Lost Ecstasy/Chapter 34
FOR a time the gulf between them was bridged.
Toward the end of September it rained again, but too late to save the range. One day the sun was warm and bright, the next small grayish clouds began to gather around the horizon to the Northwest, and slowly to coalesce. Fitful gusts of wind set the dried vegetation on the plains to rattling, and Tom, coming home that night, said:
"Looks like something doing around Medicine Hat!"
The next morning Kay rose to a world clothed in a gray veil. The clouds covered the mountains and hung so low that she felt she could almost touch them, and from this irregular roof came the rain, steady, penetrating and cold. The roads became impassable. Tom, freighting cottonseed cake from Judson, was marooned on the way, and leaving his wagon there, rode the team back.
All over the vast empty country the round-up outfits were at work. Cattlemen were frantically shipping all the cattle they could not hope to hold over the winter. The Potter company, out of twenty-two thousand head, was shipping ten thousand. Kay watched one evening while a dozen cowboys bedded down a herd on a hilltop not far from the house. Until late she could see the red glow from the stove in the cook tent, and at intervals during the night she heard the night guards moving about. When she wakened in the morning they were already on the move.
The days had begun to shorten. At five o'clock twilight fell, and by six she lighted the lamps. Perhaps she never knew just what the lighted windows of the ranch house meant to Tom; he had always been inarticulate in his love for her. But when, after the long day, he rode over some nearby hill and looked down, those warm yellow rectangles of light were his first welcome. His heart swelled, great thoughts surged in him; then he would scrape the mud off his feet outside and, limping in, could find no words for them. He would hang up his hat, kiss her, and then, indignant at his own stupidity, stand around awkwardly, watching her.
Only once did he refer to the matter of their quarrel over Clare. She was mending by the fire in the living room, and he had been apparently busy over some reports from the Department of Agriculture. But she knew he was not reading.
"D'you mind if I tell you about that girl, Kay?"
"What girl?"
"Now what's the use of that? You know and I know. I never wanted to marry her, and she knew it."
She bent lower over her mefding.
"Do we have to talk about it?"
"I do."
"You were engaged to her, you said."
"That's what I want to tell you about."
And he did tell her, sitting there by the fire, his hands dropped between his knees. His threatened arrest, his determination to go East with the cattle, his appeal to Clare and the condition she had imposed. It was then that she looked up.
"And she was found out?"
"She says she was. I don't believe it myself. Either that, or she took mighty good care to be found out. She had plenty of time to get back."
But woman-like, she had seized on one part of the story and ignored the rest.
"And on this long ride with her, did you—make love to her, Tom?"
"Not what you think," he told her. "I've lived the way a man does live, I reckon, but Clare's got no call on me. I'll swear it, if you like."
Later on she was to wonder if there had been a motive behind that frankness of his, but she was warmed and comforted that night. When, after his old manner, he came over and sitting on the floor, put his head against her knee, she had a new and different feeling for him. He was her husband, but he was also her lover and her child.
The days went on. The rain ended, and it turned bitterly cold. Tom rose in darkness in the mornings and came back to her after darkness had fallen again. He was working as a "rep" now with other outfits, but he was afraid to leave her alone at night. Not for him the long evenings in the warm cook tent, the poker games, the early turning in. He would come back in the car, turn in to sleep like a dead man, and be up and off after a minimum of rest.
He had left his revolver for her, against her protest.
"You're the one who may need it."
"I'm not worrying about myself."
But as a matter of fact, after that malicious breaking of his dam, nothing happened, nor was to happen for a long time yet. When the drives ended at the railroad, sometimes the outfits would work side by side with the Indians, and at such times Tom kept a wary eye open for Little Dog. But he never saw him, and later he heard that he was working on the other side of the range. After that he was easier.
He himself was doing no shipping that year, but his purchases of hay and cake had practically exhausted his money. When the last cattle car had been loaded at the railroad near Judson, he went in one day to see George Seabright at the store, and asked how good his credit was.
"Good as money in the bank, Tom."
"Well, I'm not asking for interest on it!" he drawled. "But I may have to stretch it some this winter."
"That's all right, Tom. Anything you say."
But George was practical too. The big Newcomb wheat job was still threshing, and it needed men. They paid good money.
"I'm no farmer," he objected. "And what's more, I'm not leaving my wife alone these days."
"Send her into town," George suggested. "Sally and I've been talking about that. She's young. Send her in and let her go to the movies and see some life. She's got a long winter ahead."
Tom considered that on the way back to the ranch. After all, why not? He needed to earn, needed it desperately. Kay needed clothes; she must be warm that winter. He could manage food, with George's assistance, but cash was different. Under ordinary circumstances he could have taken in horses to break at ten dollars a head, but that avenue was closed to him.
And Kay needed a change. He thought of her, alone all day in the house. She had grown thinner lately, and she was very quiet. Her hands, when she mended by the fire in the evenings, were like small white claws. Not so very white, either. Poor little hands!
By the time he got up and put the car away he had it all planned. There was a new lift to his shoulders when, having scraped his boots outside, he went in.
"How'd you like to go to town for awhile, and live like a lady?"
"And leave you, Tom? I wouldn't think of it."
"I've bached before this. Anyhow, I won't be here."
"Where would you go?"
"The Newcomb company needs me. Says it can't get along without me! That's the kind I am!"
She was relieved. For a moment she had thought he had meant to go to Ursula too, and a sickening fear of Clare had taken her breath away. But she did not easily fall in with his plan, even then. She liked Mrs. Mallory, but to take a room there—that was different. Here she had her work, but there! What would she do with herself?
"You could go to the movies."
She laughed at that, but she had a small uneasy feeling of apprehension. Ursula meant nothing to her; she had been watched there, although she did not tell him so. But he was singularly determined to have her go. He picked up one of her hands and examined it. Then he kissed it.
"First thing you're going to do," he said, "is to get that healed up. Can't have them saying I work my wife to death!"
In the end she yielded.
He sat up late that night making his plans. He could come down over week-ends and see after his cows and calves. There was nothing to worry about, until when the cold weather came. And she was to get some warm clothing while she was in town. He'd been paid; he had plenty. There was something magnificent in the way he handed her fifty dollars.
"Warm!" he insisted. "All wool and a yard wide. There's the hell of a long winter coming."
She was strangely uneasy, although on the surface she was acquiescent enough. She moved around, doing her small packing the next day, making her arrangements.
"You know about the damper in the stove, Tom, don't you?"
"Me? I took a course in dampers before you knew there was such a thing."
His cheerfulness was forced, she thought, but his determination held. Only once he weakened, when she was packing the gold brushes and jars from the bureau. He had always had an odd sort of pride in them.
"Little old house is going to be mighty"—he hesitated—"mighty bare," he said.
He seemed to loathe to leave her, stood around awkwardly, got in her way, ate little. Once he said, apropos of nothing at all:
"How'd you like to stay in town all winter?"
"What have you got in your head now?" she asked. "If you're trying to get rid of me!"
"You've never spent a winter out here. You don't know what it means. That little old stove won't keep this place warm. What you ought to do's to dig in like a bear some place. Only you haven't got any fat on you."
But she knew he was only arguing to have her oppose him.
He was very talkative on the way to town, very cheerful when Mrs. Mallory had taken them up and showed them the plain little room.
"It isn't much. But it's warm," she said.
"Warm—that's the word. And it looks pretty fine to me."
Then suddenly he went away. He took his hat off, kissed Kay quickly, and disappeared. Mrs. Mallory listened to that one step at a time descent of his as he went down the narrow Stairs.
"He never was one to show what he feels," she said to Kay, half apologetically. "Now I hope that bed's comfortable. If you want more blankets"
It was their first real separation since their marriage. After the beginning Kay accepted it stoically, but she missed him. Now that he was gone, after the fashion of women the world over, she forgot his failures, his occasional moroseness, his quick angers, his moments of actual violence. And, also after the fashion of women, she began to rebuild her romance. Her letters to Bessie, with their enclosures to her mother—Bessie had suggested that finally—took on a new note.
"Dearest mother:
Aunt Bessie says you are feeling better, and I am so relieved. And I am not on the ranch just now. Tom has had to go north on business, and I have a room in town. I am more than comfortable, but of course I long for my own little house. I had no idea I would miss it so much. I am getting some warm clothes for the winter while I am here" And so on and on.
Never a word about Nellie practicing on the old piano downstairs, hour after hour; or of the odors of cooking, or of the long periods when Mrs. Mallory sat creaking in her rocking chair and talked about the old times when Jake was still alive. Nor of Little Dog, nor Clare Hamel, nor of the "business" which had taken Tom north.
It was a business which threatened to keep Tom rather longer than he had thought.
He was working hard, new work which tired him more than he cared to admit. By dawn the engineer and crew were waiting by the big caterpillar. Then, when the time came, the engineer threw over his lever, the great belt began to move, and into the ever hungry jaws of the separator went the first waiting sheaves of wheat; the thresher roared and shook, the men in the growing light, forks in hand, bent, straightened, pitched; the belt writhed, the jaws crunched, the brown wheat kernels flowed from the side of the machine like blood. But it was not blood, it was bread. Bread for the world.
There was competition among the separators, scattered over fifty thousand acres of wheat, and so there were hours when life for Tom narrowed down to the slats that climbed endlessly in front of him, to the fork in his hand and the incessant bend, straighten, pitch of his job. When his boot bothered him he took it off, and the wheat stubble cut his foot and hurt him painfully.
But at night, unable to sleep for very weariness, he would lie awake and think about wheat. Maybe Jake had been right after all. Wheat was king now, not cattle. He and his kind were through, or nearly through. They would hold on for awhile, but the end was in sight.
He did not go home that first week-end, but on the second Saturday he filled up the Ford and started back. It was threatening rain, and he made all the haste possible. But it was after dark before he halted the car near the house and stared at it in amazement. There was a lamp lighted inside.
Never once did he doubt that it was Kay. He left the machine where it stood and fairly ran to the kitchen door. But when he flung it open, it was Clare Hamel who stood busy over the kitchen stove.