The Last Letter (37 page)

So, holding onto one tree then the next, and so on, she finally reached the front door where she pounded with her gloved hand, hoping they would hear her over the storm and violin.

Jeanie leaned against the door, her forehead there, eyes shut, the ice finding its way in between her and the door, freezing her eyes closed as she banged on it with her frozen fist. Finally the door groaned open and Jeanie fell inside, feeling immediately a hard wood floor, knowing even with her eyes iced shut that she had stumbled off course and into the home of someone else.

Jeanie rolled to her back, her thoughts tangling among themselves…where was she? The babythebabythebabymyKatherine-myKatherineJamesTommyFrank.

She felt hands on her shoulders propping her up, someone rubbing her back, pulling at her. She realized ice had formed in her ears and it muffled the voices of the people who were handling her. She couldn’t even hear her own words as she repeatedly said she needed to get back out to go home to find her children, that if she thawed she’d never make it back home, but the hands kept rubbing her back, the voices, though muddled were clearly tension filled, as though bickering. Maybe about how to approach the process of thawing her out.

How long had she been out? How frozen was she? Her lashes melted first and as water worked its way under her lids, she could feel again, she opened her eyes and looked around, then twisted her body to see who it was caring for her.

And there, behind her, kneeling with expressions of horror on their faces were Frank and Ruthie.

Frank? Ruthie? Where am I? Your house? How did I get all the way here? I was only outside for twenty minutes, thirty at the most. To check the animals and get some fuel. Jeanie covered her mouth and stared at the two of them. It sunk into her mind hard that all four of her children were separated from their parents and two of them were without adults at all.

Frank grabbed Jeanie by the shoulders and started to pull her up.

“Yes, yes, get me up. I have to go back to the house. Northeast will take us home to Yale and Katherine and James and Tommy. Where are they? Oh my God. I can’t have nursed that miniscule baby to health to have her die because I lost my bearings in a storm.”

“No,” Ruthie said, “don’t have her stand yet. She probably saved herself by not stopping in the storm, but her blood is cold and if she stands up before her body temperature warms, it’ll freeze her heart. She’ll die.”

Jeanie stopped struggling, the words of Ruthie and Frank sounded garbled to her, as though they were slurring, though making sense at the same time. Jeanie’s own words felt like solid masses inside her frozen mouth. She wondered if any of them were understandable. “That’s right. That happened to Pete Carroll last year when…you go, Frank. Go to the house and, and, I’ll expel some milk into a cup and you take it to Yale and drip it into her mouth like we did…”

“No one’s going anywhere. It’s seven o’clock—”

“Seven o’clock?”
Jeanie said. “I couldn’t have been out for three hours. That’s not possible and if it is then Yale will starve, she’ll starve! Katherine will freeze. They don’t have enough fuel! Tommy had to take Greta back before getting buffalo chips and the hanks will only last an hour or so. You have to go, Frank. They’re your children.”

“That storm will have me into the next township if I attempt to go out,” Frank said.

“Then I’ll go,” Jeanie struggled to get her feet under her, but they were thick as though actual ice blocks were tied underneath them, the pain that suddenly pulsed through them felt as though it were fire surging through her veins.

“You’ll die and then what will we do?” Frank said.

Jeanie closed her eyes and struggled to breathe. The children! She couldn’t stop thinking of them. She knew she couldn’t walk, that she’d never make it ten feet from Ruthie’s house with her body already staggered from the temperature change, she’d die for sure either freezing or her heart giving out. She closed her eyes, willing herself to calm down, to find some strength and with it a solution.

She tried to open her eyes yet exhaustion overcame her still, while she ran the facts of the situation through her mind. Frank and Ruthie had clearly been in the house since the storm started or long enough that each sustained normal body temperature. One of them could go. That was the way it was on the prairie, one of them would just have to risk their lives for the children.

Jeanie tried to form the words, ready to tell Frank to do exactly what his fatherly gut should have already told him to do. She mumbled and lifted her head toward the voices of Ruthie and Frank.
Why aren’t they helping me?

Jeanie forced her eyes open. Across the room in the kitchen, she watched Ruthie, wearing a night-robe, pour tea, as Frank, in his long johns, shoveled buffalo chips into the stove. Jeanie reached out. They didn’t notice her hand extended toward them.

They stopped their chores to gaze at one another as though lovers.

Jeanie dropped her head back down to the floor. She was hallucinating. She’d heard of the great damage cold could do. She must have lost her mind along with the numbing of the rest of her senses. She looked back again. Ruthie, still embraced in Frank’s gaze, reached up and traced his lips with her finger.

Jeanie’s mouth fell open.

Frank parted his lips and took Ruthie’s finger into his mouth, smiling around it as though they’d just discovered the secret to happiness and long life.

Jeanie closed her mouth and ground her teeth so hard she nearly cracked a tooth. She breathed heavily as her mind seemed to lift itself from her body, filling her with grief she’d never imagined anymore than she’d ever entertained the notion that Frank could possibly be interested in Ruthie of all people. Ruthie.

“Ruuuuuuuthhhhhhieeeee,” Jeanie bellowed across the room. The lovers flew apart. Ruthie jumped back into the stove setting the sleeve of her robe on fire.

The fire sizzled up her sleeve so quickly it burnt off some of her mousy hair before Frank was able to tackle Ruthie to the floor and roll the flames out.

Jeanie sobbed, watching them from across the room, on her knees, body pulsing, understanding what her mind didn’t. How could this have happened? How could she come to be sitting in a friend’s home during a blizzard while her children were unattended and her husband was well-tended by another woman? The dowdy friend.

Jeanie’s ears were useless, feeling as clogged as they had when they’d been ice filled, as though her confused thoughts were so real they took up space in her head, blocking out noise. She could see them talking, heads together, comforting one another, but she had no idea what their exact words were.

Jeanie knew she was sobbing loudly, she could feel it as her shoulders rose and fell and she watched Frank look back at Jeanie from atop Ruthie after extinguishing the fire on her robe. His face scrunched up as though he were crying. He was crying, though she couldn’t hear him. Ruthie’s body heaved also, crying, but not looking toward Jeanie.

“You are not allowed to cry, Frank Arthur! You are not allowed to feel anything but despicable shame. Our children are lost in this storm,
I
was lost in this storm and you’re here playing the violin, making love to another woman. Where’s Lutie? I thought. I was
sure…
”

Jeanie lurched up to her feet and then forward, lumbering toward the lovers. Ruthie and Frank’s faces were aghast, as though Jeanie were a spirit that had risen from the dead, as though she’d been a danger to them instead of them being a danger to everything Jeanie valued in life.

Jeanie fell into Ruthie and steadied herself, gripping Ruthie’s arms, feeling as though her nails were digging through Ruthie’s flesh. Ruthie’s face looked like it were made of clay, remolding itself into untold faces of shame for what she’d done.

‘You“re hurting me,” Ruthie cried. “My arms. You’re hurting my arms.”

Jeanie relaxed her grip and smoothed the sleeves of Ruthie’s robe, feeling as though she wasn’t breathing, yet didn’t need to.

“You are the worst kind of woman, Ruthie Moore. A traitor. A worthless thief of the heart.”

Ruthie’s chin dropped to her chest as she sobbed.

“Look at me,” Jeanie said.

“Come on, Jeanie, let’s just get through the night,” Frank said.

“You look at me,” Jeanie said. When Ruthie didn’t look up, Jeanie grabbed Ruthie’s pocked cheeks, digging her nails into the flesh, pulling Ruthie’s face up to eye-level.

“Open your eyes, weak woman.”

Ruthie opened them, tears barreled down her cheeks. “I’m so sorry, Jeanie. I don’t know why I did it. I just felt loved for once, for…forgive me, please forgive me. Please, I never…“

Jeanie watched Ruthie’s wracked face, dug into her cheeks, and listened to her pleas and attempts to explain away such evil behavior, but all Jeanie could feel was equal amounts of hate to Ruthie’s shame. When Jeanie drew blood from Ruthie’s cheek, she startled at her own aggression, quiet at it was. Her hate didn’t diminish, but her desire to rip Ruthie’s face from its bones scared Jeanie into reality, forcing her to remember the most important thing of the moment. The safety of her children. Nothing else compared.

When she’d spewed all her boiling hate, when her throat was too raw to speak, when she’d realized the only solution to her predicament was to wait out the storm, Jeanie crawled into a corner of the room, tucked her legs under her skirts and up against her chest, creating a ball of warmth. She wanted to exist as far from Frank and Ruthie as possible. And there, lodged where two walls met, she set her mind to finding a way to save her family even when it seemed impossible that she might.

The three captives of the storm sat still as wooden carvings of themselves. Jeanie wouldn’t speak or move for fear of what she might do to the two of them. They probably sat still for the same reason.

Jeanie was able to focus her attention away from Frank and Ruthie and what they’d done for some time, due to the intense thawing of her limbs. It took all her might, eyes squeezed shut, watering, nose running, to get through the experience of blood re-infiltrating starved layers of cells and muscle and skin. She thought she could feel her bones actually releasing the fiery blood from inside them, could feel minute drips of blood meet the tips of her toes and fingers, searing them.

Once the acute pain passed, Jeanie was left with thumping, more dulled pain that she thought might last forever, and that was fine with her because at that point she could at least turn her attention to how to save her children. It was also at that point that she realized Lutie was missing, that she’d always thought it were Lutie Frank was interested in, that if he were to have found another woman’s flesh under his, it would have been her pristine, creamy skin.

Jeanie lifted her head from atop her knees to see Ruthie heading into her bedroom, probably to the chamber pot.

“Where’s Lutie?” Jeanie asked.

“She went out just as the storm crashed in. I’d given her a note to give to James. He was hanging the flag at the stupid weather station he and Templeton built and I knew, I knew this storm wasn’t a normal one the minute the sky went to ash. So Lutie—”

“
Why didn’t you go?”

Frank opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out but a cracked squeak. He looked into his lap.

“Don’t look into your lap like a shamed little boy. You are a man who acts as a ten-year-old. Don’t you dare go do that now, not under these circumstances. You have their lives on your hands. All of the children’s, and now Lutie’s life.” Jeanie shivered, her teeth chattered.

“Why would Lutie agree to such a thing?”

“She went to the Hunts. I sent her. She made it to James, gave him the note, but then I sent her to the Hunts.”

Jeanie realized why and instead of the pure anger that normally swam through her when she realized someone was destroying his life with opium, she merely felt numb. “You sent her to the Hunts for opium?”

Frank crossed the room to Jeanie. “Sit by the fire.”

He crouched beside her. Jeanie jerked away from him, as far into the corner as she could. Frank put his hand against the wall where she sat. “There’s a breeze firing through there like a locomotive. It’ll suck the heat, what’s left of your heat, out of you in two hours time and then who’ll be there to care for the children in the morning?”