The Legacy

Longing

1902-1903

As spring became summer, Caroline grew more used to the presence of Joe and Magpie and the other Ponca women, who were Joe’s mother White Cloud and widowed sister, Annie. She did not call upon them again, but Corin warned her that it was traditional for Indian womenfolk to drop in on one another, and to exchange gifts, and she received several such visits before the Ponca seemed to lose interest. Caroline dreaded seeing the trio approach the house, and she sat awkwardly through their visits, crippled by nerves, unsure of how to speak to them, or what to give in return for their gifts of honey, mittens and an elegantly carved wooden ladle. In the end she usually gave them money, which White Cloud accepted with a closed expression on her face. Caroline made them tea and longed for them to leave, but when their visits ceased she could not help but feel that she had failed in some way. And she watched Joe from the window as he went about the ranch, her eyes ever curious for the alien oddity of his features, his black mane of hair. He wore a long knife in a tooled leather sheath on his hip, and each time she saw it a cold shiver scurried down her spine.

She did not get used to the heat, which increased with each passing day. By noon the sun was a flat, white disc that seemed to press like a giant hand on her head whenever she stepped outside, pushing her down, making her heavy and half-blind. When the wind blew it seemed as hot as the blast from an oven. Accustomed all her life to rising at ten in the morning, Caroline now took to getting up with Corin, at first light, in order to have some time to exist, some time to live before the heat became unbearable. At that hour the sky in the east was violet and azure, pricked by faint, glimmering stars that winked out of existence as the day broadened. Corin drove her back to Woodward to order fabric for curtains, and rugs, and a large mirror to hang above the mantel, and he paid for all of these things with a slightly bemused expression. Caroline chafed with impatience in the intervening weeks it took for the goods to come by train from Kansas City, and she clapped her hands with excitement when they arrived. Gradually, she dragged the furniture in the house into a better arrangement, and she swept and swept to keep the sand out on windy days, until her hands blistered and she gave up in frustration, stopping up whatever gaps she could find around the windows and doors with rags.

It was even harder for her to get used to the work required, on a daily basis, just to keep the household up and running. She knew that as Corin’s wife she should make his coffee and breakfast in the morning before he set out onto the ranch, but by the time she had put up her hair and washed her face and laced herself into her corsets, he had provided for himself and gone out to work.

“Why do you take such time with your hair, love? There’s nobody here that’s going to think badly of you if you just pin it back in a simple fashion,” Corin pointed out gently, scooping her hair from her damp neck and running his thumb across the fine strands.

“I would think badly of it,” Caroline replied. “A lady can’t go around with her hair unbound. It’s just not decent.” But she took what she thought to be his meaning and began to rise even earlier in order to make herself presentable and still have time to cook breakfast.

When the cistern was dry, water had to be drawn from the well at the top of a rise to the north of the house; a well Corin was quick to point out was nothing short of a miracle, since most of the county’s groundwater was tainted with gypsum that rotted the guts and tasted foul.

“Not even the finest house in Woodward has a supply of water this close and this sweet. They’re still hauling it in from the south by wagon!” he told her proudly.

It took a long time to boil water on the stove and, since timber was so scarce, more often than not the cow chips Caroline had encountered in Hutch’s camp fire were the only fuel. Upon finding out what these were-chunks of dried-out cattle manure-Caroline promptly refused to collect them, and could only be induced to use them by poking them into the stove with iron tongs. Not far away from the ranch was a shallow stream that the ranchers referred to as Toad Creek, along the banks of which grew a thin line of straggly cottonwoods, sand plums and walnut trees, giving the ranch a welcome dash of foliage.

“Why can’t we just cut timber from the creek?” Caroline asked, wrinkling her nose as Hutch, a little disgruntled at the task, delivered a basket of cow chips to the door.

“Well, ma’am, we could. But only for a couple of months and then we’d be back to the chips and without any trees to pretty up the view,” Hutch told her, drily.

And each morning there was the water to bring in, the stove to sweep out and re-lay, breakfast to make and then pots to clean, laundry to wash-Caroline was used to dirty clothes being taken away and then returned to her two days later, clean, pressed and neatly folded; she was astonished to discover how much work went into those intervening two days-and then the endless battle with the sand in the house and on the porch. She had also to tend to her wilting, stunted vegetable garden. Corin had presented her with the seeds proudly, having traded them with a neighbor. Watermelons and marrows, peas and beans. He also bought her two tiny cherry trees, which she watered with great care and attention, fretting when the wind buffeted them. They struggled in the red soil, and did not flourish no matter how she cosseted them. Then there was lunch to prepare, clothes to be mended and then dinner. Caroline was not a good cook. She scorched the eggs and forgot to salt the beef. Vegetables went soft, meat went tough and stringy. Her beans had hard, gritty centers. Her coffee was weak, and her bread refused to rise, emerging from the oven solid and chewy. Each time she apologized, Corin reassured her.

“You’ve not been brought up to do it, that’s all. You’ll get the hang of it,” he smiled, manfully swallowing down whatever she put in front of him. Every time her hands got grimy she washed them at once, hating the feel of dirt on her skin, the dark crescent of earth and smuts beneath each nail. She scrubbed her hands so many times in a day that the skin grew red and angry and began to crack, and she sat mourning their lost softness, cradling them in her lap at the end of the day.

Hot baths could only be had by laboriously filling a large copper drum and lighting the fire beneath it, and then filling the tin tub by the bucketful, behind a wooden screen that Caroline had ordered for the express purpose of private bathing. Corin chafed at such wanton use of precious water, but at the end of her day’s labor, with her movements hampered by her corsets, Caroline’s body ached from fingertips to toes. She could feel each knobbly protrusion of her spine as it uncurled against the back of the tub, feel a tender crease between every single rib. Her hands, as she wrung out her washing cloth, trembled with fatigue. In the yellow glow of the kerosene lamps, she examined her broken nails and the tan color of her arms where she had taken to pushing up her sleeves in the heat. She rubbed her thumb over her calluses now, massaging rose-scented vanishing cream into them to soften them, as lonely coyote song filled the darkness outside.

She did not complain of the work, not even to herself. Whenever she caught herself flagging, she pictured Bathilda, smiling in mocking triumph; or she thought of Corin, so full of admiration, calling her brave and beautiful, and how she would hate to prove him wrong. But on the occasions that her spirits did begin to sink, Corin seemed to sense it. He brushed the sand from her hair at the end of the day, singing softly as he pulled the bristles through in long, smooth strokes; or telling her tall stories to make her laugh: about the super-smart cow that drank beer and had learnt to count, or the impatient settler who’d painted himself all over with the wet red mud of Woodward County to pass himself off as Indian and settle on their lands. Or, as she lay in the tub and rubbed her calluses, he would appear around the bath screen and work his fingers into the tight muscles of her neck and shoulders until she was all but drowsing in his hands; then he would gather her up and carry her, dripping wet, to the bed. In the consuming, blinding joy of his lovemaking, she forgot all other aches.

One night they lay side by side on the bed, catching their breath after their exertions. Propping himself up on his elbow, Corin wiped the commingled sweat from Caroline’s chest and slid his hand down to her stomach. She smiled and shifted under the heavy weight of it, the hot press of his skin.

“Boy or girl to start with?” he asked.

“Which would you rather?” she replied.

“I asked first!” he smiled.

Caroline sighed happily. “I truly don’t mind. Maybe a girl… a little girl with your brown eyes and hair the color of honey.”

“And then a boy?” Corin suggested.

“Of course! You’d rather a boy first?”

“Not necessarily… although it would be good to get him up and running, get me some more help around the ranch…” he mused.

“Poor baby! Not even born yet and you’ve got him out riding the fences!” Caroline cried.

Grinning, Corin put his lips to her belly and kissed her damp skin. “Psst! Hey, you in there-come out a boy and I’ll buy you a pony!” he whispered.

Caroline laughed, putting her hands around Corin’s head to cradle it, no longer noticing their roughness.

It was two months before a neighbor dropped by to visit. Caroline heard a shout at the front of the house, as she was glumly examining a sunken honey cake that she’d just taken from the oven.

“Hullo, Masseys!” the shout came again and, startled, Caroline realized it was a woman’s voice. She smoothed back her hair, brushed flour from her apron, and opened the front door, stepping onto the porch with regal grace. Then she gaped. The woman, if such she was, was not only dressed as a man-in slacks, leather chaps and a flannel shirt tucked into a wide leather belt-but she was sitting astride a rangy bay horse, slouching as comfortably in the saddle as if she had been born there. “You’re home! I was beginning to think I was hollering at an empty house,” the woman declared, swinging her leg over the horse’s back and dropping abruptly to the ground. “I’m Evangeline Fosset. Pleased to meet you, and do call me Angie since everybody else does,” she continued, approaching with a smile. A long ponytail of orange hair swung behind her, and although her face was as tanned as Corin’s it was also strong and handsome. Her blue eyes shone.

“I’m Caroline. Caroline Massey.”

“Figured you were.” The keen blue eyes swept over her. “Well, Hutch told me you were a beauty, and Lord knows that man never lies,” she said. Caroline smiled, uncertainly, and said nothing. “I’m your neighbor, by the way. My husband, Jacob, and I have a farm about seven miles that way.” Angie pointed to the south-east.

“Oh! Well… um… won’t you come inside?” Caroline faltered.

She cut little squares from the outside edge of her honey cake, where it was indeed more or less like a cake, and served them on a large plate, with tea and water. Angie took a long draft.

“Oh! How I envy you that sweet well of yours! To have water not tasting of gyp or the cistern is something wonderful, I can tell you,” she exclaimed, draining the glass. “Did Corin tell you how they found it? The well, that is?”

“No, he hasn’t…”

“Well, they’d tried digging about a hundred different holes and found nothing but gyp, gyp, and some more stinking gypsum water. They were relying on the creek but that dries up half of the year, as you’ll soon see. And they were being so darn careful with the supply that not one of the men on this ranch had washed himself for more than a month. I tell you, no word of a lie: I could smell them from my front step! Well, one day a funny old man came riding by on a beaten-up mule and said did Corin want him to find sweet water on his land? Ever one to give a person a chance, although he didn’t see how the old fellow was going to achieve what he hadn’t managed in months, Corin tells him by all means.” Angie paused for breath and popped a square of cake into her mouth. Caroline watched her, mesmerized. “This old fellow takes out a narrow, forked branch of wood that’s all worn smooth with years of touching, and off he goes, wandering here, there and everywhere, holding this twig in his fingertips. The midday sun starts pounding down and still he goes hither and thither, back and forth, until he gets to the top of the rise and bam! That twig of his twists in his grip and points straight down at the turf like an arrow. “Here’s your sweet water, sir,” the old fellow announces. And digging down, sure enough, there was the well. Can you believe that, now?” Angie finished her tale with a nod and a smile, and watched Caroline, expectantly.

“Well, I…” Caroline began, her voice sounding frail after Angie’s bold narrative. “If you say so, of course,” she finished, smiling slightly. Angie’s face fell a little, but then she smiled again.

“So, how are you settling in? You getting used to ranch life?”

“Yes, I think so. It’s rather different… to New York.”

“I’ll bet it is! I’ll bet!” Angie chuckled; a low, throaty sound.

“I’ve never seen a woman ride astride before,” Caroline added, feeling rude to mention it, but too astonished not to.

“Oh, it’s the only way to travel around here, believe me! Once you’ve tried it, you’ll never go back to fiddling around sideways. When I heard Corin was bringing a gal back from the city, I thought, that poor thing! She can’t know what she’s getting into! Not that I don’t love this place. It’s my home, although Lord knows Mother Nature can be a bitch around here at times, pardon my language-but really, she can.” Again, Angie looked at Caroline, and Caroline smiled nervously, at a loss. She poured her guest some more tea. The china cup, with its pattern of pink roses and blue ribbons that had seemed so charming in the catalogue, looked as fragile and childish as a toy in Angie’s strong hand. “The loneliness gets to some women. Not seeing anyone-well, any other women-for weeks at a time. Months, sometimes. It can get to a person, being in the house by yourself all day.”

“I’ve been… keeping very busy,” Caroline said hesitantly, startled by the woman’s forwardness.

“As we all do, for sure,” Angie shrugged. “Kids’ll help, when they start coming. Nothing like a houseful of little ones to keep you distracted, I can tell you!” Caroline smiled, and blushed a little. She could hardly wait to have her first baby. She longed for a tiny child to cradle, for the softness of its skin, the wholeness of a new family. The permanence of roots put down.

“Corin wants to have five,” she said, smiling shyly.

“Five! My good Lord, you’ve got your work cut out for you, girl!” Angie exclaimed with a wide grin. “But-you’re young yet. Spread them out, that’s my advice. That way the older ones’ll be able to help you with the toddlers. Well, when you fall, be sure to let me know. You’ll want more help then, and advice from an old hand. Just remember where I am, and send word if you need anything.”

“That’s really very kind of you,” Caroline said, secretly sure she would need no such help. She knew, in her heart, that while her cooking refused to improve and her body would not harden to the housework, it was in motherhood that her calling lay.

When Angie left, an hour or so later, she did not set off in the direction of her home, but toward the corrals where some of the men were at work. Caroline tended not to venture there herself, feeling too shy of the men and too unsure of the nature of their work, despite Corin’s urgings that she learn the running of the ranch. What she had seen she had found brutal. Animals brought roughly to the ground, their horns sawn off, their heads pushed beneath stinking, stinging dip to kill parasites, the Massey Ranch emblem, MR, burned into their skins. She hated the way they rolled their eyes in terror, so white and vulnerable looking. But seeing Angie lead her horse calmly over to Hutch, who was overseeing the branding of new calves in the nearest corral, Caroline suddenly felt left out and left behind. She hurriedly removed her apron, grabbed her bonnet and walked quickly in the same direction.

Hutch had come over to the fence and was leaning upon it, continuing to watch the branding even as he talked to Angie. Wondering how to announce her presence, feeling high strung with nerves, Caroline heard her name spoken and stopped instead, stepping sideways so that the shadow of the bunkhouse engulfed her. The stink of burning hair and skin made her gag, and she put her hand over her mouth to stifle the sound.

“She’s none too friendly, is she?” Angie said, folding her arms. Hutch shrugged one shoulder.

“She’s trying her best, I reckon. Can’t be easy, with her brought up so soft. I don’t think she ever walked more than a quarter mile at a time before, and I hear from Corin that she surely never cooked before.”

“Shame he didn’t set up nearer town-she could have taught class or something. Made better use of those fine manners than she will out here,” Angie said, shaking her head as if in disapproval. “What do the boys make of her?”

“Hard to say, really. She doesn’t come out of the house much; she doesn’t ride out, sure as heck doesn’t bring us lemonade on a hot day,” Hutch grinned. “Feels the heat a bit strongly, I think.”

“What was Corin thinking, marrying such a green tenderfoot and leaving her out here by herself?”

“Well, I reckon he was thinking she was a fine-looking girl with a good head on her shoulders.”

“Hutchinson, one of these days I’ll hear you speak a hard word about someone or something and I will fall clean off my horse. Good head on her shoulders in the city maybe, but out here? Why, she’s even setting about the chores with corsets on so tight she can hardly breathe! Does that sound like good sense to you?” Angie exclaimed. Hutch said something that Caroline could not hear above the calves’ frightened bellows, and then he turned toward Angie. Fearing she would be seen, Caroline skirted the side of the bunkhouse and walked swiftly back to the house, angry tears smarting her eyes.

Later, at dinner, Caroline watched her husband as he ate the bland food she had given him without complaint. He had come in late from rounding up two stray beeves, arriving at the table ravenous and having performed no toilette but to splash his hands and face with water from the trough. In the lamplight he looked rough, older than he was. His hair stuck out at wild angles and there was prairie sand along his hairline. After a day outside he seemed to soak up the sun and then glow all night long, she thought. The sun loved him. It did not love her. It scorched her pale skin, burnt freckles into her cheeks and made her nose peel most unattractively. She watched him and felt a surge of love that was at once wonderful and somehow desperate. He was her husband, and yet she felt as though she might lose him. She had not known that she was failing until she met Angie Fosset and heard her verdict on Corin’s soft new wife. She swallowed her tears because she knew she would not be able to explain them to him.

“Evangeline Fosset came by here today,” she said, her voice a little constricted.

“Oh? That’s wonderful! She’s such a good neighbor, and always so friendly. Didn’t you find her so?” he asked. Caroline sipped from her water glass to forestall her reply. “If ever there was an example of how the West gives women freedoms that they’ve never had, and of how best a woman might make good on those freedoms, Angie is that example,” Corin went on.

“She didn’t leave a calling card before visiting. I wasn’t prepared for a guest,” Caroline said, hating the cold tone in her voice, but also hating to hear her husband praise another woman.

“No, well… when you’ve got to ride seven miles to say you’re going to call on a person, seems like sense to just go ahead and call on them once you get there, I suppose.”

“I heard her talking about me to Hutch. She called me tenderfoot. What does it mean?”

“Tenderfoot?” Corin smiled briefly, but stopped when he saw his wife’s tight expression, the glimmer in her eyes. “Oh, now, sweetheart-I’m sure she didn’t mean anything bad by it. Tenderfoot just means you’re not used to the West, that’s all. To the outdoor kind of life.”

“Well, how can I be used to it? Is it my fault, where I was born? Is that any reason to talk about a person, and use names? I’m trying to get along with life out here!”

“I know you are! I know.” Corin took Caroline’s hands and squeezed them. “Don’t fret about it. You’re doing great-”

“No, I’m not! I can’t cook! I can’t keep up with all the work! The plants aren’t growing… the house is full of sand!” she cried.

“You’re exaggerating-”

“Hutch knows I can’t cook, so you must have told him! I heard him say it!”

At this Corin paused, and a little color came into his cheeks. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I shouldn’t have said it and I’m sorry that I did. But, my love, if you need some help just tell me, and we’ll find you some help!” he assured her, stroking her face where tears were wetting the skin.

“I need help,” she said, miserably; and as she admitted it she felt the weight of it lighten on her shoulders. Corin smiled.

“Then you shall have it,” he told her gently, and he murmured soft words to her until she smiled back at him and stopped her crying.

So Magpie was recruited to come into the house and share the housework, and although Caroline was not sure that she wanted the Ponca girl beside her all day long, Magpie came with a ready smile and an ease of doing things that came from being born to it. Happily, Caroline relinquished the cooking to her and watched as old bones and dried beans became thick, tasty soup; and bread dough rose willingly between damp cloths when left in the sun on the window sill; and handfuls of mysterious herbs picked from the prairie made sauces savoury and delicious. The washing took less than half the time it had previously taken, and came up cleaner; and Magpie did the heavier jobs, like fetching water and carrying the wet linens out to the line so that Caroline, for the first time since her arrival, found time in the day to sit and read, or to start some sewing. She never thought she would feel anything other than glad to have another person take on these tasks, but at the same time she envied the ease with which Magpie performed them. Magpie worked with good cheer, and she taught Caroline tactfully, never implying that she ought to know such things, and never making Caroline feel inadequate, so it was impossible to resent the girl.

But she did find it hard to concentrate with Magpie in the house. The girl drew the eye and she sang softly to herself as she worked-odd melodies like none Caroline had ever heard, as alien and eerie as the voices of the prairie wolves. And she moved softly, so softly that Caroline hardly heard her. She was sitting at her sewing one morning, stitching a tiny flower garland into the corner of a table runner, when she sensed a presence behind her and turned to find Magpie right by her shoulder, appraising the work.

“Very good, Mrs. Massey,” she smiled, nodding approvingly. “You stitch very well.”

“Oh… thank you, Magpie,” Caroline said breathlessly, startled by the girl’s sudden appearance. The sun, catching the long braid of the Ponca girl’s hair, showed no sign of red, or of brown. It was as black as a crow’s wing. Caroline noticed the thickness of it, and its inky sheen, and thought it coarse. With her round face and wide cheekbones, Magpie almost resembled the Celestial women Caroline had occasionally seen in New York, although Magpie’s skin was darker and redder. Caroline could not help shuddering slightly when their arms accidentally brushed. But she was fascinated by the girl, and caught herself watching her in whatever task she was performing. In the heat of the day, while sweat blistered Caroline’s brow and itched beneath her clothes, Magpie seemed unaffected. The sun had no power to discomfort her, and Caroline envied her this, too.

One suffocatingly hot day, when Caroline thought she would run mad if she had no relief from it, she went into the bedroom, shut the door, stripped off her blouse and corset and threw them to the floor. She sat still and felt the relative cool of the air in the room touch her sticky, stifling skin and, slowly, the light-headedness that had dogged her all that morning began to diminish. It was so humid, the air so thick, the sky so blindingly, glaringly bright that Caroline seemed to feel her blood thickening, simmering in her veins. When she dressed again, she left the corset off. Nobody seemed to notice, and indeed there was little to notice. The heat and her own cooking had reduced her appetite and the work had taken its toll. Beneath the rigors of her underclothes, Caroline had grown very thin.

Later that week it rained. It rained as though the sky were blackly furious with the ground and aimed to injure it. It rained in torrents, not in drops but in solid rods of water that lanced down from the glowering clouds and stirred the topsoil into a soup that ran away toward Toad Creek. That modest creek became an angry cascade. The horses stood stoically, nose to tail, with water streaming from their manes. Out on the pasture, the cows lay down and narrowed their eyes. Corin was in Woodward with Hutch, having driven seven hundred head of cattle to the stock pens, and Caroline lay on the bed in the early evening and prayed as hard as she could that the North Canadian would not flood, would not stay long in spate, would not prevent Corin’s return. She left the shutters open, listening to the rain hammer the roof above her, waiting, arms outflung, for the air creeping in through the window to feel cooler-for the water to wash the heat away.

There was a tentative knock at the door, and Magpie appeared.

“What’s wrong?” Caroline asked abruptly, sitting up with a start.

“Nothing wrong, Mrs. Massey. I have brought you something. Something to make you relieved,” the girl said. Caroline sighed, smoothing back her sweaty hair.

“Nothing can make me relieved,” she murmured.

“Come and try,” Magpie pressed. “It’s not good to lie down too much. You don’t grow used to things that way,” she insisted, and Caroline dragged herself to her feet, following the Ponca girl to the kitchen. “Watermelon. The first one of the summer! Try some.” Magpie passed Caroline a wide slice of the fruit: a bloody-colored crescent moon that stickied her fingers.

“Thank you, Magpie, but I’m really not very hungry…”

“Try some,” Magpie repeated, more firmly. Caroline glanced at her, met her bright black eyes and saw only goodwill there. She took the fruit and nibbled at it. “It’s good, yes?”

“Yes,” Caroline admitted, taking bigger bites. The melon was neither sweet nor sharp. It tasted mild and earthy, softly easing the parched, torn feeling at the back of her throat.

“And drink this.” Magpie passed her a cup of water. “Rainwater. Straight from the sky.”

“Well, there’s no shortage of that today!” Caroline joked.

“This is water from the land, this is water from the sky,” Magpie explained, pointing to the fruit and the cup. “To eat and drink these things, it makes you… it makes you balance with the land and the sky. Do you see? That way, you don’t feel so much like you are punished. You will feel like you are a part of this land and sky.”

“That would be good. Not to feel punished,” Caroline smiled slightly.

“Eat more, drink more!” Magpie encouraged her, smiling too. They sat together at the kitchen table, with the rain hissing down outside and their chins slick with melon juice; and soon Caroline felt a blessed cool begin to spread outward from inside her, sluicing the fevered burn from her skin.

There was a dun-colored mare called Clara, who had short, slender legs, a compact body, ribs like a barrel, neck a little scrawny. She was in her twilight years and had foaled a half-dozen times for Corin; foals that had grown into fine saddle horses, with just one exception-a colt who was never right between the ears, and could not be broken, and who snapped the bones of several fine bronco busters before his heart finally gave out with the strain of his own fury.

“Clara hung her head all sorrowful the day it happened, even though that colt was over the other side of Woodward by then,” Hutch told Caroline, as she stroked the mare’s bony face tentatively. The pungent reek of horse and the leather of the tack was strong in the morning sunshine. Caroline squinted up at the foreman from the shade of her bonnet. Hutch’s eyes were bright slivers between the furrows of his brows and the crow’s feet scoring his temples. These marks on his face were deep, though he was only a little older than Corin.

“You think she knew her baby had died? How sad!” Caroline said.

“I reckon she knew. Inferno, we called that colt. He was the color of fire, and when you walked up to him he fixed you a look in the eye that made grown men tremble.”

“How horrible! How could an animal as gentle as Clara have such an evil offspring?”

“Many a murderer was born to a decent, God-fearing woman, and I guess the same applies for horses as for humans,” Hutch shrugged. “Now, Clara here wouldn’t hurt a fly. You could get up on her back, yell at the top of your voice and give her a mighty wallop with a stick and she wouldn’t even hold that against you.”

“Well! I don’t think I’m going to do any of those things!” Caroline laughed.

“Well, sure you are-the getting up on her back part, that is,” Hutch smiled.

“Oh, no! I thought I was just learning how to put the saddle on today?” Caroline said, a note of alarm in her voice.

“That’s right, and that’s taken all of five minutes. And what’s the point of a horse with a saddle on it if nobody gets up and sits in it?”

“Hutch, I… I don’t know that I can…” she faltered.

“Only one way to find out,” he said, but gently, and he took her elbow to draw her closer to the horse’s side. “Come on now, Mrs. Massey. There’s no way the wife of a rancher can go around not knowing how to ride. And it’s nothing to be scared of. It’s as easy as sitting in a chair.”

“Chairs don’t run around! Or kick!” Caroline argued.

“No, but they don’t get you from point A to point B in half the time a wagon does, neither,” Hutch chuckled. His smile was crooked and warm, and when he held out his hand to her she found it impossible not to take it.

“I’m really not sure about this,” she said, nerves making her voice small.

“In about ten minutes’ time, you’re going to be wondering what all the fuss was about,” Hutch assured her.

Hutch cupped his hand around her shin and boosted her into the side saddle, where she perched, her face pale, expecting at any moment to be cast back into the sand. He showed her how to hook her right leg around the pommel to keep herself secure, and to take her weight in the left stirrup for balance.

“All right now. Comfy?” he asked.

“Not really,” she said, but she found the beginnings of a smile for him.

“Now, give her a little nudge with that heel, loose those reins and say, ‘Get up, Clara!’ ”

“Get up, Clara! Please,” Caroline said, with as much conviction as she could manage, and then gave a little shriek as the mare moved obediently forward.

“OK, now you’re riding!” Hutch exclaimed. “Just relax, she’s not going anywhere. Relax, Mrs. Massey!” he called, walking beside her with one hand loosely on the rein. “You’re doing a great job,” he told her.

For half an hour or so Hutch escorted her around the empty corral. Clara walked steadily, stopping and starting and turning left and right without the least hint of bad attitude or boredom. Caroline listened to what she was told, and tried to remember it all, tried to feel the movement of the horse and make it her own, as Hutch instructed, but she could not shake the feeling that the animal had no choice but to resent her being there, and would at any given moment revert to the wild and throw her as far as she possibly could. Her back and legs were soon aching, and when she commented on this to Hutch, he gave the side saddle a disparaging look.

“Well, that’s bound to happen when you do something for the first time. But, to be honest, Mrs. Massey, you’d be a heck of a lot more comfortable riding astride than you are sat sideways like that…”

“Men ride astride. Ladies take the side saddle,” Caroline said firmly.

“You’re the boss,” Hutch shrugged.

At that moment, Corin came cantering in off the pasture with two of the line-riders. Sunlight rippled from Strumpet’s black coat, and sweat was running down the mare’s forelegs. Caroline sat up straighter, rigid with embarrassment. The line-riders, whose names she still could not remember, tipped their hats to her, and slowed their horses, and she thought for a hideous moment that they were going to stop and watch the rest of her riding lesson. She gave them a small wave, and her cheeks flared scarlet. They rode as naturally as Magpie cooked and worked, slouching in the saddle as though their bodies had been designed for that very purpose. To her immense relief, they carried on toward the water troughs and only Corin pulled up at the corral fence.

“Well, now! Look at you! You look fantastic up there, sweetheart!” he beamed, pulling off his hat and rubbing his hot scalp.

“You want to go on over?” Hutch asked, and Caroline nodded. “Well, go on then. You know how,” he urged her. Cautiously, Caroline turned the mare’s head and persuaded her to walk over to the fence.

“That’s fantastic, Caroline! I’m so happy to see you up on a horse at last!” Corin told her.

“I’ll never be able to saddle her alone-it’s so heavy!” Caroline smiled, anxiously.

“Well, that’s as may be. But you can just ask any one of the boys and they’ll help you with it. There’s always somebody around, and they’d jump through hoops if a pretty girl like you asked them to!” Corin grinned.

“Can I get down now, Hutch?” she asked.

“I think we’ve done enough for one day,” Hutch nodded, hitching up his jeans at the waist. “Couple more goes like today and we’ll change your name to Annie Oakley!” he smiled.

Feeling altogether less of a tenderfoot, Caroline listened as Hutch described the best way to dismount, but somehow her foot got snarled up in the stirrup, and her skirts tangled her knees, so she sprawled forward on the descent, landing on her front in the corral sand with the air whooshing out of her lungs. Behind her, Clara gave a small snort of surprise.

“Damn! Are you all right, Caroline?” Corin swore, scrambling out of his own saddle.

“Well, that wasn’t exactly how it was supposed to go,” Hutch remarked calmly, taking her arm and helping her to sit up. “Hang on there, catch your breath,” he instructed, but Caroline had no intention of staying in the dirt, or so close to Clara’s hooves, for any longer than she had to. She climbed shakily to her feet, coughing, her eyes streaming where grit had got into them. Her neck was jarred and one wrist badly over-bent where it had taken the weight of her fall. She was covered in dust from hair to hemline. She glared at Corin, furious with herself and crippled with embarrassment.

“Why, you look every bit as fierce as Inferno, when you fire up like that!” Hutch said, admiringly.

“And every bit as red, too,” Corin grinned.

“Don’t… laugh at me!” Caroline bit the words off, frustration and anger burning her up inside. She turned on her heel and stalked away toward the house, shaking with the shock of the fall, her legs jellied by the riding. She was more disappointed than she could bear-to have failed again, to have made herself a laughing stock.

“Ah, hell, Caroline! Come back! I wasn’t laughing at you!” She heard Corin call out behind her, but she squared her shoulders the best she could and kept walking.

Autumn arrived on the prairie with a string of vicious thunderstorms and pounding hailstones rent from blackened skies. Hutch came in from the range one evening and warmed himself by the stove as he reported the loss of three head of cattle, felled that day by a bolt of lightning that had struck the ground amidst the herd and thrown them into the air like confetti. Caroline paled at the tale, and Corin gave his foreman a censorious look that the poor man, his teeth chattering and his hands curled into scalded red claws, failed to notice. This glowering season was short, and soon the true winter began. Corin came in for dinner with his movements stiff and clumsy, and granules of sleet clinging to his eyebrows; but he always found a smile for his wife, declaring:

“There’s one hell of a blue norther blowing out there!”

Caroline, who would once have been shocked by such language, no longer was. Still, she frowned slightly, out of habit, and pulled her shawl tightly around her against the wave of cold air that entered with her husband. She, who never thought she would miss the summer’s heat, found herself longing for the sun.

They saw out the end of 1902 and welcomed in 1903 with a party at the Fosset’s farm, to which all of the nearby ranchers, their families and riders had been invited. The night was still and dry, the air hanging like a chill blanket, and on the buggy ride over, Caroline’s fingers, toes, her nose and the tips of her ears grew quite dead with cold. There was no moon, and the lantern on the buggy lit the prairie a scant few yards ahead. The dark all around was like a living thing, like solid flesh that watched. Caroline shivered, and huddled closer to Corin. Behind them, she could hear the hooves of the Massey riders following, keeping close as if they too felt pursued. When the Fosset place hove into view ahead, lights blazing out into the night, Caroline uttered a short, silent prayer of relief, and breathed a little easier.

There were fires burning about the yard, and meat smoking and spitting on the griddle, and a mass of people and horses all gathered into this oasis of light and life on the dead, dark plains. Corin’s arm was shaken, his shoulder clapped, and they were soon engulfed by the friendly crowd of their neighbors. An accordion, a fiddle and a drum struck up in the barn, and the heat given off by dancing bodies warmed it, filled it with the animal smell of breath and sweat. Angie’s children had made a painted banner out of a ragged old sheet, and it hung above the gate, reading happy new yere! and easing to and fro in the slow shifting air. Angie had two girls, aged twelve and eight, and a little boy aged four, who had his mother’s red hair and the bluest eyes anyone had ever seen. Even as she danced and laughed and talked, Angie kept one eye on this perfect, happy little lad, and when she saw Caroline admiring him, she called him over.

“Kyle, this here is our good neighbor Caroline Massey. Now, what do you say to her?” she whispered to the boy, swinging him up onto her hip.

“Please’ t’ meetya, Missus Massey,” Kyle mumbled shyly, around the fingers he was chewing.

“Oh, well I’m pleased to meet you too, Kyle Fosset,” Caroline smiled, taking the hand that wasn’t in his mouth and shaking it gently. Angie set him down and he darted away, ungainly on his short chubby legs. “Oh, Angie! He’s just the most beautiful child!” she exclaimed, and Angie beamed.

“Yeah, he’s my little angel all right, and don’t he just know it!”

“And the girls too… you must be so proud of…” Caroline said, but she could not keep her voice steady and had to stop.

“Hey there, now-stop that! This here is a celebration of the new year, and all the wonderful new things it’s going to bring. You hear me?” Angie said, significantly. “It’s going to happen for you. You just have to be patient. You hear?” Caroline nodded, and wished she could feel as sure as Angie sounded.

“Mrs. Massey? Will you dance with a rough rider like myself?” Hutch asked, appearing beside them.

“Of course!” Caroline smiled, hastily blotting her eyes with her fingertips. The band played one tune into the next without pause, and Hutch led her in a swaying dance that was almost a waltz, but not quite so. The room was a blur of smiling faces, some of them none too clean, and Caroline remembered the Montgomery’s ball, still not yet a year gone but seeming to belong to another lifetime altogether. She had come such a long way, she told herself. It was no wonder that she did not yet find herself feeling at home.

“Is everything all right, Mrs. Massey?” Hutch asked, seriously.

“Yes, of course! Why wouldn’t it be?” she said, too brightly, her voice thin.

“No reason,” Hutch shrugged. He was wearing his best shirt, and she noticed that the top button was hanging by a thread. She made a mental note to add it to the pile of mending back at the ranch. “Are you ready for another riding lesson, yet? You did great, that first time we tried it, but I never saw you go back for another try.”

“No, well… I’m not sure I’m the world’s most naturally gifted horsewoman. And besides, now the weather’s turned so cold I would surely freeze if I tried it!” she said.

“There are some people that take naturally to it, that’s for sure, and others that don’t. But I’ve seen those that once struggled get to grips with it in the end, with practice. But you have to be willing to get back on the horse, Mrs. Massey. You do have to get back on the horse,” Hutch said, intensely, and she was no longer sure that he was talking about riding.

“I…” she started, but could not think what to say. She looked down at her feet and saw how dusty her shoes were, and found her eyes swimming with tears.

“You’re going to be just fine,” Hutch said, his voice so low that she hardly heard him.

“Hutchinson, I’m cutting in! That’s my wife you’re cradling and she’s by far the handsomest girl in the room,” Corin announced, taking Caroline’s hands and spinning her into his embrace. His eyes were alight with happiness, cheeks flushed from sipping whisky and dancing, and he looked glorious, so glorious that Caroline laughed and threw her arms around his neck.

“Happy new year, my darling,” she whispered into his ear, letting her lips brush lightly against his neck, so that he held her tighter still.

In February snow fell deeply, lying in thick drifts and making the world too bright to look upon. Caroline stared at the featureless scene beyond the window in wonder, and stayed close to the stove as much as she could, her hands curled inside the fingerless mittens that Ponca had given her, which kept as much of her skin covered as possible while still allowing her to do the mending. Her chilled fingers fumbled the needle and dropped it often.

“Now you are glad to have them,” Magpie said, nodding at the thick mittens. “When White Cloud gave them to you, I saw in your face you thought you would never need them!” she smiled.

“I should have paid her double,” Caroline agreed, at which Magpie frowned slightly.

“Will you tell a story, while I do this work?” Magpie requested. She was kneeling at the wash tub, rubbing the stains out of Corin’s work wear on a ridged wooden washboard.

“What kind of story?”

“It doesn’t matter. A story of your people,” Magpie shrugged. So Caroline, unsure who her people were, told her the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and of the treacherous serpent, the delicious apple, and the subsequent fall from grace. She put down her sewing as she reached the finale, describing their sudden shame at their nakedness, and the scramble to find something with which to cover themselves. Magpie chuckled, which made her cheeks even rounder and her eyes sparkle.

“This is a good story, Mrs. Massey-a missionary man told this same story to my father once, and do you know what my father said?”

“What did he say?”

“He said this is typical of a white woman! An Indian woman would have picked up a stick and killed the snake and all would have been well in the garden!” she laughed. Caroline, stung for a moment by the implied criticism, soon found herself smiling, and then catching the girl’s infectious laughter.

“That’s probably about right,” she conceded, and they were still laughing when Corin came in, brushing the snow from his shoulders. He looked at Caroline, sitting by the stove with her sewing to one side, and at Magpie on her knees by the tub, and he frowned. “Corin? What’s wrong?” Caroline asked; but he shook his head and came over to the stove to warm himself.

Later, as they were eating supper, Corin spoke his mind.

“When I came home today, I… I didn’t like what I saw, Caroline,” he said.

“What do you mean?” she asked, her heart high in her throat.

“You just sitting there, keeping warm, when Maggie was working so hard-”

“It wasn’t like that! I was working at the mending! Ask Magpie… I just stopped to tell her the story of Adam and Eve…” Caroline trailed off, unhappily.

“I know you’re used to having servants, Caroline, but Maggie is no servant. I meant for her to help you in the house, of course, but she does not have time to do everything here. She has her own home to tend to, and soon she won’t be able to do as much. You need to help her more, love,” he finished gently. He broke a piece of bread from the loaf and crumbled it distractedly between his fingers.

“She does help me! I mean, I help her too-we share the work! What do you mean, soon she won’t be able to do as much? Why won’t she?”

“Sweetheart,” Corin looked up at her through his rough golden brows. “Maggie’s pregnant, Caroline. She and Joe are going to have a baby. Their first.” He looked away again, his face somber, and in that expression Caroline read an accusation. Tears sprang to her eyes and she was choked with an emotion a little like ire, a little like grief, a little like guilt. An insufferable mixture of the three that burned in her gut and made a roaring noise in her ears. She clattered up from the table, ran to the bedroom and closed the door behind her.

In a light buggy, harnessed to a bay horse with a high, proud head carriage, the journey to Woodward could be made in a day, with a dawn start and a break to rest and water the horse at noon time. Most of the ranch hands and riders accompanied them on horseback, including Joe and Magpie. Caroline watched the Indian girl, who rode a wiry gray pony, and wondered how she could have failed to spot the telltale swell at her middle, the slight deference in her movements.

“Is it wise for Magpie to ride in her condition?” Caroline whispered to Corin, although there was little chance of being heard above the thudding of hooves, the wind and the creak and whirr of the buggy wheels.

“I said the very same thing to Joe,” Corin smiled. “He just laughed at me.” He shrugged. “I guess Ponca women are a bit tougher than white women.” A few tiny flecks of rain blew out of the sky. Caroline made no reply to Corin’s remark, but she felt the sting of it. The implication she heard, whether he had intended it or not, was that she was weak and that she was failing here in the West, as a woman and as a wife.

They arrived in Woodward as dark was falling and took a room at the Central Hotel. Joe, Magpie and the ranch boys melted into the town: to the Equity, Midway, Shamrock and Cabinet saloons, to the brothel run by Dollie Kezer at the Dew Drop Inn, and to the houses of friends. Caroline’s back ached from the long drive and she was tired, but she nevertheless urged Corin to lie with her, and she shut her eyes as she felt him spend himself within her, praying that whatever magic it was that made a child coalesce into being, it would happen this time-this time.

Caroline’s spirits had soared with the prospect of coming into town for the spring gala day, and for dancing. Visits away from the ranch were precious scarce and they had not ventured forth for four long months since the Fosset’s shindig on New Year’s Eve. Woodward, which had seemed upon her arrival from New York to be a one-horse town indeed, now seemed a vibrant hub of life and activity. But there was something about this very fact, even, that saddened Caroline. The following day dawned fair and the streets thronged with people, cowboys and settlers alike. They formed two thick cords that ran for several blocks along the length of Main Street, undulating where a raised sidewalk ran in front of a shop. The air thronged with the smells and sounds of thousands of bodies and excited voices, the stink of horses and manure, and the parched wood and paint fragrance of the buildings. Store fronts were strung with colorful bunting and had their doors flung wide open to welcome the unprecedented opportunity for new custom that day.

The crowd was entertained with a roping and riding contest, a mock buffalo hunt, and shooting competitions. There were fancy lariat tricks and a display of bull-dogging that looked unduly violent to Caroline, who turned her face away as the steer’s head was pulled around, its lip clamped as they both crashed to the ground. Joe far outperformed all other competitors in a knife-throwing competition, sending his blade again and again into the center of a paper target pinned to hay bales to win a box of fine cigars and a brand new Bowie knife. The applause for his victory was muted compared to that lavished upon the white victors of other events, but Joe smiled his wry half-smile nonetheless and admired the new blade. They ate barbecue, fresh peaches, ice cream and honey cakes, and the ladies drank iced tea while the men took beer. Caroline, who had been without ice or refrigeration since leaving New York, found the chilled drink in her mouth to be not far short of heavenly. They caught up with neighbors, and Corin swapped the current prices of wheat and beeves with fellow ranchers; and they ran into Angie and Jacob Fosset, Angie clad in a lurid lilac gown with too much color on her face. When Corin complimented her, she laughed and exclaimed:

“Oh, I look like a show girl, I know I do; but we gals don’t get to dress up often enough! And I need a little help to look festive, Lord knows-we can’t all be pretty as paint like your wife here, Corin Massey!”

“Well,” Corin told her, with a generous tip of his hat, “you look just fine to me, Angie Fosset.” While the men talked, Angie took Caroline to one side.

“Any news, honey?” she asked in a low tone, in answer to which Caroline could only grip her lower lip in her teeth and shake her head. “Well, I’ve thought of some things you could try…” Angie told her.

In the evening the band played waltzes and polkas, as well as some square dances-large sheets of canvas were laid over the sand of Main Street to facilitate the dancing, since no hall in town could accommodate such a large number of pairs. Caroline danced with the grace of her upbringing, even though Corin’s steps were marred by beer and there were wrinkles in the canvas to snag unwary feet. With buildings all around her, and people, Caroline felt better than she had in months as they marked a Mexican waltz among the jostling shoulders of Woodward’s citizens. For a while, the smile she wore was not a brave one, nor a dissembling one, but a genuine one.

But later, as she stood talking to a circle of Woodward wives, Caroline saw Corin across the street, bending down in front of Magpie and putting his hands on her midriff. He seemed to cradle the bulge in her abdomen gently, almost reverently, and while Magpie looked embarrassed she also looked pleased. Caroline caught her breath and blood flooded her cheeks. Corin was in his cups, she knew, but this behavior was too much. Soon, though, it was not for this reason that her cheeks burned. Corin’s face was turned away, his gaze was unfocused. Waiting, she realized; waiting for the child to move inside the Ponca girl. And as she witnessed this act of intimacy, she suddenly thought she saw something possessive in her husband’s touch-something altogether too interested.