Lions

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There’s one about that kind of mistake, too. Today, where the old highway connects with the frontage road that takes you to the new highway, there’s a one-room schoolhouse that appears and disappears among the giant papery green docks and goosefoot-shaped leaves of lambsquarter. When it’s lit up, you can see the old brass bell tolling, though it makes no sound. When Leigh was a girl, she begged May to tell and retell the tale.

A woman from out east who had once been the schoolteacher, a twenty-six-year-old Honora Strong, was held responsible for the death of every single one of her nineteen young students, aged four to fifteen, frozen to death in a sudden, late-spring blizzard. Though she herself didn’t survive to be hanged or cast out for it, she was caught forever on the highway looking for them. Sometimes in a high wind, you can hear them crying, and her calling them by name.

She lived in a room adjacent to the schoolhouse, with a bedstead and a stove, and had sent her students home, hoping they’d be ahead of the storm, because she was expecting a lover. He went by Miller — David Wayne Miller — and he had been seeing her off and on for two years as he traversed the countryside, east to west and north to south. He was from Utah, though his family were Germans and Swedes out of South Dakota. He had small eyes the color of stone, dark hair raked with silver, and a barrel-shaped torso. Though he wasn’t a tall man, he called himself a big guy, which was accurate in the sense that he took up all the space in a room, left none for anyone else to talk, nor air for them to breathe. He had, somewhere, a wife and two children — and had, somewhere else, another wife, and another child. To all of his women he made promises he couldn’t keep, and left each one of them trapped in her hometown, waiting for him to make good.

Like so many of the westerners who broke the land and occupied positions of influence, May told Leigh — the sheets and yellow wool blanket pulled up to her chin, her small white fingers curled around the satin binding — David Wayne Miller was a sunny liar, a good storyteller, a hard worker, and an expert, cold-hearted son of a bitch. He came out of every shoot-out, every rotten horse trade, and every madam’s house smelling like a rose. For every crime he committed, for every life he ruined, there was a fabulous story to stand in for the truth.

“And you know what?” May asked her daughter. “People loved the stories. They wanted them. People say they want the truth but they don’t. They want a story.”

“I want a story.”

“I know you do.”

According to the historical record, David Wayne Miller was seen some five or six years after the death of Honora Strong and her students, in Deadwood, in a gunfight with a man who was no better than he was and who thus recognized a sick man when he saw one. Miller survived the fight, and, it is said, took up a stethoscope and paraded around the West as a traveling surgeon praised for his healing arts, and died rich, fat, and happy at an old age on a ranch in southeast Wyoming.

“Green River?” Leigh asked her mother from her narrow bed.

“Couldn’t say.”

“Rawlins?”

“Not telling.”

“But he’s dead? For sure?”

“There is no man more dead than this man.”

Nobody could guess where the schoolteacher had met him. Once Honora could see Miller wasn’t coming that frigid spring day, and the windows were half blocked with blue snow, then within an hour completely blocked and blackened, and there was no more wood in the box to burn, and it was hours before dawn, she confessed the entire matter in writing. In the days after, children were exhumed out of their empire of snow, their pointed faces blue, their eyelashes frosted with ice. The schoolteacher was likewise discovered, the confession stuffed in her frozen bosom.

A world of hurt. That, May Ransom told her daughter, is what comes of choosing the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. And then waiting for him, waiting for him. There are good and decent men in this world, she told her daughter, and there are men like he was: touched by darkness and, eventually, overcome by it.

When the old schoolhouse materializes out of nothing on the side of the road, it’s as clean and white as the day it was built, the bright bell shining in its square-shaped wooden tower, and passersby from behind the windshields of their Pontiacs and Hondas, driving from Chicago to LA or Omaha to Reno, have seen the poor woman right beside it in a long brown- and rose-colored dress, her thick, curling red hair blowing as if she, alone, were on fire in the midst of a terrible storm.

Such tales of children and their schoolteachers or bus drivers caught in sudden snowstorms on the plain are all too common; some still say that David Wayne Miller is behind the death of every one of them.

“Because every wrong man,” May told Leigh every time, while the girl watched the shadows of the cottonwood bend and lengthen on the wall behind her mother’s head, “is the same wrong man.”