Lydia (29 page)

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 down. 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.

We wandered quietly, with Evangeline’s fingers touching my arm, along a path we preferred between the hot pots and pools. As if a sign, over in the middle distance a geyser erupted to a height of ten feet or more. You could glimpse the water column when the wind blew the steam aside, like watching a beautiful sight through fluttering curtains.

“You remember what Mr. Cox said after supper,” Evangeline began.

Bill said a lot, but I didn’t ask
what
,
on account of he only said the one thing that wounded.

“Yes, I do.”

She went on a few steps by my side. Have I ever told you of Evangeline’s physical carriage? She moved like a trained dancer. Even though she was inches shorter than me, she didn’t seem so when we walked.

“Would you rather become a father or remain as we have been?”

My stomach gave a flop. My knees buckled, and if she hadn’t been steadying my arm, I might have staggered.

“Are we discussing the planning stage or the done deal?” I asked.

“Would it matter?”

“I suppose not.” It’s funny how you can crave a thing you never even knew you wanted. At that moment, I realized I’d been wanting a child—boy or girl—for many years, at least since those nights in the trenches when I felt without connection.

“I’ve dreamed of someday being someone’s father. I lost my own.” In my mind, I saw Dad in San Francisco, the day he carried me on his shoulders while we watched the Chinese funeral. “I have resolved to do a better job of parenthood than he did.”

Evangeline continued the walk. From the relaxed musculature of her face, I could see relief. Whenever a woman breaks news of this sort, she can never assume how the man will take it.

Evangeline said, “The time has arrived for you to practice your resolution.”

We stopped, intertwined hands, and turned to gaze at one another. I knew right there on the spot that no matter how long I stayed alive, or what became of me, things would never get better than now.

I needed confirmation. “Then, it is true?”

Evangeline smiled and nodded. “Have I made you happy?”

I looked into her eyes and felt her skin against my hand. This woman was all I ever wanted and more than I deserved.

I said, “I am happy. There is no doubt.”

***

Every joke has its punch line, and I got mine.

The glee I felt over impending parenthood was impossible to suppress. The next morning, up at headquarters, Snuffy saw it all over my countenance.

“Who bit you in the butt?” he asked.

I beamed. That’s what I did. “What do you mean?”

We were walking from the motorcycle barn over to the dining hall at the Mammoth Hotel. It’s a short stroll across cut grass we walked most days I was posted at headquarters.

“You look like you swallowed a toad.”

The sky was a brilliant blue, the pine needles a rich green. Elk scat steamed. It would be hard to imagine a day more deeply itself.

I couldn’t keep the news to myself. “My bride is with child.”

He kind of chuckled and cut his eyes my way. “And you no doubt think this is a positive development.” Snuffy had seven offspring himself—five before the war and two after. He always said he joined up as an excuse to get out of the house.

“I do indeed,” I said.

“Well, to each his own.”

Inside, we ran into Bill and Shad hunched over coffee and beefsteak. Bill was dressed in his buckskin outfit, which had gone out of fashion when Wild Bill Hickok was gunned down in 1876. You don’t see no one but drug pushers and lawyers dressed like that nowdays. He’d grown the worm mustache into a looper since we last met, and I couldn’t help but count more elk ivories on that necklace of his. Oldest friend or not, if I caught the son of a bitch wasting an elk for two teeth, I would throw his tail into a small room with no windows.

Shad nodded in my direction. He ate steak with a toothpick lodged in the corner of his mouth. I’m not sure how—or why—he did that.

Bill said, “What’s with him?” meaning me. That’s how visually excited I was. Anybody in the world who saw me that day would have immediately known I was walking on air.

Snuffy grinned real big. He’d gotten to know Shad and Bill since the day Shad brought my Harley into the barn. He considered them funny folks.

“His wife has a bun in the oven.” Snuffy chortled. That’s the proper word for what he did—chortled.

Shad was okay with it. “Congratulations,” he said. “There but for the grace of God, go I.” Pregnancy brings out the card in even the most taciturn of men. Something about admitting you did what had to be done to make a woman that way and now you’re facing the consequences strikes the male gender as hilarious.

But Bill frowned. I could sense he didn’t like being proved wrong about the unloaded-gun crack. He didn’t so much as look my way while Snuffy and I proceeded across the dining hall over to our usual table.

I ordered a Salisbury steak that was tough as a baseball mitt and coffee, and as I sawed away on the meat, I watched Bill stew. He was working out a method to get back at me. I could see it plain as the cloud on his face. I regretted telling Snuffy. I regretted us coming to dinner. I regretted me coming to park headquarters. I should of stayed at the cabin and been with Evangeline. We could have locked the door, pulled the curtains, and played cards. She enjoyed a game called hearts.

When they rose to leave, Bill tossed money on the table, then he walked to the counter and dug a toothpick out of the dish there. Shad, who already had his pick, disappeared out the door. I thought they were gone and I was safe, but then Bill nodded to himself, and he turned and worked his way across the hall, coming through the mostly empty tables.

I steeled myself for whatever nasty remark he might choose to make. In my mind, I knew he couldn’t touch me. I was loved by Evangeline and on the cusp of an expanded family, and he wasn’t either one.