Yellowstone Memories

by Spinola, Jennifer Rogers

  A figure clad in a long coat pushed open the wooden door, his lantern light shining across the ruined layers of log and stone. “I know it’s gotta be around here. That’s what the ol’ dog said, didn’t he?”

  Wyatt ducked his head as he recognized Kirby Crowder’s voice, and his eyes watered from the dust. He moved just enough to rub his nose against his shoulder, hoping to goodness he didn’t sneeze. He’d spent all spring sneezing as a child when the wild grasses bloomed; twenty-five years hadn’t changed his allergies and wimpy sensitivities much. When the dust blew across the Wyoming plains, he swelled up like a porcupine.

  “Fella’s lyin’ through his teeth.” Boots clomped against boards. “Why, I oughtta …”

  The room grew utterly still, and Wyatt was pretty sure he knew what they were seeing: his boot tracks in the dust leading straight to the root cellar. His chest heaved with nauseated panic.

  “By cricket.” Wyatt heard Kirby’s boots scuff the wooden planks as he squatted down, and something like heavy leather holsters groaned. “Somebody’s been here. Looky this.”

  “Down to the root cellar, I reckon.”

  “You g’won down and see, and I’ll wait here a spell.” Kirby lowered his voice. “See if he comes back—whoever he is.”

  Wyatt eased his head around the side of the chimney to see if by some miracle he and Jewel could outmatch Kirby in weapons, but he needn’t have. A shift in Kirby’s stance and the clanking of heavy holsters confirmed that, yes, Kirby would shoot the daylights out of Wyatt if he even tried to draw his revolver.

  Kirby cocked his shotgun, and the sharp, metallic click echoed through the cabin.

  Benjamin’s boot clatters faded down the stone steps, and Wyatt heard him holler. “There’s a hole busted in the floor. Reckon they’ve already took it?”

  “What do you mean, a hole?” Kirby must’ve leaned under the cellar door to see because his lantern light abruptly died into a cold shadow. “We got here before that Bradford sucker did, that’s for shore. Ain’t nobody else who’d know what that old Injun told us.”

  “Well, somebody’s pulled the floor up.” Benjamin’s voice echoed, low and eerie. “There’s a space underneath, but ain’t nothin’ in it.”

  The cabin silenced, and Wyatt felt himself convulse with a sneeze. His chest shuddered as he pressed his nose closed, and Jewel elbowed him hard in the shin. So hard he almost cried out.

  Wyatt thought he saw Kirby march to the door to check outside, holding out his lantern, and then the image dissolved into watery stripes. His mouth scrunched closed. His nose tickled.

  And he sneezed.

  Exploded, rather.

  Twice. So violently that he rocked backward, banging his head against the wall and knocking off his hat. A startled pigeon flew from the broken section of roof overhead, wings flapping.

  “What in tarnation?” Kirby growled, stalking over in Wyatt’s direction and hoisting his rifle. “Come out now, whoever you are, or I’ll blow you to bits!”

  Wyatt tried to move, but his lungs stifled, and his nose itched. He slid to his knees in misery, fumbling to keep his hold on the revolver. His glasses fell off, clinking against his boots. And he opened his mouth to sneeze again.

  When he opened his eyes, Kirby lay sprawled on the floor and Jewel was raising a heavy wooden plank to swing again. Benjamin hollered and fired a shot behind her, but she ducked. The bullet glanced off a rotten section of log, making a chunk crumble from the wall.

  Instead of swinging again at Kirby, Jewel whirled around and brought the plank square across Benjamin’s middle without any warning, doubling him over. His lantern clattered to the floor, and she wrestled the pistol out of his hand, knocking his hand into the wall until he cried out in pain.

  He lunged after her, but in a quick second she’d cracked him across the skull with his own pistol, knocking his hat off and bringing him to his knees. He struggled to get up, and she laid him out with another blow to the head. Ripping his other revolver from his belt and kicking his rifle down the cellar stairs with a clatter. Just in time to turn the pistol on Kirby, who was scrambling to his feet. Both hands grabbing at pistols in his holster.

  Wyatt stood there, the revolver clenched in his hand. His knees knocking and eyes watering. Unable to take his eyes off Jewel’s quick and fluid movements. If he had any doubts about her ability to kill, she’d removed every one.

  “Why, you little cur!” Kirby turned the barrel of his shotgun around and swung at Jewel with such great force that he struck the wall, splintering the heavy wooden barrel of the gun. Shooting two rounds into the wall behind Jewel with the pistol in his left hand. “Who are you anyway?”

  Jewel ducked, cocking Benjamin’s pistol and leveling it at Kirby’s head. “Don’t worry about who I am,” she retorted. “Drop your gun.”

  Do something, you idiot! Wyatt scolded himself. Don’t let Kirby Crowder take down a woman!

  Wyatt blinked swollen eyes, remembering how his burly father had thrown himself across his mother and two sisters for protection, wrestling five Indian braves as they tried to drag him away. The wagon burned, bristling with arrows; the prairie grasses sputtered with flames. When his father’s great head finally slumped, bloodied, Wyatt counted six arrows sticking out of him—and two gaping bullet wounds.

  His blood trickled down into the smoking prairie grass, a terrible rust-red.

  And when they came to haul away his body and kill the others, his father lifted his hand one last time: plunging his dagger square into the Cheyenne brave’s chest. Even after they carried away the wounded brave, blood and spittle leaking from his mouth, they couldn’t pry the dagger from his father’s dead fingers.

  Wyatt had buried his face in his mother’s side and bawled, terrified.

  “You’re certainly not your father,” everyone said to Wyatt with a shake of the head. As if he wasn’t smart enough to figure that out himself. Uncle Hiram thought him a fool and a skinny excuse for a ranch hand.

  Wyatt felt a pang sting through his chest as he looked down at his slim, freckled hands, bony in the moonlight from the broken roof. Not great and strong and calloused from hard work like his father’s. No, he was scrawny Wyatt Kelly: a twenty-five-year-old who could barely see and whose flaming red hair and glass-blue eyes had been so exotic—so alien—that the Cheyenne warrior who raised the spear to take his childhood spared him out of pity. But mainly fear.

  The same fear that kept them from slaughtering the rare white buffalo. “Sacred,” they called it. “An omen.”

  A spectacle was more like it.

  And such was the reason that Wyatt even lived.

  Instead of pulling the trigger, Wyatt eased backward, letting a shadow obscure his face.

  Before Wyatt could plan a move, the unbelievable sound of horses’ hooves thumping on the ground outside the cabin jarred him upright. He heard shouts, saw bright lights.

  Sidekicks. We’re done for. Wyatt squeezed his eyes closed and tried to imagine how it felt to die—and what would happen after Kirby’s bullet knocked him into the proverbial Kingdom Come. Was there really a heaven and hell like the family Bible depicted in those stuffy old picture plates? Or was it just lights-out, and nothing more than eternal darkness? Sort of like being locked in Crazy Pierre’s root cellar for eternity?

  Oh God, no…. Please. Anything but that.

  “This is Major Marshall from the Yellowstone National Park cavalry,” barked a voice, echoing through the half-open door. “Kirby Crowder? Benjamin? I know you’re in there. Come out with your hands up, or I’ll fill you both full of bullets.”

  Wyatt opened one eye.

  The window shutters flung open, and two soldiers stood there in full uniform, light from lanterns and torches blazing against their brass buttons and cocked revolvers.

  “You’ve been poaching elk and bison off national park property, Crowder. And about two dozen mule deer. We’ve been tracking you for miles. You so much as fire one shot, and we’ll take you do
wn.”

  Wyatt saw Kirby freeze, his pistol aimed at Jewel. Benjamin, who’d roused himself and started to climb to his feet, stood shakily.

  “Better come on out,” another stout voice rang out. “There are six of us here, and we’ll shoot you if we have to.”

  By jingle. He’s right. Wyatt felt his breath go out in a shaky spasm. The army ran Yellowstone now, and they were vigilant about cracking down on poachers. The last fellow who got caught poaching bison red-handed wound up in the guardhouse at Fort Yellowstone before he could reload his musket.

  “You’re surrounded, Kirby,” called the major. “I’ve got men on every side of this place.”

  Wyatt heard whispered curses and stamping feet, and both Crowders frantically rushed around the room, probably looking for an exit or a place to hide.

  The cellar. If either of the Crowders holed up down there, it could be days before the army got them out. But Wyatt couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe.

  Over the ruins of a broken table, Wyatt saw Jewel meet his eye, giving him a slight nod toward the basement.

  Me? Wyatt looked behind him to see if she were gesturing to someone else. She wants me to block the cellar?

  Wyatt licked his lips, sizing up the shadows and shapes in the room, and then suddenly leaped around the chimney, scrambled over stones, and ducked through the cellar door. He slammed the door shut behind him, trembling as he tugged the latch to hold it closed.

  “Wait a second—another one?” Kirby roared from the other side of the door, jerking it hard. “Who’s this? He looks like that scrawny Wyatt Kelly fella, if I didn’t know better.”

  Boots clattered on the floor, and bright light flooded the crack under the door. “Time’s up,” barked the major. “Kirby, Benjamin, drop your weapons and get your hands over your head before I count to three, or I’ll shoot you where you stand.”

  “You, half-breed,” Kirby rasped. “I’ll be back, you hear me? I know where the gold’s at, so don’t bother getting in our way.”

  The major spoke again, his tone harsh and strident. “Now, Kirby.” Wyatt heard someone kick the front door open followed by the sound of booted footsteps and metallic clinking of weapons.

  “There’s somebody else hiding in here, too,” bellowed Kirby in a hoarse voice, banging on the cellar door so hard it rattled Wyatt’s teeth. “And I aim to find out who it is.”

  “I don’t care if it’s Crazy Pierre’s ghost. All I care about is you and your deadbeat brother. It’s three in the doggone morning, and I’m sick of chasing you.” Wyatt heard the major cock his revolver. “One. Two.”

  Kirby’s guns clattered as they hit the floor.

  The US Army. The national park. Reality seemed to fade, ripple, as Wyatt sank to his knees.

  Yellowstone, they called the park—where thunderous falls roared over a yawning chasm of volcanic rock and sulfur steam boiled up from the ground like a watery furnace. Scalding water bubbled and spurted, sometimes hundreds of feet into the air—and shimmering pools of acid carved wildly colored rings and chambers into the rock like glazed Indian pottery.

  Jim Bridger and other explorers had written about “petrified birds and trees” and “waterfalls spouting upwards,” all stinking of volcanic smoke, but most folks thought they were weaving tall tales. Bridger, however, spoke the truth. Wyatt had seen the geysers himself as a skinny kid, prodded along by an impatient Uncle Hiram who wanted to show him the pits of “fire and brimstone” where he was sure the devil lived. And where “boys who disrespect their elders go, too, when they die,” Hiram had added, giving an evil cackle.

  Wyatt had stared, horrified, into a shimmering basin of searing water, heat bubbles breaking on its steaming surface—recalling the black-clad street preacher in Cody who’d wept and shouted about hell, hanging graphic paintings of lost souls in a smoke-filled agony that looked an awful lot like Yellowstone.

  As the mists on the geyser pit lifted, Wyatt peered deep below the shivering water to an underwater pool of clearest crystalline blue—so blue the color hurt his eyes. Beyond it, streaks of red-gold and green intertwined like strands of multihued cliffs against a cobalt Wyoming sky.

  “Uncle Hiram,” he’d said, pointing. Breathless. “How could the devil make those colors? They’re so beautiful, don’t you think?”

  Hiram had leaned forward, scrunching his craggy brow. “Dunno, Wyatt. Mebbe he got bored there in hell. Ain’t nothin’ to do but burn.”

  Wyatt said nothing, gazing over the railing and wondering if Uncle Hiram and the street preacher were right, and the devil made it all. Or if both of them were wrong, and by some sort of divine, comic irony, God had made the whole thing.

  Wyatt had just turned to follow along the rickety boardwalk when a long snort at the far edge of the wood made him turn his head. And there, not thirty feet away, stood a colossal, full-grown bull bison—chest-deep in the hot springs, steam clouding all around him like heavenly stained glass. Two sharp horns curved toward the sky in reckless splendor.

  The biggest animal Wyatt had ever seen. So strong his sinews stood out under his massive brown hide in taut lines, shaggy fur mounting around his enormous head like a king’s chain mail battle cloak. Daring anyone to disturb his respite on such a cool morning.

  The bison stamped his bushy feet, shaking the water into colored rings, and waded a pace or two deeper. Mockingbirds and meadowlarks parted; aspens cringed. He snorted again and tossed his magnificent head, horns gleaming. Breath misting over the water. Huge and defiant eyes caught Wyatt’s in an insolent gaze of absolute fearlessness, should Wyatt dare to challenge his majesty’s peace.

  Wyatt backed up, white-faced, and scrambled up the boardwalk to call for help.

  But no one had noticed the bison. Wyatt stopped, peering over his shoulder. The big beast turned his head away from Wyatt, silent and aloof.

  And Wyatt said nothing. Dry-mouthed. Keeping the secret to himself, a fluttering of pressed-down excitements too wonderful to voice.

  But as he rounded the forested bend, seeing nothing more of the bison but a cloud of steam through the aspen leaves, Wyatt knew one thing: No devil had made Yellowstone.

  It had to be God.

  Someone tugged open the cellar door, and Wyatt looked up at Jewel’s silhouette against stars in the open roof. Crazy Pierre’s dark and ruined house curved around her, silent.

  The stench of sour pickles wafted up from the root cellar, and Wyatt thought suddenly of spiders.

  “Are you all right?” Jewel knelt down and lit the lantern. The glow warmed her face and cupped hands.

  Wyatt tried to raise his head, but it felt heavy.

  “Mr. Kelly?” She shook his shoulder. “They’re gone. You can come out now.” She held up the lantern. “You should have covered me better, you know that? If it were up to you, I’d be dead by now. I think our deal should be more like sixty-forty, not fifty-fifty. But you did keep them out of the cellar. I suppose that counts for something.”

  Something twinkled over her head, like a spider dangling from a silken thread.

  “Did you shoot the buffalo, too?” he murmured, feeling a giddy blackness in his head. “I hope not. It’ll take more rounds than you’ve got in your revolver anyhow.”

  And Wyatt put his head down on the top step.

  Chapter 4

  Wyatt flipped the Bible page and fixed his glasses, trying to look calm and nonchalant, as if he didn’t care a bit. “So you really think I fainted, Mrs. Moreau?” He watched Uncle Hiram in the rocking chair by the fireplace, dozing. His fingers steepled together and eyes closed.

  “You did faint. I didn’t know you were so … sensitive.”

  “I’m not sensitive.” Wyatt felt heat flare in his cheeks.

  “And afraid of spiders.”

  Wyatt scooted his chair back in a huff, blood pulsing in his face. “That’s enough. Read the next Bible story, will you?” He glared over at his uncle again, wondering if he’d been bats to invite Jewel back for tutoring. But
he needed to speak to her about the gold—and by George, Wyatt wasn’t the sort of fellow to slink around the ranch alone with a young girl—married or not—making the ranch hands whisper.

  Jewel looked up at him with a slight smile. “It’s all right, you know that?”

  “What’s all right?” Wyatt’s brow still made two angry lines.

  “To be afraid of things. To be … well, just like you are. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  Wyatt bristled, turning the pages of the Bible faster than necessary. He scrubbed a fist along his cheek, scruffy with patchy red, and hoped he could hide the blush. “Are you going to read or not?” he asked crossly.

  Her gaze probed him with gentle curiosity before turning to the Bible before her. “ ‘Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,’ ” Jewel read aloud over Hiram’s snores, her words clear and beautifully strong. “ ‘Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.’ ”

  “Does that make sense to you?” Wyatt stifled a yawn.

  “Not really.” Jewel blinked at the lines of type, following them with her finger. “Do you have faith, Mr. Kelly?”

  “In what?”

  “In God. In the truth of the Bible.”

  “I … I don’t know.” Wyatt squirmed uncomfortably. “Faith in anything seems a little impossible to me. Although I’m always interested in the truth.”

  “I know you are.”

  “You … what?” Wyatt scratched his red hair uncomfortably.

  “I can tell you’re a man who seeks the truth.” Jewel leaned back and regarded him coolly. “Of course, I could be mistaken. But people do say you keep your word.”

  Wyatt lifted an eyebrow. “I’m not sure anybody around here has a good word to say about me.”

  “You’re quite mistaken, Mr. Kelly.” Jewel leaned forward boldly. “You want to hear truth? You could do so much more with yourself if you stopped trying to be someone you’re not.”

  “Pardon?” Wyatt’s jaw slipped.