Softly Falling (43 page)

McMurdy was as good as any man at discerning what was unsaid. “Not feeling the love, eh?” He sipped his coffee. “Sometimes it’s good to be the little man out here. I’ll probably lose my shirt, come spring, but I’m doing it on a scale a whole lot smaller than the outfit you ride for. Merry Christmas, Jack. Maybe things’ll look up in ’87.”

Sure enough, the long-suffering Fothering brought back a message the next morning for him to come to the house at once. Jack knew Fothering was a reader of moods. “What’s in the air? Trouble for me?” he asked.

“Sir Oliver the Great and Mighty is packing,” Fothering said, then dropped into Sam Foster–Ohio. “He didn’t look like the first dandelion in spring, if that’s what you’re driving at.”

“I’ll walk you back.”

Heads down against the roaring wind, they trudged the few hundred yards to the house. Fothering had called it correctly. Mr. Buxton was doing his own pacing in front of his window.

“If the weather holds tomorrow, you and I are riding to Wisner and I’m catching the train.”

Jack felt bold enough. “Why do you need me? You can just leave your horse in the livery stable and get it on your return here.”

Mr. Buxton turned red. “You’re not going to be here much beyond this spring, if I can help it,” he snapped. “I . . . I . . .”

If he wasn’t going to be working for the Bar Dot—praise Almighty—beyond spring, Jack reasoned, why not say it? “You don’t think you can get to Wisner by yourself, do you? But it doesn’t matter to you if I have to return alone.”

He waited for the explosion, but it didn’t come. Mr. Buxton just narrowed his eyes and continued his pacing. “Tomorrow, hear me?”

The ride to Wisner, only four miles, was longer because of wind, snow, and silence filled with animosity. It might have been fear. Jack couldn’t tell what drove Mr. Buxton lately. Fothering’s comments about Mrs. Buxton’s “fragility” seemed to be a code for “instability” that had nothing to do with the body. Will Buxton used to spend evenings with his relatives in the comfort of their parlor, but lately he had been staying in the cookshack, playing poker with Preacher and a surprisingly adept Nick, with broomstraws as the stakes. According to Lily, Luella was more and more reluctant to leave on weekends. Jack rode in his own self-contained silence, grateful he wasn’t Oliver Buxton and happy to put him on a train.

He waited in the depot for Mr. Buxton to buy his ticket. The warmth indoors seemed to unlimber his boss.

“You’re not real curious about my trip to Cheyenne,” Buxton said.

“You’re the boss. You’ll tell me what I need to know,” Jack replied with a shrug.

“There’s been talk of putting the press on you small-time ranchers. The Cheyenne L&C wants its property lines straight. The consortium might want me to make more of an . . . effort to get you to sell. And there’s that big bull of yours.”

“The land’s not for sale and neither is Bismarck,” Jack told him.

“We’ll see about that. Be here for me on Christmas Day.” He turned away.

Jack couldn’t leave the depot fast enough, wondering if he had been threatened. He knew his deed for both land and Bismarck were secure, but the Cheyenne L&C, like the other consortiums, had the ear of the territorial governor. They owned Wyoming as sure as if some cosmic force had wrapped a big red bow around the whole territory.
Merry Christmas
, he told himself.

After the Cheyenne Northern pulled away from the depot, he went to the Great Wall for chop suey and saw a morose Mr. Li, who shook his head over slow business.

“Nobody want chop suey,” he mourned. “How is a man to make a living?”

“We’ve had tough winters before, Mr. Li,” Jack reminded him. He thought about the hard-working little men from China who ran the restaurants, washed the clothes, and built the railroads. “You’ll be here, come spring.”

Mr. Li nodded. He handed Jack a sack of almond cookies. “For that pretty lady?” He giggled like a girl. “You maybe marry her some day?”

“She’s a lady, Mr. Li,” he said, feeling his ears burn and not from frostbite. “It’s a nice idea, though.”

Mr. Li just giggled and retreated behind the beaded curtain, the subject closed.

He stopped at Watkins’ Mercantile, hopeful, even as he looked at bare shelves.

“Food’s gone,” Watkins said.

“Had something else in mind,” Jack said, putting down four bits. “What about a lace collar? Have anything like that?”

Curiosity was stamped all over Watkins’s face, but Jack ignored it. The merchant rummaged in one of the deep drawers behind him and pulled out a lace collar. “What do you know, fifty cents. Want a box for it?”

“Sure.”

Watkins drummed up a slim white box with cotton padding. He set the collar inside and handed it to Jack, a question in his eyes.

“Merry Christmas,” was all Jack said.

He tucked the box into his coat pocket and took the snow-covered road to the Bar Dot, a narrow trail now, with the snow even threatening to close it behind him like a sprung trap. He wished he had enough money to put Lily on the Cheyenne Northern, like McMurdy had done with his Elsie, and keep her safe in some hotel for the winter. He wondered if Lily would leave if he offered to take her to the train.

“Would you, Lily?” he asked the wind. Sunny Boy’s ears perked up. Something told Jack she wouldn’t. He wasn’t really an optimist, but as he rode home, he thought of Lily’s comments about reordering her opinions, as she put it. Maybe it was time to reorder his own.

C
HAPTER
40

T
he cold came back, turning the slush to ice. Preacher’s horse went down and became another casualty. Lily’s brown eyes filled with tears when Jack shot the horse because Preacher couldn’t.

“I used to ride, back in England,” she said, when he came into the cookshack to explain the rifle shot.

“We’ll go riding this spring,” Jack told her.

Over his men’s protests, he directed them to start moving the huge woodpile even closer to the cookshack and horse barn. When the Sansever children volunteered to help, Lily did too, taking her place in line as they handed firewood from person to person while Will stacked it.

“You don’t have to,” Jack told her.

“I do too. I live here,” she said. She stopped when the wind whistled up her skirt and petticoats and set up a shiver she couldn’t control. Jack made the Sansever girls stop too. White patches had appeared on Chantal’s face, and she was rubbing the spots.

“They itch,” she told Jack, who led her away from the woodpile.

“You too, Amelie and Lily,” he said, and it wasn’t a suggestion.

In the cookshack, Madeleine scolded her youngest, and then she cried and dabbed white crème on the spots.

“Frostbite,” Jack whispered to Lily.

She took a good look at his face, with its own patches of blistered white skin. When Madeleine finished and sent her girls to bed to keep each other warm, Lily dipped her finger in the salve and dotted Jack’s blisters.

He smiled his thanks and started for the door. “I’ll tell the others to stop now. We’ll go at it in the morning again.” He touched her sodden and icy skirt and shook his head. “Lily, I hate to ask this, but you’d be a whole lot better off in trousers.”

“I couldn’t possibly,” she said. “The very idea!”

“Lily, don’t be a knucklehead,” he said. “You can’t stop shivering and that’s a bad sign. Madeleine?”

The cook came to the kitchen door.

“What can you do for Lily?” he asked.

Madeleine crooked her finger. “Come here. We’ll close the kitchen door and you’ll take off the skirt and petticoat. I can dry them in front of the stove.”

Lily opened her mouth to protest, but they were both looking at her, each equally capable of enforcement. “Very well,” she grumbled.

Madeleine closed the door behind them, but not before she heard Jack’s laughter.

“I am a source of amusement,” Lily said as she stripped off her skirt and both petticoats. She drew the line at removing her two layers of union suits and Madeleine didn’t object.

Madeleine gathered up her clothing and draped it over the makeshift clothesline she had strung near the stove. “Amusement? You think that is all you are,
mon cher
?” she asked.

“Well, no, but . . .”

“When was the last time you heard Jack Sinclair laugh?”

Lily couldn’t remember a time. She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Madeleine.”

The cook patted her cheek and pointed to the lean-to where her daughters crowded together. “Three will fit. Keep warm.” She chuckled. “He called you a knucklehead.”

By the time her clothes were dry, the men were drinking coffee in the dining hall, and Madeleine was serving stew. She dressed and joined them, grateful for the warmth of her dry clothing, grateful for the small things, which was all anyone had now. Her fingers itched and burned, but scratching didn’t help.

Jack took her hand. “Chilblains. I’m going to go through Stretch’s trunk and see if he has some wool socks. You can put them on your hands at night.” He gestured to Pierre. “We’re also going to your father’s house and see what clothes of his we can salvage for you. You two are about the same height. I’d loan you mine, but I’m wearing most of them. Now don’t you go blush about that! Anything else you want from the house?”

“Paper. Check his desk. I need paper,” she said.

She walked with them to Jack’s old house. The last wind had knocked the True Greatness sign crooked. She put the least amount of firewood she could manage into the stove, thinking that each stick was precious and that even little Chantal paid a price for it.

They returned an hour later with her father’s wool trousers and shirts, plus a shapeless, thick sweater that suddenly looked like heaven to her. After they left, she thought about Miss Tilton’s proper school for the last time and put on her father’s pants. She found a belt and cinched it tight, then pulled on the blessed old sweater, the one she had been planning to throw out while he was gone to Cheyenne.

Gone to Cheyenne. “Papa, how could you desert me?” she said out loud.

It was easy enough not to think about Papa as Christmas approached. She had chosen psalms for each of her children to memorize and prepare for a recitation on Christmas Eve. Praise Providence, the paper was dry, thick vellum that Jack had scrounged from Papa’s old house.

Her plan to fold several sheets of paper in half and turn them into a journal for each child nearly died aborning, when she found she couldn’t even thread the needle to sew the sheets together at the spine because her chilblains made her hands too clumsy. Jack found her in tears two nights before Christmas when he stopped by after Luella was asleep.

Tears streaming down her face, she held out the needle to him. He couldn’t thread it either. “What’re you making, honeybunch?” he asked.

She knew he couldn’t have meant that. It must be a Southern expression, because he had said that to the Sansever girls before. Better just ignore the slip.

“I wanted to sew six folded-over sheets of this heavy paper together to make journals for my children,” she said, wishing her chin didn’t quiver, because she hated to cry in front of this strong man. She flexed her fingers and winced. “It’s much nicer in Barbados.”