Lost Ecstasy/Chapter 31
DEAR DOWLING:
I have always done business with my cards on the table, or most of them anyhow. I understand your position and realize that you find the present situation fairly unpleasant. But I am on the ground as to it, and you are not.
In the first place, I have an old-fashioned idea that when two people are joined together they ought to have a chance to try it out anyhow. Maybe they can make it go, maybe not, but they are entitled to their chance.
You are not going to like this letter, but first I want to tell you one thing. Your girl is going to stick. I don't imagine it has been all honey and roses, but she cares for McNair and I believe he cares for her. He is a hot-tempered devil, but he is considerable of a man for all that. He may not know how to use his fork—I don't know—but he knows the cattle business, and at the present moment I am banking on him. Literally. I have loaned him money enough to make a small start, and the rest is up to him. They have a little place on the Reservation—the post office is Judson, if you care to know—and she has fixed it up in good shape. I am banking on her too; there is a good bit of old L. D. in her.
Yours sincerely,
H. S. Tulloss.
Kay never forgot that home-coming of hers, the bleak dreariness of the deserted ranch house in the rain, the isolation, the dirt. Nothing had prepared her for it. But's he never forgot, either, the care Tom took of her that first night. The wood he cut and the fire he built, the superhuman energy with which he moved about, lame as he was; bringing in and setting up the bed, carrying in food, chopping firewood, and now and then looking at her furtively with anxious harassed young eyes.
"Getting better every minute, isn't it?"
The house was damp and cold. He put her in a chair and wrapping a blanket around her, forbade her to move. "I'm doing this job. You can boss all you like." And underneath it all was his pathetic desire to make her comfortable, to see her smile, to have her share his own sense of what he had had only once before, of journey's end.
Long after that first meal of theirs had been eaten and she was in the white iron double bed, he was still at work. He had the team to see to, the wagon to cover from the rain, more wood to chop. She lay there, listening to him moving about, and to the rain on the roof just over her head, and after a while she got out of bed and dropped down on her knees. She was going to stick, no matter what; just give her strength to stick, and she asked nothing else.
But she had to get up once again that night, to help Tom to get his boot off his swollen and discolored foot.
"Been as busy as a dog licking a dish!" he told her cheerfully. "And don't you worry about this leg of mine. It's got to get limbered up, that's all."
He was up at dawn, and he had the fire going and water carried from the well before she stirred.
"You mustn't spoil me like that."
"I'm just breakin' you in kind of easy! No use putting the saddle on until you're halter broke, you know."
The house had three rooms, a large one, opening directly from a narrow porch, and two smaller rooms, one the kitchen. It sat out on the rolling plains, unshaded from the sun, and below it, lined with a few cottonwoods, a thin and now muddy stream wound its way beneath cut banks from the distant mountains. In summer it was hot, and the dust came in and covered floors and furniture with a fine gray grit; in winter the gales shook it, and only a small area around the stove was warm. Tom, spending those tragic months later on, was to learn that, and finally to move his bed into the kitchen.
There was no other house in sight. Judson, the nearest town, was a line of nondescript buildings along the railroad track, some miles away. The only moving thing within Kay's vision, that first morning of their arrival, was cattle thinly spread out over the empty country, and a lonely cowboy silhouetted on top of a butte. When she stood still the silence was unbroken; the time was to come when that silence was to beat on her ears like thunder, when she was to rattle her dishes, move her bits of furniture, to escape from it.
But at first there was healing in it. Tom, moving in and out, still watchful and anxious, was surprised to find her cheerful in the litter of mud, boxes and general confusion.
"Bearing up, are you, girl?"
"I like it," she told him. "It's so peaceful."
"So's a marble orchard."
"A marble orchard?"
"A cemetery."
It never occurred to her that, after all she had hoped of life, now she was asking for peace. . . .
If the ranch house, rather like Tom, had little resemblance to her earlier romantic dreams, at least it responded quickly to care and affection—and was rather like Tom in that, too.
To Kay, certain unforgettable pictures of those first weeks on the Reservation remained always. There was the fixing up of the ranch house, its development from dirt and squalor into a place of order and cleanliness and even comfort. The big room, with its floor painted and Indian rugs on it; the day by day touches; the evening when Tom came home to find the white dotted curtains at the windows; the day she labored all day at the rusty stove, and when on starting the fire they were both driven outside by the smell of burning paint; Tom putting up hooks in the kitchen, and then proudly arranging their pots and pans on them; the uses to which wooden boxes and packing cases could be put; the discovery that an old creeper lying in the grass could be lifted and trained up over the porch; the morning Tom called her out to see a cow grazing on a hillside close by, and proudly pointed out the L. D. brand on its side.
Small matters at the time, only to assume true proportions when from a far distance she looked back on them; when the fatigue and discomfort had been forgotten, and all that stood out was that she and Tom had been together.
Discomfort there was. The rain was as though it had never been, and again the heat was intolerable. The ground outside cracked and fissured, and the air that came through the opened doors was hot and lifeless, and laden with graywhite dust. She would wipe it away, only to have it come back again. She was always thirsty, with a thirst that the flattish alkaline water from the well did not assuage. The very thought of handling food sickened her, the bacon limp and running with grease, the butter a formless oily mass. The meat Tom brought once or twice a week from Judson had to be cooked at once or it spoiled.
The very stove in that weather became her deadly enemy. It seemed to play tricks on her with malicious intent. One moment it would be burning intensely, devastatingly; the next she would find it had died entirely. She took to watching it, standing by it with a fresh stove-length of wood in her hand, as if she meant to beat it into submission. Her hair was always damp, her face covered with little beads of moisture, her hands burned and roughened.
In between these times there were hours when she had nothing to do. She would bathe herself and then lie down, but the bed would be blistering hot. She took to lying on the floor instead for coolness, and Tom, coming in unexpectedly one day, found her there asleep. She was so pale, she lay so still, that he thought she had fainted.
"Kay!" he said. "Kay!"
When he found she had only been sleeping he was angry with relief.
"That's a fool thing to do, lying on the floor like that? Suppose" he cast around for something that might have threatened her. "Suppose a rattler had crawled in?"
During this part, as she looked back later, Tom had always been working. He worked at white heat, frenziedly and yet with a cool purpose behind that frenzy. He had freighted lumber from the railroad and was preparing for the winter. Now and then a half-breed from Judson came over to help him. He had wasted little time on the barn, but before long he had built a calf yard, and shelter sheds, and a high log corral. There were many times now at night when his foot was so swollen that he could not get his boot off.
"Let me help you, won't you?"
"It went on; it's got to come off," he would say doggedly.
In the intervals he worked his mixed herd, drove in his unthrifty cattle for feeding, watched his calves, broke and rode his green horses. There were days when he was gone all day; when he rolled a bit of lunch inside a slicker and tied it to his saddle, and was off from dawn until nightfall. On those occasions he always left his revolver, loaded, where she could easily reach it.
"But I'm not afraid, Tom, really."
"Just don't let anybody inside the house. That's all I'm asking you."
But they were young and still passionately in love. The outside world hardly touched them; there were whole days when she never thought of Henry, or Katherine, or Bessie Osborne, or Herbert. They belonged to some queer half-forgotten life where people still rang bells and trays were brought, or tea, or whisky and soda with tinkling ice in glasses.
There were evenings, then, when the sun had gone down behind the distant mountains in a glory of rose and purple and gold, and the night breeze came rolling over the plains, cool and reviving, when they sat hand in hand on the step of the narrow porch, and sometimes talked and sometimes were silent.
"Not tired of me yet, girl?"
"Not unless you're tired of me."
"Never, so help me God."
But there was a new angle to their relationship. It was Tom now who was deperident on her, was sensitive to her slightest withdrawal, who watched for her approval or disapproval. And that his jealousy of Herbert was only slumbering she realized one night when they sat watching the northern lights spreading their long pale-green streams across the sky.
"The Indians call them the campfires of the dead," he told her.
"That's rather lovely, isn't it!"
He squared about and looked at her.
"If anything happened to me, Kay, what would you do?"
"I'm not going to think about it."
"But if it did? Suppose a horse comes down on me some day—you never can tell in this business—then what?"
"I suppose I'd go home. I don't know what else I could do. Please, Tom!"
"And marry Percy? That would be it, I suppose."
"I'd never marry anybody. I couldn't."
"You'd marry him," he said somberly, and was silent for a long time.
Outside of that one reference to her old life, he never mentioned it.
Time went on. The drought continued. Already the leaves of the cottonwoods by the creek had turned yellow and were falling; they dropped into the stream and were caught underneath by the eddies, where they moved along like small golden fish. The stream was very low, and what had been mysterious shadows in its depths were now revealed in their stark nakedness under a rock, a floating end of it looking like a long dead arm.
The trout had left the riffles and taken refuge in the pools, and the little pond surrounded by rushes, which was the ancient overflow from some forgotten irrigation ditch, was almost dry. Now and then a flock of early ducks flew over it, heads thrust forward, circled it and then went on in search of something better. The cattle kept slowly on the move in search of grass; one morning Kay found them all around the pool, and saw that they had eaten the rushes down. She could have wept, and thereafter the pool, like the débris, in the creek, lay naked and ugly, save when at sunset it reflected the colors of the sky.
But as time went on and the heat and drought continued, anxiety began to tighten Tom's nerves. He came in one day to have his bad foot catch under the end of one of the Indian rugs and almost throw him.
"Hell of an idea, having loose carpets lying about, anyhow!" he said savagely, and kicked it into a heap.
And Kay, tired and hot, came to her kitchen door and ordered him to replace it!
"I will not. You can break a leg if you like, but I need mine."
"I seem to need mine too," she said wearily, and got down to straighten it. He lifted her to her feet savagely, and kicked the rug back into place. Then he stalked out through the kitchen, and she could hear him angrily rattling the wash basin. He was quiet enough when he came back, but—and later she was to mark that incident as significant—he did not apologize. There was no tender making-up. The incident came, passed, was apparently forgotten; but it marked a milestone in their relationship, nevertheless. . . .
His good looks had not altered. Chaps or overalls made no difference. Kay, on the other hand, was showing wear and strain. He did not notice it; for all his occasional outbursts, she was still Kay to him. Her beauty or her lack of it made no difference to him. She was Kay, his sweetheart and his wife. Perhaps, man-fashion, he was taking her too much for granted. But he had his own worries, and grave enough they were.
The creek was almost dry.
One day Kay heard him stirring very early, even for him, and found him later throwing a small dam across the stream. Like everything he undertook with his handicap, it was a long and arduous piece of work. He would shovel earth from the cut bank into a barrow, wheel it, dump it. He had made a ridge of rocks across, and was filling it.
She never knew whether he had the right to dam the creek or not. He was exhausted at night, his hands badly blistered, but he only laughed when she asked if she could help him.
"All right!" he said. "You bring down one of those little silver-plated spoons you set such store by!"
But he kissed her, was genuinely touched.
Yet that very evening they had what approached a scene. He came in, went into the living room and stayed there. She could hear him moving about, but he did not come back to the kitchen.
"I need some water, Tom."
"I'm busy. Pretty soon."
She was suddenly angry. She took the pail and went out to the well. When she started back she saw him at the kitchen door, but he made no move to help her. He stood aside and let her pass him, and she slammed it down on the table.
"Must have been in a hurry," he drawled, watching her.
"When you're too busy to carry water for me, I'll do it myself."
And then her nerves gave way. She did not cry. She stood, white and defiant, and reviewed her grievances, the isolation, the heat, that she was a prisoner. And she ended by showing him her hands, roughened, the nails broken.
"You used to like my hands! Look at them!"
"I'm sorry, girl. I tried to tell you what it would be like."
They sat down to the meal in silence. It was when he began to eat that she saw what he had been doing when she called him. The blisters on his own hands had broken, and he had been covering them with adhesive plaster.
She got up and put her arms around him.
"I must have been crazy, Tom."
He drew his first full breath since the outburst.
"You sure had me ready to whoop and holler!" he said. "Thought you were getting ready to hit the trail for somewhere else."
That night, by the lamp, he began his eternal figuring again, and he told her that with luck after the shipping next fall he could pay his interest and have six hundred dollars left over. It stunned her. All this labor, the long hours, the worry, and—six hundred dollars! She had paid more than that for an evening wrap.
When he saw her face he tried to explain to her the cattleman's grievances; the demand for young beef in Eastern markets, as against the fine mature cattle which were his pride and his profit; the necessary accepting at Chicago or Omaha of that day's prices, "figured by a lot of crooks who go up an alley and get their heads together." And the necessity of accepting that figure, iniquitous as it might be.
"But why do they let them have them?"
"What's a man going to do? Ship 'em back a thousand miles?"
Even that was with luck. Without it!
They had not much time together, now. Tom came in for his food, ate it hurriedly and went out again. But sometimes glancing out she would hear him whistling and knew that, heat and exertion and worry notwithstanding, he was happier than she had ever known him. He was looking better too; his hospital pallor had gone. He was not drinking at all.
Standing in front of the defective mirror in the bedroom one day, she remembered what Mrs. Mallory had said: "Ranching sure ages a woman. It's all right for the men. It keeps them young."
She could not even ride with him. She had no riding clothes, no saddle. And Tom was still afraid to trust her on his green horse. He was breaking one for her, he told her, but it would take time. She wondered sometimes if he realized that she was as truly a prisoner as though she had been shut behind bars. But what could he change for her, even if he would? For the first time in her life she began to think of the pioneer women all over America who had done this very thing. Out there the back country was still full of them, women who had come there, young like herself, and now that comparative ease had been achieved were too old to use it; who could only sit, on their verandahs or in their cars, their worn hands folded, looking out on a land which they had hoped to conquer, but which had conquered them instead.
And then one day, as if in answer to that thought of hers, he went into Judson, and late that afternoon she heard a strange sound coming up the road, a rattling and bumping which sounded vaguely familiar. She looked out, and there was Tom, sitting grinning cheerfully in an ancient and disreputable Ford. How ancient and how disreputable were revealed by his first words.
"Bought it in town for fifty dollars!" he called. "Ain't but half broke at that; tried to buck me out more than once. But it sure can go."
He was enormously proud of it. That its cushions were broken, with gaping holes from which the hair filling protruded, and that its mudguards were bent and its radiator a shame that cried aloud, meant nothing to him. It was his, and it could go. He even made her get in beside him, and raced down the road.
"Little old engine's sure purring fine."
"Wonderful. And it doesn't matter how it looks, if it can travel."
His face fell.
"I suppose it looks pretty poor to you, after that garageful back east."
"I wasn't thinking of that."
But she had been, for a moment.