Softly Falling (4 page)

“I believe I do.”

“You won’t have heard of his kind before, but he is a Herferd.”

He had a poor accent, but she knew precisely what he was saying, and she understood. “It’s Hereford, sir, and I have heard of his kind. A red cow with a white face?”

“You got it, ma’am. How’d you know?”

“I’m from Gloucestershire, which is hard by Hereford-shire. I have seen these cows.”

She moved her plate of chop suey farther away, noting how his eyes followed it.
Uncle, here comes another social gaffe of enormous proportions
, she thought with some glee. “Mr. Sinclair, you are welcome to finish my chop suey.”

“Not to your taste?”

“Not really.”

She glanced toward the beaded curtains as they rustled, and there stood Mr. Wing Li, his brow furrowed, his lower lip drooping, his eyes on her rejected plate. “Oh dear, he doesn’t take kindly to my lack of appetite,” she whispered to the foreman. “Is it a personal thing?”

“I don’t pretend to know, ma’am,” he whispered back, his eyes on her plate too. “He scares me and he has that cleaver.”

Lily laughed. Without a word, she pushed the plate toward him. Without a word, he forked the chop suey onto his plate and kept eating. “Hairiford, Hairiford,” he said around bites. “Sounds better than Herferd. Miss Carteret, after I won your father’s ranch, I spent my whole life savings on a bull. He resides in majestic splendor on two thousand acres of fenced land with his harem of two cows.” He put down his fork. “I am the laughingstock of the entire territory, but I have a plan.”

His enthusiasm was undeniable. Lily sipped her tea, wondering about a man who ate chop suey, won a ranch in a card game, and gambled everything on an English hunk of beef. She had never met anyone like him.

“I’ve never had a plan,” she said, setting down her cup. “I envy you.”

Mr. Sinclair merely shrugged. “No need. Get a plan of your own, Miss Carteret.” His look was kindly then, as far as Lily understood kindness. “I’m speaking out of turn, but any daughter of Clarence Carteret should get a plan.”

“Pretty soon?”

“Almost immediately.”

C
HAPTER
4

M
r. Li insisted that Lily take a handful of almond cookies. “He make you give him your dinner?” he asked in a voice loud enough for Mr. Sinclair to hear as he twirled the cleaver, with its congealed blood and chicken feathers.

“No, Mr. Wing. I have been on the train for four days and my stomach is . . . is . . .”—Lily patted her middle—“. . . unsettled.”

Mr. Li brightened. He held up one finger as though to keep her there and rattled back through the bead curtain.

“What have I done?” Lily whispered to the foreman.

“I don’t know,” he said doubtfully. “But whatever he brings out, you should probably drink.”

Lily closed her eyes when she heard the beads rattle again. She opened her eyes when he set down a porcelain cup, its content the same color as the soy sauce.

“Bottoms up, Miss Carteret,” the foreman said with a grin. “Better you than me.”

She gave him a speaking glance and picked up the cup. “My stomach doesn’t hurt that bad,” she said to Mr. Li.

“Drink it, missy,” he said, still twirling that cleaver.

She felt her stomach give a great heave as the brew landed inside and probably crawled away to some dark corner. She set the cup down and waited to die.

Nothing. “I am cured,” she told him. Why not gild the lily a bit? “Mr. Wing, you are a wonder.”

The Chinaman beamed at her and nudged Mr. Sinclair’s shoulder. “You bring her around anytime, Jack. She better than the bad girls at Lucy’s.”

I will sink into the ground
, Lily thought. She glanced at Jack, whose face had gone as red as a man lost three or four days in the Sahara.

“Um, well, yes,” Jack managed, then stood up. He plunked some money on the table and nodded to Lily without looking at her. “We’d best be on our way.”

He was halfway across the café when she joined him, taking his proffered arm. She could tell he was suffering in the worst way, and she liked him.
Uh, best to put him at ease
, she told herself, falling into the vernacular.

“Mr. Sinclair, I have decided not to be embarrassed by anything I see or hear in your territory,” she told him in her most serene voice as he hurried along the boardwalk.

“I don’t go to Lucy’s.” He turned even more red. Probably without being aware of it, he glanced up the street toward a building painted a color not found in elevated social spheres, where two women hung out the window, calling to passersby.

Time to put the poor fellow at peace. She stopped. “Let us come to a right understanding, Mr. Sinclair. What you do or do not do in your spare time is your business.”

“Seriously, I don’t. I do play cards now and then.”

Lily found a larger concern as wind started to tug at her skirts. She released her hold on Mr. Sinclair’s arm and fought to keep her steel-taped bustle sedately behind her where it belonged. Another gust at the corner flared out her skirts, giving anyone who might be looking more than a glimpse at her legs. Her mortification grew as a man in a long linen duster whistled and tipped his hat to her. “Jack, you dog,” he called. “You’re the envy of nations!”

“Mercy,” she murmured, taking her turn with embarrassment, suddenly grateful that the ranch was several miles away and she wouldn’t have to set foot in Wisner again until she left it.

“Just a Wyoming zephyr, ma’am,” Mr. Sinclair said, kind enough to keep a straight face at her predicament.

“I’d hate to be here when the wind actually blows,” she joked, wishing the wagon were closer.

Once across the street and back on the wooden sidewalk, the buildings blunted the force of the wind. Lily took his proffered arm again and found herself nudged toward a store.

“Forgot something,” he said. “I’ll be just a moment.”

The store was cool and dark and a blessed relief from the wind. Interested, Lily looked around to see bolts of cloth on shelves and kegs of food. She followed him to the long counter, peering into the kegs and seeing raisins, flour, and cornmeal. There were several boxes with pungent dried fish. In the distance, hoes and shovels had taken up residence next to horse collars and crockery.

“Imagine, all this in one store,” she said.

“You don’t have general stores in England?” he asked.

“No, indeed. We go from shop to shop,” Lily said. “I believe I like this better.”

At the counter, while she waited for Mr. Sinclair, Lily admired German dolls with bisque heads and tiny feet in the glass-fronted case. Wooden trains and knives were jumbled next to dominos and packs of cards. Overhead were strips of gluey material with flies stuck to them, trapped in mid flight. As repugnant as that was, Lily couldn’t help but admire the enterprise of someone manufacturing and selling fly strips. The United States and her territories were going to be an unceasing interest, she decided.

“Here.”

Mr. Sinclair held out a small paper bag to her. She took it, surprised at its weight.

“It’s a nickel’s worth of lead shot,” he explained. “What you do is sew a handful of these into each of the hems of your skirts.”

His kindness touched her. “I’ll never be a spectacle in Wisner again.”

She looked inside the little bag with lead shot, and it suddenly became something much bigger. Somehow, accepting the bag from a man that was essentially a stranger had cracked open her book of life for the first time. What had gone before—the shame of being a remittance man’s daughter, a woman of color, a poor relation—was only prologue. She couldn’t have put her finger on it, but accepting that bag meant she was going to live large now. Whether for good or ill remained to be seen.

“A little lead in each hem?” she asked, grateful for his small gift.

“Just drop in one lead ball and sew a little vertical seam on either side of it. Six inches later, repeat the process.”

“Where’d you learn this, Mr. Sinclair?”

“I could lie, but why? A faro dealer at the Back Forty told me that’s how she kept her skirts from flying in the wind.”

Lily nodded, appreciative of his honesty. He had no airs to put on and probably nothing to prove. “She is a wise woman.”

“Indeed she is. Vivian tells me she’s saving money to open a millinery shop in her hometown. Everyone needs a plan.”

They drove in silence, but it wasn’t an embarrassed silence, not even after his plain speaking. Jack thought he ought to say something, but he noticed that Lily was looking around, noticing everything. She pointed at a brown and white deer-looking creature.

“Antelope. You’ll see them with the cattle a lot. Don’t know why, really. Maybe they’re sociable.”

He drove slowly, then looked back at Wisner, a middling sort of place with a background of low hills. It was the kind of town that needed a few more churches and then a school, and maybe ladies would come and there would be families. He hadn’t thought of the matter, but here was Lily Carteret sitting beside him, observing. Maybe that was why he saw Wisner through different eyes.

“It’s nothing like your home, is it?”

She shook her head. “I haven’t really had a home, Mr. Sinclair. As you were plain speaking, so shall I be.”

He waited, wondering what she would say, but half knowing, because he knew her father.

“I’ve lived at the mercy of begrudging relatives all my life,” she said, looking straight ahead now. “They fed me, clothed me quite well, and educated me because they had to. To their credit, I have never gone without anything I needed, not once. Uncle Niles owns a shipbuilding yard in Bristol. He’s a wealthy man and aiming for a match with a lady who is plain and prim, but the daughter of a baronet.” She paused and looked at him, hoping he understood what she didn’t say.

“And . . . and maybe you don’t fit into the world he wants?”

“I don’t. He decided to send me on my way to his younger brother, a remittance man. That way, two of us are out of sight and out of mind.” She raised her hands in her lap and then lowered them. “I don’t know what will become of me here, but I intend to count somewhere.”

Jack thought of his own life and felt an amazing kinship with the pretty lady who was neither fish nor fowl, and who had absolutely nothing in common with him. “I came out here after the war. There was nothing left for me in Georgia. I starved and I probably should have died, but I learned about cattle.”

“You understand me then,” she said.

He didn’t mind her subsequent silence. He was content to breathe the pleasant lavender of her hair or clothing. He tried to imagine the landscape through her eyes: the edge of the plains as it met low hills and the mountains beyond; the dry air and the wind-chased dust devils; the enormity of the sky. Everything was tawny now in late summer, more parched and thirsty than usual, even in this dry land.

Cattle roamed everywhere, crossing the dirt track that passed for a road, idling around shrinking water holes, on the search for grass. Beyond them were the drift fences—slatted affairs paralleling the road but not attached to each other—that he knew she would question.

“Those fences can’t hold anything in,” she commented finally.

“They’re drift fences. Look around you. You won’t see any bob wire, or maybe you have wooden fences at home.”

“Some, and stone fences. Even hedgerows.” She turned to look at him then, and he saw all the intelligence in her lively eyes. “But these don’t keep anything in. How could they?”

“It’s open range, Miss Carteret. Each ranching district has drift fences, which are supposed to keep the cattle from wandering too far.” He gestured to the wideness around them. “You’re looking at cattle from several ranches. They just mingle together until the cows gather. The boys from different ranches separate them according to brand. Usually the four-year-olds go to market.”

She must have heard his uncertainty. Jack reckoned she was a hard woman to fool.

“But . . . but they didn’t go this year? Is that what you’re . . .” She chuckled. “. . . you’re
not
saying?”

“They’re too puny, what with no rain and no grass. The buyers from Chicago made lowball offers and most of the ranchers decided to hold them over for another year.”