by Tim Sandlin
Craning my neck forward, I strained to see the grizzly. What I saw was my torn-open gut and my intestine snaked across the meadow grasses to where the bear had dragged it. He was leaned forward like a dog at its food bowl, slurping me up.
I screamed. The raven flew. I awoke soaked in sweat with a terrible pain in my shoulder.
***
The room was painted bone white and had four narrow beds, but the other three were empty. There was a sink and a closed cabinet. My clothes were folded on a wooden stool. Curtains you wouldn’t usually find in a hospital blew in the window, and I heard a motorcycle revved up beyond where park personnel normally revved. I figure the motorcycle woke me up. Or the ache in my shoulder. It was a deep ache, not simply a surface wound. It felt as if my muscles had gone under a hammer.
You can call it intuition or premonition or the spiritual side of morphine, but something felt out of place. I swung my legs to the side, and holding my arm tight to my breasts, I stood in my underclothing. Vertigo spun me ass over head, but after I stayed still a minute, the room settled, and I was capable of walking to the window and looking out.
The hospital room was on the third floor of the former fort. I could see down into a park-like grassy area, where Shad was circling my bike and Bill and Evangeline were engrossed in conversation by the horse rings. I couldn’t hear their words. From the posture of their bodies, they appeared at the height of tension. Bill faced away, but Evangeline’s mouth was a hard line and her eyes blazed. Bill reached across to grab Evangeline’s wrist. She flung his hand off and spit out an angry oath. Then she walked quickly away and into the door beneath my window.
Bill turned to watch her go. His face showed a smile that made me sick to my stomach. He glanced up at my window only I jerked back before he saw me. I think.
By the time Evangeline came up the stairs and through the door, I was in bed, pretending to sleep. I heard her footsteps crossing the room and her touch at my brow. I opened my eyes slowly to look at her above me there. Her color was up, kind of a reddish brown like varnished mahogany.
I said, “You look nice.”
She said, “Do you hurt?”
“Not so much. There wasn’t cause for you to come all the way up here.”
“Yes, there was.”
We gazed at each other over a space of time. I thought then, and still think, Evangeline was the most beautiful aspect I ever beheld. To this day, I can close my eyes and picture her in the headquarters hospital room, staring down at me.
I said, “Are you troubled?”
She blinked a couple of times. “I was concerned about you. The man said you’d been attacked by a bear, but he didn’t tell me more. I didn’t know why he had your motorcycle, and then he drove fast coming over the pass and made me nervous. I’ve never ridden a motorcycle before today.”
This was the lengthiest speech Evangeline had made in our eight months of matrimony. I knew it was the result of more than anxiety over my welfare.
She leaned in to study what she could see of my stitches. “Has the doctor said when you can go home?”
I sat up. “We’ll leave soon as you bring my clothes from over there.”
She walked across to the stool. “The shirt is torn.”
“It’ll be okay. You can sew it, back at the cabin.”
***
I didn’t get infected, but what I did get was tired. I slept for most of the next three days, propped up by pillows at the head of the bed so my shoulder stayed somewhat upright. Evangeline spoon-fed me a medicinal soup she claimed came from her heritage, but I didn’t believe her. The central ingredient tasted like geyser runoff—sulfur with traces of iron and orange algae. The sulfur didn’t do my tear any harm, and it possibly did some good since, like I said, no infection set in, but it did have a powerful affect on my stomach. I put out farts could have knocked down a buffalo.
Friday evening, one of my farts blew so strong it woke me up. Evangeline sat on the side of the bed, a damp rag in her hand, a slight smile playing across her lips. A Mona Lisa smile. I’d been a Paris artist, and I’d seen the actual Mona Lisa, so I knew that smile, even if it wasn’t on velvet. That smile meant I am amused by the smell of your fart. Look at her and you’ll agree.
Evangeline comforted me by dabbing the damp, warm cloth to my forehead. “Your friends came calling while you slept.”
The cloth felt nice, but her words chilled me to the core. “What friends is that?”
“The men from the hospital. Mr. Cox and Mr. Pierce. They told me the story of your injury.”
I moved Evangeline’s hand away and tried to command her attention through contact between the eyes. She would have none of it.
“Those two are no friends of mine,” I said. “Or maybe Shad is. I can’t say. If he’s such a fine fella, why’s he been dragging along after Bill Cox all these years? He may be tainted too.”
She glanced my direction, then away. “You do not approve of Mr. Cox?”
“No more than I approve of a rattlesnake in my blankets.”
“And yet he saved your life.”
I found myself nonplussed. And confused. Which one of them was she talking about? “Bill told you he saved my life?”
She nodded. “Twice in France and then with the bear.”
That brought me off my pillows. “Those are absolute lies. Shad saved me from the bear, after I was done saving him. Bill never saved nobody—not in Yellowstone and not in France. I don’t know how much conversation you’ve had with the man, but he is to be shunned by all right-minded people.”
Evangeline got up and carried the rag to our wash pan on the woodstove. She stuck the rag in the water, then wrung it out and hung it on a peg to dry, all before she looked back my way.
“He’s coming to supper tomorrow evening. The both of them are.”
It may sound far-fetched to say I gasped, but that’s what I did. I gasped. “Why, for God’s sake.”
She stared down at the pine flooring and came to the crux of what bothered her. “Are you so ashamed to have an Indian as your wife that you would hide me from your people?”
There it was again. I have no notion where she got the idea that a white man married to an Indian would feel embarrassment. Maybe she was raised by parents who thought that way since Evangeline wasn’t full blood herself. Or maybe she learned it in Europe. To my death, I will deny she got it from me.
“I got no people, Evangeline. And of course I’m not ashamed. If I had people, I’d introduce you and be joyful in it, but I don’t. All I have is you. You’re all I need.”
Her eyes came off the floor, and she gave me a look of defiance. “They are coming to supper. I want you to act civil.” She took my pants off a nail and tossed them across the room, where they landed on my lap. “And out of bed.”
***
In Paris, when Evangeline fixed a Stroganoff, she employed veined beef and sour cream. Compare that to Fountain Ranger Station, where she made it out of elk Snuffy gave us and sweet cream I bought from the Hamilton Store at headquarters. The elk was tough, being as Snuffy gave us the cuts his wife refused, and the cream changed the flavor, but the meal was still far better than what Bill or Shad deserved. No matter what gossips whispered about Evangeline’s native ways, no one ever said she wasn’t a first-class cook.
She seemed worrisome all day, as if she wasn’t looking forward to visitors any more than I was. Early afternoon, she chased me out of the cabin—told me to take a bath. This I did by mixing one of the less-hot hot springs with river water. Most of those springs were so close to boiling, you couldn’t fetch a bucketful without risk of a burn, but a few were only scalding and could be buffed down. While I tub bathed, I managed a soap lather sufficient for shaving. I also cleaned out my wound best I could and rewrapped the bandage.
Bill and Shad arrived in later afternoon, driving a four-door M
odel T Ford touring car with no windshield. Not a new Ford either, this automobile was one of the originals. Bill stepped out wearing a driving scarf, goggles, and fringed gloves like he was a European tourist. Shad looked same as ever. They’d brought a bottle they said was port, although I doubted if either knew what that meant. They weren’t sophisticated about liquor, having never lived in Paris.
Bill got huffy when I turned down a taste. “You too uppity to drink with your childhood friends?” he said.
Evangeline cut her eyes my way while I took up the bottle and peered through it. Bottles didn’t have labels that year, on account of prohibition. As a ranger, I could have arrested Bill on the spot.
“I’m law enforcement now,” I said. “You shouldn’t flaunt your ways in my face.”
Bill laughed and poured himself a jarful of the golden liquid, reaffirming my opinion of his alcohol savvy. I never saw any golden port in all my days of drunkenness.
“You wouldn’t turn in your oldest and dearest friend.” He turned his attention to Evangeline, who was setting out every dish and piece of cutlery we owned. She’d put on a calico dress I’d bought her in New York City. To me, it showed her figure nicely and was much too good for company.
Bill said, “Did Oleander tell you how the three of us met?”
We sat at an outside table I’d drug over from the public picnic area. While Evangeline served the repast, Bill told the Miller brothers bank-robbing story. He’d forgot me and him met Fourth of July when he offered to shoot me. He also got the robbery wrong. He made himself the hero who faced down the outlaws, while I cowered behind the teller cage. He had Shad fire off a dozen shots, then Bill disarmed him because he could tell Shad was a good boy led astray and not fodder for killing. Shad knew it was all a tale, but he never contradicted a word. I have thought about Shad Pierce for many years now, and I still can’t come to terms with why he put up with Bill’s nonsense. It couldn’t be that promise of servitude given in his youth. I don’t imagine. No one signs away their whole life unless they want to.
Bill told about the other Miller boys shooting at me and Agatha when we came out of the underground bowling emporium. He made me cowardly in that story too.
“Oly dived under an automobile and left my sister to fend alone. He wouldn’t come out till I’d chased Roy and Ephir Miller to the town limit,” he said.
“Agatha must have been proud of you,” Evangeline said. In all the time spent with her, I never learned to separate sarcasm from sincerity. That strikes me as important skill in a marriage.
“I just did what any good citizen would do,” Bill said.
Rather than tell the true story, I asked about a subject close to my heart. Besides expecting to run into Bill and Shad ever since we came west, I’d secondly been waiting for the Roy and Ephir to surface on my doorstep.
“You ever hear what happened to the surviving set of Millers?” I asked.
Shad stopped with a fork full of Stroganoff at his lips. “They was hung.”
“Hung dead?”
Bill spoke with what I call a smirk. “Not two months after we last saw those boys, they got caught rustling beef steers in Lincoln County. Folks down there are quick with a rope. There weren’t weight-bearing trees close by, so they hung the both of them from a telegraph pole. I saw a picture in a Billings Gazette.”
I stared off across the basin as a moose came from the forest and picked his way between the fumaroles, working his way to the river. He was majestic as can be, wending through the steam.
“When did you see this Billings Gazette?” I asked.
Bill pretended to shoot the moose. From the space of his arms, I’d guess he was firing an invisible Lee-Enfield. “Mom sent me a packet of newspapers every week while we were in training camp.”
My voice got quiet. Evangeline and Shad heard the menace, but Bill didn’t. “You mean you knew they were dead before we left Calgary? Why didn’t you tell me?”
He glanced from the moose to me. “You never asked.”
“Those two were why we went to France. Our years in the Great War were wasted time.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Bill said.
“We fought for nothing.”
Bill affected a look of wonder. “That’s hardly true. You wouldn’t have met this lovely lady and found joy through wedlock if I hadn’t led you to France. How can you think you fought for nothing?”
This is a philosophical stance that has bothered me for at least eighty years and maybe longer, maybe all the way back to Mama’s violent death and those Congregationalist women saying it was God’s will. If Mama hadn’t died, I wouldn’t have met Agatha and if I hadn’t met Agatha, I wouldn’t have met Bill or killed Millers and so forth through the Great War until Evangeline. Does that mean my mother’s demise and the millions dead in the war was to my personal benefit? That’s a stretch I’m not willing to admit.
You hear it regular in nursing homes: If I hadn’t been raped by that cur, I’d never have given birth to my darling daughter—and here the speaker makes the leap I don’t follow—therefore, the rape was a blessing. I do not believe a bad experience leading to good results makes the bad experience worthwhile. That’s just me. The war was not a good deal simply on account of without it, I wouldn’t have found happiness. Sometimes the price is too high.
Bill, naturally, thought the Great War was a lark. At least he did looking through six years of hindsight. He spent the next hour regaling Evangeline with our grand adventures in the trenches. His memory of war was as far from mine as the sun is from Jupiter. Even Shad snorted disbelief at a few stories involving camaraderie and high jinks.
Evangeline listened to Bill’s malarkey with concentration in her eyes, as if she bought it. She asked the pertinent questions—“Weren’t you frightened?”—and gave the expected comments—“You boys should have been court-marshaled for that trick.” Bill told her about battles and drinking contests and fistfights with Australians, as if they were all of equal value. He gave his version of nights in houses of ill repute, including me in the tales, which wasn’t necessary. He never knew I paid those women not to perform.
He told one about stealing a Mark I tank and driving to Marseilles that I know he made up whole cloth. Maybe someone heard about someone else doing it and Bill adopted the story as his own. Evangeline laughed appreciably more than once, which was rare for her. Evangeline loved life and enjoyed a good joke, in her own way, but she was never much for out-loud giggles.
For dessert, she brought out a huckleberry pie made from berries she’d picked in the near vicinity. It steamed straight from the woodstove and smelled like my belief in heaven. Along with the pie, she served up the last of the heavy cream she hadn’t put in the Stroganoff. I never tasted anything so good, before or since.
As Bill poured cream over his pie, he said, “This brings to mind the fresh strawberry tart my sister’s chef bakes whenever I go to visit.”
I couldn’t help myself. I bit. “Agatha has a paid chef?”
He grinned that gum-exposing grin of his across the huckleberries. “You don’t expect her to cook for herself, what with three young ones and another on the way.” He made a show of looking around the cabin, assessing my financial worth. “You should be thankful Agatha threw you over. She’s made Frank Lesley buy her a mansion of a house and a new automobile. And jewels. If you’d married her, she’d have run you ragged supporting all those babies.”
I chuckled. Evangeline gave me a look.
Bill turned snide. “Or maybe you wouldn’t. I see you and your Missus don’t have offspring. A person might expect you would, by now.”
I said, “We’d rather wait and enjoy each other for a bit before we start a family.”
Evangeline set her coffee cup down by her plate and did that thing I’d seen in Paris the night we met, the thing where she goes placid. It’s as if she shuts her being dow
n. Folds into herself so nothing of her spirit shows. I guess she didn’t like me saying start a family as if the two of us weren’t one already. Or maybe she did dream of a child and resented that I hadn’t give her the opportunity yet. To tell the truth, we’d never talked babies. I’d assumed sometime in the future, but I hadn’t put any serious thought to the matter. I don’t know what Evangeline assumed. I imagine now that I should of asked.
Bill shoveled a wad of huckleberries down his gullet. He swallowed and looked at Evangeline while speaking to me. “I’m happy to hear you are barren by choice,” he said. “I was afraid that disease you picked up from the Indian whore left you with an unloaded gun.”
Without a word, Evangeline rose and walked into the cabin.
***
No more was said of babies for another six or eight weeks. My shoulder healed to the extent I could work, which in September and October meant patrolling the south border. For some reason I never caught on to, men from Wyoming think they have a God-given right to kill big game in Yellowstone National Park. They have no more scruples over poaching than Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest, especially when it concerns moose. Wyomingites pretty much wiped out the moose population along the Upper Snake River there; then they blamed the wolves and demanded we exterminate them, and of course, we did—with the exception being me.
So, I was away from home sometimes three, four days and nights. Upon my return, Evangeline always expressed singular delight at my arrival. Neither Bill nor Shad nor any unpleasantness from their visit was mentioned, even though I knew they were living in Gardiner, Montana, only eight miles north of headquarters. It is somewhat an amazement we hadn’t crossed paths with them earlier than we did.
On the evening of which I speak, I’d been in West Thumb a few days and just come back. Evangeline cooked a knockwurst and potato dish she learned in Austria. It was mighty good, although she herself didn’t eat but a taste.
Together, we took our evening promenade about the basin. Tourists don’t know this, but October is the fairest month in Yellowstone Park. It snows a bit in September, just to clear the pine pollen and riffraff from the auto camps. Then the air turns to a clean sparkle like nowhere else I’ve ever been. The mixture of low humidity, cold nights, and bracing days makes for a wondrous quality of light.
