by Karen Wills
RIVER WITH NO BRIDGE
RIVER WITH NO BRIDGE
KAREN WILLS
FIVE STAR
A part of Gale, a Cengage Company
Copyright © 2017 by Karen Wills
Five Star™ Publishing, a part of Gale, a Cengage Company.
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This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Wills, Karen, author.
Title: River with no bridge / Karen Wills.
Description: Waterville, Maine : Five Star Publishing, 2017. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016057799 (print) | LCCN 2017012159 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432836948 (ebook) | ISBN 1432836943 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432833985 (ebook) | ISBN 1432833987 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432834012 (hardback) | ISBN 1432834010 (hardcover)
eISBN-13: 978-1-4328-3398-5 eISBN-10: 1-43283398-7
Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Historical. | FICTION / Sagas. | GSAFD: Western stories.
Classification: LCC PS3623.I577435 (ebook) | LCC PS3623.I577435 R58 2017 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016057799
First Edition. First Printing: June 2017
This title is available as an e-book.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4328-3398-5 ISBN-10: 1-43283398-7
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Printed in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 21 20 19 18 17
To my mother Evelyn Wills, who gave me so much, including the idea that grew into this book.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to many people who encouraged, advised, and helped me in the completion of this novel. Among them are my mother and members of Authors of the Flathead, my critique group that included Debbie Burke, Jim Satterfield, Phyllis Quat-man, Bev Zierow, Betty Kuffel, and Cindy Dyson. I also thank readers Marie Martin, Karen Feather, Ann Minnett Coleman, Barb Lietz, Janice McCaffrey, and Shirley Rorvik. Librarians and volunteers at the George C. Ruhle Library in Glacier National Park, especially Jane Clark, steered me to the most helpful books, articles, and reports on the history of the Park and the North Fork. Special thanks as well to Cindy Mish who had the heart and foresight to interview many North Fork old-timers back in the 1870s to preserve their memories, which now live on in the George C. Ruhle Library. Zena Beth McGlashan and Richard Gibson gave invaluable advice on early life in Butte, and Kathryn L. McKay on the Flathead Valley and the North Fork of the Flathead River. Thank you to Tiffany Schofield and the editors and staff at Five Star Publishing who helped make the publication of this book a reality. Most of all, I thank my husband Jerry Cunningham whose intelligence, humor, and love stay the course.
Over the decades I’ve read numerous books and articles, particularly in Montana History Magazine, about our western heritage. All have contributed to my understanding of the western experience and to River with No Bridge. Some that deserve special mention are:
Charles River Editors. The San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906 & the 1989 Bay Area Earthquake: The History of California’s Two Deadliest Earthquakes.
Emmons, David M. The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875–1925. Urbana–Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 1990.
Fradkin, Philip L. The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Gibson, Richard L. Lost Butte Montana. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2012.
James, Don. Butte’s Memory Book. Caldwell, ID: Caxton Press, 1983.
McGlashan, Zena Beth. Buried in Butte. Butte, MT: Wordz & Ink Publishing, 2010.
Mckay, Kathryn L. Looking Back: A pictorial history of the Flathead Valley, Montana. Virginia Beach, VA: Donning, 1997.
Porter, Bill (Red Pine). Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits. San Francisco: Mercury House, 1993.
Shea, Debbie Bowman. Irish Butte. Charleston, AC: Arcadia Publishing, 2011.
CHAPTER ONE
Boston, February 1882
Nora Flanagan shivered as she strode from the Parker House Hotel’s staff entrance into the winter night. In minutes her shoe leather and stockings were soaked through, coat and maid’s uniform darkened wet at the hems, and she still faced a two-mile trudge to her tenement. Her worn heel skidded on treacherous ice, and she grabbed a stranglehold on a lamppost. An image of Paddy, her father, slipping under the horses’ hooves leapt unbidden. Would icy streets always bring that memory?
Holding on, she lifted her face into the swirling snowfall that muffled the light. It would purify the city for a few hours before surrendering it back to dingy gray. Nora missed white flakes blanketing the Wicklow Hills of her childhood. She summoned memories of Ireland as she released her grip and walked on through the heavy flakes.
As though conjured by her footsteps crunching on fresh snow, a figure emerged from the alleyway ahead. Gaunt to the point of spectral, the woman carried a bundle that might be an unnaturally still baby. Dressed in rags, she spoke Gaelic in a thin, urgent voice, holding out a dirty hand, sores visible on her arm below a ragged sleeve. Nora froze.
A ghost from the Great Hunger? No, only another Irish woman crushed by circumstances.
Fear and pity competed in Nora’s mind. Thugs hid behind such beggars, murder and assault common on these streets. Just last week a girl from Nora’s tenement had been violated, beaten, and left for dead. Ready to crack skulls before falling victim to such a fate, Nora gripped Paddy’s twelve-inch blackthorn shillelagh tucked in the special pocket she’d sewn. She should have stepped into the street even at the risk of being run down like Paddy, but memories of her da’s broken body stopped her.
“Could you come out of the shadows, please?” She forced her voice to be firm. The woman, perhaps Nora’s own age of eighteen, took a step forward, alone.
“I’ll leave you a coin. Don’t pick it up until I pass.” Nora bent to set a dime on the streetlamp’s plinth—who knew what disease the girl carried—before she caught her breath. What would Paddy Flanagan remark seeing her treat this poor unfortunate so? Despite his weakness for drink he always shared a kind word with the fallen and downtrodden, and he’d taught her to do the same regardless how tight money might be for them or how unappealing the destitute. “No. Let me hand it to you. I wish it could be more.” She dropped the coin into the claw-like hand.
In response to the soft, Gaelic, “God bless you,” Nora crossed herself and hurried on.
Thoughts of Paddy continued. Once when she was just a little red-haired snippet of a girl they’d come upon a magpie dragging an injured wing. Paddy had pulled the wagon to a stop, climbed down, picked up the bird, and fashioned a splint. She remembered his words, “Every feathered creature needs strong wings. They’re like our dreams that carry us a
bove our everyday woes. We’ll have this good luck charm soaring into the clouds before we know it.” They’d kept it until he pronounced it able to fly again. Nora wished she could’ve done the same for that hollow-eyed beggar girl.
A gleaming carriage careened around the corner. The driver lashed his sleek black horses with a great black whip, their hooves thundering. Nora heard the animals’ hoarse breathing as she shrank back.
“Murderers! Arrogant robber baron!” She wailed after it barreled past. This could be the very Boston Brahmin whose carriage ran Paddy down on the cobbled street. Some callous rich man wanting his warm bath and clean sheets after sating his appetites in Boston’s sordid North End. Pity any heedless creature wandering into his path.
Light-headed, Nora squared her shoulders, shuddered, and walked at a brisker pace. She’d gone too long without eating, but couldn’t spend money for more than her one meal at night. She would go hungry before becoming like that desperate street girl. Nora still had work and a place to sleep, wash, and dress, dreary as her life might be. That wretched woman stood only a section below Nora on America’s ladder that she’d dreamed of ascending, but in reality the rungs proved so precarious, so slippery.
Paddy had died with no money and worse, they owed rent. The collector had been by and given her a short extension, but he’d also eyed Nora up and down in a nasty way. Paddy’d been a drinker, but no man would’ve dared leer at his daughter while he lived. Now she must navigate a social wilderness inhabited by predators ready to pounce on an orphaned immigrant girl.
At last Nora reached her tenement, climbed its porch steps, and entered the dim hallway. She grimaced. Gray, humped forms squeaked and scuttled along the cracked, uneven floor. Five by her count. Rats leaving their filthy droppings. Children went barefoot here. No wonder so many sickened and died. She’d stopped trying to learn their names, but she remembered bewildered eyes in grimy faces. Innocence deserved so much better.
She knew it irrational to fear rodents would run up her skirt with their twitching noses, but she always imagined their claws catching at her stockings, their teeth biting at her knees and thighs. She put her work-reddened hand to her mouth, fighting the urge to retch. The devils skittered on the stairwell. They must be in the very walls of this place, them and the roaches.
She stomped and braced to go forward, clomping heavily, watching to make sure none sat on the railing. What a disgusting sight to come home to. Vermin. They needed St. Patrick to lure them off as he’d done the snakes. Her neighbors here needed decent housing, medical help, even clothes. It all came down to needing better than slave wages.
A muscular orange cat leaped from a corner and seized a rat half its size. The victim’s legs scrabbled at the air in futility as its tormentor carried it off. “Good for you, old tabby,” Nora muttered. “Save the children.” Cats grew fat in the North End.
Smells of cabbage, fish, and nameless stews mingled with odors of cramped and overcrowded rooms. The stench of poverty. Sounds of little ones’ wheedling, whining voices, and quarrelling couples surrounded her as she climbed four stories to her thin-walled flat. Inside, the only light shone from the moon through the window.
Nora hung her coat on a nail, unbuttoned and removed her wet shoes, and slipped off her stockings. She put on a pair of worn slippers and padded to the window, undoing her collar and releasing her long red hair.
The moon hovered, a glowing cloud in the snowy sky. Nora pulled a threadbare shawl over her shoulders and warmed leftover stew on her hot plate, enough for a bowl containing a piece of meat with the cabbage. Trying not to fixate on the skeletal beggar or the black horses, she dragged a chair so she could eat before the window with the moon, at least, for company. The stew warmed her weary body, but she ached with missing Paddy always joking and telling stories across from her. She set the bowl aside. “I have nothing and nobody,” she whispered in the emptiness. “What am I to do? What happened to America?”
Silence lived inside her flat while human life hummed in adjoining rooms where neighbors lived crowded, contentious lives, loving and bickering. She heated water, sponge-bathed, and climbed into an old nightgown. For some reason, tonight she prayed to St. Christopher for . . . what? She had no plans for further journeys, but she prayed to the patron saint of travelers anyway. She yearned to find a way out of all this. She’d thought adventure and respectability and freedom from want would all be hers when she left Ireland. Now she prayed for something, anything better than this solitary life of toil and degrading poverty. “St. Christopher, please give me a chance,” she prayed. “I’ve come far, but this life is so hard. I’ll better myself. I’ll work to better myself, if you’ll please give me one chance.”
Next morning, Nora collided hard with her blank slate of a future. Cradling a stack of monogrammed linens against the dampened bosom of her uniform, sniffing the comfort of their hot, clean smell, she half ran through billowing steam in the laundry. Head down so, she rushed past burdened workers hauling tubs that sloshed with the menace of scalding water. Dulled by grief, she performed her tasks like an automaton.
Tade Larkin stood alone in the slanting light below the high window.
She crashed into him.
Stepping back she recognized him at once for one of the black Irish, a stocky blue-eyed man with the curling, thick hair that earned them their name. A burlap bundle rested at his feet. He grinned at her, and she found herself smiling in return at the open admiration in his blue eyes. She hadn’t smiled since Paddy’s death, but there was such a clean, open approval in this man’s face. Their contact had been brief, but with something electric in it.
“May I help you, sir?” she bobbed a maid’s curtsey, her heart inexplicably thumping against the shiny linens, a blush betraying her attempt at nonchalance.
“Would you be helping me all the way to Butte, America?” he asked, mock-beseeching. “No, the fact of it is, I’m looking for my aunt, Agnes Larkin. I’m Tade Larkin, come over the water from County Cork.”
“Nora Flanagan, Boston. Aggie finished her shift and went home.”
He frowned and picked up his bundle, muscles straining against his jacket. She noticed his big hands. Since her tinker’s childhood, Nora had relied on her survivor’s instincts. They’d been asleep, but now reawakened. Could this man be a result of her prayers to St. Christopher? Could he be the start of a journey to something exciting? Better? Meeting him shook her from her dull sadness. How could she prevent his walking away, this clear-eyed man who looked at her with respect, not like so many who assumed an Irish hotel maid came with the room, to be used and left behind?
Nora cast back to his first words. “Butte? Where the miners go? It’s really in Montana Territory in the West, isn’t it?” So many questions. She’d barely spoken since losing her father. Now it seemed important to manage a whole conversation. She tried to slow her breathless prattle. “I have an old family friend there. She writes me from time to time.”
“It is in Montana. They say the Irish get steady work in Butte and a fair wage, too, bringing out the ore. Sure, some of the men from Cork are nearly there already—headed west straightway off the ship.”
“What’s the news from Ireland?” Her voice trembled. Her brother Seamus joined the rebellion so young, just a boy really, yet he died like a man when the British caught and hanged him. The steamy air turned stifling. She willed sorrow over Seamus to recede into the other griefs lingering in her heart’s shadows.
If Tade noticed her distress, he didn’t let on. “Let me buy you dinner when you’re off work and I’ll tell you. You can answer my questions about America.”
Nora hesitated. She’d been so lonely, but wouldn’t a social event during mourning show disrespect? Of course, her da wouldn’t care for any outward show of grief. He hadn’t cared about being respectable when she scolded him for drinking, had he? She winced, feeling guilty. Paddy’s indulgence had mortified her often enough, but he never stopped encouraging her to pursue her dreams.
“It will be your choice entirely.” He stepped back, solid as one of those lovely male statues in the museum she sneaked off to see when she heard people describe them. She’d blushed as she admitted doing so in her first confession afterward.
For the next two hours, Nora moved in a daze as she dusted ornate armoires, changed the linen scarves on dressers, and made up high four-poster beds. She hadn’t spent much time thinking of any man in particular, although her red hair and green eyes drew glances and unwanted propositions. A drunken guest once cornered her in his room. Luckily, his ice-eyed wife interrupted, tapping his shoulder. Life in Boston’s tenements and this maid’s job taught lessons no good Catholic girl in the old country would expect to learn.
Tade Larkin seemed both familiar and exciting. When she saw him, an image emerged of Ireland’s green Wicklow Hills and foam-flecked strands, worlds within worlds where she’d once inhaled salty breezes from faraway American shores. She’d dreamed into clouds that flowered over the sea of some different life, one with challenges, but dignity, too. After four years in Boston’s overcrowded North End, she’d all but given up. The Irish seemed destined for endless losses. But this manly Tade Larkin had a future. Even a melancholy Irish maid could see that.
Her shift over at last, she joined him by the servant’s entrance. She’d have preferred they meet in the lobby under the chandelier radiating light lovely as rainbows, but the prissy manager would fire her on the spot if he caught her there. Tade offered his arm. She lifted her chin and slipped hers through the crook of his elbow, aware of his warmth. She was on her own time now and as good as any of the fine folk whose rooms she cleaned. Better than some by the look of their cast-off litter.