Darkness at Morning Star

by Joyce C. Ware

  The roof was largely gone. The pillars, toppled like jackstraws, had crashed through the west wall, knocking the blocks of stone askew and demolishing the big front door. The central pair, cleft into huge shards, lay athwart Belle’s garden, their carved slitted eyes blinded by muddy debris. Below the shattered windows a thousand fragmented suns glittered from the glassy bits spewed across the dooryard. It was as if a horde of malevolent imps had been loosed upon this place, the more so when I realized how narrow the erratic path of destruction had been.

  Untouched were Rita’s shack, the henhouse and the vegetable garden no more than fifty yards to the north. To the west, save for a curving swath swept clean of posts, the prairie grasses, revived by the rain, responded pliantly to the wind’s bidding. The old windmill, its rusted vanes and tower spared, had resumed its grating complaint, and around its base, a patch of sunflowers nourished by the trough’s slimy overflow flaunted gold-rayed heads.

  “Belle?” I called, “Belle? Where are you?” Quinn kept his distance, watching in silence as I turned and turned again before glimpsing a familiar bit of sprigged cotton and glint of silver half-hidden among the broken stalks and mangled leaves. Cradled by her babies. The metaphor seemed apt until I moved closer, shouldering aside the oozing stems to reach her side. I feared no Lazarus-like resurrection awaited my poor sister.

  It had not been an easy death. I looked down into staring eyes and a mouth frozen wide in a silent scream. Her bloodless fingers clutched at the vine drawn tight around her throat; her silver head hung suspended in its murderous grip. That briony is a hardy critter, Belle had said proudly. I swear it’ll outlive you and me. Tears blurred my vision as I tried to pry her rigid fingers loose, but the wiry whiplike strands resisted my frantic efforts.

  I looked up to see Quinn still standing outside the garden, still watching through hooded dark eyes.

  “Have you a knife?”

  His hand moved toward a leather scabbard on his belt, then hesitated. Although his face was expressionless, I sensed his wariness about my intentions.

  “In the name of heaven, give me your knife so I can cut her free!”

  He pulled it loose and flipped it toward me in a practised motion that sent it somersaulting to a quivering, point-down landing within my easy reach.

  Once severed, the vine uncoiled from around Belle’s throat in slithering loops soon lost in the torn and tangled undergrowth. I traced its stigmata in her swollen flesh; I smoothed back her silver hair and pressed my tear-stained cheek to hers. I no longer cared that she had betrayed me, had even been ready to kill me if it suited her purpose. She was my sister, my twin, and I grieved not so much for what I had lost, as for what might have been.

  I rocked her in my arms, protecting her in death as no one had in life. Grateful my mother had been spared this, I hummed her favorite lullaby, wishing Belle sweet dreams into eternity.

  Hush-you bye, don’t you cry, go to sleepy little baby ... when you wake you shall have all the pretty little horses ...

  “If that don’t beat all.”

  I looked up. Quinn stood over me, hat pushed back, one hand raking through his dark mop of hair. “I’ll be damned for a horse thief, you are Serena!” It was the first time he’d bothered to give my name all three of its syllables.

  “If you’d listened—”

  “I listened well enough; the believin’ was the hard part.”

  Understanding him, but not wanting to, I looked away. I was in no mood to spar with him.

  “It was that tune of yours did it, ‘bout the pretty horses. A donkey sings prettier than Belle ever could.” He paused, took off his hat and ran the brim between his calloused fingers. “It was true, then, what you said about her? What she did? What she had in mind doin’?”

  I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

  “Lordy, Lordy.” I could barely hear him. “Sharo and me, we’ll dig her a grave, if you want to get her ready.”

  He hunkered down beside me and effortlessly lifted her up into his arms. “Cobby’s goin’ into town for supplies and to roust out the boys; you want he should fetch back the preacher?”

  If I had accepted Bazz’s proposal of marriage, was this the preacher who would have done the honors? The one who could have testified to a wedding at Morning Star of Basil Cooper to a silver-haired girl, never mind which one he took away with him? I recoiled at the thought.

  “No,” I said firmly. “Belle wasn’t much for religious observances. I’ll say whatever needs saying.”

  “Suit yourself.” He walked beside me up the path, bearing his burden lightly, slowing his stride to match mine. Belle’s silver hair streamed down across his forearm, bannered by the breeze. “Where d’ ya want her?”

  I clenched my teeth, forcing back the angry words clamoring to be said. For all her sins, Belle was my sister, not some animal found dead out on the prairie.

  “In Rita’s shack. She left soon after you did,” I added stiffly, “just as you predicted.”

  We walked on in silence.

  “I sure wish she’d stuck around,” he muttered.

  “If wishes were horses—”

  “Yeah, I’d be outta the horse business.”

  “None of them were hurt, were they?” I blurted, ashamed for not having spared a thought for the horses sooner. “Is Bingo all right?”

  “All of ‘em safe as a bet on five of a kind, ‘cept for the horses we rode to hell and gone gettin’ back here. That twister was a ripper, but it ran on a narrow gauge track.”

  “We weren’t expecting you back so soon,” I admitted.

  He smiled knowingly. “I reckon not. If it wasn’t for Sharo, you and Fawn—” He broke off, looking sheepish. “He had this hunch.”

  “Hunch? You mean what women call intuition?”

  Sensing a jeer, Quinn bridled. “Cobby’s knowed him longer’n me. Says Sharo can sniff out weather better’n anybody he ever saw. Interestin’ kid, Sharo. Lot like me, only more ... more—”

  “Dignified?”

  He slanted a look at me. “Yeah, you could say that.”

  Quinn preceded me into the simple shack, ducking in sideways under the low door frame. The only illumination was the light filtering through the cracks. My eyes, straining against the gloom, picked out a couple of blankets stacked up against the plank wall. I hastily unfolded them and spread them out, one on top of the other, both of them old and torn and none too clean. Quinn knelt with his sad burden. I sank to my knees across from him, and together we arranged her as best we could. In that dim light, with her eyes and mouth now closed, I could almost convince myself she looked at peace. Quinn got to one knee, then hesitated, finding it hard to say what he felt he must.

  “I’ll get Cobby up to stay with her while you get whatever you need for the laying out.”

  “I can manage,” I said, hoping I sounded braver than I felt. “There’s no need to delay his trip to town on my account.”

  Quinn shifted uncomfortably. “This hut’s got no foundation; the floor boards is broken ... the little critters....”

  I turned away, pressing the heels of my palms to my temples, trying not to shudder as images of bright, beady eyes and small, sharp teeth skittered through my mind’s eye. I forced myself to speak. “I hadn’t considered the ... hazards. If you can spare Cobby.. .”

  He nodded. “It has to be done fast, S’rena, but it’ll be done proper; I promise you that.”

  He left too quickly to hear my whispered thank you.

  True to his word, Cobby arrived sooner than I would have thought possible, his bowed legs forcing a rolling gait that set to sloshing the fuel in the lamp he carried. I hurried out to take it from him.

  He looked at me for a long moment, his rheumy eyes satisfying him that what Quinn had said about my transformation was true. “A sad business, missy.”

  He followed me into the hut, hunkered down next to Belle and lit the lamp. The wash of light over her livid face and foam-flecked lips destroyed the illusi
on of serenity. My nostrils detected the cloying smell of death.

  “Sad business,” Cobby repeated in a mutter, shaking his grizzled head. “Go along now. I’ll see she comes to no harm.”

  I dreaded returning to the big stone house. The kitchen, however, had suffered little damage aside from its windows. Sitting untouched on the big work table were the four baskets I had packed with food for a journey that would never be taken. It was like entering the galley of one of the deserted ghost ships sailors spin hushed tales about. I took some soft, clean clothes for the washing, filled a bucket of water at the kitchen pump, and for Belle’s shroud cut off a length of the homespun she had used for straining her herbal concoctions. If her hampers had survived the destruction, perhaps they contained something sweet-scented I could use to disguise the tell-tale odor of decay.

  The hall had borne the brunt of the pillars’ collapse. Now open to the sunlight, the uncompromising illumination revealed Bazz’s beautiful piano, shattered beyond repair. The boxes containing his books and music and Belle’s bags and trunk had been first battered by fragments of stone, then sodden by the driving rain. Leaves torn from the plants in Belle’s garden plastered the tumbled blocks and slithered wetly under my feet. Only the hampers, stacked at the far end as I had last seen them, seemed to have weathered the storm virtually undamaged.

  Fragments of glass clinked off the lids as I lifted them, revealing rows of bottles and jars inexplicably intact amidst the carnage wrought by a wind powerful enough to wrench stone pillars from their foundations and whip a vine around a fragile neck. Packed between the exotically labeled elixirs and the humbler ointments Cobby set such store on, I found some rose geranium toilet water that would suit my purpose.

  As I picked my way back through the muddy, glass-strewn debris I paused to cock my head, thinking I heard footsteps stealing softly, slowly, across the floor above. A door slammed. I could feel my heart stutter.

  “Who’s there?” I cried.

  The door slammed again and yet again, accompanied by a long, creaking sigh. Caught by the wind, I told myself. Mortally wounded, the house had already become prey to the elements. I hurried back to the kitchen, where, set at ease by its homely ordinariness, my heartbeat slowed to its normal rate. Then, after packing a basket with the things I had assembled, I returned to the hut and the difficult duty awaiting me.

  At best a man of few words, in this case Cobby’s lack of them proved a blessing. He held the lamp as I did what had to be done, lending a hand when the need arose. Working together thus, in silence, the task was soon accomplished. I sat back on my heels, unable to look away from the waxen mannequin wrapped in plain ivory homespun, her silver hair its only ornament. This wasn’t my sister; it couldn’t be! Belle could never be this pale, this still. Tears flooded my eyes, and I cried out in anguish, a long, keening wail of grief that I smothered in Cobby’s shoulder.

  “There, there, missy,” he muttered, patting my head clumsily, more at home with fillies than human females. “There, there.”

  Minutes later, Quinn appeared in the doorway to lead us to the grave site Sharo had dug at the far edge of a small fenced plot in a grove of cottonwoods. He must have read the question in my eyes.

  “I reckon Belle is due a place with the family that took her in. Judgin’ what she done, well, that’s been took out of our hands. No point punishin’ the dead for it.” He cleared his throat, as if embarrassed to be found wanting in harshness. “There wasn’t time to make a box, but we put some planks down.”

  Sharo stood beside the grave he had dug, its sides as cleanly cut as the youth’s high-cheekboned features. He sprang lithely down into the pit as Quinn approached, solemnly extended his arms to receive my sister’s body, and set it down gently on the planks that served as her final resting place. He then joined us at the graveside as I recited the passage from Ecclesiastes that Belle had misquoted to me only yesterday, neither of us dreaming how tragically apt its sentiment would shortly become.

  “To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill and a time to heal. ...”

  It was soon over. Quinn led me away quickly, and -we were almost out of earshot before the rhythmic thudding of shoveled earth began.

  “Cobby’ll soon be leaving for town. He’ll be stoppin’ by the station to buy you a ticket on the next train east. Anythin’ you want from Rita’s hut?”

  I shook my head. “That’s where I’ll be staying.”

  “Not much of a place. Cobby can move in with Sharo for a coupla days—”

  “It’ll do,” I cut in. “I’m handier than you give me credit for.”

  He gave me a sidelong glance. “Oh, I give you a whole lot of credit, S’rena, but what’s bein’ handy got to do with where you lay your head ‘til your train pulls out?”

  I swallowed hard. Convince him he needs you, I told myself. You’ll never achieve your purpose unless you make yourself an essential part of his.

  “I’m not leaving, Quinn.”

  He stopped dead. He turned to stare at me for a long incredulous moment, then threw back his head and laughed. “You didn’t find the gold, did you? You didn’t find it, and now you want to hang around ‘til you do, and you and your sidekick Basil.” He wasn’t laughing anymore; his frowning eyebrows formed black bars above his eyes. “Well, let me tell you—”

  “No!” I blurted. “I mean I don’t know if Bazz and Belle found the gold or not, and with the pillars smashed and the posts gone, maybe no one will ever find it. Yes, I’ll admit I told them how they might find it, but I had already decided to stay. Before ... before all this happened.” I raised my hands to indicate my hennaed hair.

  “ ‘No ... yes ... maybe ... might....”‘ He gave a clod of earth in our path a powerful kick; I suspect he wished it were me. “You already got me to believe one impossible thing today, S’rena, how many times you plannin’ on ropin’ me in? If, like you say, there’s nothin’ to keep you here—nothin’ I know about, anyway—why you thinkin’ on stayin’?”

  I looked directly into his eyes, braving his disbelief. “I’ve got nowhere else to go. There’s no reason you should care what happens to me, but tell me this: If you send me packing, who’s going to look after Fawn? Do the cleaning? Tend the garden and the hens? Like it or not, Quinn Cooper, the fact is you need me here at Morning Star. I’m not asking you to like me; I’m just asking to be given a chance to prove I’m worth my keep.”

  “Oh, I like you well enough, S’rena, trouble is I don’t trust you farther’n I can throw a bull calf. Cobby’ll find someone in town ... there must be somebody who—” His confident tone faltered.

  “Somebody who what, Quinn?” I didn’t know what the Kansas version of the grapevine was, but I was willing to bet every woman in the territory, red-skinned and white, had heard unsettling rumors about Morning Star; and Quinn, belatedly realizing it, ignored my defiant question.

  We walked on in charged silence, but as we neared Rita’s shack I was beset by doubts. That sagging roof probably leaked... that single narrow window offered little in the way of ventilation.... My steps slowed. The list had hardly begun, yet I knew at the head of it was my fear of never being able to rid my nostrils of the smell of Belle’s mortality.

  Quinn paused beside me, eyeing first the shack, then me. “The roof overhang needs shoring up.”

  “It offers more shade the way it is,” I said evenly, sensing a chink in his armor.

  “And the cracks in that wall are near big enough to see through.”

  “Only if someone’s standing closer to them than they ought,” I countered. “Besides,” I added offhandedly, “by the time the cold winds blow, you’ll have made up your mind one way or the other.”

  “How ‘bout your mind, S’rena?”

  “Mine’s already made up,” I replied, and all at once, realizing this was true, my misgivings melted away like l
ate-April snow. I held my breath.

  His dark eyes challenged mine. “I can’t pay you much.”

  “I’ll settle for bed and board until you can,” I said. “And help bringing a few things from the house. Some bedding, if any survived the storm, a table, a chair or two.” I hesitated. “In the kitchen there’s food packed in baskets. Enough to tide us over until Cobby returns.”

  Quinn grinned. I’d almost forgotten how appealing the dancing lights in his dark eyes could be.

  “Food made ready for you to skedaddle, huh? Guess maybe there’s some truth in that old saying about an ill wind.”

  I opened my mouth to deny his mistaken assumption, but what was the use? I could hardly blame him for not believing my decision to stay had been made before I had been dragged and dumped into the cyclone cellar. To convince him otherwise would take more time than either of us had just then.

  “Sharo’ll give you a hand with the essentials. The rest’ll have to wait ‘til the men get back, but don’t you be forgettin’ me and Cobby give the orders. I don’t want you swishin’ your skirts down around the bunkhouse like your sister used to do. And if you want to ride that little pony of yours, you just saddle up and git. No flutterin’ or ankle flauntin’, savvy?”

  Holding my tongue so hard I could taste blood, I nodded. “Anything else?”

  “I’m not keen on havin’ to ride herd on folks every minute of the livelong day. Got better things to do. If you see somethin’ needs doin’, I expect you to grab holt and do it.”

  He turned away, then looked back over his shoulder, a grin of pure devilment splitting his craggy face. “Oh, yeah, almost forgot. Leave the henna be. If I’d wanted a fancy woman, I’d’ve left Cobby here and taken the wagon to town myself.”

  He raised one finger to the rolled brim of his hat, winked, and strolled away with a lazy, hip-swiveling gait. He hadn’t an ounce of lazy flesh on him. All bone and sinew, he was, and a lot quicker-witted than it suited him to let on. I fumed as I watched his progress down the hill, down to his quarters where Fawn awaited him. Was there ever a man more self-satisfied? Then I caught myself. He had been kind to me in his way and, at the time of our rescue, almost fatherly toward poor little Fawn. ... I clapped my hand to my mouth. How could I have forgotten her?