Showdown at Buffalo Jump (10 page)

But the action was purely practical, not spiritual. It would make no sense to let wolves and coyotes and skunks come to associate the Bass Ranch with an easy meal.

Catherine had risen early, cut up the carcasses, shaken the pieces in a mixture of flour and pepper and salt, and tossed them into grease, already sizzling in Max's three big frying pans.

Max stepped through the dugout door, leaving his hat on the pile of wood at the entry. Catherine motioned him to the table. She had fried sidepork for the grease and made dough-de-dads with the last remaining dough kept overnight in a pan covered with a damp towel. They were still warm when Max sat down.

“You're early.”

“Didn't want to do any cooking after the other ladies arrive. Don't want anyone to see me in this … this,” Catherine said, a sweep of her head taking in the dugout.

She had dismissed with that nod all the days Max had spent with a pick and shovel carving the dugout from the bank of clay. He had moved a houseful of dirt from the hillside, hauling it upstream to a narrow stretch of the creek, using earth and logs hauled down from the hill to build a low earthen dam there.

The work had not come easy for Max. The first tasks he had put himself to on the homestead—fencing, developing springs, and damming coulees—had all been respectable work for a cowhand, and bone deep that was what Max was.

But digging the dugout was another matter. Cowhands do not stoop to such labor, considering themselves a breed apart from those who build calluses to fit the handles of shovels and picks. Their souls are better fitted to horizons that stretch wide as the sea than to the confining gray walls of a dugout.

Max had done the work, understanding that it represented a major shift in the direction of his life, and when he was done, he was pleased that he had done it well. That was the credo upon which he had built his life.

And now Catherine sneered at the dugout as she had sneered at the privy, at his dream of building a ranch to fit the breadth of this land.

Catherine had measured Max and found him terribly wanting, and Max was forced for the first time in his life to look at himself by standards more stringent than how well he strung fence or branded calves or played poker. And he was beginning to doubt himself, to see the dirt beneath his fingernails rather than the strength of his hands.

He watched Catherine as he ate, taking care not to be caught with his eyes upon her. She had been beautiful two days ago in Prairie Rose. Standing over the stove, now, dressed in pants and a long-sleeved shirt, hair aflutter and face flushed with the heat, she was more beautiful still.

But to Max, she was like the delicate pink wild rose that traces the waterways of Montana: beautiful, sweet scented, but guarded by a jungle of needle-sharp thorns. And talking to her was like wading into that jungle, knowing there would be thorns to pick from his flesh before he found his way out of the tangle.

But Max wanted to talk, to meld Catherine's time with his own, and he wanted an answer to a question that had been needling him.

“Saw Phillips last night.”

Catherine stiffened. She wasn't ashamed of her battle with the banker. He had it coming. But in the heat of the battle, she had betrayed Max's confidence about the money he had hidden on the homestead and made him vulnerable to that despicable man. She felt like a Judas.

Max continued, “Horses nickered, and I walked down along the creek by the corral. There was the banker, digging a hole. I watched him for a minute or two and then came up quiet behind him and asked him what he was doing. He jumped straight up about three rails high. Said he was going fishing. Not too many people go fishing in the middle of the night without a pole, but he said that was the way he liked to do it. Said he could cut himself a willow. He didn't have a can, so I asked him where he kept the worms. He kind of hemmed and hawed and said he always carried them in his pockets to keep them warm. So I helped him pick worms until his pockets were pretty well filled. Didn't even say thank you, just started off downstream like a little kid who had had an accident in his pants, and he walked right past a patch of willows without stopping to cut a pole. Might be he decided he really didn't want to go fishing, after all.”

Max looked at Catherine, but she avoided his eyes. Her fight with Max was personal, and she had shared it with a man who would use it to hurt Max if he could. She felt shame for what she had done and anger at Max for having put her in such an untenable position.

But just as she was about to speak, she was saved by the rumble of wagons and Jake Thomsen's high, clear voice. “Max, about time you got out of bed. We came out here to get some work done, not to sit here getting splinters in our behinds.”

Max grinned a little despite himself. Jake and a couple of others from town had arrived early with the lumber he had ordered.

When he glanced back at Catherine, she was rigid by the stove. “Don't you bring them in here,” she said, her voice brittle as shore ice in winter.

“They've been in here before.”

“Not with me.”

“No, not with you.” But then neither have I, Max thought, except for a few moments around the table in strained silence or in heated battle. “They'll be expecting breakfast.”

“We don't always get what we expect.”

“We sure as hell don't.”

Catherine's eyes sliced into Max's. “Mr. Bass, that language is probably acceptable to your friends. It is not acceptable to me.”

“If you find something that is acceptable to you, I would be obliged if you would let me know. I'd rope it off and sell tickets to it as the eighth wonder of the world.”

Catherine looked at Max out of the corner of her eye. “Sometimes you surprise me, Mr. Bass. Somewhere behind that plate of bone you call a forehead, there lurks a light, a dim, dim light, but a light nonetheless.”

Max sighed. “These are my friends. Please be nice to them. It is just one day, and then they will be gone.”

“You do, then, allow
some
people to leave this … palace of yours?”

Max's voice edged sideways through gritted teeth. “Damn it, woman, don't you ever stop?”

“If I trouble you, please feel free to send me on my way.”

“I don't want to talk about that now.”

“I do. I want your friends to know what kind of a man you really are. Do you think, then, that they would come to this place and build a barn in your honor?”

“Whose part do you think they will take?” Max spat. “They were all standing there at the Patchucks' when you promised to take me for better or worse. You want them to know what an easy liar you are?”

Catherine gasped. In a flash, she was standing by Max's chair, her fork—the only weapon she had—describing a vicious arc toward his face.

Max caught Catherine's wrist, and the two were still struggling as Jake Thomsen poked his head through the door.

“Max, you still in bed?” Jake's grin faded as he saw the two. “Sorry,” he said, ducking out the door.

Catherine's voice was like a late fall wind keening through the naked limbs of cottonwoods, reaching in supplication toward an unpromising sky.

“Mr. Thomsen, you said you would help if I needed it. I need it. Please take me to Prairie Rose. Please take me away from this, please … please.”

Thomsen pretended he hadn't heard her, trying to carry the smile he had taken to the dugout back to the wagon, but it was too heavy a burden.

Max stumbled for the door, taking a deep breath before plunging through. He appeared outside as though surfacing from the depths of a pool, gasping for air. Max tried to grin, but the effort twisted his face into a macabre mask.

“Miss Catherine is frying chicken. You boys will have to wait on your breakfast,” he said, his voice little more than a croak.

And Catherine stood at the stove watching the frying chicken through a veil of tears, as though from behind a rain-streaked window. She would escape this place. One way or another, she would escape.

8

Max and Edna Lenington stood silent, unmoving as though by some magic they were taking root, becoming the second and third parts of a cottonwood grove on the creek bottom.

It was full light now, and most of the men were laying the barn's foundation downstream where a flat, bare slab of sandstone overlooked Max's natural corral. The foundation was taking shape, a rough rectangle built of sandstone hauled from an out cropping below.

The families had come just after the sun set fire to the day, children poking solemnly from the beds of slow-moving wagons like sentinel gophers. Once the wagons stopped, the children spilled over the sides and flowed to the creek as naturally as rainwater, sometimes quiet as a meadow brook and sometimes raucous as a mountain torrent, but always to the creek.

The children knew the importance of water instinctively. It was hammered into their subconscious by murmured conversations of their parents, desperate eyes seeking dark clouds.

Consciously, they knew that a creek, open water, would be as close to a carnival as most of them would ever come. Creek water was cool on feet that went dry except for second- or third-hand bathwater on Saturday nights. It was a strange environment inhabited by soft-skinned frogs and snakes that didn't bite and fish that did. And the stream was edged with grass, green and soft, not hard and brittle like August bunch grass.

None of the children could resist the creek: None of them tried.

A barn raising was a holiday, but not from the labor that hardened the homesteaders' hands and stiffened their backs. They would work as hard today as they did at home, harder perhaps, pitting themselves against one another in unannounced contests of skill and strength.

But the day was special. They would share scarce gossip, tap into the rich vein of kinship felt by those who shared life on the Montana prairie. They would tease underused muscles into grins and guffaws and share pieces of their lonely lives with others of their kind.

The men were already at work, following a few quick instructions from Max.

But wives and older daughters stood rooted in the creek bottom with Max and Edna, awaiting the resolution of a breach of prairie etiquette. Catherine was hostess, and she should have been outside to greet the women as they came, to tell them what they needed to know to prepare the day's feast, but still she had not emerged from the dugout. None of them were willing to step in, awed yet by the dignity with which she carried herself at the wedding.

So they fidgeted, watching the doorway of the dugout, awaiting some signal from Catherine.

Signal, they got.

Catherine swept aside the dugout's blanket door and stepped out, pausing a moment for effect. She was wearing a beautiful blue dress, a copy of one she had seen in Boston. It had taken her months to save enough money to buy the material for the dress and weeks to make it, stitching each detail from memory.

She had sewed in secret, knowing that the other servants would laugh at her for believing she would ever have occasion to wear such a dress. But as Catherine sewed, she dreamed of the stir the dress would create among young gentlemen admirers. And today, she glided down the steps from the dugout as though she were leaving the veranda of a Southern mansion to mix with guests on the lawn.

Much to Max's relief, when Catherine spoke she was the model of civility.

“Mrs. Lenington, I'm glad you could come.” Then Catherine turned to Max, her smile cold as the moon on a winter night. “Mr. Bass, I thought you would take it upon yourself to set up a table down here in the shade of the cottonwood tree.”

Max scurried off.

“Mrs. Lenington, perhaps you wouldn't mind helping me carry the chicken and potato salad to the table?”

Edna nodded and then called to the waiting women. “Table will be here, might as well bring down the food.” The women exploded into a rush of talk, walking back to their wagons, eager to get to work.

One said in a stage whisper as she walked away, “Certainly dresses well for a woman who lives in a hole in the ground.”

But the woman's companion brought her up short. “Not all of us can live in a nice tarpaper shack like you do, Lucille,” and that ended the discussion.

The men had framed the barn's walls on the ground and had them up well before noon. Mean while another crew was working on the trusses for the roof. After the walls went up, the trusses were hoisted into place. Then one crew went to work flooring the loft, and others divided up to side the building.

The men swarmed over the emerging barn like ants, moving under the direction of some central intellect or instinct. No one really seemed to be in charge, although occasionally one man or another would approach Max, ask him a brief question, and then return to the barn. His coworkers would gather for a moment and then go back to their tasks with renewed fervor.

Catherine watched, fascinated, until the shade and Edna called her back to the long tables set up along the creek. She found that she was enjoying herself as the day wore on. The shade of the great cottonwood was filled with the buzz of conversation, and hungry women and giggling children.

The Sunday supper was ready. The children, of course, had already been picking at the goodies on the table, snatching a piece of chicken whenever opportunity presented itself. There was much to-do made about these raids with stern looks for the children and grins for the other grown-ups.

The work had been steady since first light, the crew pausing only for long draughts of water hauled in buckets to the barn. The men, women, and children were hungry, but Max didn't want to break for supper until the barn was substantially finished. Once the men had cleared the heavily laden tables and tapped the keg of beer cooling in the creek, work would be swallowed in a vortex of beer and talk and horseshoes.

The tables were covered to protect the food from the flies that gathered for the feast. Catherine, wishing she had worn pants rather than a dress, settled on a rock by the creek when she would have preferred sprawling on the cool grass.