The High Divide

by Lin Enger

  The water was sweet and cool, and it tingled through his arms and pricked at the tips of his fingers. He drained it without taking a breath.

  “And I have something for you,” he said.

  In the back of the wagon he rummaged through what was left of his stash of gifts and came up with a green drinking glass and a red bandanna. He brought them inside, where she smiled her thanks, showing four teeth left in her gums—one on the top, three on the bottom. She held the glass above her head, peering through it at the hanging lamp, turning it this way and that before setting it carefully on her shelf. She returned to her little bench, where she set about wrapping the bandanna around her neck and making an elaborate knot at the front of her throat.

  Then they sat for a while, a few feet apart, Ulysses on the chair, she on her bench. Her eyes closed, and her chin fell against her chest and remained there.

  “If you don’t mind,” he said, “I think I’ll go outside and try for a little shut-eye. First light, I’ll be moving along.”

  She didn’t respond, but when he cleared his throat one of her eyes fluttered open.

  “I do have a question for you,” he said. “I was wondering if you know of a man called Magpie.” He repeated the name, “Mag Pie,” as if it were two words.

  Her second eye snapped open.

  “Magpie,” Ulysses said again.

  In a scratchy, unused voice—it was the first time he’d heard her use it—she said, “Magpie,” lifting an eyebrow and pointing a crooked finger at Ulysses and shaking her head, as if to say, That’s not your name.

  He touched his chest. “I’m not Magpie, no,” he said.

  The old woman closed her eyes again.

  Outside it was cold, heading toward a good frost. He climbed into the bed of the wagon and pulled his big quilt around himself and the heavy canvas tarpaulin on top of that. He lay on his back, looking straight up at stars so thick some giant hand might have skimmed cream from the pail and tossed it up against the firmament. He could make out Orion and both dippers, big and small. Also Pegasus, Cassiopeia, and Gemini.

  He closed his eyes, turned on his side, and curled up tight, pulling his covers close around himself. Fifteen yards away the ox was breathing with less difficulty than before, and Ulysses dared to hope it might have turned a corner, that tomorrow would be better, or at least no worse. From downriver a goose called. Seconds later a coyote answered with three long howls, but Ulysses didn’t hear it—he was already sleeping.

  In the morning he woke with the sun in his face and knew it was past his usual time to rise. His feet tingled as they did whenever he slept hard and well, but the strap of the beaded tobacco pouch was biting into the skin of his neck, and so he threw off the canvas and the quilt too, and he pulled the strap from where it was binding and settled the pouch at the center of his chest. He breathed in the smell of the dry grass and of the river that sighed and muttered just yards away. For a minute he lay there with his eyes closed, not willing just yet to let his day begin. He might have allowed himself a bit more rest except that he sensed a presence. When he opened his eyes, what he saw—no more than a foot above his face—was the old woman staring at him, her face upside down, her wrinkled mouth pursed and disapproving. She was perched on the buckboard of the wagon, her hands gripping the back of it, and she was looking down squarely at the beaded pouch that rested on Ulysses’s chest.

  Instinctively, he brought a hand up to cover it, and no sooner did he move than she pulled her face away and scrambled down off the wagon to the ground. Ulysses sat up and watched her move quickly through the grass and sage to the sand along the edge of the river, where she turned around and looked back at him, setting her fists on her waist and tilting her head. She lifted a long willow stick and waved it in the air, motioning for him to join her.

  “All right,” he said, and pushed himself up from his hard bed, every joint creaking. It felt as if his bones were detaching from each other. He climbed down from the wagon and joined her in his stocking feet on the cold sand.

  “What is it?” he said.

  She pointed at the river with her stick and then at the sand in front of her and made a line in it, about a foot long and parallel to the river’s flow. Then as if to say, Hear me now, she pointed once more at the river and again at the line she had drawn in the sand.

  “I see. So that’s the Tongue,” he said, gesturing toward the line she had made.

  She drew a second line, this one perpendicular to the other, making what looked like a capital T, though the horizontal top line was longer than the vertical one she’d drawn first. She performed her work carefully, bent over double at the waist, and when she was finished, she looked up at Ulysses, her eyes bright and snapping.

  He said, “If your first line, there”—he pointed to it—“is the Tongue, which flows north, then that one”—he pointed again—“has got to be the Yellowstone, which the Tongue feeds into. Am I right? The Yellowstone?”

  She stepped back from her scratching and blinked for a few moments, as if thinking hard. Then she bent over and started in again with her willow stick, this time drawing a series of small lines—tributaries, Ulysses had to assume—all of which led into the Yellowstone from the north. From time to time she glanced up to be sure he was paying attention.

  “Yes, yes,” he said.

  When she was done, she tossed the stick aside and stepped forward to the ground on which she had drawn her map and crouched there, making herself so small that from a distance she might have been mistaken for a child. With her tiny fingers she began to construct mounds of sand like small soup bowls turned upside down. She worked quickly, not glancing up at all, intent on her excavations, and when she had created half a dozen of these mounds, which were scattered among the tributaries beyond the Yellowstone, she finally looked up, her face cocked and waiting.

  Ulysses nodded. “Those would be the hills and buttes of the Divide, the high country north of the Yellowstone and south of the Missouri.”

  She smiled, apparently satisfied that he understood—though whether she recognized the words he uttered, he couldn’t tell. She stood up from the sand, retrieved her willow stick, and aimed it straight at the tobacco pouch hanging from Ulysses’s neck, the tip of her stick touching the colored beads. Then she reached out and tapped several times on the hills she’d fashioned in the sand before speaking clearly in her squawky, unpracticed voice.

  “Magpie,” she said.

  15

  The Cost of Help

  For days she’d been lying sick on the heavy robe, unable to rest even in sleep, unable to throw off the dead weight that was pushing her down beneath the surface where the dream was always the same one. She was riding in one of the canal boats in her old neighborhood, sitting in the prow as the boatman poled her along. For no good reason, he refused to dock at Holmen’s Street, her stop, and despite her pleas kept poling on, all the way around the circular route—past the castle, past the old brewery, past the library and the stock exchange, and then past Holmen’s again, refusing to come alongside and let her out. Even worse, each time they floated by the Gammel Street bazaar, she could see Ulysses sitting at a table near the beer stand. He was naked and shameless, his long limbs splayed out in the sun as he drank dark, foamy ale from a glass mug. And though she called to him and waved at him, begged him to help her, he ignored her completely.

  On the third afternoon of her fever, she rose through brightening fathoms into the close air of the Two Blood home, Agnes sitting right beside her. Against the old woman’s gentle arguments, Gretta dressed herself and went outside into the blinding sun and walked north toward the house she had never visited but only heard stories of—the house she’d questioned her husband about just once.

  “Of course I haven’t been there,” he said, and laughed at her.

  At the time, she thought he might be embarrassed by her lack of faith in him. Now she wondered if he was laughing at her for how incompletely she knew him, for thinking the distance
between them had something to do with a girl, when in fact his secrets were so much deeper. In any case, she would be a fool at this point if she hadn’t seen a pattern—first, the meeting in church about the burial of the girl, likely an Indian, and then his fight at the depot over the Indian family. It was true that her husband’s sense of fairness had been oddly heightened by the experience of baptism, but he might have chosen other battles besides those two. And so she needed to see this woman face-to-face, no matter what people might think—as if it mattered what they thought. For all she knew, they’d think she was going to Mary for a job!

  The house stood just past the town line, behind a wall of pine trees interspersed with young aspens, the trees so thick there was no seeing through them, and then beyond the trees a high board fence besides. Gretta unlatched the gate and walked up to the door, which was opened to her by a girl who looked fourteen or fifteen, with red hair and gray eyes.

  “Are you here to see Mary?”

  Gretta nodded.

  She was led into the house and through the parlor to a side porch, where the girl pointed her to a rattan chair. Until today Gretta had seen Mary only from a distance. But now, entering the room, she looked tidy, more like a schoolmarm than a madam, with a tailored dress that was buttoned to the neck and graying hair pulled into a neat pile on top of her head. Her fingernails were clean and manicured, her posture was straight and her chin proud.

  “I was surprised when you didn’t come by earlier, after the meeting last winter,” Mary said. “But now after so long, I have to say I didn’t expect you.” She spoke precisely, enunciating each word, her voice full and melodic.

  “So you know who I am.”

  “It’s a small town.”

  Now that she was here, Gretta wasn’t sure what to say—or maybe she didn’t know how to say it. She hadn’t expected to feel shoddy in the woman’s presence, nor underdressed and awkward. “I should have come earlier,” she blurted out. “I wanted to.”

  “Were you afraid?”

  “I think I wanted to believe him, but I wasn’t quite sure if I could.”

  “You were afraid.”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he tell you when you asked? After the meeting at the church, I mean.”

  “He said he’d never been here. He said he did what he did because it was the right thing—what God would have told him to do, he said, if God made a habit of coming down and telling us things to our face. He said it wasn’t Christian to deny somebody a proper burial, only on account of their sins.”

  Mary looked off at the sky, which today happened to be the same color as her eyes, a dull blue-green. “He said that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it sounds awfully nice.” She took out a lace handkerchief and dabbed at her nose with it. “But you didn’t believe him when he said he hadn’t been here.”

  “I told myself I should,” Gretta said.

  “And you were right to do so. He has never been here—unlike some of those men in your church, I won’t say most. When your sexton, Mr. Peach, came by and reported to me about the meeting, gave me the council’s decision and told me who said what, I had to think for a minute to figure out who your husband was. But then Mr. Peach told me he was a carpenter, and I remembered when he put up the barn back there, for Smith.” She gestured toward her nearest neighbor to the west, a small farm on the other side of a lilac hedge. “That’s years ago now,” she added.

  “You’re not saying this out of respect for my feelings?” Gretta asked. “To cover things over? Avoid further problems?”

  Mary laughed. “I don’t cover things over, Mrs. Pope. As for problems, I take them as they come.”

  Gretta reached out and laid a hand on the woman’s forearm. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”

  Mary smoothed her dress against her legs and shifted on her seat. “Well, then.” She stood up and without further courtesies led Gretta off the porch, back inside the house—which was neat, quiet, and smelled of soap—and through the parlor to the front door.

  Gretta, tired suddenly, was aware of a weight she’d been carrying that was gone now. “Is it true,” she asked before leaving, “that the girl who died was an Indian? The one you wanted to bury at Our Savior’s?”

  “Oh, I didn’t want to bury her there—it’s what she wanted. And no, she was Swedish. I think in all these years I’ve had one Indian girl, and she didn’t stay on long. Of course, people like to think my girls are different from themselves. Black, Irish—or Indian. It helps explain things, I suppose.”

  “My husband told me she was Indian.”

  Mary Bond shrugged. “How would he know?” she asked.

  Walking back through town Gretta felt lighter on her feet, less constricted in her chest, though in fact she was no wiser in regard to the whereabouts of her men. Not that she’d expected to be, she realized. She was passing by Fogarty’s place, staying well to the other side of the street, when the banker’s son exited the hotel lobby and made a beeline toward her, half running and half walking.

  Gretta didn’t slow her pace.

  “Mrs. Pope, I have something for you,” he called out.

  She glanced back at him. It was a bag he was carrying, and Gretta recognized it—a large canvas bag that she’d sewn herself and always used for shopping at the grocer’s—and now he held it up for her to see as he came on. She stopped to wait for him.

  Herman Stroud was a tall boy with a face that reminded Gretta of a muskrat, his nose flat against his face and a mouth perennially ajar, as if he lacked the energy to close it. He was grinning widely, but she didn’t trust him—not after the way he’d picked on Danny at school. “I work for Mr. Fogarty now,” the boy announced, “and he said for me to give you this. He said it’s got some things in it you might be needing.”

  She took the bag and looked inside. Her boar-bristle hairbrush was there, a sunbonnet, and several pairs of cotton bloomers. To make up for the blush spreading across her face, she said, “Aren’t you supposed to be in school, Herman?”

  “It’s Saturday, Mrs. Pope.”

  “So it is.” She turned with the bag and started walking again.

  “Excuse me,” Herman said, following. “Mr. Fogarty wanted me to ask if your boys are back yet. If that sheriff finally got busy and sent them.”

  Gretta spun around so fast that Herman almost ran into her. “What do you mean? What sheriff?”

  Herman’s smile had widened into a foolish grin. “I don’t know,” he said. “The sheriff that sent the telegram, I suppose. Whoever he is. You’d have to ask Mr. Fogarty.”

  “What telegram?” Gretta asked, looking past Herman toward the hotel, where she imagined Fogerty watching her now, enjoying this. The bastard, the fat bastard! How many ways could he think of to ruin her life?

  “You’ll have to ask Mr. Fogarty, like I said. But he’s gone right now—he’ll be back from Fargo tomorrow.” The boy turned and jumped down from the boardwalk and ran flat-footed across the street, calling back over his shoulder as he went: “He said to tell you he’d be happy for a visit. That he’d love to tell you everything he knows.”

  Gretta turned immediately, gathering her skirt in her fist, and headed straight for the depot, aware even in the sudden fog of anger that nobody would have anything to tell her. Not the telegraph operator, not the sheriff, not anyone. That as long she stayed here in Sloan’s Crossing, there was only one man, apart from Two Blood, who was willing to help her, and that his help wasn’t the sort she needed—though for all that, she still had to decide whether she would take advantage of it, whether it was worth the cost to her, whether there was another way forward that didn’t involve Mead Fogarty.

  16

  U.S.P.

  Hornaday took the cigar from his mouth and cleared his throat. “You know what they say about the Badlands, don’t you?” Next to him the cowboy Sully was sleeping again, his stubbled chin resting on his chest. The boys, side by side, were sitting across from the t
wo men.

  “Nope,” Eli said.

  Beyond the window of their car, the earth had fallen away into ancient, cavernous riverbeds, a dream of towers and grotesque castles as far as they could see, a cemetery of fantastic rock in striations of pink and red. Yellow, purple, orange.

  “The devil’s backyard. Get turned around down there and you never get out. Bottomless gorges and pits of burning lava. I’m just glad we’re up here, floating across.”

  Cracking an eye, Sully said, “Myself, I had to go after some curly-sided yearlings that wandered down a dry creek. Heard ’em bellering someplace ahead of me. Never found ’em, but I’m telling you, you could smell roast beef coming out of that smoking brimstone.”

  Danny glanced at his brother and then across at Hornaday. “You think they have many derailments along this stretch?” he asked.

  Sully laughed through his teeth, but Hornaday said, “I asked the conductor that same question, and he reassured me we’ll be just fine.”

  By late afternoon as they rattled into Miles City—which was laid out south of the Yellowstone—the horizon had regathered itself beneath a pale sky, the reach between here and there an expanse of rolling, gray-brown prairie in all directions. To the west a long, high butte stretched out beneath the sun like a sleeping cougar. The river was blue and wide, its choppy waters dotted with fishing skiffs. There was also a ferry docked at a crooked pier and a big red paddleboat steaming against the current. The dusty town itself was busy with wagons and carts and horses. Down the middle of its rutted central street a herd of a dozen sheep advanced almost formally, neither rushing nor lagging, driven by a mangy dog and a boy carrying an ancient double-barrel shotgun. Eli had never stepped foot on Montana Territory, but there was something here he could feel on his skin, dry and electric, something he could see in the faces, too, with their strong cheekbones and eyes that managed to hold a fair bit of the country’s impressive distances—men mostly, all wearing hats and pointed boots, their pants hanging low in the crotch, but women as well, bare legs flashing in their windblown skirts, and hips aroll as if mounted on hidden wheels.