Softly Falling (28 page)

“Tell us first, and then we will do as you wish,” Lily said.

He stood beside the buffalo hide, touching it lovingly, smoothing his hand over the ever-widening spiral. “We tell time in stories,” he said. “We begin at the beginning.” He pointed to the center of the spiral. “Every year, after we are in our tepees and winter is roaring outside and trying to get in, the elders decide what is the most remarkable thing that happened all year. The winter count keeper draws it.” He gestured to the children. “Come close and tell me what you see. You too, Miss Carteret.”

Forceful as always, Luella went nearly nose to nose with the winter count. She put her finger on spotted people lying down. “What’s this?”

“A visit from smallpox, brought upriver to Fort Union Trading Post. Many died,” he said. “You would call that year 1837.”

Nick pointed to a picture nearer the outer ring of the spiral of blue-coated men falling from their horses and body parts here and there.

“You might call it the Little Bighorn. We call it the Greasy Grass battle,” Pierre told him. He moved his finger to the next portion, which had a flag Lily recognized.

“That’s the English flag, the crosses of St. George and St. Andrew,” she said to her children. “And look: tepees.”

“A year after Greasy Grass, Sitting Bull and his nation crossed to the Grandmother’s Land, Canada.”

Amelie, ever the observer, pointed to several scenes with the same drawing. “Here, here, and here.”

Pierre tapped the blank space on the hide, the next spot to draw on, for 1886. “I might add that here, too. It means long winters.”

Lily rubbed her arms, looking at the representations of snow and the bare trees bending. She looked closer on one of the later drawings, which had the snow, plus two thin figures with tears gushing from their eyes.

“Winter and a starving time,” Nick said simply.

C
HAPTER
26

Y
ou know, Pierre, I should feel some guilt at abandoning my entire day’s plan, but this was better,” Lily said as she sat on the doorstep after school with the Indian, who had returned from adding more nails to roofs, his orders from Jack Sinclair before he rode off the place. “Month by month instead of year by year is perfect.”

“Chantal is only six,” Pierre said. “Think how small would be her winter count of what she remembers. And your idea of May to May was best. It still gives them much to think about.”

Too much
, she thought, drawing up her knees to rest her chin on them. It was vastly unladylike, but she was tired. She turned to Pierre. “The Sansevers each drew such sad pictures for March! Come, I’ll show you.”

He followed her into the classroom, looking where she pointed at the individual winter counts spread on each desk. His smile looked wistful to Lily as he ran his finger above each sad picture, as if to touch it would invite ruin. “But look how true to character, Lily. Nick has drawn Jean falling off a horse; Amelie’s picture is a headstone; and here is a little girl in tears for Chantal.” He looked away and Lily saw his shoulders rise and fall. “We all cried except Amelie.”

“She does hold things inside,” Lily said as she traced the outline of the tombstone.

“What is this?” Pierre asked, touching Luella’s February. “Two arms with red dots? She does have an imagination, but we didn’t have smallpox last winter.”

“It’s not that simple,” Lily told him, wondering how much to say and fearing to betray the child. “You mustn’t say anything, but her mother pinches Luella’s arms and leaves welts.” She touched the little picture of pain. “Could it be that
our
winter counts are ways to say things we cannot say?”

Pierre took several audible breaths, then touched June on Luella’s winter count, which showed a girl in braids gathering flowers. “We have pretty wildflowers.” He moved back to the Sansever drawings for June and tapped Chantal’s drawing of a girl washing many dishes. “It was the cow gather, and there were so many consortium members going from ranch to ranch. Jack even drafted Preacher and Stretch to help Madeleine and the children in the kitchen. You should have heard them complain!”

“My dears lead different lives on a ranch where they are so close,” Lily said.

“They
are
your dears, aren’t they?” he asked.

Lily nodded, unable to speak. She went to the board to erase i-m-m-u-n-e, which had stayed there through a perfunctory arithmetic lesson shortened so everyone could return to their winter counts. “I didn’t plan for them to become my dears,” she said, happy that he couldn’t see her face. “It’s only been a few weeks! How does this happen so fast?”

She heard his chuckle. “I know I’m being silly,” she said.

“No, not that. This picture you drew in . . . in August. Jack will be impressed.”

She turned around to see him pointing at the big animal with the white forehead and red body. “I cannot draw cattle, and it’s rude to laugh,” she told him, which only made him laugh more.

“Maybe I’m amazed that Bismarck was more important to you than anything else,” he said. He shrugged. “But that is winter count: people notice different things.”

“You should have seen him with his arms on the fence, just staring at Bismarck,” Lily said, putting down the eraser Stretch has made for her out of an old chamois he claimed was just lying around. “You know how determined he can look. He’s staked everything on that bull.”

“I know. Remember that his name is He Stands With Feet Planted.” He pointed to Lily’s September. “There are two more days in this month and you have already filled it in?” He looked at her, delight on his face. “That’s me drawing the Little Man of the Prairie!” He looked closer. “My nose is not that big.”

“ ‘People notice different things,’ ” she echoed. “It happened to me too. Look here at Luella’s drawing, and Nick’s, and . . . oh, what they have done.”

She pressed the bridge of her nose to stop any tears as Pierre tapped each little picture of her in September, a tall and slender woman with big brown eyes, round like a child’s, and tan skin. Nick’s Lily was drawing numbers. Chantal’s Lily knelt by Little Man’s hole to look in. Amelie’s Lily was laughing. Luella’s Lily was unbraiding her hair.

“You really got down on hands and knees to look in the hole?” Pierre said.

“I really did,” she confessed.

“You worry too much. I told you the Little Man would return.”

“You were right. This afternoon we put out a sliver of a mirror for grooming purposes, and some wheat from Madeleine.”

“Would you mind if I bring her here to see her children’s winter counts?”

“If it doesn’t make her too sad,” Lily replied warily.

“No harm in tears for a good man,” he said. “Also, she’s your best source for wheat. Which reminds me: Freak. . .”

“Francis,” she corrected.

“Francis followed me here, just sort of gliding along the tree line like he does. If it were warmer, I’d tell you to sit on the rock and wait.” He shrugged. “Cats.”

He left with a wave of his hand over his shoulder. Lily watched him go into the side door of the cookshack. Thinking he wanted to show Madeleine the winter counts by himself, she put on her coat, wished it were warmer, and tied a muffler around her neck. She stood by the Little Man’s hole and left a few bread crumbs she had remembered to stuff in her pocket after breakfast.

“Thanks for coming back,” she told the hole. “Look out for Francis.”

She closed the door behind her and stretched her shoulders, feeling pleasantly tired. She walked to the wagon road that ran past the school and gazed at the empty prairie. The dried grass made a whooshing sound, reminding her of small pebbles in a rattle. She knew it was only a few miles to her father’s former property—Jack’s now—and four miles to Wisner. Maybe if the weather held this weekend, she would walk to the little ranch with the fences and take a look at Bismarck by herself. She wondered if Manuel got lonely, with no more company than an impressive bull and his pregnant harem.

Lily had decided that tomorrow, after completing the lessons so neglected today, she would ask the children what they thought about writing a letter to Mr. Wing Li at the Great Wall of China café, inviting him to the Bar Dot Temple of Education to tell them about China. They were nearly through with Alger’s little pot boiler about Ragged Dick the shoeshine boy. She knew Stretch was from Connecticut, somewhere back there by New York City. Maybe he could be prevailed upon to tell the children—her children—about big cities.

There would be more class tonight in the cookshack, all to keep Luella a little safer, and Nick moving ahead on his math, and her father occupied. She looked in the direction the men had gone this morning, but the prairie horizon remained empty. She saw mountains in the distance, big brooding things with snow already on top from last night’s storm.

The snow at the ranch had melted during the day, where the sun had struck it. Snow remained only in the more shaded areas. And there was Francis, peering at her. She patted her pocket and felt the piece of cheese in paraffin paper that she had forgotten about yesterday. She unwrapped the cheese and held it in her outstretched hand.

Nothing. She waited, her hand out, holding her breath as he started toward her. Two hesitant steps, then one back, and then three forward, standing sideways with the ruff on his back high.

“It’s just cheese and you probably won’t even like it,” she told Francis. “Don’t get so exercised. It’s rag manners.”

His ears went back and then forward as he dropped the pose that surely intimidated little creatures like the pack rat. She could have reached out and touched him, but she held still, remembering Pierre’s words.

As she watched, holding her breath now, Francis delicately took the cheese from her palm. She waited for him to bolt for the tree line, but he rubbed his cheek against her hand for a split second. Up close, his battered and frostbitten ears were testimony to a hard life. His one eye was big and green and beautiful.

Another rub, and then he was gone. “My goodness,” she said. She looked down the road again, wishing for Jack to materialize. She would share the news about Francis with her father over supper, and the children tomorrow, but she wanted more than anything for Jack to know. Why, she wasn’t sure, except that he would probably say something stringent and pithy in his slow-talking way, and she liked the cadence of his Southern speech.

She kept her eyes on the road a little longer as she closed her eyes and sent a silent message to the foreman.
I am planning every day now, Jack
, she thought.
True Greatness requires it
.

Jack pushed back his Stetson and tried not to glare with envy at Will, Stretch, and Preacher, who still looked lively after three days of pushing around cattle that didn’t want to be pushed around. As they passed through Wisner, Will and Stretch had tried to talk him into stopping at the saloon, but he vetoed their plea. “Praise the Lord,” Preacher had said, looking heavenward with what could only be called a smirk on his face.

“Gents, Oscar has standards at the Back Forty, and to put no bark on it, we stink,” he said. “I’ll let you loose early enough tomorrow night.”

I do need a bath
, he thought. The range was so dry that generous helpings of dust had been their appetizer and main course. That was bad enough, but the dust also settled in crooks and crevasses unused to such indignity. He hoped he wouldn’t see Lily or Madeleine before that bath, because he was walking funny. He knew that Lily’s impression of cowboys in the American West had been informed by the larger-than-life heroes in dime novels. He doubted those cowboys ever had painful crotch problems.

“What you grinning about, boss?” Preacher asked.

“Nothing much. Just thinking about what a jolt it must have been for Lily Carteret to find out what real cowhands are like.”

“What? You mean that we smell bad and should’ve taken along our toothbrushes?” Preacher joked in turn.

“Yep. That.” Jack pointed west. “We’re takin’ a detour to my ranch.”

Stretch groaned. “We can’t visit the saloon in Wisner, but we have to look at your bull?”

“Healthier and cheaper for you,” Jack replied, laughing when the others groaned.