The Legacy

Losing

1903-1904

The summer swelled and Magpie’s body ripened in time with it, seeming to expand by the day as her baby grew. She moved with an odd grace, as purposefully as ever but never suddenly, neatly angling her new width around the furniture and through the narrow door of the dugout she shared with Joe. Caroline watched her. She watched, and she wondered, her heart full of suspicions that she went from discrediting to confirming to herself twenty times a day. And more than anything, she was jealous. She felt sick and weak and full of something dark and bitter each time she saw the growing inches of the Indian girl’s body. And if anything could have driven her from the house and out into the summer sun, it was this.

The wooden house just could not keep out the heat as the thick brownstone walls of New York had done. And, Caroline reflected, when it was hot in New York, it was never as hot as this, and she had never before had to be active in such temperatures. But Magpie’s composure and Hutch’s exhortation to her at new year were at work upon Caroline’s mind; so one day, which dawned slightly overcast and a little cooler than usual, she decided to get out of the house. She packed a basket with a newly ripe melon, some biscuits and a bottle of tonic water, tied the ribbon of her sun bonnet in a bow beneath her chin, and set off for the nearest neighboring farm, which belonged to an Irish family called Moore. It was six miles to the northwest and Caroline, who had no idea what it felt like to walk six miles, had nonetheless overheard Corin say that a man might easily walk four miles in an hour. Setting off early, she thought, she would be there in time to take coffee and maybe a bite of lunch, and then back again in plenty of time to help cook dinner. She told Magpie where she was going, and squared her shoulders when the Ponca girl gave her a level, incredulous stare and blinked slowly, like an owl.

She walked for an hour, at first admiring the flowers on the horsemint and wild verbena and gathering a posy to present to the Moores, but soon found the basket a dead weight on her arm, bruising her skin. She was slick with sweat in spite of the clouds, and felt it prickling her scalp underneath her hat. Her skirts were fouled up and wadded together with sandburs and thistle barbs, and they swung ponderously around her legs, tripping her. The sandy ground, which undulated gently, pulled at her feet and was more strenuous to walk across than she’d thought. She battled slowly up a long rise, certain that from the crest of it she would see the neighboring farm. She could not. Breathing hard, she saw the landscape roll away into the distance, as far as the eye could see. Putting the basket down, she turned in a slow circle, staring into the unbroken horizon. A hot wind blew, making waves in the long grass that looked, in the distance, like a green and gold ocean. The wind carried the scent of dry earth and sagebrush and it moaned a low note in her ears.

“There’s nothing here,” Caroline murmured to herself. Something rose up in her then, something like panic, or anger. “There’s nothing here!” she shouted, as loudly as she could. Her throat felt raw and dry. The wind snatched her words away, and gave her no answer. She sank onto the prairie and lay back to rest. An endless sky above her, and endless land all around. If she did not rise again, she thought, if she stayed where she was, only wild dogs and buzzards would ever find her. It was an irresistible thought, a terrifying one.

Walking back at last, having never reached the Moore’s place, Caroline nearly missed the ranch. She had veered to the north by a mile or more and only happened by chance to see smoke rising from the chuck hut to her right, where a silent Louisiana Negro called Rook would be cooking dinner for the ranch hands. Turning south, Caroline’s legs wobbled with exhaustion. Her mouth was parched and her face, after a day in the harsh light and hot wind, was tight and stinging. Behind her she could feel the vastness of the prairie spreading out, watching, and beyond the ranch the grasslands stretched away to every point on the compass. The corrals, fences, wheat and sorghum fields her husband had mapped onto the land were pitifully small. The ranch was an island, a tiny atoll of civilization in an endless patchy sea, and when she finally reached the house, gasping for breath and scattering wilted flowers behind her, she shut the door and burst into tears.

That night Caroline lay awake, in spite of her exhaustion. The clouds cleared as night fell, and the moon rose luminously full. It was not this that kept her awake, but the knowledge, the new understanding of how vast and empty the land she now lived upon truly was. She felt swallowed up by it; tiny, invisible. She wanted to grow, to expand, to take up more space somehow. She wanted to be significant. The air inside the bedroom was smothering, thick with the lassitude of summer. Beside her, Corin snored softly, his face pressed into the pillow, arms flung out to his sides. The moon caught the contours of the muscles in his arms and shoulders, and the sharp line where the tan of his neck became the pale of his back. Caroline rose, took a spare blanket and went outside.

She spread the blanket among the fecund orbs of the watermelons and lay down upon it. Something scuttled away into the foliage close to her face, and she shuddered. There were no other sounds, though her ears strained to pick up any movement from the bunkhouse, any sign of an approaching ranch hand. Then she pulled her nightdress up until it covered only her breasts, leaving the lower portion of her body bare to the night sky. Her hipbones stood proud, casting shadows of their own in the silvery light. Her heart beat fast in her chest, and she did not shut her eyes. Stars scattered the sky. She began to count them, lost her place and started again, and again; losing all idea of how long she had lain there and where on earth she was. Then the door banged behind her and she heard uneven steps, and Corin grabbed her beneath her arms and pulled her into his lap.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” Caroline gasped. Painted in grays and blacks, Corin’s face was pinched with fear and his eyes were wide. Seeing her awake and well Corin let her go, exhaling heavily, and put his face into his hands.

“What are you doing out here?” he mumbled. “Are you all right?”

“I’m… fine. I just… it was so hot in the bedroom…” Caroline hurriedly pulled her nightdress down.

“But it’s just as hot out here! What are you doing-why were you naked?” he demanded. Alarmed, Caroline saw that he was shaking. She bit her lip and looked away.

“Moonbathing,” she said.

“What?”

“I was moonbathing… Angie told me it might help,” Caroline said quietly. She had sneered inwardly at such superstition when their neighbor first mentioned it, but now it seemed she would try anything.

“Help with what? Love, you’re not making sense!”

“Help a woman to get pregnant. To lie with the moon shining on her body,” Caroline said, shamefacedly.

“And you believed her?”

“No, not really. Not really. It’s just… why aren’t I pregnant yet, Corin? It’s been over a year!” she cried. “I don’t understand.”

“I don’t understand it either,” Corin sighed. “But I’m sure these things happen when they’re good and ready, that’s all. A year is not that long! You’re young and… it’s been a big upheaval for you, moving out here to be with me. It will happen love, please try not to worry.” He tipped her chin up with his fingertips. “Come back inside now.”

“Corin… why were you so afraid just now?” Caroline asked, as she rose stiffly to her feet.

“What? When?”

“Just now, when you found me out here. You looked so alarmed! Why? What did you think had happened?”

“There was a woman, on the other side of Woodward a couple of years ago… never mind. I just thought something might have happened to you. But you’re fine, and it’s nothing to worry about…” Corin reassured her.

“Tell me, please,” she pressed, sensing his reluctance. “What happened to the woman?”

“Well, apparently she felt the heat badly, like you do too, and she was also pining for her home back in France, and she took to sleeping out in the yard to keep cool, but one night… one night she…” His fingers grasped the night air, searching for a way to tell her without telling her.

“She what?”

“She cut her own throat,” he said, in a rush. “Three children waiting for her indoors and all.” Caroline swallowed convulsively, her own throat closing at the thought of such violence.

“And you thought I’d… done that to myself?” she breathed.

“No! No, love, no. I was just worried for you, that’s all.” He ushered her back into the bedroom and said he would wait up until she slept, but soon his soft snores began again, and still Caroline’s eyes stayed fixed upon the ceiling.

She wondered. She wondered where Corin went all day. It had never occurred to her to think about this before. He always gave an account of his day over the supper table, but how could she know that he was telling it true? How could she know how long it took to round up strays, to pursue rustlers, to brand the new steers, to set the stallion Apache to a brood mare, to mend fences, to plough or sow or reap the wheat fields, or cut hay, or do any of it? And Corin could, of course, send Joe anywhere if he wanted him out of the way. And Magpie had often already left, by an hour or so, before Corin came in for the evening. There were times, plenty of times, when she had no idea where either of them might be. And the way he had touched Magpie, that time-the way he had put his hands on her at the Woodward gala. These were Caroline’s thoughts as she lay awake, and as she sat in the ringing silence at the end of each day, waiting for Corin’s return. When Caroline saw her husband, her fears vanished. When she was alone, they flourished like weeds. Her solace was Magpie’s plainness, as she saw it. The coarseness of her hair, the fat on her figure, the alien planes of her face. She noted these things and called to mind Corin’s praise of her own beauty.

But one hard August day when a high, spiteful sun was bleaching the grassland, even this solace was taken from Caroline. Magpie was at the kitchen window, standing sideways so that she could lean her hip against the bench as she peeled carrots with a short, sharp blade. She was singing, as usual, her expression soft and her hands busy. Caroline watched her through the doorway from the main room, from behind a book she was supposedly reading, and a falter in the quiet song made her blink. Magpie stopped peeling, her gaze falling out of focus and one hand going to her distended belly. A tiny smile twitched her lips and then the song and the work continued. The baby had shifted, Caroline realized. It was awake, alive inside the girl. It was listening to its mother singing. Swallowing, Caroline put her hand to her own stomach. It was more than flat, it was concave; there was no welcoming fold of flesh, no fulsome vitality. She could feel her ribs and her hipbones, wooden and sharp. How dry and hard and dead her body seemed, compared to Magpie’s. Like the dead husks, the chaff that the men beat out of the wheat. She looked at the girl again, and then her throat went tight and for a second she couldn’t breathe. The sun streaming in through the window caught the gloss of Magpie’s thick, black hair; the wide, bowed curve of her top lip; the high slant of her cheeks and eyes; the warm glow of her skin. Magpie was beautiful.

Before dawn the next day, as Corin stirred and began to wake, Caroline went on soft feet to the kitchen. She poured him a cup of cold tea and cut two thick slices of bread from yesterday’s loaf, which she spread with honey. She presented him with these offerings as he sat up, blinking in the charcoal glow of near-day.

“Breakfast in bed. I always used to have breakfast in bed on Saturdays,” she told him, smiling.

“Well, thank you. How grand I feel!” Corin cupped her face in the palm of his hand, and took a long draft of the tea. Caroline propped the pillows up against the wall behind him.

“Sit back for a moment, love. You don’t have to rush out just yet,” she urged him.

“Putting off a chore never got it finished faster,” he sighed, ruefully.

“Just five more minutes,” she begged. “Try some of the bread. I spread it with that honey Joe collected for us.”

“That man is a marvel with bees,” Corin nodded. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Just walks right up to the nest and puts in his arm, and never once takes a sting.”

“Some Indian magic, perhaps?”

“Either that or he’s just got the toughest hide of any man alive,” Corin mused. Caroline thought of this-of Joe with his unforgiving black eyes and skin like the bark of a tree. She shuddered slightly, wondering how Magpie could bear to bed herself with him.

“Corin?”

“Yes?”

“You know, it’s been more than a year now since we were wed and, well… we never have been back to go swimming again, like on our honeymoon.”

“I know. I know it, Caroline. It’s so hard to find the time,” Corin said, leaning his head back against the wall, his face still languid with sleep.

“Can we go? Soon? I just… I want to spend the day with you. The whole day… we hardly ever do that! Not with all the work you have to do.”

“Well, I don’t know, Caroline. There’s just so much to do at this time of year! We’ve got the stupidest bunch of beeves as I’ve ever had on the ranch and they’ve been busting through the fences every chance they get, wandering off and getting themselves stuck in the creek and caught up in wire and I don’t know what else. Maybe in a week. In a week or two… how about that?”

“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.

At 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.

Two 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.

Caroline’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.

By the spring of 1904 there seemed to be infants everywhere. Several of the mares had gangling foals running at their heels, the yard hens bobbed on a sea of fluffy chicks, William’s howls could at times be heard in every far corner of the ranch, and a small wire-haired terrier belonging to Rook, the Negro cook, gave birth to a litter of blunt-nosed puppies following a chance encounter with a Woodward mongrel of uncertain provenance. The weather was turning warm again, the days longer. No more ice in the cistern, no more hailstorms and blue north winds. The young wheat and sorghum was pale green, and there was a brave scattering of blossom on Caroline’s spindly cherry trees. But, try as she might, Caroline could not be rid of the weight of her dashed expectations, or her fear of the open land that her husband loved so much.

They sat outside on the porch one fair Sunday afternoon, after a travelling preacher had called by to read a service for all the ranch’s inhabitants, and, because of the contentment she read in Corin’s face, rocking gently in his chair, Caroline felt a hundred miles from him.

“What are you reading?” he asked her eventually, startling her because she had thought him asleep beneath his copy of The Woodward Bulletin. She smiled and raised the book so he could see the cover. “What, The Virginian again? Don’t you get tired of reading it?”

“A little. But it’s one of my favorites, and until you take me to town to buy some others…” she shrugged.

“All right, all right. We’ll go next week, how about that? Once Bluebell’s foaled. You could always go by yourself, if you didn’t want to wait for me? No harm would come to you-”

“You don’t know that! I prefer to wait for you,” Caroline cut him off. Just the thought of striking out for Woodward alone was enough to turn her stomach.

“All right, then.” Corin retreated back beneath his paper. “Read some of that one to me then. Let’s find out what’s so special about it.” Caroline looked at the page she had been reading. Nothing was that special about it, she thought. Nothing but that the heroine, a civilized lady of the East, had made such a life for herself, had found such happiness in the wilderness; had been able to see beauty that Caroline could not, and to understand her man as Caroline could not. Caroline scoured the pages as if the secret to this was hidden there somewhere, as if she might be taught how to settle in the West, how to love it, how to thrive. But the passage she had been reading described Molly Wood deciding to leave-the dark spell before that girl’s sunshine happy ending, and Caroline hesitated before reading it out, sitting tall as she had been taught and holding the book high in front of her so her voice would not be hampered by a crooked neck.

“This was the momentous result of that visit which the Virginian had paid her. He had told her that he was coming for his hour soon. From that hour she had decided to escape. She was running away from her own heart. She did not dare to trust herself face to face again with her potent, indomitable lover…”

“My, what drama,” Corin murmured sleepily when Caroline finished, and she closed the book, running her hands over the cover which had become dog-eared and creased with rereading.

“Corin?” Caroline asked hesitantly, a while later when the sun was getting fat in the western sky. “Are you awake?”

“Mmm…” came the drowsy reply.

“I come into my money soon, Corin. I know I told you before, but I… I didn’t tell you how much money it is. It’s… a lot of money. We could go anywhere you wanted… you won’t have to work so hard any more…”

“Go somewhere? Why would we go anywhere?” he asked.

Caroline bit her lip. “It’s just… so isolated here-so far from town! We could… we could buy a house in Woodward, perhaps. I could spend some of the week there… Or we could move everything closer, move the whole ranch closer! I could… join the Coterie Club, perhaps…”

“What are you saying, Caroline? Of course I can’t move the ranch closer to town! Cattle need open grasslands, and the land nearer town is all given over to homesteaders now.”

“But you won’t need to raise cattle any more, don’t you see? We’ll have money-plenty of money!” she cried. Corin sat up and folded the newspaper. He looked at his wife and she recoiled from the pained expression on his face.

“If money was what I was interested in, I’d have stayed in New York. Sweetheart! This life is everything I’ve dreamed of since my father took me to Chicago when I was a boy and I saw Buffalo Bill Cody’s ‘Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World’ at the Columbian Exposition… That was when I decided to come out here with him, when he came looking for fresh suppliers. I watched those ropers and riders, and I knew that this was what I wanted to do with my life! Ranching isn’t just a job for me… it’s our life, and this is our home, and I can’t think I’ll ever want to move or live anywhere else. Is that what you want? Do you want to live somewhere else? Somewhere away from me, perhaps?” His voice caught when he asked this question and she looked up quickly, shocked to see tears waiting in the corners of his eyes.

“No! Of course not! Never away from you, Corin, it’s just…”

“What is it?”

“Nothing. I just thought… perhaps I might be happier, to have a little more company. More refined society than I have here, perhaps. And… perhaps if I was happier, we might start a family at last.”

At this Corin looked away across the corrals and he seemed to consider for a long time. Caroline, thinking the discussion over, sank back into her chair and shut her eyes, sad to her core and exhausted by this attempt to voice her fears.

“We can build. We could use some of the money to double the size of the house, if you like, and get a maidservant, perhaps. A housekeeper to take over from Magpie now that she has William to look after… An electricity generator, maybe. And plumbing! A proper bathroom for you, with running water indoors… How about that? Would that fix this?” Corin asked. He sounded so hurt, so desperate.

“Yes, perhaps. A bathroom would be lovely. Let’s see when the money comes,” she said.

“And I’ll take you to town very soon. We can stay the night, maybe even a couple of nights, if you like? Buy you as many books and magazines as we can carry back; and I need to go to Joe Stone’s for some new spurs. I’ve been idiot enough to break my spare pair and I’ve still not yet laid hands on the original ones…”

“They’re at Joe and Magpie’s place. In the dugout,” Caroline told him tonelessly.

“What? How do you know?”

“I saw them in there, when I was helping with the birth.” Hating herself, Caroline watched him closely. For signs of guilt or embarrassment, or a telltale blush. Instead Corin smacked a palm to his forehead.

“Lord, of course! I loaned them to Joe, months and months ago! Way out toward the panhandle that day we chased those thieves down-his snapped and since Strumpet was behaving and that gelding of his was being a brute, I gave him my spurs. I never thought to ask for them back at the end of that long ride-I was that ready to fall down and sleep! Why didn’t you say, if you saw them, love?”

“Well, I…” Caroline faltered, and shrugged. “I… just forgot, that’s all. The baby came and that was something of a distraction…” Corin sprang to his feet.

“You clever girl to remember them now! I’ll go over and fetch them right away, before we both forget again,” he smiled, and strode away from the house. Caroline watched him go and then she put her face into her hands for all the times since William’s birth that she’d pictured the spurs, lying there in Magpie’s home; all the times she’d imagined the haste and the urgency with which they might have been discarded there, flung aside by passionate hands in the desire to reach that hidden, adulterous nest of blankets.

After her suggestion that they move to town, and as the second anniversary of their marriage approached, Caroline caught her husband watching her more closely-for signs of malaise, perhaps, or melancholia. He must have noticed, then, that she was increasingly quiet and visibly enervated, but there was little he could do about it. Caroline smiled when he asked after her, and assured him that she was quite well. She did not say that when she opened the door she felt as though she might fall out, might tumble into the gaping emptiness of the prairie without man-made structures to anchor her. She did not say that gazing into the distance made her heart wince and then bump against her ribs so loudly she was sure Magpie could hear it. She did not say that the sky was just too dizzyingly huge for her to look at. Only cradling William seemed to soothe her. She marvelled at his increasing strength as he struggled to reach for things, to grasp and chew her fingers. The movement of his small body against hers seemed to fill a dark and gaping hole inside her, and Magpie smiled to see the tender expression on her face. But Caroline always had to give the baby back to his mother, and each time she did the hole inside her returned.

The plants in the garden wilted and were choked beneath encroaching weeds. Unharvested vegetables split and rotted in the sun. Magpie agreed to take over the tending of the garden, but she too watched Caroline with a slight, appraising frown. She forced Caroline to oversee the pulling up of the spent winter plants and the rearrangement of the garden for summer crops.

“You must tell me what to plant, Mrs. Massey. You must tell me where to plant,” the girl insisted, although they both knew that Magpie was by far the wiser in such matters. Caroline demurred, but the raven-haired Ponca girl, with calm insistence, would brook no argument. As Magpie dug and hoed, Caroline remained always in the shadow of the house, her hands behind her, resting on the rough wood of the wall as if for support. Magpie jumped back with a gasp when she uncovered a rattlesnake in the shelter of the dying leaves, but then she killed it deftly with her hoe and tossed the limp coils to one side. “Think, now, if the white lady had done it this way in the Garden of Eda!” she called to Caroline, laughing. But the violence made Caroline sick to her stomach.

“Eden,” she whispered. “It was the Garden of Eden.” She went back inside without another word, her fingers never leaving the side of the house.

One evening, Caroline saw Corin stop Magpie as the girl, with William slung across her back, headed for the dugout where she would prepare another dinner, and keep another household. She stood at the window and held her breath as Corin jogged over to Magpie, put a hand lightly on her arm to stop her. Caroline strained her ears as if she might hear what her husband asked, for even from inside the house she could see questions written all over his face. Magpie answered him in her usual contained way. No gestures, no telltale facial expressions-or at least none that Caroline could read. When Corin released the girl and started toward the house, Caroline turned away and busied herself plating up the meal Magpie had made for them. Roasted corn chowder, with thick slices of roast beef and warm bread.

Corin was troubled by whatever Magpie had told him, that much was clear. Caroline felt a stab of resentment toward the girl, but she smiled as she put food on the table, willing him reassured, willing him unconcerned about her, because she did not know what she would say to him, if he were to ask if she was happy. What he said, as they settled down to eat, was:

“I do think, sweetheart, that you should learn to ride and come out with me sometime to see more of the land we live on. There’s nothing that lifts my heart more than a fast ride over the prairie, with the wind to buoy you up and the swiftness of a good horse…” But he broke off because Caroline was shaking her head.

“I just can’t, Corin! Please don’t ask me… I tried! The horses frighten me. And they know it-Hutch says that they can sense the way people feel, and it makes them act badly…”

“But you were afraid of Joe and Maggie, until I introduced you to them. You’re not still afraid of them now, are you?”

“Well, no…” she reluctantly agreed. Magpie she no longer feared, of course, but on the rare occasions that Joe came up to the house to speak to Corin, or to deliver supplies fetched in from Woodward, a knot of tension still clenched in the pit of her stomach. His face looked fierce to her, no matter what Corin said. His features spoke of violence and savagery.

“Well, it would be just the same with the horses. That mare you rode-Clara. Why, she’s as gentle as a lamb! And that side saddle I bought you is just sitting in the shed, gathering cobwebs… The season’s changing now, the weather’s better… If you would only come out with me and see the beauty of God’s virgin country here…”

“I just can’t! Please, don’t try to force me! I am far happier staying here…”

“Are you, though?” he asked. Caroline stirred her soup around with her spoon and said nothing. “Maggie tells me…” He trailed off.

“What? What has she said about me?”

“That you don’t want to go outside. That you stay indoors, and you’re too quiet, and she has much more work to do. Caroline… I…”

“What?” she asked again, dreading to hear what he would say.

“I just want you to be happy,” he said miserably. He watched her with his eyes wide and she saw nothing within them but truth and love, and hated herself anew for ever thinking he could have betrayed her, could have passed over her infertile body to make a son elsewhere.

“I…” she began, but could not think what to say. “I want to be happy too,” she whispered.

“Then tell me, please. Tell me what I can do to make you happy!” he implored. Caroline said nothing. What could she say? He had done everything a man could do to give her a child, but she could not manage it. He had loved her, and married her, and given her a new life, and she could not ask again for him to give that life up. “We’ll go swimming again. We’ll have our honeymoon again. This Sunday-we’ll go. Hang the ranch, hang the work-just you and me, my love. And we’ll make a baby this time, I just know it. What do you say?” he urged. Caroline shook her head and felt a tremor shake the core of her. It was too late, she realized. Too late for their second honeymoon swim. She could never go back to that pool, not now. It was too far, the way too open; it was too much for her now, too frightening. But what remained? What else could she suggest?

“Only… only promise me you’ll never leave me,” she said, at last. Corin put his arms around her and held her tightly with quiet, helpless desperation.

“I will never leave you,” he whispered.

The first hot night of June, Caroline woke in the darkness with sweat cooling between her breasts, pooling in the hollow of her stomach and slicking her hair to her forehead. She had been dreaming of waking up alone, out on the grasslands, as if she had fallen asleep that day she set out for the Moore’s place and not woken since. No house, no ranch, no people, no Corin. She lay still and listened to the blood rushing in her ears, listened to her own breathing as it slowed, grew quieter. Goosebumps rose along her arms. She looked beside her at the comforting outline of Corin, edged in gray light from around the shutters. The coyote song that always haunted the night echoed outside, reaching out unhindered for mile after boundless, borderless mile. Caroline closed her eyes and tried to shut out the sound. It shook her very soul to hear it, waking from such a dream, from such a nightmare. It told her, over and over, of the wilderness outside the walls; of the empty, pitiless land.

Suddenly then, Caroline faced what she had long known but refused to acknowledge. This was where she lived. Here was her husband, here was her life, and this was it. No change, no move; Corin had told her so. And no children. It was two years since she and Corin had been wed and the failure to conceive a child certainly did not stem from a want of trying. She would watch Magpie and Joe raise a brood, she thought; and never have a child of her own. It would be unbearable. If Magpie were to conceive again, she would not be able to have her in the house all day. So, this empty house then, when Corin was away buying or selling beeves, delivering a thoroughbred saddle horse to its new owner, or arguing the price of wheat in Woodward. This empty house in this empty land, for the rest of her life. I will lose my mind, Caroline realized, seeing this fact clearly, like plainly printed words scrolling in front of her eyes. I will lose my mind. She sat up with a cry and beat her hands against her ears to block out the howling and the resounding silence behind it.

“What is it? What’s happening! Are you ill?” Corin slurred, stirred from his sleep. “What is it, my darling? Did you have a nightmare? Please, tell me!” he begged, grasping her hands to stop the blows she was raining onto them both.

“I just… I just…” she gasped, choking and shaking her head.

“What? Tell me!”

“I just… can’t sleep with those goddamned coyotes shrieking all night long! Don’t they ever let up? All night! Every night! They’re driving me out of my goddamned mind, I tell you!” she shouted, eyes wild with rage and fear. Corin took this in and then he smiled.

“Do you know, that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you swear?” he said, releasing her, brushing her dishevelled hair from her face. “And I have to say, you did a mighty fine job of it!” he grinned. Caroline stopped crying. She looked at the shadow of his smile in the darkness and an odd calm befell her-the numbness of exhausted sleep as it stole in and overcame her in seconds.

The next morning, Corin went out briefly before breakfast and then returned, smiling at his wife with a twinkle in his eye. Caroline’s eyes were puffy and they itched. In silence, she went about making breakfast, but she burnt the coffee beans in the roasting pan and the resulting drink was bitter and gritty. She warmed some bean pottage from the night before and made a batch of flat biscuits to go with it, all of which Corin wolfed down with great relish. Before long there was a shout from outside. Caroline opened the door to find Hutch and Joe outside, mounted on their dun-colored horses with rifles jutting up from the saddles and pistols at their hips. Joe held Strumpet’s reins and the black mare was also saddled and ready to ride.

“I didn’t think you were riding out today? I thought you were mending fences?” Caroline asked her husband, her voice a small thing after the furies in the night.

“Well,” Corin said, swallowing the last of his coffee with only the faintest grimace and walking out of the house. “This is a little extra trip I’ve decided to take, on the spur of the moment.”

“Where are you going?”

“We’re going…” Corin swung into the saddle, “to hunt some coyotes,” he grinned. “You’re quite right, Caroline-there are too many of them living close to the ranch. We’ve been losing some hens; you’ve been losing some sleep. And it’s a fine day for a bit of sport!” he exclaimed, wheeling Strumpet in a tight circle. The mare got onto her toes and snorted in anticipation.

“Oh, Corin!” Caroline said, touched by his efforts for her. The men tipped their hats to her, and with a whoop and a drumming of hooves they were away, leaving nothing but tracks in the sand.

By lunchtime the sky had closed over, filling with thick clouds that rolled steadily out of the northwest. In the kitchen, Caroline sat at the table with Magpie, shelling peas while William slept quietly by his mother’s feet. Every now and then he stirred and whimpered as if dreaming, and while this made Magpie smile, it made Caroline’s heart ache as if with cold. How much longer, she wondered, before this chill became irrevocable and her heart would be lost to her just like three of Hutch’s toes had been lost to him? Magpie seemed to sense her sadness. At length the Ponca girl spoke.

“White Cloud is a very wise woman,” she said. In the stillness of the house the crisp pop of the green pods and the rattle of peas falling into the pail were loud. Caroline waited for Magpie to say more, unsure of how to reply to this statement. “She can make many medicines,” Magpie went on at last. Caroline glanced up and Magpie met her gaze with steady, black eyes.

“Oh?” Caroline said, with as much polite interest as she could muster.

“In the days before, when she lived among our own people, in the lands far to the north of here, many Ponca would go to her for advice. Many women would go to her,” Magpie said, with heavy emphasis. Caroline felt warmth prickle her cheeks, and she got up to light a lamp against the dull afternoon. The yellow glow shone on glossy braids and brown skin. Caroline felt like a wraith of some kind, as if Magpie were real and she herself were not quite so. Not quite whole, not quite flesh. The lamp did not light her in the same way.

“Do you think… White Cloud would help me?” she asked, in barely more than a whisper. Magpie looked at her with great sympathy then, and Caroline looked down, studying the peas as they blurred in front of her.

“I can ask her. If you would like me to ask her?” Magpie said softly. Caroline could not speak, but she nodded.

Later, Caroline stood and watched from the window as the first drops of rain began to fall. It was not a violent rainstorm, just a steady soaking that fell straight down from the sky. Not a breath of wind was blowing. Caroline listened to the percussion of it on the roof, the gurgle of it in the guttering as it sluiced down into the cistern. It took a while for her to work out what was making her uneasy. The rain had come on slowly, out of the northwest, the same direction in which the men had ridden away. They would have seen this rain closing in, drawing a gray veil over the horizon. It would have found them long before it found the ranch, and yet they had not returned. There would be no hunting in rain like this, and it was late. Magpie had put a rabbit stew in the stove and had left, over an hour ago. The table was set, the stew was ready. Caroline had scrubbed her nails to get the stain of the pea pods out from underneath them. She stood at the window and her unease grew with each drop of rain that fell.

When at last she thought she saw riders coming, the end-of-day light was weak and made them hard to discern. Two hats only, she could see. Two riders only, and not a third. Her heart beat in her chest-not fast, but hard. A steady, slow, tight clenching that was almost painful. Two hats only; and, as they drew nearer, definitely only two horses. And as they drew nearer still, she saw two horses with dun coats and no black one.