Eternal Deception

by Jane Steen

  “We have to take the rifle.” Tess picked up the gun and pointed it toward the trees, well away from the horses. “See, you do this—“ and she worked the lever awkwardly but vigorously, letting out a high-pitched peep of triumph when the spent casing leapt out of the top of the chamber. “Now it’s all ready to fire again. I think you should hold it though, Nell—you’re stronger than me and your hands are bigger. It’s hard to do, you know,” she added informatively.

  “I don’t think either of us should be taking our chances with guns.” I watched the rifle warily, at the same time trying to keep an eye on Judah. Literally one eye, since the other appeared to be closing. That whole side of my face felt tight and throbbed alarmingly.

  “You don’t want him to have it, do you?” Tess thrust the gun at me and headed back to the wagon, her gait awkward on her cold legs.

  I certainly didn’t. Cradling the rifle in my arms, keeping my finger well away from the trigger and the barrel pointed skyward, I backed toward the wagon and clambered up, pulling Tess after me.

  Tess burrowed into the blankets—I could hear her teeth chattering—before I could advise her to put some clothes on. I sighed and grabbed a spare blanket, pulling it around my shoulders. Of course, I’d left the other hide at the fire, and now that the excitement had ebbed, I was starting to feel chilled to the bone.

  I picked up the rifle and lay on my stomach on the floor of the wagon. I cursed the steel rods of my corset, which pressed into my flesh at a most uncomfortable angle. I could hear the sound of Judah rising to his feet—I was almost certain he was muttering swear words under his breath—and in a moment saw his silhouette against the glow of the fire.

  “Tess was right, we do know how to fire this gun,” I said as calmly as I could as he walked toward the wagon. “We tried it.” That wasn’t strictly true, but how was he to know? “And now I’m pointing it at you, Judah. I’m not going to let you come near me again. I suggest you get on that horse and ride back to the seminary. You can tell them whatever you like. I know the pastor will come for us soon, and he’ll bring the men from the mission. If you’re still around by then, I’ll make sure everyone knows you hit one woman and threatened another. You’re better off leaving. You’re a good rider and can be back at Eternal Life before daybreak.”

  Judah stood still, seeming to consider my words. Finally, he shrugged. “Very well,” he said. “I’ll need the bridle—it’s hanging on the front of the wagon.”

  “Fetch it,” I replied. “But know that I’ll shoot you if you step one foot toward me.”

  I shifted into a sitting position as the dark shape moved toward me. My heart pounded so hard I could feel the pulse throbbing in my injured cheek, but Judah did nothing except unhook the bridle and then step away from the wagon.

  “You may not survive this, you know,” he said conversationally. “The plains are a very big place and mighty dangerous. A woman, an imbecile, and a child out alone in the middle of winter—the wolves will have you, Nell.”

  I shivered but refused to let his words sink into my brain. “Get out, Judah. Get away from me and never think to approach me again.”

  “Oh, we’re not done.” I could not see his face, but I could imagine the gleam in his beautiful violet-blue eyes. He rubbed the back of his head, and when he spoke, there was a smile in his voice. “We’re not finished at all, Nell. I’m looking forward to our next meeting.”

  I felt my shoulders relax a little as I heard him walk in the direction of the horses, but I kept the gun at the ready. I could hear him talking to the uninjured horse as he slipped the headgear on; a few more minutes elapsed before he rode into view. The horse was unsaddled, I knew, but in the faint light from the fire, I could see Judah was sitting on its broad back with nonchalant ease, straight-spined and almost elegant. He wouldn’t come to any harm, I thought, and was glad. I didn’t want my actions to be the cause of his death, however much I wanted him gone.

  “I’ll see you shortly, Nell. If the wolves don’t see you first.” He turned the horse’s head, and then I heard the rattle of loose stones as he urged the animal up the slope, toward the high plain.

  Very little snow had fallen—a mere dusting lay between the grass and dead stalks of plants—and the snowflakes were now falling more sparsely. I lay watching the glow of the fire, not daring to compose myself to sleep, but also reluctant to get down from the wagon. So when sleep finally took me despite all my efforts, my last jumbled thoughts were a confused chaos of fire and snow. My dreams were haunted by the image of Judah—wearing the expression I had glimpsed as he aimed a blow at my head—circled in a halo of white light.

  44

  Peril

  “Nobody.”

  I had returned from my reconnoitering trip to the top of the gully. I sank my head into my hands, despair washing over me. Outside the wagon, a few flakes of snow floated down to join the others on the ground.

  We had managed to rekindle the fire. I had known a moment of terror when I awoke, cold and stiff in every limb, to find the fire out. Far worse was that the injured horse was gone. As useless as the animal had been to us, it might at the very least have given warning of wolves. And it would have given them something to prey on rather than me, Tess, and Sarah, I had thought callously.

  “You’re so cold, Nell. You shouldn’t have stayed up there for so long.” Tess pulled the buffalo hide up over my shoulders.

  “I’ll go stand by the fire in a moment. I just wanted to talk to you while Sarah’s still asleep. What are we going to do? We’ve wasted half the day waiting, and no one has come.” I stuck my hands, freezing despite my mittens, back under my armpits. “We have no food—aside from the biscuit I saved for Sarah—and in perhaps three, four hours, it’ll be dark again. I’d be sorry to prove Judah right.”

  I would indeed. For Sarah’s sake, I had tried to make light of the situation all through the long morning. I had kept her busy gathering wood for the fire, telling her I had fallen, and Mr. Poulton had gone to get help. Tess, stalwart, played games with Sarah inside the wagon while I stood a lonely vigil for as long as I could on the trail.

  I had hoped against hope to see the moving specks on the horizon that would mean Pastor Lombardi had come for us. But nothing had moved in the frigid air except the occasional bird. Even with the rifle on the ground beside me, I had been in a constant state of terror that a pack of wolves would sneak up on me. Or that they would attack the wagon and I would return to find Sarah and Tess mauled to death—

  Or, more realistically, that the snow would fall deep and we would be completely stranded. So far the snowfall had been light. No more than an inch of white powder dusted the ground, settling between the grasses and sprinkling the bare branches of the trees in the gully like fine sugar. But I was certain it was colder than it had been the night before. There was something ominous about the lowering gray clouds that seemed to press down on us from the vast sky.

  “If it snows hard, you won’t be able to move so fast.” Tess’s words echoed my thoughts. “Or maybe not at all. I think if you’re going to go, Nell, it should be soon.”

  “I know.” The notion of attempting the trail by foot had been on my mind since the morning. Tess had initially opposed it, and she was perfectly correct that the safest course of action was to stay put and wait for a search party. But as the day dragged on and the clouds darkened, the possibility of being stranded in an impassible snowstorm had thrown both of us into a far less certain state of mind.

  When we’d been forced to make camp, Judah had estimated we were about two hours away from the Lombardi mission. All I had to do was to walk along the trail for maybe three or four hours—for I was sure the wagon didn’t travel all that fast—and I would find the mission and direct the rescue efforts to the right place.

  “You must take the buffalo hide, Nell,” Tess said. “We have enough blankets. It’s a pity Mr. Poulton took the other one though. It was ungallant of him.”

  “I don’t think gallan
try was foremost in his mind,” I said, gingerly touching my sore face. Handfuls of snow, scraped up from the grass at the edge of the trail, had brought down the swelling at the cost of red, raw fingers, and I could now see out of my left eye again. But the soreness extended from my cheekbone to my ear, almost down to the jawline and up to the temple. I could only begin to imagine what it looked like.

  Tess watched me for a minute as I stared out of the front of the wagon, my mind a whirl of indecision. “Make up your mind, Nell,” she said. “Whatever you do will be right in my eyes, but if you decide to go, now really is the best time. If you go when Sary’s awake, she’ll scream and cry. That will be hard for all of us.”

  I nodded, wincing as the movement sent a lancing pain through my face. We had been over this a hundred times. Now was the time for action.

  “I’ll build up the fire before I leave,” I said. “And you keep a tight hold on that rifle, Tess.”

  With a longing glance at the sleeping form of my daughter, I hugged Tess tight and then grabbed the buffalo hide she held out to me. “Tell Sarah—tell her I love her and I didn’t want to leave her.”

  I piled the fire high, adding the thickest branches I could find in the hope they would hold the heat for several hours. And then with a last look at the wagon, I shrugged the buffalo hide over my shoulders, its thick, coarse fur enveloping me in its warmth, and set off one more time up the slope that led to the trail.

  “Look after me, Mama,” I whispered to the sky. “Tell me what to do.”

  For some reason, memories of my mother had been crowding in thick and fast all that long day. There had been moments when her presence seemed almost tangible. I had sworn once or twice I could smell her lily-of-the-valley perfume on the bitter, snow-laden wind. As I began to walk as fast as I could, my head ducked to stop the keen wind from making my face hurt even more, I clung to her memory. As if, at the end of the trail, I would find my home.

  And yet—shouldn’t it be my father I sought in this howling cold? For what I was doing now was exactly what he had done all those years ago—gone on a rescue mission because he couldn’t wait for help to come. And he had died in the snow and left behind him a child—me—almost the same age Sarah was now. Perhaps it was my fate to repeat his.

  When I had been safely ensconced inside the wagon, the plains had seemed immense but friendly, a landscape of waving grasses and the ghosts of summer’s flowers sparkling in the frosty sunlight. Now that I was alone on the trail under a leaden, cold sky, the undulating landscape took on a sinister aspect.

  As my onward march nibbled away at the miles, step by pitifully small step, I began to imagine I was walking along the spine of a sleeping giant, a Gulliver so vast that his torso had no end to it. That the giant was dreaming I had no doubt. It didn’t seem possible that the voices I detected, rising and falling like the ebb and flow of a conversation only half-heard, were just the sounds made by the wind. That wind had now turned vicious and whipped along the ground in a roar of speed that flattened the grasses and tossed the seed heads wildly as I passed them.

  I had been walking for—one hour, two? I no longer knew—when the clouds darkened to pewter gray. The snow began to fall in earnest, at first in soft, mounded flakes, but soon in stinging ice crystals that assaulted my eyes and forced me to walk with my head bowed in defense. The wind hurled the chips of ice up and under the buffalo hide I had wrapped tight around my shoulders. It stole away the warmth from my legs and midriff so that shivers of cold moved upward to join with the rivulets of icy snow melting down my neck.

  My hands, even clad in mittens, would begin to ache if exposed too long to the biting wind. I changed their positions frequently and suffered a loss of heat every time I did so. My feet didn’t hurt—from the cold at least—because I simply refused to stop for even a second. I doggedly put one foot in front of another to the rhythm of the tunes I sang in my head to block out all thought of what I was doing and where this could end.

  When the wind shifted and the snow turned once more to loose, soft flakes, I raised my head with relief, hoping to soothe my aching neck. Only to find that a new torment had been prepared for me. Now the snow tickled my nose and cheeks, making them itch. Every time I used my hand to scrub at my face, the hide would slip, and a small cascade of snow would join in the assault on the dryness of my clothing.

  After a while, I realized I was repeating the same words under my breath again and again and again. “In the sweet by and by, we shall meet on that beautiful shore.”

  It was my last memory of Mama’s voice raised in song, from the summer after Sarah was conceived but before anyone save myself knew of my disgrace. She had taken a fancy to the new hymn they were singing at our church and trilled it as she sewed, arranged flowers, or sorted her correspondence. Without my realizing it, the words had taken root in my brain only to burst forth in this time of peril.

  “We shall sing on that beautiful shore, the melodious songs of the blessed, and our spirits shall sorrow no more, not a sigh for the blessing of rest.”

  There were other verses, I knew, but I couldn’t remember them however hard I tried to reach the memory of Mama’s high warble, muted by the plush upholstery of our parlor. “You goose, Nell, you have forgotten,” I heard her say. Or was it the wind?

  I realized that some time had passed without any awareness of what I was doing. Was I still on the trail? My heart gave a sudden jolt of fear, and I looked wildly about me. Yes—I thought I was. At least, I was following a jagged line of clean, blank snow that cut through the uneven landscape of grass stalks and the black dots of sunflowers, their petals long dissolved into the dirt.

  I looked down at my boots, which were covered by the merest layer of snow. Why had I stopped? How long had I been standing there? “I mustn’t stop,” I muttered under my breath. “Don’t distract me, Mama, I have to keep walking. Help me to live.”

  In-the-SWEET—by-and-BY—no, that was the wrong rhythm, it made me stumble. I could not fall now. In-the-swee-ee-eet-by-and-by-eye-eye—yes, that was better, I could move more easily to that.

  You would think, with all this walking, that I’d be warmer. It was strange how I didn’t seem able to get warm. But it was dark, of course, and the absence of the sun would make everything colder. How long had it been dark?

  In-the-sweeeeeet . . . Perhaps I should just let the buffalo hide fall. It wasn’t keeping me warm anymore, after all, and it was a dreadful heavy thing. Or perhaps I was warm. I had stopped shivering, and that was good. I could go faster without the burden of the buffalo skin—

  “And then you will DIE-ie-ie,” the wind whispered to me, and I shrieked back in terror, a formless, wordless scream that tore at my throat and left me shaking.

  The horror of the night invaded me like a bolt of lightning. I wasn’t going to survive, was I? I was alone in the snow, with endless miles before me and endless miles behind. I had made my decision, I had taken my gamble, and I was going to lose.

  So be it, I decided, the moment of fear passing. We shall sing on that beautiful shore. I gritted my teeth—at least I thought I did, I could barely feel my face anymore—and did my best to hitch the buffalo hide more tightly around me.

  I’ve never seen the sea, I thought. Or did they mean a shore like Lake Michigan’s, all scrub and dead alewives? That wasn’t particularly beautiful, but it was the only shore I knew. No, they must mean the sea, I decided. Was the seashore beautiful? I hoped there would be flowers, for Mama’s sake. But I would not stop walking, not until I found myself at a shore that was, in point of fact, beautiful. There, I had my resolution.

  There was a light up ahead, but I had seen that before. It was a ghost light, I was sure, because it seemed to come from no definite source, just flickers that turned the snow gold but gave no heat. There were voices too, but they were the wind. Keep walking.

  “It was a wolf.”

  “It was a scream.”

  “Wolves make a noise like that, Martin. You haven’t
been out on the plains enough.”

  Martin?

  I opened my mouth to call, but only a whimper emerged. “Mama.” No, that was wrong, wasn’t it? She was on the beautiful shore. I took a deep breath. “Martin!” If only the snow had not decided to begin falling more densely. As dark as it was, if the snow would stop falling, the white snowpack would surely give me something to see by.

  The light burst forth in full radiance, like the sun coming out from behind a cloud, and blinded me. I threw up a hand to shield my eyes, and a bucketful of snow cascaded down my back from the slipping buffalo hide. I wailed feebly in protest, like a child who has had quite enough of the day and just wants to go to bed now.

  There were two lights, I realized. One hung back and said, “Did you see that?” but the other darted toward me, rocking dizzily from side to side. I was about to protest at the lurching movement when the light plunged to somewhere near my feet, and something wrapped itself tight around me.

  “I found the mission,” I heard myself saying. “I found the mission, didn’t I? Tess—and Sarah—they’re all alone—come back with me; we’ll fetch them.”

  My feet went out from under me, and my empty stomach lurched as the giant upon whose spine I had been walking swung me into the air. The buffalo hide slipped completely away, and I gasped at the shock of cold on my chest and shoulders.

  “Get that,” I heard the giant say, and then the lights began to dance, whirling like the snow. Better close my eyes, I thought, or I’ll be sick. I felt the scrape of a button against my cheek, and gave myself up, gratefully, to the dark.

  45

  Cabin

  “Are you completely insane?” Martin asked. “No, don’t answer that. Take a sip of this.”

  I twisted my face away from the nasty smell. “You know I don’t drink.” Was that my voice, so far away and weak?