by Karen Wills
Jim blasted the first stumps three weeks later. At ease with dynamite, he turned a quizzical look on Nora before she retreated away from the noise with Dawn. “Remember whose country brought the world fireworks?”
“Whose?” Nora teased.
Jim shook his head at such real or feigned ignorance of China’s brilliance and placed each load. Explosions shook the cabin and upset Wink and Cotton, but the precious window panes, taped as a precaution, held.
Just before supper a week later, Beartracks whooped from the road. He reported the money had indeed been sent to Dierdre. The bank president even telegraphed Michigan to be certain that Bat Moriarty’s widow still lived at her old address.
Nora stepped away from the men to offer a quick prayer of thanks for this news.
The friends ate together. After awhile Beartracks stood. “A delightful meal and better company. Well, I’m off to old Zeb’s.” He smoothed his hair front to back, the crown of a wide-brimmed hat tilted on his head. “Zeb’s a surly scoundrel who partnered with me twenty years ago. Pete said he’s settled three miles from here.”
In the morning, Beartracks broke out of the trees, driving two jersey cows ahead.
“You’ll need a better fence for these bossies. Zeb’s dead. A bear. Wasn’t much left of him to bury.”
“Poor man.” Nora ran her hand down one cow’s ample flanks. “Such fine animals,” she murmured. “We’ve dreamed of starting our own herd.”
“Why don’t you just take them? Use their milk for Dawn. Zeb was a loner. No family.”
“We’ll make good use of them, for certain,” Nora answered.
After dinner they talked at the table. She touched on the subject of Zeb. “I know he was a sort of friend to you.”
“He was a hard man in bad times. Not many of us left.” Beartracks frowned.
In the morning, he was gone.
“He left the best of himself with us,” Jim said, picking up Dawn who smiled now at the man who’d become her father.
Nora again loved the look of the land in spring, dotted with white three-petaled trillium, yellow glacier lilies, blue harebells, and white beargrass. But summer held its own rewards. Scaring ground birds and field mice, Jim cut wild grass with a scythe, bundled it for Wink and Cotton, then plowed the meadow before planting timothy for hay.
Nora planted her half-acre garden in potatoes, rhubarb, squash, beans, and onions. Her hands were long past worrying over. She seldom paused to glance in a mirror. She thought only of Jim, Dawn, and the land. She blasted out two stumps by herself after Jim showed her how. They cut down jack pine. Hard work left them sun-scorched and exhausted at the end of each day, but with a second clearing by summer’s end. They figured meeting the cost of more cattle, even a small herd of twenty or so, would be hard, but possible. They finally built the real barn that gave the place an air of permanence.
One evening after the long day’s labors, Nora and Jim rested on a rough-hewn bench on the porch, sipping buttermilk cold from the crock always submerged in icy mountain waters. The baby’s babbling accompanied the sunset change from yellows to pinks to blues on the mountains.
Jim spoke of what they’d both noticed. “We have not seen much of Beartracks Benton.”
Nora only shrugged. “I suppose he’s got his own business to attend to.”
Jim leaned back, admiring the view. “He may want to give us time to settle in with Dawn . . . it may hurt him to see her.”
“It was a strange time with Pete, Clementine, and her Englishman. Beartracks giving up his daughter almost got swept aside. Do you still believe Miss Dasher brought bad luck?”
“She probably will never return to hurt us. Just a foreboding I attach to her. All I want is a peaceful life with you and Dawn Mist. No one else matters.” He reached over to tuck a blanket up to their drowsy daughter’s chin.
The mountains altered to dark hulks as early stars presented themselves, faint at first, but nothing in the world could stop their coming like schools of still white fish in the darkening river of the night sky.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The North Fork, 1902
Each year they bought one or two head of cattle. They kept their herd in the hills part of the year, then brought it down for fattening on Evening Star Ranch, as Jim had persuaded Nora to name their place. They enlarged the cabin to include two real bedrooms. Nora canned venison, berries, made rhubarb wine, and packed butter in crocks for trading. Dawn gathered eggs from the hen house.
One winter night, Nora sat by the stove, studying Jim as he read a book borrowed from Nan Hogan, his hair falling loose on his shoulders. Nora often found herself stirred by his muscular grace, his strong, slender hands. That she warranted this elegant man’s love still surprised and gratified her at times. Their nights of passion differed from any she’d known. Jim, a creative lover, brought her to sensual heights. The sense of the forbidden, his dark hands on her white skin, knowing no pregnancy would result, the surprises in joining their two cultures, all of it flowed together in a torrent. Her body matched his in desperate eagerness.
Of course, the Hogans and others cast disapproving looks when Nora and Jim openly became more than business partners.
“Did they think we were stony saints?” she’d asked Jim. She mused on how they could never have become what they were anywhere else. On the North Fork, they created new lives, new selves.
She set aside her mending and rose to stand beside him. “Is that poetry you’re reading?”
“Yes. Keats. About a young man and woman who run away together on St. Agnes Eve. That’s tonight.”
“Sort of like what we did.” She reached out to touch his cheek.
“Yes, each loves the other beyond all else.”
Nora knelt before him, her hand on his knee.
Jim laid the book aside and covered her hand with his. “Are you happy?”
“I am. You brought me back to life. You redeemed me. We have Dawn Mist.”
“Will you still marry me?” They’d spoken of marrying every year, but wondered whether an official would perform the ceremony.
“Yes. I’ve wanted it since the avalanche, but I didn’t know how we’d do it. I’ve heard from Nan there’s a priest in Midvale near the Blackfeet reservation. He must be used to marrying whites to Indians. Do you think he’d marry an Irish-born to a Chinese?”
“When the snow melts. We will become beyond reproach, even in the eyes of your church.”
“And Nan Hogan. Well, perhaps not Nan.”
In June Nora and Jim asked Beartracks to caretake their place for a week. Nan agreed to take Dawn Mist, who’d come to think of the Hogans as an aunt and uncle.
Beartracks commented that he didn’t see why anyone had to go to all the bother. What did a few words from a priest make?
“The difference between heaven and hell,” Nora answered.
“Ah, the afterlife,” Beartracks said with a condescending smile.
In fact, Nora was thinking of her earthly past.
The night before they left, Nora couldn’t sleep. She burrowed into their quilts in the crisp night and reflected. When she left Ireland, there could be no turning back. When she left Boston, it was also for good. But none of the previous moves had the finality of the day they forded the North Fork of the Flathead, the river with no bridge. Once on the west side, she and Jim created a new way of life combining East and West. Had anyone told her she’d marry Jim Li, raise a mountain man’s daughter as their own, and live in the wilderness, she’d have called the speaker witless. There would always be those who’d turn their backs to the pair of them. Still, together and properly wed they needn’t care about anything else. Hadn’t they built a shelter sturdy enough for all weathers?
They stayed at Beartracks’s cabin in Apgar, boarding the train next day, traveling east over the granite faces of the Rockies at Marias Pass to the village of Midvale. Nora spotted a small clapboard Catholic church beyond the tracks.
As they crossed to
it, carrying their satchels, a white-haired priest emerged, raising a hand in friendly greeting.
Jim took the lead in broaching the subject.
After he understood their circumstances, the old Father smiled. “You know, I’ve married many whites and Indians here. I’m a bit of a rogue and a rebel on that point,” he said. “Most of the unions hold firm and no harm done. Certainly not the harm of living in sin. I wasn’t expecting to perform a ceremony today. I’m due to leave for a funeral in Browning this evening, then on to Great Falls, but we’ll take time. I’ll send the proof of marriage to the courthouse there. Wait here while I find a witness.”
Benches substituted for pews inside the clean, one-room church, and windows looked out on sweeping flower-carpeted prairie. Nora tucked her arm through Jim’s as they stood in sudden stillness after being outside in wind that filled their ears. The seriousness of finally marrying, the permanence of it, impressed them.
The priest, Father John as he informed them, entered with a young woman who smiled shyly and handed Nora a bouquet of Black-Eyed Susans. After the brief ceremony, Nora Flanagan Larkin Li and her husband signed the Bible in the little Midvale church.
Nora explained to the priest that she’d become a United States citizen while living in Butte after Tade’s death. He expressed no concern over Jim’s lack of citizenship. He said that no Montana judge he knew would bother to question Nora’s right to remain a citizen even if married to a foreigner or simply living with one.
Content, Nora accompanied her tall husband, whom she’d known as her spiritual spouse for years, into the bright wind-cleansed day.
“Like the first day of the world,” she murmured into the wind that carried her words to all the unknown places beyond.
By the time she reached age forty, Nora expected nothing more than life with Jim, together raising merry Dawn Mist who often revealed her mother’s dimples and Beartracks’s sense of fun. Nora and Jim husbanded their land, no longer improving it for themselves alone.
But on a late summer day two years after they married, a stranger walked over the rise of the river bank and strode toward her, clicking a willow branch along their cross-fence. She’d started skinning a coyote Jim had shot to stop its threatening the cattle. Not a job Nora enjoyed and she felt annoyance at this interruption that would make odious work last even longer. Since she didn’t recognize the skinny youth who approached, she picked up her Winchester 30-30, cradling it in one arm as she stepped out from the barn’s shadow to let him see her. He must have used their raft to cross, she thought.
Nora waited, a hard, planed-down version of the soft rounded girl who’d boarded the train in Boston. Fine lines branched from the corners of her eyes, and a light copper bronzed her skin. Frontier woman now, she handled the rifle with confidence wrought by experience.
The boy, hair tawny with a hint of red, strode toward her, but slowed when he saw the gun. The two scrutinized each other like wary animals. She figured him as just an adolescent, some runaway boy about fifteen or sixteen, dusty clothes frayed and a little outgrown. A burlap sack hung over one shoulder. He stared at her from brown eyes, then flashed a smile that showed perfect white teeth.
“Stop there, boyo,” Nora ordered. “What business have you here?”
“I’m searching for Nora Larkin and I’ve had the devil’s own time finding her,” the boy answered.
Nora nearly dropped the gun, grown so heavy on her arm. “Who are you?” She gulped the last word down as her throat constricted.
“Nora Larkin’s son Michael. Would you be the woman I’m looking for?”
“I am.” The mountains danced behind the boy. The meadow blazed up in shimmering amber flames.
“Before she died, my mother . . . or I believed her to be until she lay dying . . . Bridget that took me in and raised me . . . told me about how you are the mother I was born to and how my father died, and you couldn’t look after me so you gave me over to be raised by her and Michael, my dad.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, letting the willow branch slip from his fingers. “They both died of the fever. All the money from the house went for debts, too.”
He raked a hand through his hair. “Before she passed away, she told me to find you in Helena. I found out more about you there from that fat banker, Sean Kehoe. I just met and spoke to him by chance in a saloon where I was sweeping up and all. Imagine. He told me where you’d gone. Said you’d done some business.” He stopped fidgeting and gave her a direct, almost challenging stare. “So I’ve found you.”
Nora listened in disbelief. Her friend Bridget dead? And this boy? Could this be her son really come to her as she’d dreamed so often? Nora gasped and took a step forward. “You’re him?” She lay the gun on the ground just before her knees buckled. She knelt beside it, looking helplessly up at the boy with the sun at his back and the contagious smile replaced by panicked concern.
“Don’t faint,” he pleaded. “Oh Jesus, I swear you’re white as a ghost. Lower your head. Please, Mrs.—Mrs. Larkin—Mrs. Nora.”
“Water. From the bucket.”
The boy searched frantically from one side of the long porch to the other before he spotted a water bucket. By the time he raced back, water sloshing over his dust-caked boots, Nora had struggled to her feet and staggered to the bench.
“Thank you,” she said, taking the dipper with a trembling hand. She gave it back to him to replace, still not trusting her knees. She stayed put, taking him in with mixed wonder and fathomless need.
Michael walked to the far side of the porch to replace the dipper, paused a moment, then swung back toward her. His wool jacket and his pants might be travel smudged, and his boot leather crazed with dust-filled cracks, but she recognized Bat Moriarty’s self-assured walk. With her recovery his smile returned, and she saw Bat’s fateful good looks in it.
“Well,” she said in a husky voice, “from all I can see Bridget and Michael did a fine job of raising you. I believe I did the right thing when I sent you to them in Butte, America.”
“Butte, Montana. Nobody says that other any more. It’s 1904, after all.”
“Pardon me.”
“Sure. You’ve been way up here for awhile, I guess. Once I found out, I had to find you. How many fellows have their dying mothers tell them a story like that?”
“Not too many, I suppose. What, exactly, did Bridget tell you about me and yourself?” Nora took her eyes off him for the first time and lowered them to her hands.
“She told me everything. How my dad died in one of the big cave-ins at the Neversweat. There was one every year for awhile. Just about everybody he worked with back then is moved on or dead. Mother told me his name. Tade Larkin. She told me how you moved to Helena to keep a boarding house after he died. Why didn’t you just have me and stay in Butte with your friends? Or else, why didn’t you go ahead and get the boarding house in Helena and keep me?”
“Well.” Nora reached back to untie her bloodied apron. The slow movement belied the speed of her thoughts. She folded the cloth and tucked it under the bench. “Well, now, it’s a long story. Give me a minute to let me think how best to tell it.”
Nora gazed desperately at the mountains, trying to clear her stunned mind. Bridget had only told the boy half the truth. She’d been friend enough to protect Nora, or perhaps she’d just been mother enough to protect Michael from knowing the sorry fact that his father was a skirt-chasing, shiftless, gambling man.
Nora inhaled. “I made a bad investment of my savings and lost all my money from selling my house—that very house in Butte you grew up in. Mrs. Leary, who was to be my partner, lost her money to the same crooked bankers. She went off to live with her son in Great Falls. I was in terrible sad shape, grieving after your father and then your sister.”
“I had a sister?” Michael’s eyebrows shot up.
“You had an angel of a sister. Like you, only she had angel’s blue eyes. We named her Helen for that queen all the armies fought to keep. Only I cou
ldn’t keep Helen. She went to be with Tade when she was a wee girl.”
“How did she die?’
“Diphtheria. A fierce disease. Just when I thought I’d brought her through it, she went like that.” Nora lifted a hand and dropped it. “We were living with Mrs. Leary. She had a half-Chinese servant there named Jim Li, and Jim was—like you—looking for his folks—his father anyway. She paused. She was getting off the subject that would be pressing to Michael.
He frowned. “Why are you telling me about some chink?”
Nora’s head jerked and she glared at her son. His words shook her out of the mix of dream and desperate imagining she’d been in since he appeared, the sun behind lighting him like he was an archangel come to stay. She stopped spinning a new fabric for her life’s story and narrowed her eyes at this boy from Butte. The mountains and amber meadow stopped dancing. She took a full breath.
“Jim Li is the person who risked his life to deliver you to Bridget and Michael when I was so very ill with no money. I didn’t expect to live, so I sent you to them. Jim saved my life and became much more than just a good, honest friend to me. He’s like all of us, boy. He’s more than just the look of him. I found that out.”
“A Chinaman? What do you mean he risked his life?”
“He’s half Chinese and traveled with a white baby. What do you think I mean?”
“But what’s this Chinaman got to do with anything now?”
Nora sat again. “He had a stake of his own and wanted us to be business partners since it would be easier for me to do the buying and settling of the land, me being a woman, but white at least, and him with a Chinese look. They were treated badly enough in those days.” She paused and frowned. “I guess it isn’t so much better now. Well, I was penniless and weak from sickness and about given up to despair no matter it’s a sin, and he asked me to come up here to help get some land we could survive on, and I said yes.”
“But why didn’t you take me?” The inevitable question. The hardest to answer.