Softly Falling (42 page)

“Good idea. You start, Wally.”

Preacher grinned at him. “You haven’t used my name in a long time.”

“It’s your name.”

Preacher nodded. He started to speak, but the wind picked up suddenly, as if trying to remind them that all wasn’t well, not by a long shot. “Christ could calm the wind,” he said wistfully. He looked at the table, every bowl and plate clean. “I was going to say I’m thankful for food, but I’m mostly thankful for all of you.”

Lily swallowed the lump in her throat. She thought of the fancy dinners at her uncle’s manor, the ones she had been invited to attend, and all the courses picked over, a bite here and there, and then returned to the kitchen. She had never wondered where that leftover food had ended up, but now she did. One of those fancy dinners would have fed them for a week.

She felt the lump grow as she remembered crackers and dried cheese with her father, and wondered if he thought of her this day. Her heart went to the Little Man of the Prairie and his bits of seed and grass. She glanced at Francis, who had eaten his own pork and sat in the doorway between kitchen and dining room, cleaning his face.

“I’m thankful for friends too,” Pierre was saying now. He fingered the medicine bag around his neck. “Are we all going to be boring and say the same thing?”

Everyone nodded.

“I have something else,” Luella said, blushing a little when everyone turned to look at her. Lily had brushed her hair into soft pigtails, the tight braids a thing of the past. “I am thankful for the Temple of Education.”

“Oh,” Lily said, swallowing a bigger lump than pork.

“And
Ivanhoe
,” Jack chimed in, which made her suddenly feel the need to examine her fingernails.

“My children,” from Madeleine as she reached for them.

“Plans,” Lily said, which made Jack smile and give her a slow wink.

The door banged open, and Will Buxton stood there. He shut the door and leaned against it, as though trying to barricade them from the world outside.

“I . . . we thought you’d be at the Buxtons’ all afternoon,” Jack said. “I hope you ate.”

“I did, but I’d rather be here. Is there room?”

Preacher moved closer to Pierre. “Here you are, friend.”

Will looked up at that, gratified. He sat right in the middle of the bench, not on the edge or the outside. He breathed a long sigh of something that sounded like relief, and Lily was thankful she had not been invited to the Buxtons’ for dinner.

Chantal cleared her throat and looked at Lily. “Now?” she asked.

Lily nodded. The children got up and stood close together. Lily looked into each dear face: Nick so reluctant at first, but Nick, her hero at the woodpile. Luella, probably bearing more burdens than any of them, but stalwart. Chantal, so sweet and lively, but who drew a gravestone on her March winter count. Amelie, so quiet, but with heart, depth, and grit that Lily was only beginning to understand. They were her students, her children, her comrades in the classroom. Somewhere deep in her heart she knew that they would never learn as much from her as she had learned from them. She nodded again and gave them a note.

“ ‘Come, ye thankful people, come. Raise the song of harvest home,’ ” they sang, each line centuries old and cherished, but never sung with more meaning than right now, on this isolated ranch in the middle of something that could yet prove greater than them all. “ ‘All is safely gathered in, e’er the winter storms begin.’ ”

The wind roared and slammed against the building and their voices rose to meet the challenge. “ ‘God, our maker, doth provide, for our wants to be supplied.’ ” Pierre’s pork, Madeleine’s little bit of hidden butter. “ ‘Come to God’s own temple, come, raise the song of harvest home.’ ”

C
HAPTER
39

T
he pattern of riding and hunting for lost cattle did not take the holiday season into account, but Jack had known it would not. As he shivered and swore and forced himself to endure endless days in the saddle, he thought of earlier years when he was learning his trade and was cut loose to ride the humiliating grubline. As bad as this was, he wasn’t begging at ranch houses for food in exchange for chores or wondering if his horse could hold out too.

Besides, there was Lily to ride home to, even if she didn’t know it. The night he had dropped to his knees and cried out his heart with his head in her lap hadn’t furnished sufficient humiliation for him to stop seeing her. He couldn’t stop. There was something about her serenity, even in this terrible time, that drew him like a filing to a magnet.

He knew roughly when Luella went to bed. He tried to show up a little before, because Luella always gave him a hearty greeting. In her bossy way, she would take his hand and make him sit beside her on the bench in his former front room, the room that had now become the Temple of Education. She’d put one of her books in front of him and demand that he read to her.

“Just a sentence or two” became “just a paragraph now,” and then as December neared its middle, “Just this one page.” His halting efforts became fewer as he came to understand words and sentences. He finally reached the night when the story itself began to make infinite sense. Everything started to string together, and he discovered the fun of reading.

“Say, Lily,” he had said, looking over Luella’s head to the lovely brown lady who usually sat on his sprung sofa, her feet tucked under her, because she was always cold, this daughter of Barbados. “I think I like this.”

“Of course you do. Luella has graciously let us borrow more of her books. Tomorrow we will begin
Toby Tyler, or Ten Weeks with the Circus
.”

Once Luella was in bed, tucked in with a prayer, a hug, and then another hug—something he doubted that her own mother ever provided—Lily came back to his sofa, picked up
Ivanhoe
, and began where they had left off.

She tried to get him to read, now that she knew he could, but he refused. They nearly had an argument over that, and he knew what she looked like when displeased: lips twisted to one side and eyes small. He explained to her why she was to read
Ivanhoe
, and the look disappeared.

“That’s it,” he concluded with a touch—just a touch—of his foreman’s voice. “Your English accent is the best part of my day. I want to hear it. I sound like a Georgia cracker. You sound like a queen of England. Trust me; it’s better.”

She had glared at him but succumbed. “It’s just the way I talk.”

“I know, I know. That’s what I want.” He folded his arms and waited for her to capitulate, which she did, after tapping him on the head with the book.

She could always tell when the day had been so bad that not even her voice as she read could take away his pain. Then she would stop reading, put in the bookmark, and set the book aside. “Tell me what happened,” she said, and he did, usually in fits and starts, and then with an outpouring of his exhaustion, sorrow, and true pain, about watching animals suffer and having no way to prevent it.

He told her about watching cattle wander and die against the drift fences that were supposed to contain the majority of the district’s cattle. “We ride the fence on a normal winter, and chivvy them back,” he said, taking a running jump before leaping into the horrors of the day. “Different ranches send different hands. We usually ride with the LC, since they’re closest.”

“Why is it called LC?” she had asked. Brands interested her.

“McMurdy’s wife is named Elsie,” he said. “Come spring, I’ll take you up there to meet her. She’s a great cook. Better’n Madeleine, but you didn’t hear that from me.”

There now, he had softened himself and set her at ease a bit. He told her what the Bar Dot boys and the LC hands had found that day by the drift fence, the main one located south of the Bar Dot. He described the cattle piled against the fence so deep, frozen and dead, that the cattle behind walked over them and kept struggling south into the whiteness that extended for a thousand miles. “They’ll die against someone else’s fence,” he said and couldn’t help his shudder. No need to tell her how many of them staggered on hoofless stumps or describe the low moan of dying cattle. He knew he would hear the sound in his dreams for the rest of his life.

If he felt either brave enough or miserable enough, he put his head on her shoulder. Her arm invariably went around him, and they sat together like that until the room was too cold, and he had to leave, even though it was the last thing he wanted to do.

Whether it was the last thing she wanted him to do, he did not know. He suspected it might be but did not force the issue. This winter was proving to be more complicated and problematic than any he had lived through since Petersburg and the works before Richmond in 1865. Throwing his heart into the ring would have only been one more challenge. Or so he thought.

A little bit of sky in the face of endless winter surfaced in mid-December, when the earth struggled to warm itself. One night a chinook blew through their valley, bringing warming southern winds that melted some of the snow and brought the blue sky.

Even the children seemed more cheerful over breakfast. Chantal kept going to the window, where the ice had melted, just for the pleasure of looking out, until her mother had to remind her to take the coffee pot around again.

He looked at his ranch hands. Even Will knew what was coming.

“Well, boys, let’s cowboy up and use every inch of this weather.”

He told Madeleine and Lily not to worry if they weren’t home tonight. “Likely we’ll be close to the LC and we’ll bunk there,” he said, accepting a sack of hot potatoes for lunch, and more of the everlasting raisins Madeleine had insisted on getting early in the summer.

“What will you do?” Lily asked, reminding him that she knew so little about cows and ranching.

“McCurdy said he knew of a draw where there might still be some live cattle. We’ll check it out and trail them toward the LC,” he told her.

What he didn’t tell her was that if it was even possible when they finished, he was going to bolt for his own property to check on Manuel and Bismarck. He’d go by himself, unless Pierre felt like taking his life in his hands for another day.

They found the cattle where McMurdy had predicted, a respectable-sized herd that had started milling in a circle. The ones on the outer edge were dead. The warming wind had blown away some snow, revealing heads and horns. The men cut a path through to the center, where there was still life. They nursemaided the wobbly animals closer to McMurdy’s holdings. Preacher and Will bedded down for the night, and Elsie McMurdy tried to convince him to stay. When he wouldn’t, McMurdy walked him and Pierre to their blanketed horses, who were eating the generous amounts of hay that their good host provided.

“Be careful, boys,” was all McMurdy said and then, “First good day next week, I’m putting Elsie on the train to Cheyenne. She can winter there with her sister. You might pass the word on to Mr. Buxton to think about that for his own woman and kid. Maybe even the others and that mulatto gal.”

Jack nodded.
Where would she go?
he thought as he gave McMurdy a little salute and took the blanket off Sunny Boy.

Jack and Pierre rode to the little fenced ranch where Jack’s future herd took it easy in the barn. The snow was treacherously deep in the slopes and gullies, but they plodded on, silent to conserve energy. The snow covered the barbed wire fence now, except in spots where the wind had blown it away. They found the fence and followed it to the gate with the crossbars where last summer he had tacked Sinclair Ranch, which Pierre had painted for him, since he knew how to spell
ranch
.

They found Manuel as placid as ever, knitting, and they laughed to see a knitted creation draped over one of the cows. Since Manuel had never specified any particular color of yarn, Jack had bought all colors. The cow sported a green, red, and yellow afghan, tied in place with braided yarn. Manuel had thoughtfully made allowances for the heifer’s expanse, as one of Bismarck’s offspring grew inside her.

“What do you think,
señor
?” Manuel asked, his eyes bright.

“In Georgia, we’d say ‘you’re the beatinest.’ ”

Manuel’s face fell. “I do not understand,
señor
.”

“It means you’re better than anyone else. Beatinest.”

They stayed the night with Manuel in the barn, crowding with him for warmth in the little stall he had roofed over. They arrived at the Bar Dot at the same time his hands rode in from the LC, all of them scooting in just before the chinook ended and another blizzard hit. For two days he paced up and down in the cookshack.

Madeleine’s X’s on the calendar were marching toward December 25 when a worn-out McMurdy stopped at the Bar Dot for the night. He flipped a telegram across the table to Jack. “It’s for your boss. I took Elsie and the young’uns to Cheyenne. The postmaster flagged me down before I left town.” He accepted the mug of coffee from Madeleine with thanks in his eyes. “The talk in town is that the consortiums are gathering for a meeting,” He looked at the telegram between them. “What do you bet?”

Jack nodded. “They usually get together about now to plan how many head they’re going to overstock the range with in the coming year.” He couldn’t help his cynicism, but McMurdy understood. “I wonder if that’s it. Fothering’s coming to take Luella to the big house for the weekend. He can deliver it.”