River With No Bridge

by Karen Wills

  Nora took a rare look at the calendar on December 25, shocked that she’d forgotten Christmas. Strange how she could love this place with such satisfaction, then be yanked back to her past, both bright and dark. She pictured Christmases in Butte, the Larkin family so contented. She pushed away more disturbing memories that could only bring tears, and said a quick rosary. She prayed for patience in the matter of the ring payment, adding a petition that nothing destroy the peace of her and Jim’s home, that her sense of approaching disaster be unfounded, that it might just be shadows from the disastrous past. And she prayed for her son, enjoying his first Christmas so far away.

  After breakfast, she tossed out suet and bits of biscuit and pancakes as gifts to jays, chickadees, and magpies, relatives of the ones in Ireland that bring good luck when you greet them. Ravens sailed overhead like dark ships, making hoarse, complaining cries of foreboding. She reminded herself again that Bat Moriarty had met his end at Lillie McGraw’s. No one else would want to hurt Jim or her.

  Snow on timbered slopes formed a herringbone pattern of green and white up to the snowpack on gleaming peaks. Legions of fat snowflakes drifted earthward, landing with whispers like those of sated lovers. Nora’s heart lifted. Intimacy grew here in ice curls within small hidden worlds of wood and moss. Grandeur rested in ever-changing light on mountains. Nature presented sensory gifts for which she’d been starving. Forgotten well-being restored itself in her.

  As confidence grew, Nora enjoyed Jim’s leaving her alone while he checked traps. Yet she liked his reappearances more. She puzzled over those quickenings. Could her heart know better than her mistrustful head? She so looked forward to the sight of him striding to the cabin, bearing furs to sell in spring.

  By January, winter clamped down so hard even the wooden floor chilled the cabin dwellers’ feet through their buckskin moccasins. Nora stuffed scraps of hide into cracks in contracting walls. Jim chopped through thick creek ice for water.

  They fashioned snowshoes to sell in spring. Worry over money threaded through their thoughts like animal trails through the forest. They calculated money and what could be done with it, those long silences of the journey north now giving way to lively speculation. They talked of land boundaries, the possibilities of running cattle.

  Jim never reintroduced his wish that something more might grow between them. Nora appreciated his discretion, but some nights her alcove became a lonely place. She would unexpectedly want to touch his shining black hair, rest her hand on his shoulder—then reminded herself how she erred before. She must never create such pain for herself again. It would kill her.

  At Jim’s urging the two went together to check traplines in February. They pulled their tobaggon north as the rising sun washed pale rose over all, deepening the red-brown branches of mountain mahogany. Rust-brown V’s of dropped pine needles flecked the snow. After weeks of bone-freezing, skin-cracking cold, a warmer eastern breeze puffed at them, a giant’s exhaled breath. By the time they reached Beartracks’s trapper’s cabin at Kintla Lake, wind-blasted pines complained and flung themselves, roaring back and forth like lunatics.

  That night the uproar ceased. Coyotes yipped out on the lake’s thick ice, hushing at once when wolves howled their feral, drawn-out harmonies. Feeding chunks of wood into the fireplace, Jim caught another sound, a reverberating growl from above, grumbling like a displeased god. It brought back a winter years ago when he’d heard that rumbling from the Chungnan Range. Then he remembered Beartracks’s warning about when the mountain thunders. Jim left Nora sleeping in her bedroll while he walked out in the dark to study the mountainside looming behind the cabin. Slabs of snow might slide, triggered by new layers bearing so heavily the old ones broke off. The mountain resonated another anguished moan. Jim went inside to drift, still dressed, into restless sleep.

  Louder rumbles brought him full awake. He sat up shaking Nora. He grabbed her just as she finished shoving her feet into boots. Their shouts whipped away, lost as snow on the mountain tumbled and pulsated in an overwhelming bellow. The enraged god descended, cleaving a chute down the ancient forest. They stumbled out of the cabin into a black and white jumble. Floundering, falling, they scrambled to the lake. To Jim, their dash seemed a slow hallucination rather than its actual frantic speed. The wind bent them as it did people he’d seen in prairie blizzards.

  Trees and branches flew past. The force knocked both Nora and Jim face down. She crawled to him. Man and woman gripped each other, clutching the blankets they’d dragged from the cabin until the wind snatched the cloth, whirling it away. Treetops and branches sailed overhead, the tremendous sickening crack of old trees sounded like the snapping of giant bones. White powder rolled and purled high on Boundary Mountain as a half-mile snowslide gained momentum. After what seemed hours rather than mere minutes, the slide finally came to rest nearly against the cabin’s back wall.

  That colossal roar diminished. When its last echo faded, Jim and Nora struggled to their hands and knees, gaping at the mountain. Jim pushed himself to stand on wobbling legs, then retrieved the blankets caught on debris. Ravaged trees stretched in that one long, snowy chute up the mountain. Jim covered Nora with a tattered remnant and helped her stand.

  Northern Lights appeared . . . vertical green, rose, and blue veils in darting, sinuous, vaulting undulations. Jim and Nora turned to each other, mingling tears and laughter.

  Wordless, they embraced. Instinctively, hungrily, still alive, they drew together, mouth finding mouth. They broke apart only to lean against each other, then walk back with sensual purpose blessed by shimmering aurora overhead. A wall of snow, trees, and rock rose fifteen feet behind the cabin. Oblivious to anything but desire, the two went inside.

  Jim rebuilt the fire. Nora lay watching, grateful to have him, grateful they’d survived together. They slipped each other’s torn clothes away. No reason existed for haste. They paused for slow, arousing kisses. Their hands explored each other’s bodies until Nora drew him down. Jim’s mouth again sought hers. She lay, palms open, as though awaiting a gift. He stretched low over her. His mouth sought her breast and he suckled there, grasping it, moving it as she moaned in pleasure. Then he kissed lower and lower down her body. He slowly opened her thighs as though she were a flower. He held her hips, giving her a pleasure shocking in its forbidden, unknown warmth. Never had she felt such sensations. She gripped his head as he carried her away on high waves of desire. She arched against him, shattered with joy, then floated down the crest until she drifted to a still pool of sated fulfillment. Slowly he entered her and she moved with him. She controlled the pace of his passion and felt the bliss of giving him such pleasure. It felt as though they’d done this many times—out of need, out of love, out of everything treasured in the other. His cry of release carried her name, as though its sound alone meant more to him than life.

  They held each other in the afterglow. “I swear,” Nora whispered, “I’ll never take a day of our life together for granted.”

  He kissed her forehead. When they slept, her fiery red and his black hair swept in a circle of ying and yang around their heads, eternal as love had been even before they met and greeted it, inviting it to stay with them always.

  When they awoke, Nora stretched like a satisfied cat. “Well, I believe we’ve done it now, no going back to servants and partners.”

  Jim rose on his elbow to smile at her. “No, I want to marry you. I wanted to be your partner, but that was never the only thing. I journeyed such a long way thinking it was for my past and to find my father, but it was not. The past is nothing. You are my present, my future. I love you.”

  “I will be your wife, for certain,” Nora said, opening her arms in joyful invitation. She, too, set the past aside as she felt his smooth skin, his hard body, his very goodness under her hands.

  After generous passion, hand in hand they opened the door to dazzling sunshine and the sparkle of suspended frost crystals. Complacent whitetail deer stepped on the snow-blanketed lake, nibbling
from strewn branches.

  After resting a day, Nora and Jim loaded their gear and started from Kintla toward home, eager to be where they’d created their new world, their sanctuary.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  In Clancy, Bat’s chest wound and burns proved slow to heal, leaving shiny lurid scars on his legs, hands, and torso. Lou conducted her professional life while caring for him. Although they slept in the same bed, he left her alone thanks to physical weakness and a fastidious aversion to being with a woman so used. The walls between his room and her “office” were thin.

  Anytime Lou let his supply of laudanum run low, Bat cursed in frustration, hurled his crutches against walls, and lurched through the house flinging out the contents of drawers in a frantic, scrabbling search. As a result, Doc continued to furnish heavy doses to the gambler.

  Lou became the laudanum keeper. She could handle Bat as long as she fed his need.

  Bat had dreams. In one he lay on his old bed at Nora’s house, she in her dressing gown, red-gold hair falling over her breasts and down her back. As she lay supine, he turned to gather her underneath him.

  For the first time since the fire, Bat’s body responded to desire and he slipped into Lou, whose hands, after a few astonished seconds, reached to stroke his back, cupping over his thin, wing-like shoulder blades as if she could hold him buried in her, keep him from flying away.

  Before they finished Bat awakened, but didn’t stop until release came. Then he flopped away, shuddering a little in pleasure’s aftermath. “My God, Lou. You’re still damn good at your work. Must be all the practice,” he sighed.

  “You’re my work. My hardest work,” Lou muttered, pushing herself up so her veined white breasts, brown nipples the size of quarters, drooped over the blanket’s tattered edge. “Here.” She opened the drawer of the nightstand and took out a nine-inch cigar. She scraped a match on the lantern base, lit the smoke, and pulled on it. She blew out a puff and handed the cigar over to Bat. “I saved it for this occasion,” she said, “but I near gave up on ever smoking it.”

  Taking it with him, he rose naked and tipped back a bottle to finish the last drops of laudanum, throwing the empty out the open window. It hit a rock, shattering the night’s peace. He studied Lou for a long moment. His look held no emotion, but softened as the drug took effect.

  “We need to move on, honey, if you’re planning to get all the bottles of that you want,” Lou told him. “The miners won’t be here much longer with gold playing out.” Bat had been practicing at cards, sitting by the table in his robe, coaxing his dexterity back, shuffling, cutting, dealing. Poker was his game, but he could deal faro or run keno. She continued, “I want to go with you. I’m sick of these dirty miners. This hellhole is nothing to me but bad smells and bone weariness.”

  Bat leaned out the windowsill, looking in the direction of a scrawny bush where bottle shards reflected white moonlight. His thoughts formed quick and decisive. He still felt weak, but could walk again. He eyed his reflection in the mirror. The fire hadn’t scarred his face except that pain had carved lines into his forehead and from his elegant nostrils to his mouth. Pallor and purple circles under his eyes were prominent new features. His hair had thinned a little, aging him before his time. Easy confidence had been replaced by a watchfulness, permanent apprehension of a man who’d been stripped of valuables while he lay bleeding and helpless.

  Bat felt certain, after hours of going over the scene, that it had been Jim Li who pulled the ring off his finger and left him to the inferno. Lou said she didn’t know anything about where Jim Li had gone. Lillie McGraw had closed her operation, and they heard she’d moved to Denver with a new husband. The girls scattered, mostly to opportunities in the prosperous West Coast.

  Bat nursed a bad feeling about going back to Helena. He’d been involved in the fight that caused the fire. The law might have questions. Also, Dierdre might have placed one of her infernal personal ads there by now. Anyway, Jim Li wouldn’t stay in Helena. A Chinaman who wanted to disappear with a valuable ring would likely head for a city with a Chinatown, someplace to trade stolen goods and blend in with his own, maybe even go back to China, marry, have sons, live like a lord. The very thought drove Bat to a teeth-grinding fury.

  Bat intended to find Jim Li, but needed money to do it. He could pimp Lou. She’d do whatever he told her, but they needed to be someplace where he could get into a good game.

  “We’re leaving all right,” he said at last. “What would you say to California?”

  “San Francisco?”

  “Why not, but Denver first. We don’t have enough to go straight there. We’ll have to make odd hops. Know anybody you can work with in Billings? I’m thinking Billings, Bismarck, drop down to Deadwood, then Denver, then San Francisco. Then we’ll do it all again. A big loop.”

  “You’re never going to stop looking for the big Chinaman, are you?”

  Bat growled. “When I find the son of a bitch, I’ll collect my ring or its value, then put him in the ground.”

  “Well, I hope we make it to San Francisco. I’ve always wanted to see that city before I die. I hope we have money. I also hope you never see the Chinaman again because if you find him, you might forget how much you need me.” She sat up and studied the man staring out at the night, then slid back down in the limp sheets. “And I am useful to you, honey. I’ll always be useful to you. I wish you’d develop a need for me as strong as for that laudanum. Up until tonight I’d almost given up the idea that I’d ever be more than a nurse and supplier.”

  She rolled over, face to the wall. After a long revery at the window, the man who talked of killing climbed into bed and curled against her back like a child. In minutes he succumbed to the laudanum, his coarse breathing the only sound in the darkened room. Lou lay awake.

  He woke just enough to hear her next words. “My dream of life is like yours, honey, but with one big exception. If we get out of Clancy, if we make a new start, I want to make you forget this revenge on the Chinaman. That’ll only lead to worse trouble for both of us.”

  Nora took time from preparing pelts to plan spring work: a garden, seed for hay, fencing, a deeper root cellar, perhaps a summer kitchen by the creek, but most important, a real barn.

  Hogans appeared one day. Jim had trekked away to scout for fall traplines, and Nora found herself glad for company after days of solitude. They brought a pair of skis with poles for her to try. She’d mastered the business of snowshoes, lifting her leg high then stepping down flat footed, moving through snowfields she’d have sunk in up to her hips otherwise.

  Nan’s ski instructions presented new challenges. “Bend your knees a little. Lean forward, then steady yourself and push off with the poles.”

  Nora started, flopped into soft snow twice after false starts, then discovered a long, gliding rhythm and blood-warming speed. She and Nan, exhaling icy fog as they visited and laughed, skied that night below a full moon’s radiance. Nora followed a gleam of trail, flanked by towering old growth like enchanted trees in a fairy tale. She wondered where Jim might be, hunkered over some little fire. An image rose of his black hair rising like wings to glide over the blue-white ground toward her. Without him the scene turned empty, the charm broken.

  Foreboding ambushed her. Could anything happen to Jim? Could she lose him, too?

  At first Nora heard only their conversation and the suserration of skis on snow. Then the wavered chords of wolves in full voice purled from the north. She thrust toward the sound. “Listen to them, Nan.” Her voice rang eager and strained. “They sound wild as banshees. Is it a spell they’re casting?”

  Nan shook her head at the Irish notion. “You’re imagining things. You’ll go crazy as a hoot owl if you let your imagination run wild out here. Let’s go back. Wolves make me nervous.”

  Nora felt reckless and a bit rebellious. The wilderness, that feral harmony, called to her in the night so full of untamed secrets and opportunities. She and Jim belonged to this place beyond expe
ctations. It claimed them as much as they it.

  But sensible Nan wanted to turn back to the cabin. Nora followed without argument.

  The only other visitors through that winter were moose, elk, and coyotes. Beartracks arrived every few weeks, bringing reports of a healthy baby daughter named Dawn Mist, and concern that Sweet Grass had been ailing since giving birth. He also spoke of fellow mountain men, events in Canada’s Belly River country, and talk that in spring there would be a box car railroad camp at Belton, the name now given to the place where Nora and Jim first met their jovial mentor. There were expectations of a completed railroad from the east side of the Rockies to Kalispell.

  In May, rivulets of melted snowpack gushed into creeks and rivers accompanied by incessant rain. Mud, icy pools and puddles, opaque sky above ghostly mists made up the universe. At last the June sun drove off such clammy wraithes and silvery monotones. Rocky ground sucked the frigid, pooling water into itself.

  They hooked the horses to plow and broke ground sprinkled with dashing yellow glacier lilies. Nora intended to plant a half-acre vegetable garden. Jim deepened the root cellar.

  One late afternoon when earth burgeoned green, Nora stood in the rectangle of her future garden. Stumps scattered over the half-acre rendering made straight furrows impossible.

  Beartracks appeared, riding his bay horse hard over the bank. He slowed near her. “Nora, Sweet Grass is worse. She wants you. If you’re willing, we’d better start tomorrow. Early.”

  Nora pulled off a dirt-stiff work glove and raked back her disheveled hair with her fingers. “I’ll come. Who has Dawn Mist?”

  Beartracks, looking tired and drawn, lowered his pack of furs. “The fur buyer Snyder at the lodge across the lake sent a Blackfeet woman who’s come to help, although he won’t spare her for long. None of the medicines are helping.” He paused and viewed Nora’s efforts as if glad to change the subject. “Other folks get rid of stumps with dynamite.”