Part 67 (1/2)

Besides, Bob wasn't really alive, even then-his eyes never flickered. It was only reflex that enabled him to swallow the soup she fed him. That his rod still seemed to live when she bathed him, that, too, was reflex, an obscene joke that life was playing on the two of them. It raised no feelings of tenderness in her, just a feeling of disgust at the cruelties of existence. It seemed to mock her, to make her feel that she was cheating Bob of something, though it was not easy to say what. She had married him, followed him, fed him, worked beside him, borne his children-and yet even as she changed his sheets she felt there was a selfishness in her that she had never mastered. Something had been held back-what it was, considering all that she had done, was hard to say. But she felt it anyway, fair judgment or not, and lay awake on her cot through half the night, tense with self-reproach.

In the mornings she lay wrapped in a quilt until the smell of Cholo's coffee waked her. She had fallen into the habit of letting Cholo make the coffee, mainly because he was better at it than she was. She would lie in her quilt, watching the mists float over the Platte, until one or both of the girls tiptoed out. They always tiptoed, as if they might wake their father, though his eyes were as wide open as ever.

”Ma, ain't you up?” Sally would say. ”We been up awhile.”

”Wanta gather the eggs?” Betsey asked. It was her favorite ch.o.r.e but she preferred to do it with her mother-some of the hens were irritable with Betsey and would peck her if she tried to slide an egg out from under them, whereas they would never peck Clara.

”I'd rather gather you two,” Clara said, pulling both girls onto the cot with her. With the sunlight flooding the wide plain, and both her two girls in bed with her, it was hard to feel as bad about herself as she had felt alone in the night.

”Don't you wanta get up?” Sally asked. She had more of her father in her than Betsey had, and it bothered her a little to see her mother lazing in bed with the sun up. It seemed to her a little wrong-at least, her father had often complained about it.

”Oh, shush,” Clara said. ”The sun's just been up five minutes.”

She reflected that perhaps that was what she had held back-she had never become proficient at early rising, despite all the practice she'd had. She had got up dutifully and made breakfast for Bob and whatever hands happened to be there, but she was not at her best, and the breakfasts seldom arrived on the table in the orderly fas.h.i.+on that Bob expected. It was a relief to her when he went away on horse-trading expeditions and she could sleep late, or just lie in bed thinking and reading the magazines she ordered from the East or from England.

The ladies' magazines had stories and parts of novels in them, in many of which were ladies who led lives so different from hers that she felt she might as well be on another planet. She liked Thackeray's ladies better than d.i.c.kens's, and George Eliot's best of all-but it was a frustration that the mail came so seldom. Sometimes she would have to wait for two or three months for her Blackwoods Blackwoods, wondering all the time what was happening to the people in the stories. Reading stories by all the women, not only George Eliot, but Mrs. Gore and Mrs. Gaskell and Charlotte Yonge, she sometimes had a longing to do what those women did-write stories. But those women lived in cities or towns and had many friends and relatives nearby. It discouraged her to look out the window at the empty plains and reflect that even if she had the eloquence to write, and the time, she had nothing to write about. With Maude Jones dead, she seldom saw another woman, and had no relatives near except her husband and her children. There was an aunt in Cincinnati, but they only exchanged letters once or twice a year. Her characters would have to be the horses and the hens, if she ever wrote, for the menfolk that came by weren't interesting enough to put in books, it seemed to her. None of them were capable of the kind of talk men managed in English novels.

She longed, sometimes, to talk to a person who actually wrote stories and had them printed in magazines. It interested her to speculate how it was done: whether they used people they knew, or just made people up. Once she had even ordered some big writing tablets, thinking she might try it anyway, even if she didn't know how, but that was in the hopeful years before her boys died. With all the work that had to be done she never actually sat down and tried to write anything-and then the boys died and her feeling changed. Once the sight of the writing tablets had made her hopeful, but after those deaths it ceased to matter. The tablets were just another reproach to her, something willful she had wanted. She burned the tablets one day, trembling with anger and pain, as if the paper and not the weather had been somehow responsible for the deaths of her boys. And, for a time, she stopped reading the magazines. The stories in them seemed hateful to her: how could people talk that way and spend their time going to b.a.l.l.s and parties, when children died and had to be buried?

But a few years pa.s.sed, and Clara went back to the stories in the magazines. She loved to read aloud, and she read s.n.a.t.c.hes of them to her daughters as soon as they were big enough to listen. Bob didn't particularly like it, but he tolerated it. No other woman he knew read as much as his wife, and he thought it might be the cause of certain of her vanities: the care she took with her hair, for instance, was.h.i.+ng it every day and brus.h.i.+ng it. To him it seemed a waste-hair was just hair.

As Clara watched the wagon the girls had spotted drawing closer, she saw Cholo come riding in with two mares who were ready to foal. Cholo had seen the wagon too, and had come to look after her. He was a cautious old man, as puzzled by Clara as he was devoted to her. It was her recklessness that disturbed him. She was respectful of dangerous horses, but seemed to have no fear at all of dangerous men. She laughed when Cholo tried to counsel her. She was not even afraid of Indians, though Cholo had showed her the scars of the arrow wounds he had suffered.

Now he penned the mares and loped over to be sure she wasn't threatened by whoever was coming in the wagon. They kept a shotgun in the saddle shed, but Clara only used it to kill snakes, and she only killed snakes because they were always stealing her eggs. At times the hens seemed to her almost more trouble than they were worth, for they had to be protected constantly from coyotes, skunks, badgers, even hawks and eagles.

”I don't see but two men, Cholo,” Clara said, watching the wagon.

”Two men is two too many if they are bad men,” Cholo said.

”Bad men would have a better team,” Clara said. ”Find any colts?” Cholo shook his head. His hair was white-Clara had never been able to get his age out of him, but she imagined he was seventy-five at least, perhaps eighty. At night by the fire, with the work done, Cholo wove horsehair lariats. Clara loved to watch the way his fingers worked. When a horse died or had to be killed, Cholo always saved its mane and tail for his ropes. He could weave them of rawhide too, and once had made one for her of buckskin, although she didn't rope. Bob had been puzzled by the gift-”Clara couldn't rope a post,” he said-but Clara was not puzzled at all. She had been very pleased. It was a beautiful gift; Cholo had the finest manners. She knew he appreciated her as she appreciated him. That was the year she bought him the coat. Sometimes, reading her magazines, she would look up and see Cholo weaving a rope and imagine that if she ever did try to write a story she would write it about him. It would be very different from any of the stories she read in the English magazines. Cholo was not much like an English gentleman, but it was his gentleness and skill with horses, in contrast to Bob's incompetence, that made her want badly to encourage him to stay with them. He talked little, which would be a problem if she put him in a story-the people in the stories she read seemed to talk a great deal. He had been stolen as a child by Comanches and had gradually worked his way north, traded from one tribe to another, until he had escaped one day during a battle. Though he was an old man and had lived among Indians and whites his whole life, he still preferred to speak Spanish. Clara knew a little from her girlhood in Texas, and tried to speak it with him. At the sound of the Spanish words his wrinkled face would light up with happiness. Clara persuaded him to teach her girls. Cholo couldn't read, but he was a good teacher anyway-he loved the girls and would take them on rides, pointing at things and giving them their Spanish names.

Soon all the mares in the corral were p.r.i.c.king their ears and watching the approaching wagon. A big man in a coat heavier than Cholo's rode beside it on a little brown horse that looked as if it would drop if it had to carry him much farther. A man with a badly scarred face rode on the wagon seat, beside a woman who was heavy with child. The woman drove the team. All three looked so blank with exhaustion that even the sight of people, after what must have been a long journey, didn't excite them much. A few buffalo hides were piled in the wagon. Cholo watched the travelers carefully, but they didn't seem to pose a threat. The woman drew rein and looked down at them as if dazed.

”Are we to Nebraska yet?” she asked.

”Yes,” Clara said. ”It's nearly twenty miles to town. Won't you get down and rest?”

”Do you know Dee Boot?” the woman said. ”I'm looking for him.”

”Si-pistolero,” Cholo said quietly. He did most of their shopping and knew practically everyone in Ogallala.

Elmira heard the word, and knew what it meant, but she didn't care what anybody called Dee-the fact that he was nearby was all that mattered. If Dee was near, it meant that she was safe and could soon be rid of Luke and Big Zwey, and not have to ride on the jolting wagon seat all day or be scared all night that they would run into Indians at the last minute.

”Get down-at least you'll want to water your stock,” Clara said. ”You're welcome to stay the night, if you like. You can easily make town tomorrow. I'd say you all could use a rest.”

”What town would that be?” Luke asked, easing down from the wagon seat. He had twisted a leg several days before, running to try and get a better shot at an antelope-it was all he could do to walk.

Elmira didn't want to stop, even when told that it was still over half a day to Ogallala, but Zwey had already dismounted and unhitched the horses. I wish I could get to Dee, she thought-but then decided one more day wouldn't matter. She got slowly down from the wagon seat.

”Come on up to the house,” Clara said. ”I'll have the girls draw some water. I guess you've come a ways.”

”Arkansas,” Elmira said. The house didn't look very far away, but as they walked toward it, it seemed to wobble in her vision.

”My goodness, that is a ways,” Clara said. ”I lived in Texas once.” Then she turned and saw that the woman was sitting on the ground. Before Clara could reach her she had toppled sideways and lay face up on the trail that led from the house to the barn.

Clara was not too alarmed. Just tired, she thought. A journey all the way from Arkansas, in a wagon like that, would wear anybody out. She fanned the woman's face for a while but it did no good. Cholo had seen the woman fall and he ran to her, but the big man lifted the woman as easily as if she were a child and carried her to the house.

”I didn't get your name, or her name either,” Clara said.

The big man just looked at her silently. Is he mute? Clara thought. But later the man with the scarred face came to the house and said no, the big man just didn't talk much. ”Name's Zwey,” he said. ”Big Zwey. I'm Luke. I got my face bunged up coming, and now I hurt this dern leg. Her name's Elmira.”

”And she's a friend of Mr. Boot?” Clara asked. They put Elmira in bed but she hadn't yet opened her eyes.

”Don't know about that, she's married to a sheriff,” Luke said. He felt uncomfortable in the house after so many days outside, and soon went out again to sit on the wagon with Zwey. He happened to look up and see two young girls peering at him from an open window. He wondered where the man was, for surely the good-looking woman he had talked to couldn't be married to the old Mexican.

That night she asked if they would like to come in and eat supper. Zwey wouldn't-he was too shy-so the woman brought their suppers out and they ate in the wagon.

The girls were disappointed at that turn of events. They seldom had company and wanted a better look at the men.

”Make 'em come in, Ma,” Sally whispered. She was particularly fascinated by the one with the scarred face.

”I can't just order men around,” Clara said. ”Anyway, you've met buffalo hunters before. Smelled them too. These don't smell much different from any of the others.”

”One of them's big,” Betsey observed. ”Is he the lady's husband?”

”I don't think so, and don't be a busybody,” Clara said. ”She's worn out. Maybe tomorrow she'll feel like talking.”

But the girls were to hear Elmira's voice long before morning. The men sitting in the wagon heard it too-long screams that raked the prairie night for hours.

Once again, Clara had reason to be glad of Cholo, who was as good with women as he was with horses. Difficult births didn't frighten him as they did most men, and many women. Elmira's was difficult, too-the exhausting journey over the plains had left her too weak for the task at hand. She fainted many times during the night. Clara could do nothing about it except bathe her face with cool water from the cistern. When day came, Elmira was too weak to scream. Clara was worried-the woman had lost too much blood.

”Momma, Daddy's sick, he smells bad,” Sally said, peeking for a moment into the sickroom. The girls had slept downstairs on pallets, so as to be farther from the screams.

”Just leave him be, I'll take care of him,” Clara said.

”But he's sick-he smells bad,” Sally repeated. Her eyes were fearful.

”He's alive-life don't always smell nice,” Clara said. ”Go make us some breakfast and take some to those men. They must be hungry.”

A few minutes later, Elmira fainted again.

”She's too weak,” Cholo said.

”Poor thing,” Clara said. ”I would be too, if I came that far. That baby isn't going to wait for her to get strong.”

”No, it's going to kill her,” Cholo said.

”Well then, save it, at least,” Clara said, feeling so downcast suddenly that she left the room. She got a water bucket and walked out of the house, meaning to get some water for Bob. It was a beautiful morning, light touching the farthest edges of the plains. Clara noticed the beauty and thought it strange that she could still respond to it, tired as she was and with two people dying in her house-perhaps three. But she loved the fine light of the prairie mornings; it had resurrected her spirits time after time though the years, when it seemed that dirt and cold and death would crush her. Just to see the light spreading like that, far on toward Wyoming, was her joy. It seemed to put energy into her, make her want to do things.

And the thing she wanted most to do was plant flowers-flowers that might bloom in the light. She did plant them, ordering bulbs and seeds from the East. The light brought them up, and then the wind tore them from her. Worse than the dirt she hated the wind. The dirt she could hold her own with, sweeping it away each morning, but the wind was endless and fierce. It renewed itself again and again, curling out of the north to take her flowers from her, petal by petal, until nothing remained but the sad stalks. Clara kept on planting anyway, hiding the flowers in the most protected spots she could find. The wind always found them too, in time, but sometimes the blooms lasted a few days before the petals were blown away. It was a battle she wouldn't give up on: every winter she read seed catalogues with the girls and described to them the flowers they would have when spring came.