“Have you any family in Saint Louis?”
“Not any longer,” Cora admitted. “But if I can get my asking price, I should have enough money left over to board somewhere for a few months until I can find work.”
“Work?” Nettie Mae didn’t try to stifle a derisive grunt. “What work can you do?”
“Why, you’ve seen for yourself how well I can work when necessity demands.” Cora sounded rather wounded. “I might take up as a cook in a fine household. Or I may find work as a seamstress.”
“Might. May. These aren’t certainties, Cora.”
Even as she spoke, Nettie Mae scolded her own foolishness. Don’t spoil this, you witless woman. You could be rid of her by the spring thaw. What does it matter to you whether she finds suitable work or starves? If Cora Bemis ended in a Saint Louis gutter, some noble Christian charity would take in her younger children and see that they were raised in kindly homes. There might be little hope for Beulah, old as she was, except to take up as a maid or something worse. But Beulah’s fate was none of Nettie Mae’s affair, either. Let God do with the girl whatever He liked.
“And your husband?” Nettie Mae went on, against her own better judgment. “What of him? He’s to be set free in under two years.”
“Yes,” Cora said, turning her face away, lowering her eyes in shame. “About Ernest. I’ve written a letter for him. The letter explains everything—what I mean to do, where I mean to go. I’ve told him in the letter that I can’t go on this way.” Her voice broke, but she pressed doggedly on. “I never took to life on the prairie, as Ernest hoped I would, and living here without him is far more than I can bear. I told him he may come and find me and the children, when he is free . . . if he still wants me after . . .”
Wisely, she trailed off into silence. The sheep called intermittently, husky and low. The space between Cora and Nettie Mae, the distance they kept, felt dense with the weight of mistrust, and Nettie Mae resisted the urge to shift her feet, to flinch from the discomfort of her long, steadfast hatred.
After a pause, Cora resumed. “Anyhow, I will send the letter along with whomever can ride to town, once the road is passable. He can deliver the letter to Ernest at the jail.”
“He. So you expect Clyde to go traipsing off on this errand.” Not that Nettie Mae had harbored the least doubt of Cora’s intentions. But it did give her satisfaction, to pin Cora to the wall with her own words. “Well, Clyde can’t be spared. In case you haven’t noticed, he’s the only person who does the bulk of the outdoor work now that the snows have come. Unless there’s some dire emergency—and I pray every day that God will spare us such suffering—Clyde will stay right here.”
“It doesn’t have to be Clyde,” Cora said timidly. “A rider may come here from Paintrock, and—”
“For what purpose?”
“Who can say? A delivery.”
“In the dead of winter?”
“Stranger things have happened.”
“Not here. Not in November.”
“The sheriff rode down from Paintrock, after . . .”
Again, Cora stumbled into stillness. Nettie Mae narrowed her eyes at the woman, taking in the flush of her fine, pretty face with no small amount of satisfaction. More than winter’s chill had brought the color to Cora’s cheeks. It was shame that made her blush. Well-deserved shame.
“Your plan is a foolish one,” Nettie Mae said. “It’s time you faced the truth, Cora Bemis. No one in Paintrock will believe that the china truly came from Ulysses Grant, and without the president’s name attached to it, you’ll never get enough money to see you all the way to Saint Louis. If they do believe the china came from the president, then they’ll see it for what it is—what you would see yourself, if you were an honest woman. A payoff. A bribe meant to buy your silence.”
Trembling, Cora pulled the edges of her shawl tightly around her shoulders. Even in the cold air, the rosy glow faded from her cheeks, replaced by the pallor of shock.
Cora’s air of breakable delicacy only fed Nettie Mae’s resentment as tinder feeds a fire. “I speak the truth, and the sooner you accept the facts, the better off you’ll be. If President Grant truly did send that china set to you, he didn’t mean it as a kindly gesture. He meant for it to stop your mouth. Oh, don’t look so startled, Cora. Surely you can understand. Now that the general has ascended to the White House, the Grant family won’t have it whispered about that one of their number got a bastard daughter on some licentious girl. Yes, Clyde told me everything. I know all about your birth. And I’ve sense enough to see that President Grant intends to keep the tale from spreading any farther and sullying his family’s good name.”
Cora stared at Nettie Mae for a long moment, mouth working in speechless dismay. Finally, the woman croaked, “Well, I . . . I . . .” Then she turned on her heel and stalked back toward the house.
Snow lifted on a sudden gust of wind, spiraling around Nettie Mae’s skirt. She stamped her cold feet to bring feeling back to her toes and tried to smile with grim satisfaction, but the smile slid at once from her face. Had she not begged the Lord, just minutes before, for a chance at redemption—an opportunity to cast bitterness from her heart and make good on a new start, a new life?
But there is no mending the damage between Cora and me, Nettie Mae told herself. Why should I be kind to a woman who dealt me so grave an insult? What sense is there in forgiving an adulteress—in forgiving the death of my husband?
Nettie Mae summoned memories of Substance: his broad, imposing body, the loudness of his voice, the irrefutable authority of his command. If she had hoped to find comfort in recalling her dead husband, that hope proved to be in vain. For what she remembered most clearly was not the man’s steady work, nor his capability as a provider—not the early days of their marriage, when Nettie Mae still had reason to hope, with the fruitless optimism of a callow girl, for the bliss of wedded life. What she recalled most vividly was Substance’s fist. How tightly he could clench it, how the dry skin of his knuckles would crack with the pressure and go white with strain. How those stone-hard knuckles could split a lip or bruise a cheek or an eye and how the color would linger for weeks, purple fading to brown fading to yellow.
The past held no warmth for Nettie Mae. The present was cold, winter bitter, but she took comfort in the persistence of snowfall. Snow reshaped the world. It suppressed memory, drawing everything that mattered here and now into a tight and immediate circle. Far beyond the fields, obscured by a shroud of white, the snow was mounding over a riverside grave, softening the curve of the soil, pressing memory down beneath the mute silence of the season.
CORA
All of the world had surrendered to winter. Whenever Cora paused beside one of the sod house’s windows and stared out, she saw nothing but the endlessness of white. White fields piled so high with snow that no rounded heaps remained to mark the fences or the boundary posts of the Webber farm. White flat nothingness where the road should have been. And beyond—where once lay the parched pale gold of prairie, the monotony broken by a mercy of violet shadows—only a featureless expanse of snow remained, unvaried, losing itself in the white void that had replaced the horizon.
Cora had never liked to face the winter, to confront its vast sameness, the dreadful long reach of its stillness and power. Winter had always made her feel lonely and small, even in the city. On the prairie she had gained a whole new understanding of what it meant to be isolated and insignificant. And this winter was worse than any Cora could remember. The snows had come so early and had persisted for weeks, until the first-story windows of the sod-brick house were half-buried and Clyde was obliged to shovel away the dense, wet plague every two or three days, lest the house grow too dark and confined. Hemmed in by bleak cold, Cora would have preferred to distract herself by sewing or baking bread or playing with the children, always with her back to the snow-muffled world. But if she didn’t watch, she wouldn’t see—wouldn’t know when fortune smiled on her at last and the chance came
to send her letter to the Paintrock jail and a messenger to town bearing word of the treasure Cora intended to sell.
And so Cora stopped beside every window whenever the rounds of her chores carried her near a frosted square of glass. There she would watch for signs of a break in the snowfall, a stretch of clear days to come, a sleigh creeping slowly down the buried track of the road. A sign—any small sign God cared to send that Cora wouldn’t remain imprisoned forever in this dim house with its cold, hard-eyed mistress. A sign that she might soon put the prairie at her back and turn her face toward the beacon of the city. When necessity took Cora outdoors, she would stand for as long as she could bear the cold, gazing toward the road, with one hand raised to shield her eyes against the glare. Hope made every breath shallow in her chest. But the road to Paintrock remained untraveled, the snows deep and impassable.
Weeks dragged by, and though the snowfall did slacken and finally cease altogether—though the cloud cover lifted, revealing a sky of sharp, brittle blue, hanging high and alien above a painfully brilliant plain—still no sleigh appeared to cut across the drifts where the road ought to be. There was no use trying to ride the twenty miles to Paintrock as long as the route was buried. Cora knew that much, yet not a day passed but she looked down from her bedroom window to the horses in their paddock, shaggy and huddled against the cold, and wondered how far she could expect to ride before daylight faded. It had been years since Cora had ridden a horse; she had never been good at it. But she would gladly have gone to Paintrock herself—no need to ask Clyde for the favor—if she’d thought she could survive the journey.
In the weeks since Nettie Mae had so cruelly taunted her about the president’s china, Cora had steadfastly refused to believe what the mistress of the sod house had said. Even in winter, there was no lack of work to be done, and as long as Cora kept her hands and thoughts occupied with mending or baking, she could convince herself that President Grant’s gift had been kindly intended. But when night fell—when Cora had washed the children’s faces and heard their prayers and tucked them into their beds, when she lay abed herself, with Beulah already sighing in the sleep that came so easily to the young—Cora found herself haunted by a suspicion that every word Nettie Mae had spoken was the truth. Why indeed would a man so important, so perpetually busy, go to the trouble of locating one woman in the untamed wilderness of Wyoming Territory? Why trouble with the expense of the china itself, to say nothing of its shipment? President Grant gained nothing by extending his kindness to a stranger, a woman whom he would never meet. But silencing the evidence of a family scandal—surely that would be an end to justify both the effort and the cost.
Late at night, her hands and eyes aching from hours of sewing, Cora would lie with her quilts pulled up to her chin, weeping in silent despair, willing herself not to sob lest the bed shake and wake her daughters. She had hoped her relation to the president, now a proven fact, might secure a place for her and her children among Saint Louis society. Or if not a place among society, then at least some small measure of security: dependable work, a decent home, enough friendships that she would no longer suffer in isolation. Cora hadn’t even realized she had built her hopes upon that foundation—not until Nettie Mae shattered it with the hammer of her unrelenting bitterness.
But there was no sense in denying the truth, now that the truth was plain. Cora could only scold herself for the foolish nature of her hope. Hadn’t her dear old grandfather already tried to secure some place for Cora amid the finer families of the city? Hadn’t he devoted his life, his every breath, to building a proper future for the cast-off girl—orphaned by one parent, unwanted by the other? If Grandfather could make nothing of Cora’s connection to the Grants, then Cora herself could expect to do no better.
November gave way to December, each day weakening, the low-riding sun casting a feebler light. If there had ever been a chance that Cora might ride all the way to Paintrock, it died a little more as the days yielded to ever-longer, ever-colder nights. Yet still she paused beside every window, staring and praying. Still she watched the place where the road ought to be. And still she slipped one work-chapped hand into the pocket of her apron, checking for the letter she had written to Ernest on that dreadful day of the flood. The letter had taken up permanent residence in Cora’s pocket. If any chance came to send the folio north to Paintrock, she was determined not to miss it.
On the day when a traveler did appear, Cora was so worn down by the futility of her long vigil that at first she could only stare down from her bedroom window, dull and stupid with surprise, gaping at the small figure as it crossed a wilderness of snow. The sun was preparing to set, and a wash of fleeting color lay warm and low across the winter plain. Cora pressed a hand to her lips, then blinked hard to clear her weary eyes, but this was neither vision nor dream. There was in fact a man gliding toward the Webber farm on a pair of long, shining skis. A huge black animal loped in the man’s wake. Cora gasped, afraid it was a wolf, afraid the man had no inkling of its presence. But then she noted the round, blunt head, the waving tail. It was no wolf, but a large black dog. Broad paws carried it effortlessly across the snowpack.
Cora hurried from the room and caught Beulah’s eye as she carried a pitcher of warm water upstairs for the night’s washing.
“What is it, Ma?”
“Someone’s coming. At least, someone is headed toward the farm. I don’t know whether he intends to stop, but—”
Cora didn’t finish her thought. She brushed past Beulah and all but ran down the stairs, determined to be waiting outside to meet the man if he turned up the lane toward the Webber farm. If he didn’t, Cora would wade all the way out to the road and plead with him to speak to her, beg him to carry a message back to Paintrock. This might be the only chance God provided all the long winter through.
Benjamin and Charles were seated at the kitchen table, picking bread crumbs off their plates and licking smears of apple-peel jelly from the corners of their mouths. Benjamin started up with interest when Cora took her shawl from its hook and turned back toward the sitting room.
“Where are you going, Ma?”
“To the outhouse.”
“No, you’re not. You always take the kitchen door when you go to the outhouse; everyone does.”
Charles sprang from his chair. “Take us with you!”
“Yes,” Benjamin pleaded, “we’re dreadful bored.”
“It’s almost time for bed. If you’re bored, go upstairs and wash your faces and clean your teeth. Beulah has the water ready.”
“We don’t want to clean our teeth!”
“Do as I say.”
The boys did not do as Cora said. They hurried into their coats and were on her heels before she could shut the front door behind her. By that time, the man on the skis had drawn abreast of the sod-brick house. He paused, resting on his poles, a featureless silhouette in the fading light. The black dog circled him, sniffing the ground, lifting its head now and then to bark with excitement.
“A dog!” Charles exclaimed. “Bully!”
“Is it the sheriff?” Benjamin asked. “Does he have news about Pa?”
“Of course not,” Cora said, with no idea whether she spoke the truth. “Run along inside now, both of you.”
From the second story there came a whine of damp-swollen wood against wood—a sash. Cora looked up and found Beulah’s face at the open window.
“Close that window at once,” Cora said. “You’ll let in the cold.”
“Who’s coming, Ma?”
“You heard me, Beulah. Close the window.”
Beulah obeyed, but moments later the front door opened, and Nettie Mae appeared with Miranda in her arms. The girl was wrapped in a quilt. She rubbed one eye, murmuring a sleepy complaint.
“I thought I heard a dog barking,” Nettie Mae said. When she noticed the two figures at the end of the lane—man and dog—she added faintly, “Oh.”
“I don’t know who it is, or why he’s come,” Cora said.
As she spoke, the man turned toward the house. With a flick of his poles, he began skiing up the featureless track that was the farm lane, in gentler seasons.
“Clyde!” Nettie Mae’s shout was high pitched, laced with fear. “Stranger coming.”
Sensing Nettie Mae’s concern, the boys each seized a fistful of Cora’s skirt. Miranda whimpered and hid her face against Nettie Mae’s high collar. Clyde emerged from the house with his shotgun tucked under one arm and Beulah at his side.
“Who is it?” Clyde asked his mother.
Nettie Mae only shook her head.
By that time, the stranger had covered considerable ground. Though dusk was settling in, Cora could make out the man’s features, for he had nearly reached the house. He was young—a few years older than Clyde—with a dark mustache and a broad grin. Evidently, he was glad to have found the Webber farm, whether it was his intended destination or merely a convenient stop along the way.
“Hullo,” the stranger called.
“Wait right there, fella,” Clyde answered, stepping forward so the man could see his gun.
“No need for that, Clyde Webber. Don’t you recognize me?”
“Your face looks familiar, but I can’t place you.”
“Wilbur Christianson. We met in town a time or two before, though I confess it has been more than a year since we last set outside the general store winking at the girls.”
Nettie Mae shot Clyde a furious stare. The young man’s cheeks flushed, but he ignored his mother’s ire.
“Wilbur—I’ll be! I never knew you with that dandy new mustache.” Clyde strode out into the snow, extending his hand to shake. The black dog trotted out to defend its master, growling deep in its chest.
“Come back, Mike.” Wilbur put two fingers into his mouth and whistled, and the dog returned to his side. “Don’t fret none over Mike. He’s a good dog; just tetchy about new people till I tell him it’s all right. I brought him along to keep the wolves away.”
One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow: A Novel Page 34