The High Divide

by Lin Enger

  “What about my husband?” she’d asked him.

  To which Fogarty only shook his head and smiled. “You know what I need from you, Mrs. Pope. This doesn’t have to be difficult.”

  And in fact it wouldn’t have to be a permanent situation. Or at least that was what she’d been telling herself. She could move into his building, perform the cooking and cleaning—put up with the other requirements, too, such was the curse of women—and save every penny she earned until she was able to book passage to Denmark for Danny and herself. For Eli, too, if he came home. After all, she was still young enough to start over again, wasn’t she?

  The other choice, which was clearer in mind, especially now that she knew where her husband was and knew that he was alive, was almost more frightening, because it would force the questions she had been asking ever since Ulysses left in July. Questions she might not want answers to.

  She covered Danny with the robe and left him there, sleeping. Outside she found Two Blood sitting by the front door, smoking his pipe. He nodded at the empty chair next to him, and she sat down. It was eight o’clock, and a weak sun peeked over the top of Two Blood’s gun shop across the alley. The chill of last night’s hard freeze hadn’t burned away yet. Two Blood got up and went inside to fetch a blanket, which he draped over Gretta’s shoulders.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He sat back down and took a long pull on the pipe, his eyes meeting hers only briefly before glancing away. They looked like pieces of sky with thin clouds drifting through.

  “I was out front of my shop, first light,” he said, “and Danny comes along, fresh from the train. Heading to your house.” Two Blood pointed.

  “Thank you,” she said, again. The man had been so kind to her—his wife, too. But competing now with Gretta’s sense of gratitude was the sudden anger she felt toward her husband. For the first time since Ulysses left home, she felt at liberty to hate him, and the cold rush in her lungs and belly made her almost dizzy. She closed her eyes and clenched her fists to gain control of herself. After a minute, she said, “Danny knows where he is. They found him out in Miles City. Montana Territory.”

  Two Blood looked away. He blew out a long stream of smoke. The tobacco smell was sweet and sharp.

  Gretta said, “He doesn’t want me to come after him. That’s what Danny told me. Danny says they’re planning to come home in a month or so, he and Eli. And that I should wait here for them.”

  Two Blood nodded at this.

  “But I don’t think they’re coming back, and I doubt if Danny does either.”

  Two Blood cleared his throat and spat.

  Gretta said, “Ulysses doesn’t know anything about what’s happened here. To me. About the house, or about Fogarty.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know if I should go after him or not. I’m afraid he doesn’t want to come home. I’m afraid he doesn’t want me anymore. And the way it is right now, I don’t know if I want him.” She opened her hands close beneath her breasts, as if holding a baby there. “Look at what he’s done,” she said. “Look at what he’s done.”

  “If you find him, you could give him what he’s got coming,” Two Blood said.

  “I could?” she said. “No, I don’t think so.”

  Two Blood didn’t speak.

  “I could stay here, you know. Not with you and Agnes, I don’t mean that. But Fogarty’s offered me a job at his place, and I could work for him. At least for now. That might not be such a terrible thing, right?”

  Two Blood turned and looked at her straight on, his light blue eyes blazing now. He said, “As terrible things go, maybe not.”

  “Is that what you think? Do you think it would be an awful thing to do?”

  The old man drew on his pipe and held the smoke in his lungs for longer than seemed possible. He cleared his throat then looked past her. “If it’s traveling money you need, I could help,” he said.

  “No, no.” She reached into the pocket of her skirt and took out the bills and held them up. “He sent this with Danny.”

  “Well, then,” he said, and turned his pipe over and knocked it against the side of his house. He used an index finger to clean out its bowl then wiped the blackened finger on his pants before glancing at her once more, getting up from his chair, and walking back inside.

  That afternoon he took them to the depot in his donkey cart, the one he drove each week out to Prairie Lake, where he liked to fish for northern pike and walleyes. He sat up on the plank seat, elbows on his knees, not acknowledging those they happened to pass in the street. Gretta, too, had learned to keep her eyes to herself and did so even as Danny greeted everyone he knew. At the station Gretta carried their satchel inside and bought two tickets for the westbound leaving at three.

  Through the early hours of the afternoon they watched the country roll past, most of it flat prairie the color of weathered wood. Occasional small settlements appeared then faded away, unpainted ranch houses, struggling farms with chickens and pigs, one-street towns, people carrying on their ordinary lives. Gretta couldn’t help the envy she felt—women darning and baking and collecting eggs.

  Danny stared listlessly out their window. His face was flat, his expression saying, I’ve seen this already, I’ve seen it all, and it hurt Gretta, knowing her son’s life would never be as carefree as it had been until now, something for which she felt responsible. If only she had been able to summon the strength to draw the poison out of Ulysses. If only she hadn’t turned away when she saw the pain in his eyes. In truth, she knew early on that something was wrong, even if she didn’t know what it was. But she had been raised to believe that a man’s burdens were meant for him alone to carry.

  When Gretta was thirteen or fourteen, late one night, long after bedtime, she’d overheard her parents speaking in hushed tones in the kitchen. She crept down the hallway to crouch at the corner where she could listen, not daring to peek but knowing what she would see if she did—her father leaning forward, hands clasped in front of him, his face downcast but peering up at his wife nonetheless, who would be sitting erect, chin level or slightly raised. Gretta heard her father say, “I don’t know what to do,” and her mother respond in the even, toneless voice Gretta despised: “Your complaining to me doesn’t help anything, does it?” It wasn’t long—a few months at the most—before he lost his store to the bank, and soon thereafter went to live with the woman in Nyhavn. Although he did return home the next year, he was never well again. Shortly, in fact, he died, the final sign of his fundamental weakness, according to Gretta’s mother. As a girl Gretta was willing enough to accept this judgment. It explained their predicament, after all. But having someone to blame didn’t save her mother from being a miserable person, more difficult than Gretta was willing to suffer. And so she made her escape to America, to the middle of the continent in St. Paul, where she imagined she would be free from the struggles she’d witnessed—although she still hadn’t learned, any better than her mother, how to listen.

  It was dusk before she finally got Danny to talk. She’d been avoiding the very thought of Jim Powers’s widow but knew that she needed to prepare herself for seeing her, talking with her. She wanted to ask her son about the letter—whether it was a long one and what it said, what kind of paper it was on, what sort of penmanship the woman had. And how she’d signed it: Sincerely, Mrs. Powers? Yours truly? Love, Laura? She wanted to know why Eli had chosen not to bring it home to her but opened it himself instead. He must have been trying to protect her, she thought, though it seemed like a betrayal nonetheless. She wanted to ask Danny what the woman looked like, whether she was pretty or not, whether she had a pleasant voice. Whether she wore fashionable clothes. What, she wanted to ask him, had the woman said to them that might shed light on her motivations? Was she simply the wife of a friend? And if Jim Powers had been such a good friend, why hadn’t Gretta heard of him until now?

  Gretta remembered now the young woman from
church who always stared at Ulysses during their first year in Sloan’s Crossing, the one who sat on the far right side of the sanctuary with old Mrs. Wooten. Mrs. Wooten’s grandniece. The girl ended up marrying and leaving town, and Gretta didn’t even recall her name. But she had been so obvious in her interest that it had been all Gretta could do not to get up and walk over and tell her to keep her big eyes to herself. In truth, few other women had ever seemed to notice Ulysses. The missing ear, Gretta believed, tended to overshadow his jawline and good shoulders and sensitive mouth—this, a blessing for her, although she was ashamed to think so.

  “What did she feed you the night you stayed there?” Gretta asked her son. A harmless enough question, something to get him started.

  “What?”

  “The widow, in Bismarck?”

  “Oh. Chicken.”

  “Does she raise them?”

  “Yup.”

  “She must have been surprised to see you. I mean, she couldn’t have been expecting two boys at her front door.”

  Danny pointed out the window at a hawk on a telegraph pole.

  “Danny?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “What did she say about your father?” Gretta watched her son’s face. He’d always seemed old beyond his years, but now there was a new calculation in his eyes, a cautious control she hadn’t seen before. “Danny?”

  “Only what I told you. About her husband and Dad in the service together. And Dad heading out to Montana, for bones.” Danny glanced up, then he looked back out the window.

  “Did you like her, Danny? Was she nice to you?”

  “She was nice enough.”

  “But you didn’t like her,” Gretta said, unable to help herself.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  He thought for a moment, squinting. “Because of the way she looked at us. Her eyes. Like she was trying to see into our skulls. She made me nervous.”

  A satisfying heat burned in Gretta’s stomach. She bent down for the jar of water from her bag and took a drink, but it was lukewarm and stale.

  Danny moved closer and squeezed her arm, looked up at her. “It’s going to be all right, don’t worry so much,” he said, smiling now, his eyes clear and guileless, very much her boy again.

  II

  Confluence

  20

  Storm Gods

  They rode out that day at sun-up with a breeze behind them, the sky cloudless and light blue. Before crossing at the shallow ford north of town, they stopped to survey the country beyond the Yellowstone, rolling and dusty brown, buffalo grass as far as you could see, not a tree or bush in sight except for what grew along the riverbank and bluffs. No shade and nowhere to hide.

  Eli turned in his saddle and looked over at his father next to him, sitting up straight on the big Appaloosa mare he’d chosen yesterday from the corral at Fort Keogh. When Ulysses glanced back and winked, Eli was reassured despite himself. Maybe this whole enterprise was going to turn out all right. Maybe his father would find the man he was looking for, and maybe the two of them would reach an understanding of some kind. Maybe it was a holy thing, after all, tracking down a man whose family you had killed. Maybe God was behind it, instead of plain craziness. Then again, probably not.

  “Here we go,” Hornaday said, and looked around at the party he’d put together, including an escort of four soldiers from the fort, led by Sergeant Bayliss with his large belly and fat mustache. There was also the celebrated buffalo hunter McNaney, and of course Ulysses and Eli themselves—everyone lined up at the river’s edge, their animals nosing the water. Behind them, perched on the buckboard of a light wagon, was a butcher’s apprentice from Miles City, a boy not much older than Eli by the name of Gumfield, hired to serve as Hornaday’s assistant in matters concerning specimen collection. And finally a six-mule team pulling a month’s provisions, including a ton of oats for the animals, driven by a white-bearded veteran of the Mexican War, McAnna, who had also been hired to cook. Yesterday in a light rain they’d all gathered at the fort to pick up their wagons and teams, load their commissary stores, and choose firearms and horses—everything courtesy of the United States War Department.

  Hornaday called out to the men, his voice striking an odd pitch: “Sergeant Bayliss wants us to gather up on the other side. He has a few words.”

  Bayliss tipped a hand toward Hornaday as if to say You first, and Hornaday urged his black gelding into the water, which flowed shallow and quick here over polished gravel. Bayliss and his troopers followed after. Then at his father’s nod Eli touched his heels to the buckskin mare he was on and splashed into the current, the water soon rising to the boy’s knees, the cold catching the breath out of his lungs. He whipped the horse with his reins, and they surged up the bank to the top of the rise, where his father soon joined him.

  “Will you look at that, Eli,” Ulysses said. “They built a regular highway for us.”

  Winding north was a double-rutted trail that followed a dry creek marked by its alkaline bed, dull-green clutches of sage on either side. It rose, dipped, curved, and rose again, finally seeming to pass into the sky. Clumps of white bones were scattered everyplace.

  “Sunday Creek Trail,” Hornaday said.

  Eli swung around to watch the mule team huffing through the ford, the air cold enough this morning to make small clouds of their breathing. In his belly and lungs he felt the days ahead, stirring. He also felt Gumfield’s eyes on him and, glancing back, made out the boy’s sullen face from fifty yards off, calling to mind Herman Stroud somehow, the same short nose and slack mouth. Or maybe it was just the way he held his head up, like he was better than everybody else. In the corral at the fort yesterday, Gumfield had been quick to claim the sleek-boned Appaloosa mare. He barely got the saddle cinched, though, when Hornaday pulled him aside, whispered in his ear, and pointed to a light wagon, which an orderly was hitching to a cold-blooded gray. The boy’s face loosened and his shoulders fell. When he threw the Appaloosa’s reins on the ground, Hornaday said, “Pick those up,” which Gumfield did just in time for Ulysses to come along and take them from his hand.

  Now on the north bank of the Yellowstone, Sergeant Bayliss climbed into the bed of Gumfield’s wagon as the expedition assembled around him. He took off his faded McClellan cap to reveal the gleaming pink dome of his head. Then he opened his long coat and rubbed his big stomach, grimacing. The set of his red-rimmed eyes was hard. “Something you all need to hear before we start out,” he said, lifting a hand. “There’s talk of Indians loose off the reservations and skulking around the country we’re headed for.” He aimed a fat thumb over his shoulder, north. “Crow, by my reckoning, or they could be Assiniboine for all we know, or Piegan—but out to make trouble, whoever they are. To cause what hell they can. The War Department has ordered a military escort for Doctor Hornaday, as you know, and I’m in charge of it. Are we clear on that?”

  Saddles creaked, and Eli’s mare tossed her head.

  Bayliss turned to Hornaday. “Anything you want to toss in?”

  “I’m happy for the escort,” Hornaday said, “which the Secretary of War has offered as a precaution. But he assured me, in person, that there’s no cause for worry.”

  “The Secretary’s back in Washington, last I heard,” Bayliss snapped.

  Hornaday smiled. “You’re right about that, Sergeant. And I’m not a doctor, by the way.”

  “My error. Now like I was saying, these reports are coming from up in the breaks and coulees, and all along the Divide. Renegades doing who knows what, and nobody can say how many there might be. I have it from Ned Phillips at the Cross Bar Ranch that one of his range hands is unaccounted for. The man was supposed to come in last week and never showed. Not to mention cattle losses steady as the wind. So I’m telling you right now, all of you—stick close till we make our permanent camp. That clear?”

  Eli looked around at the men, none of them looking surprised, though in fact he’d heard no talk until now
about Indian troubles. He wondered if Hornaday had been playing it down. He glanced at his father, whose eyes were scanning the hills ahead.

  “And no running off and chasing after meat,” Bayliss added. “If you see the buff you’re after, well then, my boys go with you. Understand? Otherwise, why the hell have you got us along on this chase? Which, by the way, is a waste of grain and good animals, if you ask me. The herds have been gone from this country since eighty-four.”

  Hornaday laughed, but his eyes glittered hard behind his spectacles. “Respectfully, Sergeant, your man, Ned Phillips? It’s on his word we’re heading to the Big Dry. He’s the one who spotted the animals. Or I should say, his men did.”

  “Spotted them back in June, sir. A small herd is what they saw, a dozen at most. Tell me, do you think our red friends didn’t get wind of that? Of course they did. You think they haven’t had themselves a good hunt? Course they have.”

  Hornaday smiled. “I guess we’ll find out.”

  “That’s it, then,” Bayliss said, and put his hat back on, squeezing it tight over the crown of his bald skull and yanking the small brim down for shade. “Any questions?”

  “What makes you think Crow?” Ulysses asked him.

  Bayliss looked up, his small eyes widening. “Does it matter?”

  “Why not Cheyenne?”

  “Indian expert, are you?”

  “Enough to know the Crow stay home mostly, and have for a long time. Enough to know the Assiniboine are pretty well under control, with that big fort up there. But the Cheyenne—” Ulysses shook his head. “They’ve still got a taste for meat, and they’ve figured out the government shipments aren’t something you can set your clocks to. What are they supposed to do—sit around and wait, like a bunch of old women?”