Two in the Field (19 page)

I knew Cait was there.

My breath stopped in my chest as I turned and saw her in the doorway. Jet hair. Jade eyes. She was older, yes, but maybe even more beautiful than in my memory. She stood very straight, regarding me with no visible emotion as I set about rememorizing her eyes and lips and the freckles dusting her nose.

“Leave this place, Samuel,” she said finally.

It sounded almost biblical, her words low-pitched, their import and intensity devastating. Even then a part of my brain refused their meaning and focused instead on the timbre of her voice, excited beyond measure to hear it again.

“Cait, I …”

My voice trailed away as a man stepped into the doorway beside her. Young and russet-haired, dressed in coveralls, looking very much at home, he stood there looking at me. Our little tableau held for a long moment. Then Cait turned inside with a graceful movement that wrenched at my heart.

Don’t do this
, I tried to say.

 TWELVE 

Seamus Devlin sat in a makeshift office in a far corner of “Grand Central,” a cavernous structure that served as a sort of community center.

“Come in!” he barked. A kerosene lamp cast a yellow circle on a makeshift desk fashioned from crates and littered with handwritten forms. “Welcome to the Emerald Colony!”

I made an effort to wrench my brain out of its dismal loop of replaying Cait’s words. Devlin obviously regarded me as a prospective settler or investor. I tried to track what he was saying—something about claims already taken up to eight miles all around O’Neill City.

“I don’t really—”

“But there’s fine plots available on the Elkhorn’s south fork,” he rushed on. “Or maybe in Atkinson, to the west, our other Irish-in-exile settlement.”

Long-jawed and saturnine, Devlin looked more like an undertaker than a salesman. His grins and winks seemed incongruous, and almost from the first instant I didn’t trust him.

“Looks like I might not be here too long,” I said. Rain had started to fall just before I came in. Now mud was seeping from one wall. A blast of thunder shook everything. I had no real bedroll, and most of what I owned was still wet from earlier showers. All in all, I’d probably never been in a lower state of mind. “Got a stable where I could bed down with my horse tonight?”

Devlin pursed his lips. “We’ll do better than that.” He pawed through a pile of forms. “There’s a vacancy in Number 22. You mind sharing?”

I agreed to seventy-five cents for the night’s lodging, plus stable and feed for Mr. P. I was being robbed, but I didn’t care. He could have said it cost ten bucks and I’d’ve handed it over.

Mr. P. needed attention. I needed focus. In the stable both were provided by a grizzled old-timer named Mullaney, who called himself a “freighter;” that is, he made his living transporting goods from railway points to settlements like O’Neill. Under his direction I brushed and watered and fed and blanketed Mr. P. I thought I was finished, but Mullaney handed me a stiffer brush for Mr. P’s hooves. “Got to keep ’em dry and clean,” he said, “otherwise rot sets in.”

What the hell am I doing here? I wondered, and entertained the sullen reflection that no car I’d ever owned required this level of maintenance

By the time I finished, I was exhausted. The rain had stopped and a full moon lit the prairie. In the distance I heard the Elkhorn’s watery rush as I slogged through the mud toward Number 22. At least I thought it was the one Mullaney had pointed to. No number was evident. No windows either. The air inside reeked of tobacco, liquor, straw, animals, coal oil and sweat. “Christ,” I muttered, “what’s been living here?”

“Practically everything,” a deep voice said from the far end of the place.

I dropped my valise and peered around, trying to make out something, preferably an empty bed. I couldn’t even see my hand before my face. A match scratched and a flame appeared where the voice had sounded. The flame moved to a candle and after the wick flared its illumination exposed a dark hand holding a pistol trained on me.

“Fine.” The perfect capper to this day, I thought. “Just shoot me.”

A sacklike pallet lay on the dirt floor beside my feet; it was filled with something that rustled as I fell down on it. I pulled off my muddy boots and sank my head in my hands.

“What do you want?” The voice was a deep rumble and sounded like it belonged to a black man.

“I paid Devlin to be here,” I said.

A silence followed.

“You gotta spew, do it outside, hear?”

I raised my head. He was staring at me, and he was very black indeed. Crop-haired and square-jawed. Sideburns but no other facial hair.

“That’s not the problem—yet,” I said. “You got anything to drink?”

After a moment he climbed to his feet and brought me a green bottle. The long nightshirt he wore looked even more comical than usual, given that the brawny arms protruding from it were thick as hawsers.

“Christ,” I sputtered. “This is water.”

“I’m Temperance,” he said calmly.

Wonderful. Of all the damn cowboys in the Old West to room with, I draw a teetotaler.

He wiped the bottle’s mouth and capped it after I handed it back. “Most here wouldn’t drink after me,” he said in that rumbly voice.

“Something wrong with you?”

He gave me a flat stare.

I stuck out my hand. “Sam Fowler.”

He hesitated, then shook. “Lincoln J. Washington.”

His hand felt like corded steel.

“What’s the J?” I said. “Jefferson?”

“Joe,” he said. “I was just ‘Joe’ in slavery. I gave myself those others.” He was watching me closely. “It ain’t like there’s a birth
record, you understand?” It came out like a challenge. Daring me to find fault.

I sighed. It seemed unreal that ten years ago slavery was legal. Still, I didn’t need a black militant in my face just then. “Well, I didn’t take you for Irish.”

Surprise registered on the square face. He started to frown, then the humor of it struck him and a grin broke through. The tension between us eased. “Call me Linc,” he said.

I nodded and looked around for a place to sleep.

“It don’t bother you bein’ in here?” Linc asked.

“Is something better available?”

He snorted and asked how much I’d paid. When I told him, he laughed. “Devlin robbed you blind and sent you here as an insult—in with the nigger, see? This soddy held livestock last winter and now it’s a store-all. There’s others empty, a sight cleaner.”

His anger seemed tinged with fatalism, as if life was better for some than for others, and that’s all there was to it. I didn’t know how to respond. Finally I said, “Well, I don’t smell anything now. Guess I got used to it. Why are there vacancies? Devlin gave me the impression that things are booming.”

“Only the goldbug trade—and now that’s petering out. I only been here a couple days, but I’ve heard the complaints. Where’s the promised buildings? Where’s the railroad line that’s supposed to come through?” He shrugged. “Some folks have already gone, too. Gold fever snatched some; the rough life and loneliness got to others. They had no trainin’ for it. Back East it sounded good, with John speechifyin’ so pretty.”

“General O’Neill?”

“He’s a general only if you believe the Fenians are an army,” Linc said wryly. “For politeness I’ll call him ‘general,’ but John was a captain when we mustered out of the Union Army. I was his first sergeant.”

He explained that after serving in Custer’s cavalry, O’Neill had volunteered to lead one of the new black Union units. “Second Regiment West Tennessee Infantry of African Descent,” Linc said proudly. “Fought our first engagement at Wolf River Bridge in December ’64. Stood fast in the middle of howling lunatic Rebs wantin’ to kill us more’n any Yanks they’d ever known of. John promoted me after that battle.”

“And you came out here to join him?”

“Not directly.” An odd note sounded in his voice. “First I tried goin’ home.”

Silence.

“I might ask what
you’re
doing here,” he said, shifting the subject, “and why you slumped in so sorry-like.”

I told him a little. Then I realized it was a rare comfort to have somebody to share with, and went on, filling in the story of my searching for Cait except for the time-travel part. That I covered by saying I’d been out of the country for six years. To which he simply nodded and commented that ever since the war’s end a lot of men had seen far places.

“You suppose Cait’s married to him?” I said, after describing the scene at her doorway. A pause followed, and I realized from Linc’s expression that he wasn’t sure who Cait was.

“Did she have a ring on her finger?” he said.

The Claddaugh heart … had she been wearing it?

“I didn’t look at her hands.”

He made a sympathetic noise, as if I weren’t an idiot but just someone foolishly in love, and said, “What you got in mind to do?”

“Get drunk, I guess, then get laid.”

He nodded neutrally.

“Where’s the nearest place for it?”

“Up at Yankton, I reckon, across the line in Dakota territory.”

“Then that’s where I’m headed.”

He was silent.

“You ever have this kind of problem?” I said.

“Apart from John O’Neill,” he answered slowly, “you’re the first white to ask somethin’ like that.”

“Well, what’s the answer?”

“I don’t have anything like that … not no more.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t ask ’less you want to know.”

“I do.”

Keeping his eyes downcast, he spoke slowly, his words barely audible. “When I went home after the war, the Ku Klux lured me out on a fool’s errand and burned my house down.” Sorrow edged his voice. “My wife and kids were in it.”

“Jesus, I’m sorry, Linc.” My predicament seemed almost inconsequential. “I wish I had some whiskey right now.”

“Right now, me too,” he said. “But I dosed myself with it too much. Liquor helped me through the pain—but it was a long time before I wanted to try livin’ again. If I go back to it now, it’ll kill me.”

An owl’s hoot sounded outside, a startling eruption in the stillness.

“I’ve come for the land,” Linc said, tone hardening. “For something to be
mine
, you understand? I figure home-steading out here, where I have the tie with John, is my prime chance.”

I looked around at our dingy space; it didn’t appear to be much of a prospect.

“No time to clean up yet,” he said defensively. “I been working long hours. ’Sides, I didn’t want to cause trouble right off. But John’s due back any day now, and then I expect an accounting on why Devlin gave me
this
soddy. And why it is I can’t lay claim to a plot of land closer than twenty miles from here—and
then only in sand hills not fit to plant. Hell, some of the Injuns’ ground is better—and everybody knows they got the dregs.”

He snuffed the candle and said he needed to sleep.

I lay in my clothes atop the pallet and stared up into the blackness. I thought I smelled the prairie outside, a warm, earthy, loamy incubation. Linc’s breathing deepened. A single cricket chirped somewhere, then stilled. I lay in a sod hut in Nebraska, listening to deep silence, thinking of my daughters and everything else I’d left behind in my other life.