Lake of Fire

by Linda Jacobs

  From where she stood behind Officers’ Row, Laura saw the spectacle of the stage’s arrival.

  On the long veranda, a dozen people watched as the driver brought the stage to a jerking halt and stood, sweeping off his hat decorated with an American flag. Thick dust on his tan coat showed how fast he must have driven the early-morning run.

  The driver opened the coach door with a flourish and bowed. Norman Hagen stepped out first, then turned back to assist the ladies.

  Fanny Devon and Constance alighted and stripped off their dusters. Fanny waved her paisley shawl as though she were cleaning a rug, while Constance brushed at the dirt on her dark skirt. Forrest Fielding did not alight, but Laura saw him through the open window, his shoulders wrapped in a plaid woolen traveling blanket.

  Though she’d thought she despised them all, she broke into a ragged run. Waving and calling, “Daddy! Constance! Aunt Fanny!” she arrived pell-mell and pulled herself up through the coach’s open door.

  He was weak, his arms holding her with only a fraction of his former strength.

  “Child,” Forrest whispered, and she wished she could be a child again, when life was simple and, in bedtime stories, everyone lived happily ever after.

  Aunt Fanny reached in through the coach window to clasp Laura’s hand. “Thank God you’re here.”

  Laura found tears in her eyes. After all she’d been through, believing she and Cord were going to die, she was amazed how the bond of family lifted her spirits. After helping her father down and to a chair on the veranda, she even found her arms wrapped around her cousin while they cried on each other’s shoulders.

  “I’m so sorry,” Constance said, “for everything.” She pulled back and her blue eyes searched Laura’s. “Is Cord … ?”

  “Cord has been exonerated of all charges.” Laura’s eyes moved to Fanny and Forrest’s faces. “Danny Falls murdered Edgar Young, and Hank’s sister burned his boat.”

  Constance gasped. “There’s got to be a story there. You can tell us all about it on the train.”

  Forrest pulled out his gold hunting case watch and opened the lid. “The Northern Pacific leaves from Cinnabar at four.” It was at least ten miles to the small town at the end of the line, north of Gardiner.

  Laura stalled. “You really should rest some more before taking on the train trip. There should be something going on for the Fourth of July later, maybe they’ll even have fireworks.”

  With a sidelong glance at her brother’s slack profile, Fanny said, “I think he’ll do better lying in a berth. We cannot afford to miss that train.”

  Perhaps they could not, but Laura decided, “I won’t be going with you.”

  She had an appointment at sundown. And though night would be falling, she viewed it as the dawning of the rest of her life.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  DECEMBER 25, 1900

  On Christmas night in Salt Lake City, nearly a hundred happy relatives of Aaron Bryce swarmed through his big brick house off Temple Square.

  In the kitchen, a dozen folks who’d sworn at two o’clock they would never eat again, made turkey sandwiches. In the parlor, plump, gray-haired Aunt Charlotte played the piano with earnest enthusiasm, thumping out “What Child Is This?” in a martial rhythm. Aaron’s children and grandchildren gathered before the fire and sang in joyous cacophony, their music seeping through the closed door of the quiet library.

  “Son,” Aaron said, “you’ve been in another world since you got here.”

  It was true, Cord realized. He’d sleepwalked through Christmas, hardly heard the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s hundred voices raised in praise of the Lord. He’d partaken of the communion service, mechanically passing the bread and water to the next hand.

  “Tell me,” Aaron said in the deep voice that had always invited confidence. “Have you decided what you’re going to do … after Excalibur?”

  Though the strain between Cord and Thomas had lessened since Cord had sold him his share of Excalibur, there was still a dynamic tension.

  Cord looked into his father’s loving eyes, regretting the silver that had invaded his blond hair. “I’ve been thinking about doing something new at the ranch. There’s been some talk in Jackson’s Hole that tourists from the East might care to come out, ride horses, eat fine food … Laura has even threatened to learn to cook.”

  “That sounds fine, so why the long face?” Aaron brought his cup of hot cider and sat in the biggest leather armchair in the room. Through the years Cord had watched him seated comfortably in that chair, his head bent to listen, first to his own young children and then to nieces, nephews, and finally grandchildren on his knee. Cord had been seven when Aaron had taken him from the Mormon Agency for Orphans, too big for such games.

  Aaron waited patiently.

  Outside the shining mahogany door, someone started the gramophone, and the words to “O Holy Night” reminded Cord of the stars shining brightly as he’d held Laura on Nez Perce Peak.

  “I guess it’s nerves,” he cleared his throat. “You remember when you got Laura’s telegram and came to Mammoth on the Fourth of July … when John Stafford married us that evening, we thought the fireworks went off just for us. But I’m just a little nervous about having another ceremony in the Tabernacle tomorrow.”

  “Because?”

  “Because the one thing I learned last summer is not to pretend, in any way, to be someone I’m not.”

  “The bishop will be disappointed to find out you’re not a Mormon anymore.” A hint of twinkle lighted Aaron’s eyes.

  “That’s not what I mean. I guess I keep thinking of Bitter Waters, wondering what he’s doing, how he feels …”

  The library door burst open, and a laughing Laura launched herself at Cord, landing in his lap. “No fair hiding out in here talking man talk,” she admonished. “Aunt Fanny, Father, Constance, and Norman have arrived.”

  “Then we’d best all go and greet them.” Cord dropped a kiss on Laura’s forehead.

  Over the top of her head, he smiled at Aaron, who said, “As to that matter we were discussing, I think you know there’s only one way to find your answer.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  JANUARY 5, 1901

  Early January snow drifted against the row of small squalid houses on the Colville Reservation in Nespelem, Washington. The creaking wagon in which Cord and Laura had hitched a ride from the railroad siding at Columbia Junction rolled on.

  Watching the retreating buckboard, he looked around. Laura gripped his hand.

  The taciturn Nez Perce driver had let them out in front of a fine home, contrasting sharply with the rest of the leaning, unpainted structures. Fronted by a long porch, the well-built white house had a sign in front that identified it as Superintendent Stillwell’s Residence.

  Cord moved their valises to the roadside, went up the stone walkway, and knocked.

  A pair of small blond girls with identical pigtails and ruffled pinafores answered the door. It took him a moment to realize that they were not twins, but perhaps a year or two apart in age.

  “Is your father or mother home?” Cord asked gently.

  The older of the girls looked sad. “They have gone to the Dreamer Church with Chief Joseph to prepare for a funeral.”

  “I am sorry,” Cord said gravely. “Perhaps you can direct me?”

  “Just there.” The girl leaned out the screen door and pointed to the largest building toward the end of the street.

  Cord thanked the girls and headed back into the wind, pausing to wrap his muffler more snugly about his neck.

  “I hope we haven’t come at a bad time,” Laura murmured.

  They passed the first of the small homes, and he found himself forced to reconsider his impression of squalor. Glass windows gleamed brightly; lace edged the curtains inside. On either side of the stoop, beds had been laid in which wild roses had been cultivated, though they stood dry and dead against the winter blast.

  A boy of perhaps ten years came out
of one of the houses wearing brightly colored clothing that had clearly been mended a number of times. When he approached, Cord noticed the child’s face was shiny clean.

  Cord reached into his pocket and extracted a pack of Adam’s pepsin gum. Beckoning the boy, he pressed it into his palm.

  At the end of the street, the small, wood-framed Dreamer Church looked like any other, with a bell tower above its steeply sloping roof. Cord held the door for Laura and entered on a chill gust.

  Inside, it was warm, with a steaming smell of damp winter clothing.

  Cord might not have recognized Chief Joseph. The big man still wore his draped blanket, but the crest of crisp black hair Cord remembered fell in graying hanks beside a face set in lines of sadness. Deep furrows ran from the base of his nose to the corners of his tight-lipped mouth, and his eyelids drooped, making his once-flashing eyes look small.

  His one ornament a tall hat decorated with eagle feathers, Joseph stood at the front of the small chapel before an open coffin in which a Nez Perce woman of perhaps forty or fifty years lay. She wore a beaded headdress and a royal-blue wool dress, also beaded in patterns of red and silver.

  A white man with thinning hair sat on the front bench with bowed shoulders.

  Cord set his bag in the anteroom and removed his hat. He helped Laura with her coat and hung it on a peg, then put his beside it.

  Joseph looked toward them.

  “I’m sorry to intrude at such a time,” Cord said slowly. “I’m looking for a man named Bitter Waters.”

  “Who seeks Bitter Waters?” Joseph asked.

  “My name is William Cordon Sutton. Once, long ago, Bitter Waters taught me something of family.”

  “You are not Nez Perce,” Joseph said.

  “Am I not?” Cord walked down the church aisle, reaching into his pocket. Carefully he drew out a glistening piece of black obsidian and offered it on his open palm.

  Recognition dawned on Joseph’s features. “You are Blue Eyes, the brave young man who found his wayakin during the dark days of our flight for freedom.”

  Cord nodded.

  “I believe Bitter Waters has gone to the sweat lodge, but he will want to see Blue Eyes.” Joseph looked at the older white man, who rose.

  “I’m Superintendent Stillwell.” They shook hands. “I will go and find Bitter Waters.”

  When he had gone, Joseph stepped away from the coffin. “Let us sit someplace.”

  He led Cord and Laura to a small room at the side of the chapel. There, he motioned them toward scarred wooden chairs with bright clean cushions, stepped into the church kitchen, and returned with mugs of steaming coffee. “You must get warm after your travels in this weather.”

  Smiling at Laura, he removed his elegant hat and set it aside. “I wear this for our festivals to remind the People of their heritage. In New York, three years ago, I walked through the lobby of the Astor Hotel in full buckskins. They laughed and called me savage, thinking I did not understand.”

  Cord had read in the papers about Joseph’s trip to the East, accompanied by Buffalo Bill. He sipped coffee and, putting an arm around the back of Laura’s chair, settled in to listen.

  “My father, Tuekakas, sent for me when he was dying,” Joseph said. “He told me, ‘Always remember that I never sold our country. You, my son, must never forget that.’”

  Cord felt as though he were tumbling back into the past. He wondered what Joseph thought of his running away to the white world with miner Cappy Parsons.

  “You are fortunate to have been far away when we surrendered at Bear Paw in Montana. We were taken by flatboat down the Yellowstone and Missouri to Fort Linden. There we were welcomed by the town and assured by General Howard’s men that we would be returned to our homes.” Joseph’s direct dark eyes came to rest on Cord’s. “General Sheridan ordered us loaded onto freight cars and taken to Fort Leavenworth. One hundred of our four hundred survivors died there of malaria and other sickness.”

  “If I had been with you then,” Cord told him, “I would not have spent so many years without knowing what is left of my blood family.”

  “We try to keep tradition alive,” Joseph said. “I have a house of wood that the government built for me. It is drafty and too far from the church and school, so I live in my tipi.”

  “You keep tradition,” Cord observed, “but the children learn English and study at the white man’s school.”

  “The old ways are passing,” Joseph replied in a resigned voice. “When I traveled to New York and saw its wonders, I knew we must prepare the youth to live in that world.”

  Cord felt the wall between his two worlds crumbling. He could honor both his heritages, as he had when he and Laura had exchanged vows in the Mormon Tabernacle last week, and then had come here.

  “The Colville Reservation will never be our home,” Joseph went on. “We will put Kamiah into the earth here, but someday it is my hope that she, and all of us, may sleep in the valley of the Wallowa.”

  “Kamiah?” Cord’s heart began a slow thudding. “If that is indeed the Kamiah I knew, then I must tell you a good woman has been lost.”

  The church door opened to admit a blast of cold wind and Bitter Waters. His hair was wet. “I came as soon as I rinsed my sweat in the waters of the stream.” Over his arm, he carried a soft-looking hide. “I also stopped by to get this.”

  Laura gave a muffled exclamation at the sight of the intricate artwork on the hide. Men with bows hunted deer and elk from the backs of fine sleek horses. “It’s beautiful.”

  Cord swallowed. “Believe it or not, that belonged to my mother.”

  Laura smoothed her hand over a painting of a tall young man offering a stringer of salmon to a slender, dark-haired girl. “How did it come to be here?”

  Cord put a fingertip carefully to a patch of beads. “I last saw it in my uncle’s tipi the morning Cappy took me away. It was painted for Sarah by her suitor, Tarpas Illipt, the one who died in the creek at Big Hole.”

  “Did you tell me why they never married?” Laura asked.

  “The young man’s father forbade the match, because she was half-white.”

  Bitter Waters shook his head. “There has been much trouble in our family, people taking sides and staring across a line drawn in the sand.”

  He looked toward his wife’s coffin. “She would have raised you as her own.” His eyes shone with tears. “You have come too late for Kamiah, Blue Eyes, but …”

  Bitter Waters went to Laura and reverently placed the marriage blanket around her shoulders. “It is not too late for me to welcome the newest member of our family.”

  EPILOGUE

  APRIL 1901

  Cord awakened when the first rose finger of dawn lighted the spire of the Grand Teton. Outside the wide glass window of his and Laura’s bedroom, a lone elk bugled. Stretching his neck out long, the bull shook his head, shaggy with the thick coat of late winter. Several inches of fresh snow had fallen during the night, piling cleanly on top of the already-deep drifts against the cabin’s wall.

  Last night, the dream had come again. The soldiers had walked him between Fort Yellowstone’s stables and centered him against a whitewashed wall.

  Once he’d heard his mother say that if you dreamed you died, you would. Each time Cord awakened in a cold sweat, he wondered if the firing squad might still have the power to kill him. But he believed with each day he was safe and happy, these dreams would pass, as the nightmares of his parents’ deaths had ceased to visit him.

  Putting his arm around Laura’s waist, Cord savored her softness. He remembered waking alone so many nights. He’d watched the sunrise on the mountains, the bright gold of aspens seeming to mock him, and the winter desolation that had matched the loneliness inside a man between worlds.

  This morning, he felt only contentment as he watched the rosy glow spread down the mountains, while bluish shadows lay deep in the valley.

  Cord blew warm breath on Laura’s neck. Before he could draw her closer,
she tossed back the covers and went to the window, a silhouette against the brightening world. He followed and bent to kiss her.

  “Come,” he murmured, attempting to draw her back to bed. She looked delicious naked, save for her mother’s cameo on a braided chain.

  Over her shoulder, he saw Dante come from behind the barn and pause to allow White Bird to catch up. “You might say White Bird went AWOL from the army,” Cord chuckled.

  “I can’t wait until she foals.” Laura’s lips curved into a smile, and she took his left hand, looking down at their matching gold wedding bands.

  Reaching to the bed, Laura wrapped the softness of Sarah’s marriage blanket around her. Cord went to the woodstove and lit the fire he’d laid last night. He clattered the stove lid back into place and joined her again at the window, waiting for the fire to overcome the chill air sheeting off the glass.

  Drawing Laura against his side, he felt something different about her, a lushness and languor. A certain fullness that caused him to dream …

  In just a few years, their son might push his way with chubby hands through the summer-fragrant sage between the ranch house and the Snake River, playing in the same yard where Franklin Sutton and Sarah had watched over Cord.

  Rose illumination turned lemon as the Tetons shifted and blurred beneath the constantly changing light. Just when Cord thought they remained the same, the wind would come up on the high peaks, blowing a veil of powder down another canyon.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I have tried to recapture the experience of Yellowstone at the turn of the twentieth century, the stage tours, hotels, tent camps, feeding garbage to the bears …

  I was surprised to discover that the Lake Hotel had phones and electricity in 1900, while Mammoth, seemingly closer to civilization, still lacked power. And there was a bar in the Lake Hotel despite the prohibition of alcohol in the rest of the park.

  It is true that the Lake Hotel did have maintenance problems, and the Northern Pacific decided to unload it around the turn of the century. There were rival buyers, and the sale was postponed until 1901. Otherwise, I have written a complete work of fiction around that event. My apologies to the descendants of whomever might have been interim Yellowstone Superintendent in the summer of 1900, as I was unable to unearth a name and I did not intend to paint a real man a villain. The harsh treatment of poachers and tourists who defaced the geological formations is rooted in fact—there is an historic report of a poacher being force marched to Mammoth and horsewhipped. There were also a number of stagecoach robberies in the park.