Softly Falling (34 page)

No one questioned her puny wisdom, maybe because it was as true as anything she knew. Lily put her arms around Chantal and Amelie and drew them close to her in the dark. She thought of her uncle, who could have helped her father better by nurturing him, instead of sending him into world exile, accompanied by a quarterly check to keep away, a reminder of his worthlessness to the family. She thought of her own mistrust of her father, her hesitation to give him even ten dollars to buy a little comfort in Cheyenne, fearing he would spend it on liquor. True, he seemed to be changing, but why couldn’t she have seen that for herself? When he returned, things would be different, and they would make plans for San Francisco.

Chantal gasped when the milling cattle bumped against the schoolhouse walls, not just the back wall, but on all sides now. How many were there? Lily, who seldom prayed, prayed that the men of the Bar Dot were warm inside the bunkhouse, and not out in the storm, searching for straying cattle.

“I wish they could come in, like Francis,” Chantal whispered, her voice drowsy.

“So do I, my dear,” Lily whispered back, and kissed the top of the child’s head. Probably teachers weren’t supposed to do things like that, but she wasn’t a real teacher, so how could it matter?

“What are we going to do tomorrow? We don’t have enough desks to keep the fire going all day.”

Trust Luella to be forthright. “We’ll think of something, my dear,” Lily told her. She reached around Chantal to touch the child’s shoulder. Luella leaned her cheek toward Lily’s hand. Lily felt for Nick’s shoulder on her other side, and he did the same thing.

“Nick, it’s up to you and me to keep the fire going tonight,” she told him, wishing he could just be the lad he was, and not someone forced to shoulder the burden she carried. “Can you and I take turns sleeping?”

“We can,” he told her, “but Miss Carteret, I think you will be awake all night anyway, because you love us.”

It was simply said. Lily knew that if her life ended that cold night, as the wind howled like doomed spirits on All Hallow’s Eve, she would have hardly a regret, because Nick had found her out.

Nick was right. She stayed awake all night, watching the fire as the children slept and Francis purred in her lap. They kept each other warm and they lived. She knew there were two more desks to dismantle, and then her desk. The little bookcase might buy them another half hour. After that, who could say?

As the night wore on, the cattle grew quieter. She knew they were still there, because every now and then, the schoolhouse shook as they pushed against it. Even lowly beasts wanted to live another moment. She remembered her mother’s death from yellow fever. They lay sick in the same room as servants fanned their hot bodies. She remembered the intensity of her mother’s gaze as she looked at Lily, her only child. Lily had wanted to tell Mama one more time that she loved her, but the fever seemed to press down like a wet blanket, smothering them both.

“I loved you, Mother,” she said softly into Chantal’s hair. “Papa, keep being strong after we are all gone.”

As the night wore on, even the wind seemed to tire. Long stretches passed in a supernatural sort of silence. She wondered if the moon had fought its way through clouds, because the room was strangely bright. She thought she could see out of their one window. Surely that couldn’t be, but it was. The wind had blown away some of the snow. Maybe if someone were to search for the schoolhouse now, it wouldn’t be buried in drifts.

Then the wind blew from a different quarter, as though trying to wear them down, and the drifts filled the window again. She closed her eyes, wondering how sixty seconds took so long to make a minute, and how sixty minutes struggled to become an hour. Time behaved so strangely in a storm.

They kept each other warm and they outlasted the storm. By morning—6:00 a.m., according to her watch—the storm had worn itself out. Snow still fell, but it fell softly and in a straight line, not blown sideways.

She took no comfort in the silence, since the blizzard left behind a bone-cracking cold that clamped down, until she knew that they needed more than wood from a couple of desks.

In sudden panic, she wiggled her toes, welcoming the pain because that meant blood still flowed there. Her legs ached from cold, but at least they ached. If she survived this next ordeal, she planned to cast away all modesty and beg for . . . for . . . what did they call them? . . . long johns.

In the low light, she squinted at the sleeping children, studying them for waxy spots of frozen skin. Everyone breathed evenly. They might have been in their own beds, and she hated to wake them. She looked down at Francis in her lap, who was looking up at her, with that scowl suggesting she did not measure up. Maybe it wasn’t a scowl, really. His battle-scarred face spoke of spats and quarrels and hard living.
We probably all look like that inside
, Lily thought.

She couldn’t understand all this wisdom that seemed to be arriving as she slowly froze to death. She had heard from an old pensioned veteran who had survived the Crimean War that his entire life flashed before him at Balaclava when the Russians counterattacked.
And what do I get but wisdom too late
, she thought, discouraged.

As the room lightened, she told herself not to look at the calendar, then looked at it anyway. She began to shiver as she stared at the date—Saturday, October 2. It gave her no satisfaction whatsoever that Jack Sinclair was right in his prediction that this would be a terrible winter.

She knew the stove needed to be replenished, but she just stared at it, as though she could only concentrate on one whole thought at a time. Her brain was getting stupid, and she just sat there.

God bless Nick Sansever. As she stared from the stove to the calendar and back, he rustled out of the warm cocoon of Pierre Fontaine’s winter count robe. On stiff legs, he put two more sticks of desk into the stove. He held the stove’s door open and looked at her.

“Miss Carteret, you put in the next two.”

“But I . . .”
Don’t want to move?
she thought. “Very well. Francis, you have to move.” She shook the irate cat from her lap and staggered to her feet.

The girls’ neat pyramid of wood was nearly gone. Two desk legs and part of the woodbox remained. Lily picked up the desk legs, ordering her stiff fingers to curl around the wood. In they went, and Nick closed the stove door with something resembling a flourish.

“We’ll have to chop up another desk,” he said. “You or me?”

He wasn’t going to let her quit. Lily felt the blood flow into her legs and arms. She held out her hand and he gave her the hatchet handle first.

“Chop what you can, and I’ll do the rest.”

“Then we will have cheese,” she said, pointing to the drawer where the single slice of longhorn cheese remained. “Remember what I told you last week?”

Hatchet poised, Nick thought a moment. “That breakfast is the most important meal of the day?”

They laughed together.

Jack Sinclair decided there was no dignity and barely any mobility to two pairs of socks, moccasins, knee-length Dutch wool socks, overshoes, two suits of underwear, pants and overalls, and a wool army issue shirt he had bought from a furtive fellow in Wisner who was probably a deserter. The wool gloves inside wool mittens and his blanket-lined overcoat cut the cold, but just barely. Without Will Buxton’s sealskin cap pulled low over his forehead and Preacher’s muffler tying the fetching ensemble together, he doubt he would have survived the nearly half mile on foot to the schoolhouse.

He couldn’t find his own snowshoes, but Pierre brought his out from under his bed in the bunkhouse and told him not to lose them.

“Do you realize that if I fall down, I’ll be as helpless as a turtle on its back?” had been Jack’s observation to his dressers. He couldn’t help but think of Ivanhoe preparing for a tourney. At least he didn’t have to shrug himself into chain mail too.

Pierre just glared at him in his Lakota way that suffered no fools, gladly or otherwise. Jack already knew Pierre’s opinion of complainers, so he buttoned his lip. They had weathered the blizzard in the bunkhouse, then cut a trail to the nearby cookshack when the snow slacked off after midnight. The first order of business had been to tie a rope from the bunkhouse to the cookshack for future wintertime strolls. The second had been to wipe Madeleine’s eyes, nicely command her to blow her nose, hug her tight, then assure her that Lily Carteret was as sound as a roast and would never have sent the children to find their way home through the storm. Jack hoped that was the case, anyway.

Since the distance was not so far, Pierre said he would go to the horse barn and look for Stretch, whom Jack had sent, before the storm hit, to muck out the stalls. None of them had made any comment during that long day and night about Stretch, beyond the Preacher’s observation that Stretch generally had common sense, and why should a storm prove the exception?

He sent Will Buxton and Preacher to brush off and take firewood to the cookshack. “What about the bunkhouse too?” Will had asked. Will always had a comment, which was starting to get on Jack’s nerves, not that he could do anything about the boss’s nephew or cousin or whatever he was.

“Just the cookshack right now,” Jack said. He had other plans, but he wanted to keep them to himself for a while. No need for Will to think he had to know every little detail. Buxton he was, but the boss he wasn’t.

To add to his already considerable bulk, Madeleine handed him a canvas sack with four loaves of bread and a small sack with dried apples. “That’s in case another storm comes up and you can’t get away from the schoolhouse.”

The anxiety in her eyes humbled him. She had already lost her husband last spring. Any more arithmetic of death could break even a stalwart like Madeleine Sansever. “I have some extra blankets,” he told her. “When I get your children back, you can use it to line their coats.”

She nodded, then seemed to remember something. She held up a finger and he waited while she went into the lean-to bedroom she shared with her children. She came back with what look like a woman’s union suit, wearing a blush on cheeks that didn’t usually blush.

He knew Madeleine had probably heard it all, and maybe even done it all, but she still had trouble meeting his eyes. Her voice was scarcely above a whisper, so he revised his opinion of her rough and tumble ways. “I have been washing some of Lily Carteret’s clothing, and . . .” She paused and went redder. “. . . and I’ve been washing her underthings too. They’re just frivolous bits of silk and lace. She needs these.” She thrust the garments at him and then looked away, which was probably a good idea, because he was having a moment’s pause at “bits of silk and lace.”

“I’m on it, Maddie,” he told her as he took the union suit and stuffed it on top of the bread. That probably wasn’t the appropriate turn of phrase for so delicate a subject, but he had said it. He slipped the loop of the sack over his coat and started toward the schoolhouse.

He couldn’t help cursing a little when he passed the Buxtons’ house, top heavy with snow now. Why in blue blazes had that woman insisted on the school so far away? So what if children would benefit from a healthy walk in brisk air? What had made him chuckle to himself and shake his head at the foibles of his betters made him frown now, and pray that those children—and their novice-to-Wyoming teacher—were still alive.

Even with Pierre’s snowshoes, better than his own, the going was still difficult. The fickle winds had blown snow this way and that into fantastic drifts. He sank to his waist several times, which made his heart sink too. Chantal was so small. Could he get her through the snow to the cookshack?

This and other worries left his mind when he saw what had become of some of the Bar Dot cattle. Laboring along on Pierre’s snow shoes, he kept his eyes ahead until he got the hang of the easy stride. When he felt more competent, he looked around, wondering about the odd mounds of snow, which seemed to be everywhere.

Curious, he veered from his route and approached the nearest mound. He gave it a push, and felt no give. He pressed again. Nothing. He began to brush off the snow, his heart jumping about in his throat as he finally came to a woolly, matted coat. Faster now, he brushed away the snow. The sight that met his eyes made him gasp and step back.