The High Divide (26 page)

“I already have.”

“Then live with it.” Ulysses turned away and nudged the gelding with his heels.

They rode on, descending, the cedars getting fuller and taller as they went, though not by much, the stream wider, the tracks easy enough to follow. There wasn't any use, Eli knew, in wishing his father were different than what he was, no use in wishing that he himself hadn't joined this party.

“What do you know about him?” Eli asked.

“Magpie? What I told you already—how he lost his family at the Washita, then fought at the Little Bighorn eight years later. He spent a year with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, too, touring all through the states. Still, nobody I've talked to out here admits to knowing him, or even knowing
about
him, except for the old woman. I was starting to wonder if he was real.”

“He might have given the newspaperman a false name,” Eli suggested.

“He could have, yes.”

“Do you think he knows you're looking for him?”

“Wouldn't surprise me at all.”

They followed the trail until dusk, until the stream emptied into a larger creek that flowed northwest toward the Missouri. Soon, however, the horse tracks disappeared into the gravel bottom of the creekbed and didn't come out again.

“They might have doubled back and climbed up out of here,” Ulysses said. “Maybe they're up on top and making time.”

“But we would've seen tracks coming out, wouldn't we?”

His father pulled up on his reins. “Damn it. We've been on this side of the creek for what, a mile now? We haven't kept track of the other side.”

They turned their horses and headed back toward the place they lost the trail, but now the sun was low, the light failing badly, and there was little point searching in the dark when they weren't sure which way to go—upstream, downstream, or out of the valley entirely.

“We'll have to sleep on it,” Ulysses said. “Figure things out in the morning.”

The night was cloudless, and from the high country above them the cold came down hard, as if poured from a pitcher. At least there was no threat of rain in the air. Or sleet. Or snow. For supper they ate biscuits and cold bacon, and afterward they wrapped up in their bedrolls, spreading on top of themselves a buffalo robe Hornaday had brought from Fort Keogh.

“You smell that?” Ulysses asked, once they'd settled in. He sat up halfway, propping himself on his elbows. He turned his face downstream, the direction from which a breeze was blowing in.

Eli didn't want to move and sacrifice any warmth, but he lifted his nose free of the robe and took a breath. Woodsmoke was what he got, just a hint of it—but then something else, too, that pricked his jaw and made his mouth water. Roasting meat.

“About a mile away, maybe two,” Ulysses said. He laughed. “They're feasting on Hornaday's old bull. “You know what they say. Once you've had real meat, beef never tastes quite the same again.”

They got up out of their bedrolls, dressed, and led their horses downstream half a mile at least, the smell of roasting meat growing stronger as they walked. It was full dark now, and cold. Eli knew his father had come too far and lived through too many bad nights and bloody dreams to chance losing the man now, and as they picked their way along the creek, his stomach turned over on itself.

“We're not going in there
tonight,
are we?” Eli whispered. He was ashamed of his voice, which sounded thin and frightened.

“No,” his father said.

Eli had the sensation of a giant hand hovering over him, malign or friendly, he couldn't tell which, and his impulse was to turn around and go back, put an end to this craziness.

They picketed their horses well short of the camp and moved ahead on foot. It was situated some hundred paces above the stream on a flat rise, with a rock wall to the west and a few scraggly cedars to the north. A lean-to of cedar branches opened to the creekside. Near the water's edge their horses were hobbled and grazing. From downwind, hunched inside a tight clutch of willows, Eli and his father saw three men at the fire.

“You think he's there?” Eli whispered. “You think it's him?”

“I don't know. But we don't want to surprise anybody tonight, that's for sure. We'll go back upstream a little ways and sleep near the horses. Then come back in the morning, first thing.”

“And just walk right up? Say hello?”

“That's exactly what we do,” his father said. “No circus tricks, nothing clever. Now what do you say we try to get some rest.”

A Woman's Charge

B
ack behind the Drover House, a long line of sheets flapped in the crisp morning wind, snapping and breaking like the sails on the boat her grandfather kept in the canal and recalling to Gretta's memory her childhood weekends on the water. Sometimes they sailed as far north as the coastal village of Skodsborg, where one of his old navy friends ran an alehouse, the only place beyond the city that Gretta experienced before she left for America at eighteen. Now, looking back from twice that age, she couldn't help but see that her grandfather, in dying when she was young, had established the pattern for all the men in her life.

“So you're telling me you won't take him back?” May asked, lifting a damp sheet from the basket. She shook it out then pinned it to the line, going way up on the toes of her square-toed boots to do it.

“You don't approve?”

“It's not for me to approve or disapprove,” May said.

“I'm asking you, though.”

May shook her head, lifting another sheet from the basket.

“You have to agree my prospects are limited,” Gretta said.

“No woman can expect her prospects, as you call them, to be anything but capricious. All the more reason that her
judgment
had better be sound.”

When Gretta and Danny had arrived in Miles City a week ago, Gretta had struck an agreement with May to work off their room and board until the expedition returned. From her contacts at Fort Keogh, May knew it could be another week or two, even a month, depending on the hunt, and of course on the weather, which this time of year—the second half of October—could swing from Indian summer to full-scale blizzard in twenty-four hours. So far there had been no word at all from Hornaday or Bayliss.

“What will you do, then?” May asked. “Cook and clean for that lizard Fogarty?”

“I've taken his money before, like I said. It probably wouldn't kill me to take it again. At least for a little while.”

“He'll be giving you more than his money, dear.”

“I wasn't born yesterday,” Gretta said.

“Just don't want to see you fooling yourself.”

“You seem so sure about things,” Gretta said. In fact she'd never met a woman quite like May, so independent in everything—from the way she spoke her mind, straight out, to the way she dressed.

“When it comes to men, I am. I can read them like a book. And you'll notice I'm on my own here.”

“Have you ever been married?”

May shook her head. “After the father I had, it would have been daft of me to sign up for more. You could say that he cured me of the sort of wanting that comes naturally to most women. On the other hand I've known men, a few of them, who are worthy of trust. More than a few. And if I were of a different mind concerning their gender, which I am not”—she laughed—“I wouldn't be too quick about giving up on a good one.”

“You're assuming he's a good one.”

“Yes, I suppose I am.”

“And do you think that's what I'm doing? Giving up?”

“I don't know. But you better be damn sure it's not.”

Gretta bridled at the woman's tone. “Don't pretend like you know him better than I do,” she snapped.

Without speaking, May picked up her empty basket and walked off into the back of the hotel. In a couple of minutes she returned with another wet pile of linens. Tablecloths and napkins and towels and bedclothes. “Forgive me,” she said quietly, “I don't mean to give advice. But you might not know him as well as you think you do.”

“I know,” Gretta said. She had already explained to May about her husband's secrets—his years out west with the Seventh, the disaster at the Washita. She'd also described the widow's patent claims on her husband's love.

“What I meant was, knowing what you know now, maybe you need to think harder about
why
he did what he did. In not telling you, I mean.”

Gretta bent down and plucked up a damp pillowcase. She glanced over at Danny, who was out of earshot and struggling to wield a sledgehammer half his size against the crumbling stone squatter's cabin that May wanted razed. It was a task well beyond her poor son's strengths, Gretta feared.

“Also,” May said, “what you don't know might work to your husband's favor. Have you thought of that?”

“What I've learned doesn't favor him, that's for certain.”

“Tell me this,” May said. “If at some point, say, ten years ago, he'd come to you and explained it all—what he did and why he never told you—would you have let it come between the two of you?”

“It might have taken some time, but no, I like to think I wouldn't have,” Gretta said. “I like to think I would have come to accept it.”

“Why?”

“Because at least he would have loved me enough to put himself in my hands.”

“And now, knowing how he must have suffered for what he did, is it possible to forgive him for leaving you, and then for letting you sit home with your boys and wonder what might have happened to him?”

“I'm not sure,” Gretta said. “That was so cruel. But it might be possible to forgive him. In time.”

“You could forgive your husband for killing a young boy, destroying a family, and keeping that from you. On top of that, you could forgive him for leaving you. Is that right?”

“I'm saying it might be possible.”

“How long have you been married to him?” May asked.

“Nearly seventeen years.”

“Has he been faithful?”

“Until now, you mean? Until Mrs. Powers? Yes, I believe he has. But of course I can't be sure.”

“As far as you know, he was faithful all those years. And yet you're willing to take this woman's word at face value, a woman you've never met before, who has nothing to lose and much to gain by saying what she said. I don't understand.”

“The green turtle,” Gretta said. She'd described to May how Ulysses wore the tag on the brass chain of his grandmother's. And how he tended to be sentimental in that way, keeping small objects of no practical value—the watch she'd given him that hadn't worked for years, the agate from Eli. The beaded pouch. What Gretta had not explained was the little tag's meaning for her, the way seeing it on her husband's chest always brought to mind their first night together, and the bond of love she believed they had shared.

May sighed. “It's a tobacco tag, for heaven's sake, a scrap of tin, not a locket with your picture in it. Do you hear me? Those little tags are everyplace, in case you haven't noticed. All the men have got them. Has it occurred to you that
her
husband might have had that one, too?”

Gretta didn't have a chance to answer, because Danny came up, complaining he was hungry, and May took him inside. But in fact Gretta had thought of this already—she'd tried to convince herself of it. What were the odds, though, that Jim Powers would have saved that same tag, out of the dozens of tobacco brands men could choose from? And there was something else May didn't see. She didn't see that Mrs. Powers was exempt from the dilemma Gretta had been facing for years: how to hold on to a man you were afraid of knowing. Yes, Gretta may have been able to forgive Ulysses if he had come to her, explaining and asking. But the truth was, she hadn't wanted him to do anything of the sort. And she knew something else about herself, too—she would
not
be the second woman in his life. She was thirty-six years old and figured if she could cross the ocean at eighteen, alone, and then stake her future in a prairie town with a man she barely knew, she was certainly able find her way back to Denmark and start again. Of course she needed to think of her boys also. She'd have to convince Ulysses to let her have Danny—and, if it came to that, learn from Mrs. Powers how she felt about mothering a son who was not her own, although Eli was mostly past the point of mothering.

Suddenly Gretta felt overwhelmed, her legs weak and prickly as if they'd fallen asleep, and she grabbed hold of the clothesline for balance. She lowered herself to the ground and sat on the cold, dead grass, trying to empty her mind.

Keep your head on,
she told herself.
Don't be a fool.

Later, as she peeled a sack of red potatoes from the root cellar, she tried to decide if there was anything in May's warning that she ought to heed. It was no easy thing, pushing her mind in that direction. Ever since the night in Bismarck with the widow, she had forbidden herself any warm memory of her husband, suppressing every tender thought that might sway her. She'd done this sort of thing before. After leaving her mother's house, she learned it was possible to lay down a veneer of new impressions on top of the old. During her first year in St. Paul she'd covered up her Copenhagen life so thoroughly with sensations of her new river town that every time someone asked her about Denmark, she had to stop and hunt for Danish words that should have been tripping from her tongue. And yet even now, long after that first life had disappeared like an old foundation buried in the woods, the simplest dream could cause her, on waking, to believe no time had passed at all, that in the kitchen she'd find a plate of steaming eggs, her mother and father at their respective ends of the table, looking up at her.

No, she must not listen to May. It was time to start her third life, which she was already planning, with Fogarty as her stepping-stone and Danny her companion. This week she'd begun telling stories to her son about the city where she grew up, with its cheese and pastry shops, smoky-colored buildings and dark canals, and the flat, green country around it. The pastures full of brown-and-white cows. The dazzling blue of the sky, which above the old city, though, was too often marred by dirty clouds.

She needed to prepare him—carefully, over time—so that when the day arrived, he would be ready.

After dinner she tried explaining this to May, justifying herself. It seemed important right now that someone listen to her and understand. But May would have none of it, shaking her head and making a face. It was midafternoon and they were standing at the big washtub in the kitchen, May scrubbing and Gretta drying.

“One question,” May said. She lifted her stubby, red hands from the soapy water and pushed the sleeves of her coarse shirt up past her elbows. “Why didn't you want to know what your husband was hiding?”

Gretta didn't answer.

“Did you think it was another woman?”

Gretta thought for a moment. She wanted to be honest, but it was impossible sometimes to know your own mind. She said, “No, I don't think so.”

May's eyes stayed on her. She waited.

“It's not a woman's charge, is it, to take care of a man that way?” Gretta asked.

“What way?”

“Well—to prop him up like that.” Gretta was aware of sounding like her mother, but she wasn't able to keep the words inside her head. “To indulge his concerns and his worries. To
coddle
him.”

“I don't know.” May looked up at the ceiling, then down at the dishwater. She looked over and smiled at Gretta. “I'm not the woman who could tell you.”

“That's how it seems to me, at least. No, that's how it
is
.”

“Men are that much different from us?” May's smile wasn't quite straight on her face anymore.

“They have to be,” Gretta said. She swallowed to check the indignance she felt at being judged like this, questioned by a woman who had never even been married.

May started scrubbing on a big pot. After a time, she asked, “Weren't there any hints at all about those two years he spent out west? Or about the name change?”

Gretta shook her head—too quickly, she realized. “No, he never said a thing. And he kept me away from his sister and brother-in-law, who knew, of course. Or knew more than I did. Before leaving St. Paul we saw them all of three or four times.”

“I just can't help but wonder,” May said, after a minute or two.

“Wonder what?”

“Whether you're afraid of your husband leaving you for the widow, or coming back to you. I'm wondering if you
want
him coming back.”

Gretta laughed, but without humor. “If I knew the answer to that, it wouldn't be so hard,” she said.

May handed over a dripping pot. “Foolish question. I apologize.”

“No need.”

What appeared in Gretta's mind now, vivid, like a waking dream, was Mrs. Powers's face, the expression on it when she pulled the little green turtle from inside her blouse, a look of pity and disbelief that said,
You have no idea who he is, do you?

Putting a hand on May's hard shoulder, Gretta said, “I only wish you could understand. I need someone to understand.”

May nodded. She scratched her nose with a wet finger. She was still smiling, but her eyes were solemn and glossy. “I understand why you're tempted. I do. And do you know what else? I believe you'll make the right choice.”

“Do you mean it?” Gretta asked.

“I do,” said May.

In Gretta's belly a cool ache began to pulse, a welcome pain. “I hope you're right,” she said.