said belligerently. "And I guess that's my right. There's nothing I have to do if I do get up, so—"

  "Cherokee, this isn't you. All I can think is that Pearl's right, and you're grieving over those horses. That's a blow—a bad one, and I admit it. But we can get you more horses. We can even train another high school horse. What I can't replace is you."

  It was as close as he could come to saying that I was important not only to the show but to him, and I was touched. But I was also still too sunk in self-pity. "I don't want other horses. I want Guthrie and Governor," I said stubbornly.

  "Cherokee, if I have to drug you and carry you onto that boat next week, I'll do it!" he thundered.

  I just stared at him, and pretty soon he retreated. My mind was incapable of thinking about next week, about what I'd do if the sailing date came and I didn't have my horses back.

  That night I apologized to Pearl. I'd been rude and ugly when all she wanted was to help me, and I was properly ashamed of myself.

  "Land's sake, Cherokee," she said, "it ain't nothin'. We all get down now and then."

  But she, I thought, never got down. She was always Pearl I made it to breakfast the next morning and tried to apologize to the colonel. When he asked if I was feeling better, I promised him that I'd try to be polite and added, "I appreciate your... well, you know." Apologizing was as hard for me as caring had been for him.

  That morning I was in my room writing to Louise—a self-pitying letter, I'm sure, though I later crumpled it and put it in the trash—when a great roar erupted downstairs. I could hear the colonel bellowing, "Cherokee! Cherokee! You come down here right this minute!" The urgency in his voice was unusual, even for that most mercurial of men.

  Maybe it was instinct, and maybe it was the pent-up tension, but I was suddenly so breathless that for one brief second I thought I might faint for the first time in my life. Then I was on my feet, out the door, and running toward the stairs. "What is it?" I called, my voice preceding me.

  "Your horses!" he shouted. "The king has made an exception. He's returning your horses to you!"

  I nearly fell down the stairs, ending up in a trembling mess before the colonel, who finally had to reach out a hand to hold me. "Your horses," he repeated. "They're yours. You can take them back to Oklahoma."

  And then, his arm around me to steady me, I collapsed into a great mass of sobs.

  The colonel and I went to the designated stables for the horses that day, and he rode Governor while I was on Guthrie. We took them to a livery stable near the hotel, and I ordered—really ordered!—the colonel to make arrangements for their passage on our ship. "If they can't go, I won't go," I said stubbornly.

  He shook his head. "Cherokee, quit fighting. You've won. The horses will go." Then, looking sideways at me, he said, "And I'm proud of you. Sandy Burns will be, too."

  I hadn't thought about Papa during this whole long thing, but now I realized that yes, he would be proud of me for standing up for myself, for making things go the way I wanted them to.

  "I have to go see Lady Charlotte," I said.

  There was little I could do to repay her kindnesses, but I urged her to come to Oklahoma.

  "Oklahoma?" she said. "It sounds too strange, too foreign. But"—with a shrug—"you never know. Maybe I will one day. Meantime, my dear Cherokee, it's been a new experience for me to know you. And I've enjoyed it."

  "Me too," I said.

  We sailed on August 21, with Governor and Guthrie safely in the hold. As the ship steamed out of the harbor, I looked back at England with some pain and some pleasure. "I'll never come back here," I told Pearl, "but I'm glad we've been here."

  "Me too," she said, "but ain't the food awful!"

  Chapter 13

  Buffalo Bill's show was failing. Profits went down a little each year during his string of "farewell exhibitions," and the Two Bills Show had dissolved. The year we were in Europe Buffalo Bill toured with something called the Sells-Foto Circus. When I heard about it from the colonel, I nearly cried for the demise it represented for my hero.

  "He's not a spring chicken, Cherokee," the colonel said gruffly. Then reluctantly he added, "But he's still got the name."

  Buffalo Bill would turn out to be the answer to the colonel's dilemma about reorganizing the Miller 101 Wild West Show after we lost all our animals in England. But we didn't know that as we headed home across the ocean, and we were a dismal bunch.

  Our crossing was smooth and I was not troubled by seasickness at all, though I'd approached the ship with dread. Crossing to England, when I'd been full of excitement, I'd have enjoyed being on deck, sharing our anticipation with the colonel and the others. But now, when I was physically able to be on deck, there was little to share but a sense of failure.

  None of us talked much. We stared at the ocean, and sometimes we cast furtive glances at each other. But there was little to be said. The colonel sat in a deck chair, hands folded over his stomach, eyes closed. If spoken to, he responded, sometimes politely and sometimes gruffly. If left alone, he remained silent.

  "Colonel," I asked one day, "did you get paid enough for your horses?"

  "Nothing's enough," he grumbled.

  "Colonel," I said, my voice as threatening as I could make it, "can you run the show next year?"

  He sighed. "I can. Question is, do I want to?"

  "Don't you?"

  "I don't know." He shook his head, as though bewildered. "Do you want to be in it?"

  Until that very moment, I'd known of course, without a doubt, that I wanted to be in the show, no matter where it was, what shape it was in. The Miller 101 Wild West was my life—what else would I do? But when the colonel asked that, a great shudder went through me. After a long pause, I said, "I don't know. I—I thought I did. But maybe..."

  "Maybe we're all tired," the colonel said. "Maybe we should not even think about it for a month."

  "Won't that be too late to get bookings?"

  "It's already too late," he said, "or it would be most seasons. But I predict that this war will change a lot of things, maybe even people's appetite for entertainment."

  I thought about that a lot during the next days. If I didn't ride in the show, what would I do? The answer was always the same: Go home to Guthrie. And yet I wasn't ready to spend the rest of my life in Guthrie, Oklahoma, not after I'd ridden for the King of England.

  "Did you ever hear from Buck while we were in England?" Pearl asked one day as we leaned over the rail and watched a school of fish swimming alongside the ship. Behind us people were playing shuffleboard as though they had not a care in the world. I wanted to shout and ask them if they didn't know there was a war on, and what they were going to do when they got home.

  "Buck?" I asked, surprised that she would be that curious. Pearl had always been real good about not prying into anyb
ody else's affairs, and while her question was logical, it still startled me. "No," I said quickly, "not for a while. Why?"

  "Well," she said with great practicality, "I was wondering what you're going to do when we get back to Oklahoma."

  "Go back to the 101 and see what the colonel plans, I guess," I said. "You?"

  She almost broke down. "If the colonel cancels the show, I'll have to go back to Sweetwater. And I might never get the chance to be in a show, to ride—to get away from home." Something had released a stopper in her, and the words came tumbling out. "I'll probably have to marry Donnie Slaughter and have lots of babies and wash clothes and cook—and I'll never learn to rope and ride like you do!" Her last words nearly came out in a wail of anguish.

  "You don't have to marry anyone," I said with more anger than I meant.

  "But what else could I do?" She was in tears now, but my sympathy for her was mixed with frustration. "You married Buck, didn't you? Why'd you do that?" Accusation crept into her tone.

  "Because I loved him," I said firmly, "and surely not because I didn't have anything else to do. I always had something else to do. It—it just didn't work out like we thought it would," I finished lamely.

  "I know how it would work out with Donnie Slaughter," she said darkly and stormed off, angrier at herself than at me but not knowing it.

  She set me to thinking about Buck, of course. I had heard from him only occasionally while we were in England—three letters from Hollywood and then, to my surprise, a more recent one from the 101. "I'll be here when you get home," he wrote cheerily, and as I read, I'd wanted to demand what had happened to Belle and the beautiful baby Sallie. Now I wondered if he'd really be there, and if he were, what I would do about it.

  * * *

  Somehow we docked in New York, transferred our few belongings—and Guthrie and Governor—to trains, and headed home to Oklahoma. It was a long depressing trip, and I don't think I'd ever been as tired as I was when the cars at long last pulled into ranch headquarters.

  Buck was there, waiting at the siding, and he came looking for me as we began to leave the train. "Cherokee?" He held his arms out for a welcoming hug, and not knowing what else to do, I walked into them.

  "Buck? Why aren't you in California?"

  "Didn't you get my letter? I came back here to wait for you."

  Something made me look long and hard at him. "I got the letter. Why did you really come back here?"

  He turned away. "Ah, Cherokee, I wasn't... well, it just didn't go like I thought in Hollywood. Belle—well, she exaggerated about the work out there."

  I didn't have to ask if Belle had exaggerated about anything else, or if maybe Buck had made something up in his mind that wasn't really there.

  "Let's go up to the house," I said, and turned away without waiting for him, but he fell in beside me without hesitation.

  "Mrs. Miller put us in our usual room," he said softly.

  "Good. I'm exhausted."

  Mrs. Miller had dinner waiting for us—pot roast with rich brown gravy, mashed potatoes, green beans from her garden, light bread, and for dessert a peach cobbler. I picked at it and ate maybe two bites of everything.

  "Cherokee?" she asked. "Are you all right?"

  "Just tired," I said. "Would you excuse me?" As I rose from the table, Buck stood as though to follow me. "No, Buck, you stay and enjoy your dinner. I'm just too tired." And I nearly ran up the stairs to throw myself, fully dressed, into the bed. I was asleep within seconds.

  It must have been late when Buck came in. I had no sense of time except that I had been sleeping soundly for a while.

  "Cherokee?" His voice was tentative, and the hand that reached for me was even more so.

  "I'm sleeping," I said thickly. "Just let me be."

  "Cherokee, I'm your husband, and you've been gone the better part of a year. I'd think—"

  "Then," I muttered, "you'd think wrong. Go sleep somewhere else, Buck."

  That was probably the final straw that broke our marriage, though I really didn't do it deliberately. I was telling Buck the truth when I said I was tired—I just left out the part about not wanting him to touch me. I guess he got the message anyway. But I was truly too tired to care, and I slept until nearly noon the next day.

  "Buck left you this," Mrs. Miller said when I finally made my way downstairs.

  "Left?" I asked stupidly.

  "He rode out this morning. Took everything he has with him on a pack horse. Says Zack can pick the horses up in Guthrie after he catches the train west."

  I fingered the rough sheet of paper in my hand, looked down at the familiar scrawling handwriting, and then, reluctantly, unfolded the paper to read the message silently to myself.

  Cherokee,

  What I suspected is true. It's over between us. I'll keep in touch and let you know where to send the divorce papers. Please know that I really loved you, and I'm sorry.

  Buck

  P.S. It's not Belle, believe me. She was a mistake, and I feel sorry for Sallie.

  The last lines almost made me laugh aloud, but my laughter would have been tinged with great sadness—for Buck, not for me. I knew that my spin in the spotlight was bound to be brief, but I was even more aware that Buck had never had his moment, and never would. Unless he left the show circuit, he would always be a second-rate player, and that made me sad for him. I thought about Buffalo Bill, failing and in ill health, and knew that at least he had had the grand success of his show, for years and years, to carry into old age as a comfort. Buck would never have that.

  I left for Guthrie that day.

  * * *

  Louise put me to work in the boardinghouse—making chicken-fried steak, washing linens, setting the table, all the thousand chores that went with running her home for others. It was mindless work, and it kept me from thinking. She, bless her, asked no questions and made no false conversation. Some mornings we went from the noise of breakfast—with the milliners chatting away about this hat for that lady and so on and the drummers planning their day aloud—to the subdued quiet of dinner without exchanging a word between us. It was comforting to me that we could work that way.

  If Louise never asked about Buck, she did tell me about Bo. "His wife died some seven or eight months ago," she said one morning when we were doing dishes.

  "I've got to go see him," I said immediately.

  "I'm not sure that's the right thing," she said slowly. "He's pretty torn up, from what I hear."

  "And I couldn't make him feel better?" I asked, somewhat put out with her.

  "I'm not sure that's the kind of feeling better he needs," she said, never acknowledging my bad temper.

  In the end I didn't see Bo that time I was in Guthrie.

  * * *

  On the fourth day I was in Guthrie, Papa came blowing in the kitchen door just before the noonday meal. "Tommy Jo? Where are you?"

  "Here, Papa," I said quietly. "How'd you know I was here?" I turned suddenly to look at Louise with accusation clear in my eyes, but she simply shrugged as though to say she had no idea how he knew.

  Papa told me himself. "Colonel Miller," he said loudly. "He had a rider going to Guthrie to pick up some horses and had him stop by the ranch to tell me where you were." He gave me a big hug, as expansive as he was, and then held me at arm's length. "Where'd that no-good husband of yours go anyway? Never did think he amounted to a hill of beans. Colonel's man told me he's the one left the horses in town."

  If I hadn't wanted to cry so bad, I'd have laughed. As it was, my voice was shaky with emotion when I said, "I don't know where he is, Papa. He's just gone."

  "You grievin'?"

  "Not," I said, "like you grieve for Mama. I don't miss him. I don't even know what I feel, except sad."

  "Thing to do for sad," he said, "is keep busy."

  Now I really could smile. "Louise wouldn't think of letting me do anything else," I said. "I've been busy."

  "She's pretty good help," Louise said with a smile, "but s
he doesn't make much conversation with my boarders. The ladies still think she's stuck on herself."

  "The hell with 'em," Papa growled.

  Papa stayed the day, and in the late afternoon, with supper simmering on the stove and the chores all done, we sat at the scarred old kitchen table and had a serious visit.

  "What's next, Tommy Jo? You gonna give up this Cherokee business?"

  "I don't think I can, Papa. It's who I am."

  "Colonel don't get his show together, there won't be no place for Cherokee." Papa looked almost hopeful as he spoke. "I could use a good hand at Luckett's."

  I took his big hand in one of mine. "Papa, I can't go back to Luckett's. I just can't. Right now, the show is all I know, and I'm hoping the colonel will get it back together in a month or so."

  He stared at me a long time without saying anything, then shrugged and turned to Louise to ask some banal question that had nothing to do with anything. The subject of my future was closed, as far as he was concerned.

  Papa didn't stay the night. It dawned on me, with some glimmer of amusement, that he wouldn't stay with Louise when I was under her roof—some fine line of morality that Papa drew in his own mind and would not cross. I might have thought it silly, but I didn't—I appreciated it. He hugged Louise just as he hugged me and then rode out toward Luckett's.

  "I feel almost guilty," I told Louise. "He'd have stayed if I weren't here."

  "Don't waste your emotion on guilt," she said. "He's all right."

  The colonel sent me a message two days later: "Miller 101 will team up with Buffalo Bill Wild West. Come immediately."

  Louise looked at me with a question when I read it to her, but there was no question in my mind. I was going back on the show circuit. And I was glad about it.

  Louise never said a word, so I didn't know if she was glad or sad about my going back to the show. She did say, as I saddled Governor, "I wish you'd get over this notion that you can ride all over the countryside by yourself and be safe."

  "If I didn't do that," I told her, "I'd be dependent on other people—and I can't do that."

  "Bo would have a fit to find you riding back to the 101 alone," she said.