The Legacy (25 page)

“You promised me we would,” she said quietly.

“And we will. We will,” he insisted.

Soon afterwards he rose, pulled himself into his clothes, stroked one hand gently over Caroline’s hair and kissed the top of her head before going through to the kitchen to make coffee. Caroline sat and listened to the rattle of the coffee beans, the clang of the kettle hitting the stove, and she felt a peculiar weariness wash over her. For a moment, she did not think she had the strength to rise, to see another day through to its end. Every bone in her body seemed leaden. But she drew in a long breath, and she stood, and began to dress herself slowly.

A
t the end of September, Joe appeared at the house one wet afternoon, his hat in his hands, eyes half shut against the steady downpour and an air of impenetrable calm about him. Caroline smiled, but she could not help but draw back from him, and she saw a hardening in his eye when she did this.

“Magpie’s time is come. She asks for you to go there,” Joe said.

“To go where? Why?” Caroline said, not understanding.

“To go to her. To help the baby,” Joe explained, in his guttural accent. His tone was as neutral as his expression, but something told Caroline that he did not necessarily approve of his wife’s request. She hesitated, and felt her pulse quicken. She would have to go inside the dugout. However used to having Magpie around the house Caroline had become, she could not help thinking of that low, half-submerged dwelling as some kind of animal’s den.

“I see,” she said quietly. “I see.”

“In this way, she honors you,” Joe told her solemnly. “Such work is only for family.”

After a hung pause, pinned by Joe’s inscrutable gaze, Caroline went back inside. She squashed her hat onto her hair, took off her apron and felt panic rising like bubbles in her throat. She had no knowledge of birth, no idea what she should do to help. She was not sure that she wanted to help at all.

Outside, Joe showed the first and only sign of impatience Caroline had ever seen any of the Ponca show. He repositioned his hat in his hands and looked over his shoulder toward where his wife lay in labor. Seeing this, Caroline felt a stab of guilt and she hurried out, turning her face to the ground as they went so that she would not see the terrifying spread of land around them. Ever since her abortive walk to the Moore’s farm, she had felt a dizzying horror of the gaping landscape of Woodward County. The expanse of it seemed to pull her thoughts apart, building an unbearable pressure behind her eyes. She felt the urge to run, to throw herself back indoors before she disintegrated into the mighty sky. Their footsteps splashed and Caroline’s hem was soon soaked with water, stained ruddy from the soil.

Three steps led down into the dugout, and they dropped into a soft, warm darkness lit by a kerosene lamp that battled against the gloom outside and in. There was a strong smell, made up of smoke from the stove, animal hides, and herbs that Caroline could not identify. The blood thumped at her temples as she felt all eyes turn to her—Magpie’s, White Cloud’s, and those of Joe’s sister, Annie. Joe himself stayed outside and disappeared into the rain. Magpie’s face was slick with sweat, her eyes wide and fearful. The other women’s expressions were cautious; not unfriendly, but reserved.

“Joe . . . said I should come. He said you had . . . had . . . asked for me to come?” Caroline stammered. Magpie nodded and smiled slightly before her body convulsed, and she ground her teeth together, an expression that made her look savage. “What should I do? I don’t know what I should do!” Caroline quailed. White Cloud said something rapid in the Ponca language and handed Caroline a small wooden pail, filled with rainwater, and a clean cloth. The old woman motioned dipping the cloth into the water, and then pressed her hand against her forehead, gesturing to Magpie. Caroline nodded and knelt beside the laboring girl, wiping her drenched face with the cool water, afraid, as she performed this intimate duty, that the girl would somehow see into her troubled heart.

In the semidark, White Cloud began to sing a soft monotonous song that lulled them all; lulled Caroline so that she had no idea how much time was passing, whether hours or minutes or days. The words were blurred and dry, and the song sounded to Caroline’s ears like the long, drawn-out rush of the warm prairie wind, lonely and reverent. As regularly as waves on the shore, Magpie heaved against the pain inside her, screwing up her eyes and bearing her teeth. She looked as feral as a cat, but she did not cry out. On and on these waves came, as the darkness deepened outside; and on and on White Cloud sang, mixing up a pungent drink that she gave to Magpie gradually, a spoonful at a time. Then, with a low sound in her throat like a strangled growl, Magpie’s baby arrived into Annie’s waiting hands, and White Cloud broke off her song with a sharp cry of joy, her wizened face breaking into a wide grin, and then into laughter. Caroline smiled with relief, but as Annie passed the wriggling, whimpering baby boy to its mother, she felt a splinter pierce her heart and lodge there. Tears sprang to her eyes and she looked away to hide them, seeing, in a dark corner of the dugout, a pair of spurs on leather thongs. A pair Corin had been looking for and had asked if she had seen about the place. She stared at them, and the splinter wormed its way ever deeper.

T
wo months later, the baby was chubby and delightful. He was named, in the Ponca tongue
, first born son
; but called by his parents and so everybody else, William. He rode around the ranch in a sling on Magpie’s back, gazing out at the world with an expression of mild astonishment in his round eyes. And he slept there in a crumpled little heap, dribbling down his chin, not stirring as Magpie returned to work in the main house, her body not at all fatigued by the child. The cold, like the heat, seemed to have little effect on the girl’s spirits. She appeared at the house swathed in her thick, brightly patterned blanket, her cheeks burnished dark red by the wind and her eyes as bright as jet beads.

And although it hurt her to hold William, Caroline often asked to do so. Like exploring a wound, or pressing a bruise. She cradled him in the crook of her arm and rocked him gently. He was a good-natured baby and did not cry for strangers. He had an array of fledgling facial expressions that melted her heart and eased the splinter from it. A tiny frown of puzzlement at the noises she made; the sagging of his mouth and eyes as sleep took hold; wide-eyed wonder when she showed him her peacock-feather fan. But the pain of handing him back to his proud mother was a little stronger each time, the hurt a little worse; and the only thing harder than this was watching Corin play with the baby, when he came in from working. His brown hands looked impossibly large around the tiny child’s body, and he grinned foolishly when he managed, by tickling and mugging, to make William smile. Each time he succeeded in this endeavour he glanced at his wife, to share it with her, but Caroline found it hard to find the smile she knew he wanted. Seeing him love this child, this child that was not hers, was almost more than she could bear.

There was to be no christening for William, which surprised Caroline, even though it made sense. She fretted briefly about the danger to the child’s soul, but Magpie only laughed when she tentatively suggested that it wouldn’t hurt him to go through the ceremony, just in case.

“Our ancestors are watching him, Mrs. Massey. You don’t have to worry,” she smiled.

Awkwardly, Caroline dropped the subject. But she suggested that they hold a welcoming lunch for him instead, and Magpie agreed to this. Caroline sent out some invitations, but only Angie Fosset was willing to celebrate the birth of an Indian baby, and she turned up on her tall horse with the saddlebags full of cast-off baby smocks and napkins.

“I’m stopping at three, so I’ve no need of these any more,” she told Magpie. Caroline had sent Hutch into Woodward the week before to collect the gifts she had ordered for William from Corin and herself. Magpie accepted each present with increasing embarrassment, and the atmosphere over the party grew awkward.

“Mrs. Massey . . . this is too much,” Magpie told her, her eyes troubled. Annie and White Cloud exchanged a look that Caroline could not read.

“Oh, my goodness, what lovely things!” Angie exclaimed.

“Well,” Caroline smiled, feeling suddenly exposed. “A lovely little boy should have lovely things,” she said, but felt that they could all see into her heart—that these were gifts she had wanted to give her own baby, not Magpie’s. She turned to William in his carrier to hide her dismay, stroking one finger down his crumpled, sleeping face. But this was worse. Her cheeks flared red and her breath caught in her chest. “Who’d like some cake?” she asked tightly; getting up and fleeing into the kitchen.

C
aroline’s second winter on the prairie was harder than the first. The four walls of the house became her gaol, trapping her with Magpie and William—two constant reminders of how she failed, day after day. For if Magpie’s return to work, her cheery demeanor and the ease with which she coped proved anything to Caroline, it was that she would never belong on the prairie like the Ponca girl did. She would never get on as well, never thrive, never settle, never put down roots here, but remain blown about the surface like tumble weed. She found it harder and harder to talk to Magpie, to sing and tell stories as they’d used to. The words stuck in her throat and she feared that even genuine expressions of admiration for Magpie, for William, would come out tainted with the grief she felt, and would sound insincere.

When Hutch came to the house for coffee he would push her gently to speak her mind, to come out riding again, to do anything but stay cooped up inside the house. Caroline assured him, absently, that she was fine, and all was well; and the foreman had no choice but to drift away again, a thoughtful look in his eye. When the confinement got unbearable, and Caroline did gather her courage and venture outside, the wind hit her skin like knives, and the sky rained terror down upon her and, once chilled, it took hours for her to get warm again, however close to the stove she huddled. As she broke the ice on the water cistern one morning and felt the splashes on her hands burning coldly, she remembered the warm water of the pool where they had swum on their honeymoon; and she gazed down into the dark depths of the tank, rooted to the spot by sadness.

At night, Caroline and Corin often lay awake as the wind howled around the house, too loud to ignore. Beneath the blankets one such night, he drew lazy patterns on her shoulder that both soothed and aroused her. The smell of him was so dear to her, strong and rank and animal after a day’s work under heavy clothes. She clung to him like a drowning person clinging to a float, keeping her eyes tightly shut, feeling as though the house, at any moment, might give in to the onslaught and be torn away with them inside it. The house was a fiction, she thought; a flimsy carapace between them and the empty fury outside; and it might vanish in a heartbeat. As long as Corin was there, she told herself. As long as he was there with her she didn’t care. He seemed to sense her fears and he spoke to calm them, the way she had heard him speak to nervous horses. His voice was low and she fought to hear it above the din—words rolling in a steady rhythm, like water trickling, half awake and half asleep.

“I guess we should spare a thought for White Cloud and Annie, although I know the Ponca are born to this life and they are stronger than we are, still I would not want to have nothing but hides between me and the wind on a night like this. Hutch has told me of the Great Die-Up, in the winter of eighty-seven, which was before I had come out west, and we two, you and I, were still in New York City, unbeknownst to one another. Every bad winter we have, every time I mention the cold he just shakes his head and says it’s nothing, not compared to the Great Die-Up. Whole herds of cattle froze where they stood. Riders died out on the ranges and they weren’t found until the spring, when the snow melted back and left them sitting high and dry, with their knees drawn up to their chests in the last pose they ever struck, just trying to keep warm. The beeves were all skinny and weak because the summer before that winter had been a droughty one and there was precious little grass or feed to be had. And they just died in their
droves
. And the cows lost their calves before they were due to birth them, because there was hardly enough to fill one mouth, let alone two; and Hutch himself lost three toes—two on his right foot and one on his left. He’d been out riding in a blizzard so thick he strained to see his horse’s ears, trying to keep the cattle moving so they didn’t just huddle up and freeze into one great heap of dead meat, and when he climbed off his horse at the end of the day he couldn’t feel his legs, let alone his feet. He told me he didn’t get his boots off until three days later, and by that time his feet were big and black and the blood had just frozen right there in his veins. And it’s true, too; I’ve seen the gaps where those toes of his should be. There were snowstorms the likes of which had never been seen, nor have been since; from Mexico to Canada and everywhere in between, and I remember—don’t you remember having no beef one year, when you were little? Perhaps you were too young, but I remember there being no beef in New York. Cook tried everything she could to get some each week but there was none to be had. Not with nigh on every poor beast on the ranges lying under a snowdrift. So this storm, this wind—well, like Hutch says, it’s nothing, my darling. This is the prairie being sweet to us, Caroline. And we’re warm, aren’t we? And we’re safe, too. How could we not be when we have each other?” He spoke like this, on and on through the ragged night, as hailstones hit the roof like lead shot; and Caroline drowsed on the edge of sleep, drinking in the steady words and feeling a cold ache in her feet for Hutch’s lost toes, a cold ache in her heart for cowboys hugging their knees to their chests, out in the sweet prairie wind.