Showdown at Buffalo Jump (19 page)

Max's hands needed something to do. He rose and walked to the chicken, lying now in a melting mound of hail. He picked up the bird and twisted her head off so she would bleed out as he carried her back to the tarp. There, he opened her with his pocketknife, reaching into her body cavity and pulling her guts free. He stood and threw the entrails, writhing through the air like snakes into the creek.

“You missed one,” he muttered to himself, kneeling at a puddle and rinsing his hands of the blood and stench.

“Now, we've got something to eat if we can find somewhere to eat it.” Max nodded at the steps leading into the dugout. The water was lapping at the last one, only inches away from the bottom of the door. Max turned his attention to the cottonwood and the swing he had hung from it and the flood that was trying to push the tree out of its way.

“It took my hay,” he said. “All we've got left is what's in the loft. This is my fault. I was bragging about having hay, about beating this country. You rear up on your hind legs like that, and you get slapped down.”

“Should I bow to you?”

Max's eyebrows knotted.

“I've never been in the presence of a man so important,” Catherine said, “that God would subject the rest of us to a storm like that just to humble him.”

Max's eyes disappeared into thin slits. He looked at Catherine as he had looked at the flood moments before, but whatever he was about to say was interrupted by a groan and crash from the creek. Pressure behind the log had finally become unbearable, and the swing had broken—almost burst.

As Catherine watched the log shake itself loose from the tree, she remembered the first day she had seen the swing, the promise it had held for her, and the despair she felt when she learned the truth. Her mind was playing with that as she heard the sound of a galloping horse behind her.

It was one of the Lenington boys: Andrew, she thought. Water sprayed from the horse's hooves as the boy made his way to them. The horse slipped and almost fell as he pulled the animal to a stop.

“Ma wants you to come quick as you can. Little Joey's lost in the creek.”

Catherine sucked in her breath. She remembered Joey from the barn raising, hanging from the ledge across the creek, fighting Edna's grasp to go into the circle of children to face the rattlesnake again.

“I want to go,” she said.

“Might as well,” Max said. “If your eyes are half as sharp as your tongue, you'll be the one to spot him.”

Catherine ignored Max's jibe in her rush to the barn for Lady.

The Toomey place was already teeming with neighbors as Max and Catherine rode up. Klaus was standing lost and alone in the middle of more people than most of them had seen since the barn raising.

Nobody seemed to be paying much attention to him: They were all busy with the search. Some of the men had ropes tied around their waists and were wading chest deep in the creek, feeling with their feet for Joey's body. Occasionally, the current would upset one man or another and he would be swept down stream until the crowd on the bank could drag him to shore, wet and dripping like a big fish.

The children, left to entertain themselves, eddied and swirled about the homestead, never free of one mother's eyes or another. And in the eyes of each of those women was relief that her child had not been the one taken and guilt for feeling that way.

One of the men from the barn raising—Catherine couldn't remember his name—stepped up to Max.

“Klaus thinks Joey went in down there. He was playing by the creek, and then he was gone. Long slide mark by the water. Feet probably went out from under him. We figure he caught up in that barbwire downstream, and the current held him under until he drowned.”

“Klaus was in the tack shed oiling harness when it happened. Doesn't know how long Joey's been gone. He hightailed it to the Leningtons for help, and he's been standing there ever since like he's to blame.”

The man hesitated, looking off toward the creek where the other men were wading in the cold, muddy water, and then he spoke. “There's some who say he is to blame. He never was one to pay much attention to the boy.”

Catherine was thinking about the towhead at the barn raising, trying so hard to be part of the children's play without knowing how. So Joey had played with death, and now death had called him, and the little boy had followed the only real companion he had ever had.

“Maybe the water just carried him downstream?”

“We've been half a mile down, ma'am, watching both sides real careful. Not a sign of him. If he's downstream, he's probably halfway to North Dakota by now.”

“I'm going downstream,” Catherine said.

“Think I'll go along,” Max said, and the two edged over to the creek bank.

The men were wading the creek to find Joey's body. The only hope of finding Joey alive was downstream.

Catherine didn't know if she expected to find the boy or just needed to flee from his dead-eyed father, terrified at the thought that she might have to watch Klaus's face as the men placed Joey's body in his arms.

“They're shunning him, aren't they?” she asked as they rode away.

“Maybe,” Max said. “Maybe he's shunning himself.”

The creek raged still, chocolate brown from chunks of soil torn from above. Most of the animals caught in the creek bottom were already dead, washed against some outcropping of plant or rock. But here or there a ground squirrel or a prairie dog shivered atop some high point, waiting to be dried by the sun and for the creek to go down.

At one point, they came upon a bobcat so intent with the harvest of dead and near-dead animals along the creek that he didn't notice Max and Catherine until they were directly behind him. He hissed and leaped into the flood, swimming expertly for the other side.

They had long passed the half-mile mark where the other searchers had scuffed the earth with their heels before turning back, when Max pulled the stud to a halt. “Not much sense going beyond here. We aren't going to find him downstream. Probably won't find him at all until the water goes down. Best I can do now is go back with the other men wading the creek. Doesn't take long in that water to shake the warm out.”

“No!” Catherine said, her head canted and shaking. She looked at Max from the corner of her eye. “No! You go back if you want to. I'm going to find Joey.”

Max reached out to touch Catherine's shoulder, but pulled back. His voice was low and restrained: “It's tough, but there's nothing we can do about it. If you want to look, look, but stay back from the edge, and if you see him … in the water, let him go. Pulling him out isn't worth dying for.”

Catherine's face was white, and she wouldn't look at Max, her eyes fixed on Lady's ears. She tried to speak, but her mouth moved soundlessly, and finally she turned Lady downstream and began her search.

Max was walking the stud back to the Toomey place, torn between the need to pitch in—to give his mind and body a task to occupy them—and his need to watch over Catherine. He stopped and turned just in time to see Catherine and Lady disappear over the edge of the bank toward the flood.

He wheeled the stud and kicked the horse into a gallop. They sped toward the edge, mud flying in chunks big as tea saucers.

Max was a cautious man. But he wasn't thinking about caution now: He was thinking about Catherine, and as he neared the creek bank, he touched his heels to the horse's sides and the stud jumped. The two sailed over the edge, neither knowing what awaited them below.

Catherine had been walking the horse along the bank, her eyes seeking some shape, some color that didn't fit the edges and surface of the flood. She had stopped for a moment, tears blurring her vision, when she caught movement from the corner of her eye. She blinked until her eyes cleared. There was a raft of driftwood across the creek. And on the outside edge flickered a patch of white almost as pale as the bleached wood, but different somehow. And as Catherine watched, another patch of white swirled out of the water, and on the end of it was a sleeve!

Catherine reined Lady toward the creek, and the two slid down the bank, the mare scrambling to find footing. They plunged into the flood, and Catherine gasped with the shock of the cold water.

The mare was swimming across and down, and Catherine turned the animal's nose more into the current, trying to make up the distance they were losing to the flood.

They touched the bank on the other side below the driftwood and tried to climb up, but the bank was too steep and slick. Lady fought the bank and the water and her fear, and Catherine took those few desperate moments to kick her foot out of the stirrup on the down-stream side. She jerked her leg over the horse and jumped one-legged for the bank.

She landed chest first, and the impact knocked the wind from her. She was sucking air, but her lungs came up empty, and she thought she would suffocate. And as she gasped for breath, the current pushed her legs toward the mare's flailing hooves. Her wind caught about the same time her hand brushed through a patch of silver sage. She held on, her breath coming in sobs.

Catherine pulled herself to her hands and knees and then stood, balancing precariously at the edge of the creek. Lady was scrambling wild-eyed to climb the bank, but Catherine knew the horse would die in the trying. She slipped off Lady's bridle.

“Git! Git!”

Lady swung into the current and was gone. The banks were steep on both sides, and Catherine knew there was little chance the horse would find sanctuary before her strength gave out. Just as that reality was drumming into her mind, Max and the stud appeared in midair. They struck the creek,
WHOOSH!
Then the horse disappeared, leaving only Max's head and shoulders visible before he vanished in a sheet of spray.

When Catherine had blinked her eyes clear, Max was almost across the creek, the impetus of the jump giving the stud a better start than the mare. Above the drift pile, there was a rock ledge that poked hidden into the creek, and the stud clambered on top and stood knee deep in the water.

Max climbed down slowly. He stood, talking softly until the stud's eyes stopped rolling. Then Max stepped quietly away. As he approached Catherine, his eyes were as wild as the horse's had been. “What the hell happened?”

“He's in the driftwood, there.”

Max's eyes searched the area where Catherine was pointing and came up empty. Then he saw the upper half of the boy's face thrust up and back out of the water. Max had dreaded the prospect of finding the child's body. He hated the thought of pulling Joey's corpse from the water, carrying it back to Klaus, who was standing in a pool of guilt amidst his neighbors' accusing eyes. Max hesitated a moment before stepping out on the driftwood.

“Hurry!” Catherine cried.

“No need. Won't make any difference to him.”

“He's alive. I saw him raise his arm out of the water.”

“Just the current. Makes him seem like he's moving, but it's just the current.”

But as Max watched, Joey's arm rose slowly from the water until it was extended nearly full length. It waved weakly for a moment, and then fell back with a splash.

“I'll be damned,” Max muttered as he edged out to the head of the driftwood. He reached under the water and grabbed Joey by the shoulders.

Joey struggled weakly, but the boy was exhausted. The effort of holding his nose above water against the weight and cold of the flood had drained him of all the reserves stored in his little body. He was near death, but still he struggled.

Max looked up. “I'll need some help. Have to reach under to find what he's caught on. You hold his head up in case something slips.”

As Catherine crept toward the two, balancing on bits of driftwood thrust up from the pile, Max cautioned, “Easy. This is like standing on a bag of marbles, and if it slips we're all gone.”

But the warning wasn't needed. A moment before, Catherine had stepped on a loose log and slipped into water waist deep before finding solid footing. She was moving slowly and tentatively now.

When Max felt her hands over his, he reached down, seeking the snag that held the boy tight. Joey's left cuff was twisted into a broken branch, and Max tugged until the sleeve split, and Joey's face bobbed free from the water. Still the driftwood held Joey in a grip tight as death.

“Something deeper,” Max said, ducking under the water.

Above water, the flood roared as though outraged at the limits imposed on it by rocks and banks and a little boy's body. But below, the stream chattered at Max with the clicks and rattles of stones racing each other downstream. The flood seemed to be calling him to add his bones to the race, hungry for another life to spit up on the bank, and a chill ran through his body.

Joey's foot was pinched between two logs, and Max came out of the water gasping for breath.

“He's pinned. When I try to break him loose, the whole shebang could go and us with it.”

Max scrambled up the drift toward the stud. When he returned a moment later, he handed Catherine one end of a rope. “Tie it around your waist. No slack or it might get tangled. If the driftwood lets go, hang on to Joey. The current should swing you into the bank.”

Max didn't tell Catherine that if the logs shifted the wrong way, Joey's foot could be crushed or pinched off at the ankle. But there were no options. If he wasn't released and soon, he would die. The boy was nearly comatose from the killing cold of the water. Already, Joey had hung to a tenuous thread of life longer than Max thought possible.

He tugged a chokecherry pole thicker than his arm and taller than he was from the driftwood and ducked under again. The flood nagged at him as his hands explored Joey's foot and the logs that imprisoned it, and finally Max was satisfied.

“Pray for us, Catherine,” he said and hung his weight and strength and life on the end of the pole. Solid! The damn thing was solid! Those two logs were probably the foundation for the whole pile, buried under the weight of the other logs and the power of the flood.