Lost Ecstasy/Chapter 30
THERE had been rain at last. Too late to revive the drying pastures and the scorched wheat fields, but rain.
The road was deep with mud. Every now and then the rear end of the heavily loaded wagon slewed round and slid into the ditch. Sometimes the team could pull it out again, but once or twice Tom had to take the fence post he had picked up early in the day, and with all the strength of his shoulders and back, lift a wheel out of a slough. Then Kay would urge the horses ahead, and once more on the crown of the road the wagon would jolt along.
At noon a second storm came up. The sky was a sinister dark gray, against which the bare and yellow hills and buttes stood out, tawny figures painted on a monstrous canvas. Every so often this canvas split, and to the sound of its rending forked lightning came through, like the split tongue of a snake.
The cattle huddled under the shelter of the slopes, in ravines and swales; horses stood with heads drooping, facing away from the wind. Then the rain came, like a curtain suddenly lowered. It erased the world, and left the two in the wagon like shipwrecked mariners in a rocking boat on a beating turbulent sea. There was no shelter. Here and there, with miles of empty road intervening, they passed the deserted log cabin or tiny wooden house of some forgotten homesteader; a door and a window, sometimes two windows; a barn, a shelter shed, and lying out around, exposed to the weather, broken-down wagons and rusty abandoned farm machinery.
But their broken roofs offered no security; they only added to Kay's depression, a melancholy she concealed under a fixed smile.
Tom, on the other hand, was flamboyantly happy. The rain and mud were powerless to depress him; all his life he had found nature fundamentally hostile, something to be fought and conquered. Wet, his boots inches deep with gumbo, he was yet triumphant and cheerfully hopeful. With every slow mile his spirits rose; he was proud of his team, of his wagon, of his wife; of the household goods that, piled high behind him, swung and lurched over the ruts in the road. He whistled, even sang.
I'm a poor lonesome cowboy,
I'm a poor lonesome cowboy,
And a long ways from home."
Now and then he would reach out and take Kay's hand, and she would smile up at him and return his warm pressure. Not if she died for it would she have dampened that enthusiasm of his. He was off on the great adventure.
"We've got to make good, girl. And by heck we will. We've got to show the old man."
The old man was Mr. Tulloss.
"Of course we will show him," she said valiantly.
There had been a profound change in Tom since that day when he had come into the bedroom at the Martin House, with a new soberness in his face and a new straightening of his shoulders. He had told her very quietly: Tulloss had sent for him and talked over the cattle business with him; the old man thought things were looking up. Not like the old days, of course, but still
And then suddenly he had dropped down beside her and put his head in her lap. He was to have his chance; Tulloss was going to stake him. He could take care of her now. There had been awful times when he had thought he couldn't, but that was all over. He wasn't afraid; he'd make it go if he had to work all day and all night.
It was only after that emotional paroxysm had passed that he gave her the details. The banker was going on his note for the purchase of a small herd, three or four hundred; cattle were cheap now, because of the drought. And he was to look around for some "dead" Indian lands on the Reservation, preferably with a ranch house on them. If he could buy such a place at a decent figure
"On the Reservation! Is that safe for you?"
"If I let them alone I guess they're not hunting any trouble."
But he did not tell her that a part of his agreement had been a promise, solemnly made, to keep his hands off Little Dog. It had not been easy; he had even hesitated. But he had made it.
"I owe him a skinful of lead."
"You're going to owe me something more important than lead. Good hard money."
"If he keeps out of my way"
"Don't be a pig-headed young fool. Take it or leave it, Tom."
So he had agreed.
It was after he had told her that, moving excitedly, exultantly around the room, that a new thought occurred to him. Some pause or other—for breath perhaps—brought him up before the bureau, with its gold trinkets, and he stopped and stared at them.
"I guess maybe I've been thinking too much about myself," he said suddenly. "What about you, girl? You've got a right to have a say in this."
"It's just what we have both been wanting, Tom, isn't it?"
"You don't know anything about it," he said, almost roughly. "It'll be no picnic. If I take hold I'm going through with it. I'll be away part of the time, and winter's coming. What I could do," he added, "you could get a room somewhere here, and"
"And let you fight it out alone?"
"I've bached it before this. And I'm not talking about a ranch house like the L. D. If we get three rooms we'll be lucky."
"If it's only one room I'm going with you, Tom."
Even then he was not quite satisfied. He stood looking at her moodily. She was so young, so ignorant of what she was committing herself to. He turned over a little gold brush with his finger.
"You won't need that sort of thing there."
"Would you like me to sell it?"
"God! No!" he said.
After that a new life had opened before him. He even seemed to limp less noticeably. He laughed and talked with Ed at the desk below; she could hear him through her closed door. He ate prodigiously and slept like a baby. There was even boisterousness in his love-making; he would pick her up and hold her to him, as if for sheer joy in his returning strength. And he was busy. He had found a herd, and he was to "throw in" with the Potter outfit on the Reservation, bearing his share of the cost. At night he would sit and figure laboriously. If it cost forty cents a head per month for grazing, then He would survey his totals. "Looks like a lot of money to me," he would say ruefully. But he had his moments of triumph also; one was when he had registered the old L. D. brand as his own.
"That's something to write home about!" he told her boastfully. "I'll bet old Lucius is turning over in his grave."
She suspected a certain malicious pleasure in that, directed not at her, but at her people. She knew he had never forgiven them, and after his stubborn fashion, that he never would. He wanted nothing from them, but their dogged refusal to so much as acknowledge her marriage was a gesture of contempt toward him, and he knew it.
But aside from that he never mentioned them. He had bought horses, a work team, one or two green broncs that he meant to break himself, and a big gelding which he could mount from the right side. "Not much of a string yet," he said, but he had enormous pride in them, in everything. For the first time in his life he had the sense of property.
If Kay had her own reservations, her panicky moments, he never knew them. She was at least getting him away from the town and from Clare; there would be no one to offer him liquor, or send him letters, and she was too ignorant of the feud between Little Dog and himself to worry about it. There were others who knew Tom and the nature of Indians who felt less hopeful.
It took the last of their money to buy their household goods. The room at the Martin House was crowded with her purchases; gleaming pots and pans sat in the pine drawer among her toilet things, and Tom would gaze at them with proprietary pride.
"Now what's that for?"
She did not always know, and then Tom would throw back his head and roar with laughter.
"It's a fine wife I've got! Good thing for you I'm some cook myself!"
But he would not have been Tom had he not had his depressed and even violent spells. One day he took her hands and examined them.
"They're going to have to work, those hands," he told her, almost roughly.
"That's what hands are for, or ought to be."
"Not if you'd married Percy!"
And that thought seemed to madden him. He worked himself into a frenzy over it. Why was she sticking to him? He wasn't worth it and she knew it. If it was because she was sorry for him, damn being sorry for him. He didn't want pity. He was more of a man as he was than any one of that crowd of mavericks he had met back East. And that memory lashing him to a fresh grievance, his undisciplined temper carried him on and on. She listened, her hands cold, her heart beating fast, until he flung out of the room. Half an hour later he was back, offering to get down and let her trample some of the "orneriness" out of him.
She began to feel the strain of meeting his varying moods. One day he went around to the Mallorys' and returning with his saddle, dumped it onto the floor with a strange expression on his face.
"Got to learn some new tricks, this old saddle!"
She was afraid to let him see the tears in her eyes
So she had learned a great deal, this Kay McNair, sitting on the rocking swaying wagon, with her dressing case beneath her feet, and behind her the Lares and Penates of their migration; the bed and chairs and table bought at secondhand, the box of provisions, the two Indian rugs which had been her sole concession to luxury. She had already traveled a long road from her old protected life, and she was still on the way.
The storm had settled into a steady cold rain, the wagon rocked and slewed, steam rose from the broad backs of the horses, Tom's new work team. As slow mile on mile was covered the motion became, first tiring, then painful, and at last an unendurable agony. Tom had brought out his old slicker from the back of the wagon and insisted on her wearing it, but in spite of it rain dropped from the brim of her small hat and ran down her neck. The slicker smelled of oil and horses; it began to nauseate her. Wire fences, sage brush, vast empty stretches of sodden country, ditches filled with little green frogs, a gray haze to the left that must be the mountains, and always the road going on and on, seeming to drift aimlessly, to get nowhere.
"Look! There's a chicken!"
"I don't see any chicken."
"A prairie chicken! Right good eating in the spring; not now."
He saw everything; he knew the birds, the wild flowers. To him the journey was one through beloved country among dear familiar things. He had the sense of home; better than that, of home-coming. He sang and whistled and talked. Now and then he reached over and tucked the slicker in about her, but if he noticed the lethargy of misery about her he said nothing. Occasionally he turned an anxious possessive eye to the rear and the load. He had an enormous pride in that new "gear" of theirs; he had had so little for so long.
"Funny, when you think about it," he said, "this is the way the old boys came out—the pioneers, you know. Everything they had piled up behind them."
He talked about them. There over that rise had gone the earliest trail of the covered wagons, often with soldiers from the last fort to escort them for part of the way; there or hereabouts the Indians had killed some of them. They had gone on, leaving their hastily dug graves, and later on they had come back, some of them, to search for them; but they never could find them.
On and on. Talk, talk. Sing, whistle. Creak, creak. Kay felt her nerves getting out of control.
"So this old fellow, I took him all over the place. He picked out the spring where his son was killed but"
"Tom," she said suddenly, "if you say another word I am going to scream."
He was dumbfounded. His face fell.
"Why didn't you speak up before, girl? I've been talking to keep your mind off your troubles!"
He smiled down at her, but she was too weary, too heart-sick to respond.
"Look here," he said, "you need something to eat. That's what's the matter with you."
"I'm not hungry. I'm just wet and cold and tired."
"Well, that's enough," he observed dryly, and stopping the wagon, crawled out into the mud and rain. She could hear him rummaging in the provision box behind her, and finally he came to her triumphantly with a box of sardines and some crackers.
"Now," he said, "if I can work the combination of this little fish safe"
Suddenly she laughed hysterically, and he looked up.
"What's the matter?" he demanded, suspiciously.
"Nothing. Only it's so different, so"
She began to cry.