Courting Carrie in Wonderland

by Carla Kelly

  That should have been the end of the matter. Carrie had been too terrified to even move, let alone blab, and those men knew it. She sighed, knowing how easy it is for word to get around the family to someone like Millie, who seemed to enjoy tormenting people. Some folks were just natural bullies, and others, less self-assured, were probably destined to grit their teeth and bear it.

  She stood there and thought about Sergeant Major Stiles, who probably wasn’t afraid of anything or anyone. He wore a ribbon on his uniform that declared him a hero. Could I ever be that brave? she asked herself. She thought of her mother, the bravest person on earth, who had never knuckled under abuse or hunger. Mam had worked hard every day of her life with that single-minded Scottish grit of hers until work became impossible. She died from overwork or exhaustion, or even from discouragement that she never, ever disclosed to her only child until the very end when a person could be excused a little complaining. Carrie never knew what killed her because a doctor never came.

  “Mam,” she whispered.

  Usually just saying Mam was enough to put the heart back into Carrie, but not today, not when her examination of her hair had surprisingly turned into a handsome pompadour, and when cinching her apron tighter turned into a trimmer figure. Standing there in the cherry red and white striped tent, she resolved to be braver. She suddenly knew she needed to do more, to be more. Might as well start today.

  Kitchen work began before any other duties in Mr. Wylie’s Willow Park Camp. She paid a cautious visit to the privy, which still made her laugh inside, thinking of the bear and the sergeant major, and returned to the tent to wash her face and hands in ice cold water. Next stop was the work board outside Mr. Wylie’s summer office, where she signed her name and time: Carrie McKay, 4:00 a.m.

  Mrs. Boone and her silent Shoshone assistant, Alice, were already elbow deep in roll dough for cinnamon buns when Carrie came into the kitchen. She looked at the breakfast board and smiled to see cherry pie and apple pie by her name.

  Bonnie Boone looked up from her prep table and said so casually, “It’s tourist season. You make a good pie, so the job is yours.”

  “Thanks, Bonnie. I might need some instruction with cream pies.”

  “Just ask.”

  It was still early in the season, so ten pies each at eight slices per pie would do for the day. The tourists who arrived today near noon from Cinnabar would lunch in Gardiner, tour Mammoth Hot Springs and arrive at Willow Park for dinner, famished and ready to gnaw off their left leg, as Jake Trost, camp man from the University of Washington, put it.

  Right now, the tourists still sleeping would straggle into the dining tent no later than six thirty, where coffee waited to revive them, oatmeal to fortify them, and fried eggs, bacon, and cinnamon rolls to see them out of the tent and onto the waiting coaches by seven a.m., ready to tackle the geyser basins.

  Carrie had finished rolling out pie dough into waiting tins when the tourists came in, some hesitating at the door, others (perhaps they had been here before) moving with all deliberate speed, but not exactly racing each other to a bench. She stopped what she was doing and circulated among the long tables, pouring coffee and standing back when Alice brought in the oatmeal, followed shortly by platters of eggs and bacon.

  The room was silent now. Maybe no one had breakfast at six thirty, wherever they came from. Carrie poured milk next, then more coffee. If she had a watch, she could have glanced down to see six forty-five, when newly revived diners began to talk and laugh.

  Sticky buns came last. Carrie looked around. Long experience after two summers had taught her that people who didn’t smile at the mere sight of Mrs. Boone’s sticky buns probably weren’t going to have a good time in Wonderland, no matter how remarkably heavenward the geysers shot, or how magnificent the lower falls of the Yellowstone sparkled against multi-hued canyon walls. Everyone appeared to be smiling, so Carrie smiled too.

  She looked up from pouring a final mug of coffee when the coach driver stood in the doorway and whistled between what remained of his teeth. Chatter stopped and the tourists rose like marionettes.

  “All aboard for the geysers!” the driver called. In minutes the room was deserted. For the next hour, while Alice’s glum-faced children washed dishes, the employees took their turn at the table. The coffee went around again and Carrie finally sat down. Oatmeal and half a sticky bun were enough for her, and she had unfinished duties. In another hour, the pies were ready for both ovens.

  She sat on a stool in the kitchen, her eyes on the ovens and the clock. Mr. Wylie wandered through, his ink-stained fingers testifying to a morning’s-worth of accounting in various ledgers, each with the name of a Wylie camp or lunch station. He always knew when the first pies were ready to come out of the ovens.

  He gestured for Carrie to sit with him. Pleased, she did as he asked, hopeful of what was coming. A few bites and he put down his fork.

  “Carrie, how’s your Stephen Foster?”

  She laughed and cleared her throat. It was their summer ritual. “ ‘Mid pleasures and palaces, though we may roam, be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home,” she sang, giving the last word a two-note warble because she felt like it.

  “Lovely as ever,” he said. “Looks like you’re stuck singing Stephen Foster for the campfire again this summer.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Wylie,” she said. “Would you be interested in some harmony too?”

  “I’m quite satisfied with your voice alone,” he said, “but what do you have in mind?”

  “Sophie Baxter, that first year teacher you hired to run the Wylie store, has a very nice contralto,” Carrie said. “She’s a tentmate and I’ve heard her humming.”

  “She’s the teacher from Idaho?” he asked.

  “Yes. We could branch out a bit from Stephen Foster and maybe sing ‘Annie Laurie’ together. I’ll have to ask her, of course.”

  “Do that. For now, you’re my singer. Jake Trost from U-Dub told me last night that he knows a few magic tricks.” He looked down at his empty plate. “Amazing how quickly food disappears around here.”

  “More, sir?” she asked.

  He patted his stomach. “Mrs. Wylie will be disappointed if she has to take out the waist band in my trousers. Carry on, Carrie,” he said. He leaned in closer for a moment. “Any problems?”

  Only that my heart will probably break if a certain sergeant major doesn’t show up again this season, she thought, but knew what wasn’t what he meant. “No problems yet.”

  He must have heard the worry in her voice. “I can always move you to Lake, like I did last summer.”

  Then I’m even less likely to see Sergeant Major Stiles, she thought. “No, sir, not this summer.”

  She knew Mr. Wylie felt uncomfortable about the whole conversation, and she also knew of his own problems with the Thornes. Too bad that Millie’s father was a banker and had deep ties to both the Yellowstone Park Association that ran the park’s hotels, and the Northern Pacific Railroad that brought them there. Too bad other people were bullies.

  “Going to tough it out?” he asked.

  She saw the sincere concern in his eyes. “Mr. Wylie, there was a bona fide hero sitting in your office last week. He has a medal for it. Maybe I can be a little braver about my own situation, which isn’t really a life or death matter.”

  “He certainly liked that apple pie.” He leaned a little closer again. “I heard a rumor that he came back for cherry pie too.”

  “He did,” Carrie said in a low voice. Her face felt as warm as she knew it would tonight by that campfire.

  “Will he return again?”

  She shrugged. “It’s probably hard for him to get away.”

  “But you keep making cherry pie,” he observed as he stood up and pushed back his sleeves, as if preparing to battle again with the ledgers.

  “Mr. Wylie, it’s my job,” she said, and picked up his dishes. “Will it be ‘Old Kentucky Home’ and ‘There’s No Place Like Home’ tonight?”


  “Throw in that sad song about the dog too, and you’ll get a lot of tips,” he advised.

  “ ‘Old Dog Tray’?” she asked. “When I sing that one, you always seem to get some dust in your eye or something, Mr. Wylie.”

  “I should speak to the army about getting those water wagons going, to cut some of that dust,” he said with a smile.

  “You should.”

  And so the day went and the days that followed until the week was nearly done: a casual lunch for employees, then a few hours of calm to prepare the evening meal. The coaches from Mammoth Hot Springs usually arrived about four o’clock, when the call went out for tea and biscuits to the ladies’ tents. Everyone seemed to be drooping by four, including the staff. Bonnie Boone usually found a few stray meat pies for savages and hungry coachmen who needed fortification.

  Once the dinner dishes were washed, dried, and on the shelves again, Bonnie and Carrie made bowls of buttered popcorn to circulate among the visitors who had perked up and were walking toward the roaring fire in the middle of the campground, husband and wives arm in arm, and children running around because children never seemed to wear out. With a pang, she watched soldiers arrive from the not-too-distant Norris station, ready to strike up conversations with young ladies, many of them teachers on holiday. She looked but Sergeant Major Stiles wasn’t among them.

  A week had never seemed longer, even though she knew that was silly. All weeks had the same minutes and hours. Thankfully, she never had time to mope or pine, but she couldn’t stop her mind from going over their conversation by the dead campfire last week.

  At the beginning of the week, Carrie had told herself that a man with as many responsibilities as a sergeant major must surely have was too busy to waste his time at a campfire. By the end of the week, she wrote it off as a pleasant twenty minutes with an interesting man and quietly closed that little door in her heart.

  Now it was Friday and her turn to sing. Sophie Baxter had said she would be ready tomorrow night for the duet they had practiced all week, but Carrie appeared to be on her own, as she had been since the age of thirteen. She looked toward the fire to see the U-Dub engineering major who performed magic tricks pull a handful of scarves out of a hat, and then a quarter from behind a little girl’s ear. He wasn’t very good, but no one seemed to mind.

  The magic tricks gave her time to hurry to her tent and change into a tan skirt that had earned her an A minus in last spring’s tailoring class, and a green-and-white-checked gingham shirtwaist that she had found at the Lake Wylie Camp last summer, left behind by a visitor because it had a tiny tear on one buttonhole that was easily mended. Her hair had started to curl from the heat in the kitchen, but it was dark and no one would notice.

  After the popcorn bowls circulated, Carrie stepped forward. The magician pulled out a pitch pipe and gave her a note. She sang “We Wandered Today Through the Hills, Maggie,” gratified to see an older couple on the second row of logs look at each other and smile. She sang to them and had the delight of watching the husband take out his handkerchief and dab at the tears in his wife’s eyes.

  She finished to applause, gave a little curtsy, then did something Mr. Wylie had wanted her to do, but which her hard-earned caution had vetoed. She held up her hand, pleased when her little audience quieted. Maybe this wasn’t so hard, after all. A frown on her face, Millie Thorne stood there holding a bowl of popcorn. Carrie decided to give her sweetest smile to someone who wished her nothing but hard times and bad news. That wasn’t so hard, either. Too bad Ramsay Stiles wasn’t around so Carrie could tell him that she had decided to be brave.

  “We have a sweet couple sitting on the second row,” Carrie said, marveling at her own courage. “I think maybe that was a favorite song of theirs. Would you kindly tell us where you are from and why the song seems to mean so much to you?”

  The gentleman stood up and helped his wife to her feet. They looked like Easterners, well-dressed and so out of place and tidy in a national park in the middle of basically dusty nowhere.

  “Since you asked, miss, we are from Darien, Connecticut. Our children sang that song to us only last week on the occasion of our fortieth wedding anniversary,” the man said. “This little trip was their idea of a second honeymoon.” He smiled at his wife. “We were married in 1863, when I had two weeks’ furlough from the Army of the Potomac.”

  Everyone burst into applause, including Carrie. The lady leaned her forehead into her husband’s coat sleeve, shy and looking much younger than a woman married forty years. Maybe that was what Yellowstone did to some people; maybe love did it too. Whatever it was, Carrie felt her own heart lift. It had been a discouraging week, but she vowed to put it behind her. Next week would be better. She wasn’t sure how, except that it would be.

  She sang “Old Dog Tray,” because Mr. Wylie liked it. As usual, some of the softer-hearted dog owners sniffed into their handkerchiefs. She put what she hoped was sufficient feeling into the song, which was never easy. There was a time once when she had competed with stray dogs for scraps, but these people didn’t know that. She hadn’t even told Mr. Wylie, and he knew the worst.

  She finished to more applause and waited for her audience to leave. No one moved. They didn’t know she was tired, and four in the morning came early. There had to be a way to shuffle visitors off to their tents, or it was going to be a really long summer. Carrie raised her hand again for silence.

  “There is only time for one more song,” she said. “Morning comes early around here and you will want to be in the dining hall by six thirty for Mrs. Boone’s sticky buns.”

  She heard good-natured laughter. “Does anyone have a favorite Stephen Foster song? If I know it, I’ll sing it for my finale.”

  “I’d like to hear ‘Why, No One to Love,’ ” came a voice from the shadow.

  She knew the voice, but held her breath anyway; she had been wrong before. Besides, she had already decided Sergeant Major Stiles wasn’t going to return to the Wylie Camp. What would he be doing here?

  “I know that song,” she said softly, and didn’t even need a pitch to begin it.

  “ ‘No one to love in this beautiful world, full of warm hearts and bright beaming eyes! Where is the lone heart that nothing can find that is lovely beneath the blue skies.’ ”

  A young couple standing close to the sergeant major, their arms around each other, had started to sway to the melody. Carrie sang to them, partly because Mr. Wylie had told her to target people in her little audience and make everything personal, and partly because she didn’t have the courage to sing to a sergeant major stepping out of the shadow now and holding an empty pie tin.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Ramsay was grateful Carrie chose to sing to the couple standing next to him, a couple practically reeking of orange blossoms and newness. Personally, he had never given much thought to the idea of honeymooning in Yellowstone Park, but then, he hadn’t thought to honeymoon anywhere. He laughed inside and remembered Captain Chittenden’s comment about thinking creatively.

  When Carrie started the chorus, she waved to her audience to join in. He decided to take a page from her book and sing to Carrie McKay. “ ‘No one to love! Why, no one to love! What have you done in this beautiful world, that you’re sighing of no one to love?’ ”

  As she began the next verse, he had to ask himself that question. What had he done? He listened to Carrie’s lovely voice—not loud, but so pure—and wondered how any man ever worked up the nerve to talk seriously to a lady. He’d better consult the etiquette book Mrs. Pitcher had given him.

  He sang the chorus with the others, then listened to the final verse, the one that seemed almost out of place. “ ‘Many a fair one that dwells on the earth who would greet you with kind words of cheer, many who would gladly join in your pleasures or share in your grief with a tear.’ ” Glory be, but Stephen Foster was a melancholy, maudlin songwriter. Share people’s griefs?

  He couldn’t be melancholy, not as he sang and watched
the singer. He had never seen Carrie McKay in anything but a drab dress and that all-encompassing apron. Here she stood in a trim skirt and checked shirtwaist that showed to perfection her small waist. He still preferred the single braid down her back, but the pompadour was dignified in a way that touched his heart. She was a woman to be admired, maybe even cherished. That errant thought made him take a deep breath and remind himself he was too busy this summer for anything more than admiration.

  He stayed where he was as some in the audience left tips in a jar and headed to their tents. Carrie shook the coins from the jar and divided them with the magician wearing a University of Washington letter sweater who stood close to her. He tried to hand back some of the coins, but Carrie waved him off. He said, “Maybe it would be fair if I sang and pulled scarves out of hats,” and she still shook her head, refusing to take anything back. He gave her a thumbs up and strode toward the employee tents, whistling.

  “Fifty cents, Ramsay,” she said as he came closer. “I save my tips all summer for extra things during the school year, like food.”

  She laughed but he didn’t think she was joking. Closer now, he could tell her shirtwaist was faded from many washings. Mr. Wylie had hinted that some of his summertime help needed every dime they earned for college. Ramsay already knew Carrie was one of those. Her gesture in making sure that the tips were divided evenly, even though she did the lion’s share to earn them tonight, struck him as gallant as anything he had ever seen.

  “Why that song?” she asked, with no preamble, as if they were continuing a conversation broken off only minutes ago, instead of a week. “You’ll make me worry about you, and I don’t really want to.”

  “No worries,” he said, amused. “My mother used to sing that to me. She had a lovely voice too.”