River With No Bridge

by Karen Wills

  “Pea soup,” she muttered, pulling her duster tight.

  Jim materialized out of silvery mist.

  “We’ll wait until it lifts to start, won’t we?” Nora asked.

  He nodded.

  Nora went a short way from camp to squat in the brush, then wash in a shallow stream that tumbled down to the river below. Her cupped hand ached with cold when she splashed her face, her rag towel icy and damp. No wonder her skin had turned dry, her lips rough. Her skirt darkened around the hem with moisture. She curled her toes to keep feeling in them inside cracked shoes. Melancholy visited her with the cold, bringing doubts about what they’d begun. She fought worrying. She had no future in Helena. To escape poverty and actually own land was worth even this discomfort.

  She made an effort to be brisk as she gathered firewood. For a panicky moment she lost the sound of Jim shuffling with his load of wood nearby. She called out, and he reappeared.

  “We have enough,” he said, glancing at the kindling in Nora’s arms. They used old newspaper and damp sticks to start a cold fire. Sluggish, pewter-tinted smoke rose, then leveled into the mist’s sheen. Forenoon sun arrived at last to burn off the fog. Deer grazed below along the far side of the blue-green South Fork of the Flathead. Their fine, balanced shapes grew distinct on the bank’s pebbly, nearly level incline. Heart for the journey reentered Nora.

  She scoured their pans with gravel and creek water, then shook out and rolled up her damp blankets. After Jim harnessed the horses, they began the ascent through and out of the canyon. They got down to walk, both pulling with ropes while the horses heaved against their harnesses to pull the wagon up the incline. All four grunted, panting.

  Clouds lowered again, masking mountaintops and chilling the thin, high air. Nora huddled, turning her collar up and her hat brim down against the beginning drizzle. Vertical strands of torrential gray rain soon pounded them. The wagon lurched and bounced. Jim finally gave Nora the reins and climbed down. He took Wink’s bridle and guided the horses over the rocky trail. The steep ascent exhausted them all. Finally at the summit, they roughnecked, locking the back brakes and skidding down the detritus of a washed-out slope at the start of their descent. Nora stifled cries, not wanting her fear to make things worse for Jim. Going uphill had been nearly impossible, and going downhill threatened a fatal runaway. They used ropes as pulleys, fastened on trees to snub their way down when the wagon threatened to pitch out of control. She marveled at Jim’s willingness to keep going. She kept learning there must be far more to this man than she’d once thought.

  They made a cold, glum camp, putting tarps up, trying to stay dry. Nora shivered until exhaustion brought anxiety-riddled sleep.

  Next day, relentless rain soaked through even the tarp covering their gear and supplies. Icy rivulets ran off their hatbrims to course down between their shoulders.

  Exhausted by their eighth week of bushwhacking or moving on rough trails, they crossed the river, then stopped beside a small lake. After they’d set up camp, several Blackfeet pitched tipis nearby. A long-haired white giant, a mountain man, greeted them, saying the Indians had permission to be off the reservation as he had just married one of the family, and they wished to see her new home. Dressed in buckskins and moccasins, he looked Nora and Jim over. Nora leveled a flat gaze back at him. She could read in his eyes that he thought this no country for her. She didn’t care what he thought. She chose not to think. Thinking took effort.

  In early evening, one of the Blackfeet women went into labor. Nora listened dispiritedly to the celebration that followed the baby’s arrival. Memories of other newborn life pierced her. Shivering, she cleaned her belongings as best she could in the drizzle, finally stopping to huddle on a boulder under lacy gray-green cedar branches. Images of Helen and Nora’s little son hovered on the lake’s dark surface. Could she ever stop yearning for her lost children? For Tade?

  “Here I am in the wilderness and you still follow me.” She cried a little. The hot trickle of tears stung her cheeks, salt burning her raw skin. She raised her head and rubbed her tender face with chapped hands, the nails broken and black. She rubbed one hand’s fingertips over the other’s knuckles, then scowled at her own weakness. She rose to find Jim.

  She always felt better near Jim.

  Next day, the sky turned a blue that made Nora think of satin ribbons she’d once seen on a fine Dublin lady’s hat. She gasped when they rode over a rise and viewed the jagged grandeur of the Rockies layered to the horizon, but winced when she swallowed. What a time for a sore throat.

  She squinted, partly a result of the sky’s dazzling bright blue, but partly because her eyes hurt. She rubbed her neck, trying to rid her brain of a heavy fog, then shivered, pulling a shawl around her shoulders. She couldn’t be sick. August already and they weren’t even at a decent place to settle. Not even to the North Fork.

  By afternoon Nora’s chest tightened and ached. She muffled coughs with the shawl, willing herself not to feel ill as her ribs jabbed at her lungs with each wagon pitch. Another restless night brought no relief.

  Toward late afternoon next day, they reached a clearing by the Middle Fork of the Flathead River. A railroad survey crew camped nearby. Twelve unwashed, goggle-eyed men, as Nora saw them, looked like they’d been living in tents for months. She made an effort to pull herself together, but her face felt hot, her throat full of knives that stabbed when she tried to swallow.

  A bearish man wearing a buckskin shirt, leggings, moccasins, and a scarlet voyageur’s sash around his waist moved out from the group. While the others gaped at the two seated in the wagon, his voice boomed a greeting. Nora detected upper-class English inflections. Brown hair fanned over his shoulders. A nod to vanity showed in his drooping mustache and carefully trimmed goatee. He was what Rose Murphy would have called “a fine enough figure of a man.” Nora’s grandfather would have said he had sea eyes—accustomed to scanning great distances.

  The colorful character tipped his hat. She nodded to acknowledge his mannerly gesture when a fit of coughing racked her. She couldn’t hide this one, and embarrassment reddened her already flushed cheeks. The man’s smile faded. Nora knew her eyes must be pink-rimmed, her face chapped from the weather, her hair lank.

  He stepped away and returned, offering a dipper of water. She accepted, trying not to groan as she swallowed. She handed it back and stood. The tents and men wobbled. She sat back down, but spoke as though nothing at all unusual had just happened.

  “I’m Mrs. Larkin. Nora. I’ve come to settle on the North Fork of the Flathead River with this good worker I hired.” Another fit of wet coughs.

  “I’m Beartracks Benton. Mrs. Larkin, let me help you down. You’re not well.”

  “No. We’re on our way to the North Fork. We need to ford the river. Every day before winter . . .”

  Jim Li climbed out of the wagon and turned to the tall man, their gazes eye-to-eye. The stranger grinned. “Well, I smuggled one tall Chinaman in over Flattop Mountain awhile back. There can’t be two of you. Nope, you’re he or his twin brother.”

  For once, Jim lost the customary blank mask he so often wore for white devils. Nora forgot her misery and turned toward him, surprised by his intake of breath. She jumped in. “Well, why wouldn’t there be tall fellows in China just as easily as anywhere? There must be more than one of them. Anyway, Jim has been in America for ages. Haven’t I known him since I was a girl, myself? He’s not all a Chinaman either. Wasn’t his own father a white man? His height likely came up from that root in the tree, didn’t it?”

  Beartracks studied them for a long moment. “That’s a fine way you have of speaking, Mrs. Larkin. Don’t worry, China Jim, I’ll never mention my unlawful pursuits or the company I keep again. Are the two of you—?”

  “We’re actually partners. Friends, too,” Nora risked the truth earlier than she’d intended. “I don’t know that you’ve seen our like here before, but we’re going to settle a place together, share and share alike.”
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  Beartracks only laughed and asked Jim, “What do you know about being a mountain man? Not much from the look of you.”

  “I know almost nothing. I need to learn quickly.”

  “That you do, China Jim. I can teach you a few ways of the country, but I won’t take you with me often. Not you nor any other except Pete Dumont can keep up with old Beartracks Benton, but I’ll show you how to stay alive and keep this Irish girl alive along with you.”

  Jim bowed. “Thank you. I am ignorant and we have much to do before winter.”

  Hoarseness made Nora’s words sound sharper than she intended. “First, let’s get ourselves across that river. Can you help us, Mr. Benton?”

  “Yes, but why don’t you camp here? These aren’t dangerous men, and you’re not well.”

  The head surveyor, a burly, bearded man, joined them. Ignoring Jim, he spoke to Nora, extending his own invitation.

  “Thank you, but every day counts dear for us now,” Nora responded. She turned to Beartracks. “We were told there’s a sort of ferry with cables.”

  “That’s it. There’s still light, so if you’re determined let’s do it now.”

  Watching Beartracks talk with the survey crew, Nora wondered whether they could trust him. It seemed they had no choice with her sick and the river to cross. It would be a relief to turn the wagon away from the curious men. In her feverish state menace lurked in their unwavering, hungry stares. Clear enough they hadn’t seen a woman in a long time. She reached a hand to her aching forehead.

  “You are ill. Perhaps we should stay in the camp,” Jim said.

  “I’m good enough. We have to cross the river. Didn’t you notice? Some of them look none too friendly. Maybe it’s you. Let’s keep moving. I’m afraid here.”

  “All right.”

  Beartracks Benton walked beside them. The two men guided the horses as they pulled the wagon on board a raft Beartracks borrowed from a friend. Both men pushed with long poles while Nora huddled on the wagon seat, clutching the reins.

  On the far side of the Middle Fork, towering, thick-trunked cedar darkened the trail, creating premature night under hundreds of webby branches. Nora dropped her head to her hands in sick, hot weariness.

  Beartracks moved fast. “I have a trapline cabin on Lake McDonald,” he announced over his shoulder. “Good headquarters for you tonight, though don’t plan on fancy.” Scalloped clouds shone pink by the time the three reached the foot of the lake. At Beartracks’s direction, Jim stopped beside a rude cabin just above the pebbled beach. Dimly aware, Nora had a sense of entering a massive, peaceful sanctuary, the more otherworldly because of her fever.

  Transparent water lapped over darkening mauve and blue-green rocks near her feet. A smug family of ducks floated communally on its surface, quacking at the newcomers. Forest spread on either side with mountains rising, pine spires pointing skyward—everything pulling Nora’s gaze upward. The scene at Lake McDonald’s far end won her attention, a wall of mountains dipped and folded in ridges and crevasses, mysterious and unreachable, lovely in alpenglow. Those compelling masses, remote and indifferent, went beyond the rough wildness of any she’d seen before.

  “It’s paradise,” she murmured. “Tade and Helen could be there. Just over there.”

  Then she collapsed.

  Carrying Nora, Jim kicked open the door, which swung wide on rawhide hinges to reveal a packed dirt floor, air stale in the dimness. A few cans of beans sat on a board shelf above a small wood-burning stove. Someone had stripped the rustic bunk, wide enough for two, of bedding. A small table at its foot served as a place to eat or as a desk. A scraped moose stomach covered the cabin’s small, square window. Dried herbs and other plants hung from the low ceiling. Their ends startled Jim as they brushed against his head.

  He lowered Nora to the plank bed as Beartracks followed with blankets from the wagon. Jim unbuttoned Nora’s coat. “She has a bad fever.” He pulled her limp arms from her duster’s sleeves.

  Nora murmured something. Something about flames, but Jim didn’t take it in. He lifted her again as Beartracks made the bed.

  “Build a fire and get water from the lake to boil,” Beartracks ordered. “My woman cooks up medicines. She’s off visiting Blackfeet cousins now, but she always makes sure I have her healing herbs with me.”

  Jim closed the door, worried by Nora’s labored breath. He started the kindling ablaze, then fed logs into the stove before dealing with the water.

  Beartracks pulled a leather bag from his parfleche. “As you can see, my fine young Chinaman, I have pipsissawa for fever.” He pulled out a dried pale purple flower. “I also need bark from willows down by the creek to boil for Mrs. Larkin’s fever.” He pulled another dried plant hanging in a bunch. “The moccasin flower. Lady’s Slipper, some call it. Not so easily found. And wild onions.”

  Sent out to search, Jim stumbled in the dark as he traversed the tall grass along the creek, pushing through the forest’s ground cover and fallen trees, quickly gathering what willow bark he could. Once back at the cabin, he watched Beartracks boil Black-Eyed Susan roots and then the Lady’s Slipper. Jim brought the herbal tea to Nora’s lips, urging her to sip as he lifted her head with one hand, the steaming cup in the other. He left her only to retrieve a jar of honey from the wagon.

  Nora labored to take ropey, strangled breaths. Beartracks roasted wild onions in the fire’s embers. When they’d cooked soft, he pressed oil from them, mixing it with honey. Jim fed it to Nora by teaspoonfuls. After the mountain man discretely stepped out, Jim followed his directions and spread the extract on a cloth, unbuttoned Nora’s shirtwaist, and opened her bodice. He caught his breath before he placed the cloth, in now shaking hands, upon her bare chest. Such beauty made detachment difficult.

  Later, after Beartracks had returned, Nora murmured in delerium. “What if he knows? . . . come after us, Jim . . . come up from hell itself . . . can’t go far enough. Not far enough.” The two men looked away from each other. After an awkward moment, Beartracks slipped out again.

  Anxious, Jim sat by the fire stroking Nora’s brow with a cool rag. What if he lost her? He wanted to think it impossible, but knew too well how illnesses carried off loved ones. He would be hard pressed if Nora went the way of his parents. It wasn’t just that he’d be struggling by himself in the North Fork. He would be alone in his very spirit without this tragic, determined, red-haired Irish woman. He’d been so lonely before her.

  He listened to Nora’s delerious muttering. Was it the priest’s orders, the guilt, that would conjure up such things? Jim hadn’t been haunted by thoughts of the dead gambler. Was Nora seeing his ghost in this room? Jim had thought the ring fortuitous. Why feel any guilt at all over using the dead to help the living?

  Beartracks returned to boil and measure onions and flowers, pressing and mixing. He left again to reappear long after dark, a small doe slung over his shoulder. He spoke from the doorway. “Let’s make a fire outside, China Jim. How’s Mrs. Larkin?” He peered into his cabin’s fragrant humidity. Nora lay on the bunk in candlelight, grappling for each breath. “More onion,” he muttered before they went out. “I’ve seen it used by my wife and others. Sometimes I’ve seen it work. Other times the sick ones die. Who knows the reasons? The willow bark is often damned effective for fevers.”

  Outside, Jim watched Beartracks dress out the doe by the wavering campfire’s flames. Beartracks noted his scrutiny. “You need to learn how to do this, China Jim. Mrs. Larkin’ll need plenty of good food.”

  “Yes. If she lives,” Jim muttered. He shivered even though the fire heated their hands and faces.

  “Ah, fear not, young Celestial, she’ll live. She looks to be one of the tough ones. Skinny, but strong. You build up the fire while I spit the meat.”

  After they’d eaten, Beartracks stood. “I’ll spell you.”

  “No. I must tend Nora. She talks in dreams. She won’t know you, or she will perhaps mistake you for her dead husband.” Jim bowed.

/>   “That’s the first Chinese mannerism I’ve seen you make. Mrs. Larkin says you have some white in you, is that right?” When Jim remained silent, Beartracks continued, “You’re in for a long night. Stay out here and get some air.” He flicked a glance over the small turmoil of diminished fire and turned, taking long strides to his cabin.

  The mountain man slipped in, a determined Jim following, shutting the door to keep in pungent steam. Beartracks rolled a log over by Nora’s bed, upended it, and sat, elbows on his knees, studying her as he dabbed her forehead with cool water. Nora uttered fierce snatches of words. Something about a bat and a fire. Something about a baby boy. Then her face softened. She seemed to be talking to a child. “Helen, acushla, my treasure.” Then, “Tade, what do you think of this color? Will it do? Will it suit me?” Her eyes flew open and she peered at Beartracks. “Will it do? Do I suit you in it?”

  Jim moved in front of the mountain man and pulled the blanket to Nora’s chin. “You’re the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, Nora Larkin,” he whispered in Chinese. “You must fight this. You must. We are partners.”

  Her eyes closed and she frowned, rambling on about bats again, and rings. “. . . bring us down, Jim,” she sighed, “. . . come up from hell itself . . . after us. I . . . can’t go far enough. Not enough. Stay with me . . . don’t . . . abandon me . . . I need you . . . need you, Jim.” Jim lifted Nora’s head to give her a teaspoon of onion and honey. Beartracks left just after Nora pleaded, “Take the baby away, Jim. Take him.”

  Jim reapplied the mixture on a cloth, which he laid over her perfect breasts. Later he gave her tea from the willow bark and wildflowers. He didn’t sleep, but lay on a blanket on the floor, listening to her meanderings.