River With No Bridge

by Karen Wills

  Michael headed down Main to the courthouse, feeling loose from the alcohol. That night he slept curled against locked double doors at the courthouse entrance. A few others arrived later and sprawled, sleeping or murmuring, wrapped in blankets on the lawn. Michael dreamed of Dawn Mist, unaware that under hand-shaped leaves of a nearby oak, Bat Moriarty watched first him, then the purposeful, womanly figure of Nora Li striding through the graying dark.

  Nora felt certain Michael would be first in line for filing their claim, Jim’s and her dream about to come true. Nora Flanagan Larkin Li would own land free and clear, a beautiful place, too, even if it would never make her wealthy. It was already their home. She started as a tall man stepped out of the shadows. She couldn’t make out his face as he pulled at the brim of his hat. “Sorry,” was all she heard. She hurried past and forgot about him, intent on finding her son.

  Once she did, Nora sat erect on the step beside Michael, hat and handbag in her lap, until the Clerk of Court and other county employees arrived to open their offices. First inside, Nora and Michael went to the lower floor to the door marked Land Office. Nora paid her $5.00 and filed her claim. They ascended the stairs like sleepwalkers. In outdoor sunshine, they read the document over and over.

  “Wait until Jim sees this,” Nora whispered. “Our family owns land. It will be yours after Jim and I are gone.”

  “Mine and Dawn’s. And our children’s. I’d like to talk to the priest about a wedding.”

  Nora beamed. The children were young, but their marriage would keep them all together. “I’m pleased if you’ll agree to wait one more year for you both to be a bit older. It’s good you’ll stay on the North Fork. In spite of Dawn’s beauty there are those wouldn’t see past her being half-Blackfeet so would count your wife less than human. It’s still that way for Jim and me.”

  “To hell with them. I can protect her.” Michael’s face reddened with anger and some disappointment at the proposed delay.

  “Protecting innocence in ourselves is hard enough, my boyo. Protecting it in our loved ones may be impossible.” She paused, glancing to the spires of St. Matthew’s Church. “Ah, now, we’d better stop nattering about the souls of others and see to the dark spots on our own.”

  Afterward, they went shopping before boarding the train for Columbia Falls, then switching to the main line for Belton with other jubilant homesteaders.

  A figure now wearing a duster and wide-brimmed hat pulled low above the white stubble of an unshaved face boarded the last car of the Gallopin’ Goose. Celebrating homesteaders paid little attention to anyone else. Bat pulled the crown of his hat over his eyes and closed them. He hadn’t been to bed, but anticipation wouldn’t allow him restful sleep.

  The Great Northern reached Belton after dark. Bat waited to be last out, then walked to the Belton Hotel. Since Nora and Michael weren’t there, he left, following the sound of voices. He spotted mother and son in a team-drawn wagon heading across the bridge that now spanned the Middle Fork. He heard Nora talking, her words silvery and light, like moonbeams on water. “It will be good to be at Apgar again.”

  Bat cursed in a hoarse whisper. He’d have to get a horse and follow them. He didn’t want to call attention to himself by taking a room at the hotel in this mountain hamlet where, even with the railroad, a stranger might be remarked. Some bewhiskered busybody would strike up a conversation, and Bat didn’t feel like talking. He wanted to be sharp, savor every moment.

  He rousted the livery owner, picked out a big gray, and fastened his portmanteau to the saddle horn. He paid a high price for the gelding, but needed a mount with strong lungs and legs. He rode slow and quiet on the bridge and on to the edge of Apgar to a spot hidden by evergreen and moss-hung larch. He unsaddled and hobbled the gray, lit a cigarette, closed his eyes, and leaned against the reedy bark of a towering cedar, waiting for first light.

  Night dragged. To avoid unwanted attention, he hadn’t built a fire. He ached from cold by the time the mountains across Lake McDonald hulked black against graying sky. Then Bat grunted and pushed stiffly to his feet, his brain sluggish from the thin air and lack of sleep. Splashing water from McDonald Creek on his face, he shuddered from the shock of it on his stubbled skin.

  He led his gray past a collection of buildings, cabins mostly facing the lake. Mist hovered above its glassy surface, clouds flagging the cirques and peaks at the water’s far end.

  Bat walked to a lean-to beside a cabin where he spied the ample rumps of Nora and Michael’s team in the shadowy interior. Bat remounted, guiding the gelding toward the North Fork. After a short distance, he stopped behind a stand of willow and huckleberry and waited, absently stroking his mount’s twitching neck.

  An hour later they drew near. Michael’s voice could be Bat’s own. Then he heard Nora. He couldn’t make out their words, but both sounded happy. Excited. Making plans. The muscles in Bat’s jaw tensed in a spasm of fury. Nora Larkin had profited from Jim Li’s theft. Well, they were in for a nasty letdown. Vengeance had chosen her moment.

  He permitted his prey to roll out of sight. No one would intrude between them. The day warmed. He relaxed because he hadn’t lost them, hadn’t been stopped. As he rode, he listened to birdsong, the plod of the gelding’s hooves, and the distant lilt of a woman’s voice from an old memory.

  Hours later, Bat lifted his head and observed Nora and Michael stop at the Hogans’. He skirted the meadow, watching them unharness their team and enter the house. He moved to the cover of trees. The gray disliked sorting its way off the trail, the forest a tangle of fallen, rotting vegetation and new growth. Bat cursed. It would be another cold, fireless night.

  Full daylight. Bat sat up flexing cold-stiffened fingers. A pair of deer fled, white flags vertical, when he hunched over the stream to drink and splash his face. He swallowed laudanum. He couldn’t remember when he’d last eaten. It didn’t matter. He felt sharp—the blade of a knife—the head of an arrow. He hadn’t given detailed thought to how he would do it. Now he didn’t think it necessary to plan. Nora and their son would lead him.

  He swung astride the gelding and turned at the meadow’s edge, moving through a sea of bubble-like white bear grass, blossoms higher than his mount’s knees. Nora and Michael looked like dolls readying their team. Nora embraced the large woman who walked them to the wagon and waved them on their way.

  Bat trailed at a safe distance. A strange thing happened as he rode. The colors around him, of trees and the panorama of mountains to the east, became unnaturally vivid, almost glowing in their outlines, the grass like green fire. In spite of the laudanum, his heart hammered. He felt a new sensation. The other lives he’d taken were accidents or based on the impulse to survive, self-defense as he remembered them. This was different. The pronounced greens lit with an almost yellow-white tinge. He struggled to keep from becoming too distracted for clear thought. There would never be another chance, or a better day.

  Nora and Michael crossed the river. At the landing, the North Fork flowed broad and high. He watched their wagon dip and disappear down the bank, then after moments, rise up on the other side and keep going. He moved upstream and forced the reluctant bay into roiling water.

  On the opposite bank, he checked his revolver, the Bowie knife sheathed inside his boot.

  Jim and Nora made love that night. He knew she felt pleased for him, the claim filed in her name, but meant for them both. Elation rose in him like sap in a young man Michael’s age.

  It had been a fixed happiness that his love for Nora grew and intensified. Although she physically resembled the women he’d first seen in Butte, her thinking was as a person who was part of the life here, part of the wilderness, one with him. She flowed with it. His wife was neither frail nor fragile, more like some wildflower flourishing where he’d brought her, nourished and strong.

  Jim also gave his joyful blessing to the children’s marriage.

  He lay in morning’s first light, stroking Nora’s breast, firm as a girl’s. She sl
umbered after so much love. He moved his hand to her cheek, kissed her forehead, then extricated himself from their bed, pulling on his buckskin shirt, wool pants, and worn boots. Nora sighed, turning away from the door. He paused to appreciate the fall of her still lovely hair over one white shoulder and the mound of her womanly hip under the quilt. Drawn to go back, to arch over her again, instead he closed the door behind him. There would be time after the day’s work.

  He ate biscuits with Michael and went outside to begin mending the plow blade. Later he would hunt, scouting for next winter’s trap line as well. Jim imagined anything might come into the sights of his Winchester that day, a black cougar, an albino elk—anything.

  Today Nora would rise and reread her claim document, then gather her baskets to accompany him across the river to search out medicinal plants and roots, heal all, onions, spring beauty, and mint. Dawn had gardening and baking to do at the cabin. The other three would camp across the river that night, return in the morning, and plan a family engagement celebration. Perhaps the four of them could talk about the future after they returned tomorrow evening. It pleased him that the results of his and Nora’s work would pass to loved ones.

  Bat crossed downstream, watching from the forest’s cover. He spotted Jim Li and cursed, fingering his 45. The tall man had become a muscular giant, long hair hanging over buckskin-covered shoulders, a Chinese mountain man. Li carried a rifle. Nora, a pack over her shoulder, had a knife and digging tools hanging from her baskets. Li also carried a pack, going somewhere on foot. The stalker bared his teeth in a grin. This would be easier than he thought. He could pick his time. He watched Nora and Jim walk side by side toward the river, joined by Michael when they reached the bank.

  He rode the gray back across the water after seeing them row to the far side in a small boat. He pulled up on a stand of aspen, tethered the gelding, and, panting, followed on foot.

  Jim planned to scout good places for traps on Bowman Creek, then make camp at Bowman Lake where Michael, hunting on his own, would join him. Nora motioned that she planned to dig for herbs on a ledge a distance from her husband. He nodded and moved ahead, thinking they would fish at the lake if Michael didn’t find other meat by evening. Jim stepped into the icy creek up to his knees to check a likely pooling spot for a beaver trap. He took comfort in knowing the water ran too shallow for a man to drown in it. The bloated water spirits couldn’t reach up from unseen depths and pull him to them.

  His side vision caught movement in the brush. A bear? Then over the soft rush of water, he heard the click of a hammer being pulled. Turning, he caught the revolver’s gleam. The shot came simultaneous with the image.

  Jim twisted, falling forward to his hand and knees in the creek. His shocked reflection stared back, then the gaunt, ravaged face of a man long dead above him. The face wavered in the water, but its mouth moved as a hand clutched Jim’s hair, yanking his head back.

  “Remember me, Li? It’s Bat Moriarty. Moriarty, the man you left for dead in a burning whorehouse. You stole my ring and I intend to kill you for doing that.” Bat forced Jim’s head into the water.

  Jim saw her then. One draped hand reached above the ghost’s pale, watery features. His heart broke for Nora as the spirit pulled him down. But the ghost vanished and a small, porcelain woman took its place, bowing and laughing, holding out her arms.

  “Welcome, my son. How I have longed to talk with you.”

  No longer feeling pain or cold, Jim moved toward his mother, borne on watery light toward the fulfillment of an old longing.

  Michael yelled, running through the trees. “No! No! Jim! Let him go, you bastard!”

  The white-haired killer released Jim, stepping from the water with a mad, triumphant glare.

  Michael raised his gun and pointed. “Pull him out. Now.”

  A grim, weary smile met the order, and the man bent back toward the stream. “Don’t give orders to your father,” he said as he turned again. The knife flew so fast Michael missed the flick of its wielder’s scarred wrist.

  Michael fired just before the blade sliced his arm. He dropped the gun as Jim’s pale attacker fell, clutching his chest. Michael staggered to the creek. With his good arm he pulled Jim out and onto his stomach and pushed on his back. Jim coughed and groaned, blood running from his shoulder.

  Michael moved to the assailant who whispered, “You just killed your own father, boy.”

  “You’re Tade Larkin?” Michael asked it as a reflex.

  “Bat Moriarty. Ask Nora Larkin about me. About the ring.”

  Michael heard the sputtering exhalation of death. Blood dribbled from Bat Moriarty’s mouth.

  Then Nora was there, holding Jim, tearing off his shirt to see the wound. Michael sat on the ground in shock.

  “The bullet went through,” she said. “I’ll put cold water to staunch the bleeding. If it won’t quit we’ll have to cauterize. Build a fire, Michael.”

  Michael started to shiver hard, cold to his belly, and in pain now from his freely bleeding wound. He slid over to her. “I’m hurt. He got me with his knife before I shot him.” The forest shaded now into dim gray-green and he knew it would be dark before long, and colder.

  Nora scooped up moss and plastered it against his arm, tearing a strip from her skirt. Michael awkwardly fastened it in a clumsy knot with his right hand and his teeth. Nora told him to hold a piece of Jim’s shirt against the bullet hole while she scrambled to gather sticks and light a fire. She lit a stick and without speaking twisted Michael’s hand off Jim and pressed the twig’s burning end on the bleeding wound, front and back. Jim’s eyes rolled back as he fainted. Then Michael heard the crashing of a large animal through the trees.

  Michael scrambled for his gun until he heard Beartracks’s voice. “Don’t shoot. It’s me. I found this big gray tethered by the creek and then heard shots. My god, what’s gone on here?”

  Michael’s arm had bled through the moss and ineffective bandage. When he tried to rise, his knees buckled and instead of speech, his voice caught in a sob of relief. The darkening forest spun around him.

  “All right, boy,” Beartracks said. “All right. Stay there. My god, Nora, somebody shot old China Jim? Who did this?”

  Michael heard no answer and closed his eyes to the sound of cloth tearing.

  “Drink this.” Michael gagged on Beartracks’s whiskey, then grasped the bottle and took a manageable swig. It seared his throat, but his stomach stopped quivering.

  “What happened?” Beartracks asked again. “What took place here?”

  Michael related the story in a few sentences. Nora held Jim, who didn’t regain consciousness, but moaned. She tore more bandages from her skirt and wrapped blankets around both her wounded.

  Beartracks got up and nudged Bat’s long, thin body with his boot, then knelt to search the pockets. He pulled out a bloodstained flask, opened it, and sniffed. “Laudanum. There’s no identification.” He pulled the fingerless gloves off the corpse’s hands and studied the vein-like scars and the bony face with its blood-crusted stubble of white beard. A consumed, terrible visage.

  “He was evil,” Nora’s hoarse voice declared. “There was a fight in Helena. Jim thought Bat was dead and pulled the diamond ring off his hand. We sold it to come here. His evil followed us. I sensed it always, but didn’t understand how it could be.”

  “His ring?” Michael asked, fastening on the almost magical image. “His ring?”

  “I’ll explain tomorrow. It’s Jim’s and my story, long overdue for the telling.”

  Michael fell into a sleep filled with death-ridden nightmares and pain. At one point he opened his eyes to see Beartracks waving a torch at some creature whose eyes glowed just beyond the body of the man who claimed to have been Michael’s father.

  In the morning, Beartracks made a travois to carry Jim, weak, but now awake. Michael rode as Beartracks led the gray pulling its burden. Nora walked beside them. She felt half-dead herself, her hair a snarled tangle. Once the wound
ed and she were rowed across and settled at the cabin, Beartracks took a shovel back across the river to bury Bat Moriarty in an unmarked grave.

  Jim sipped broth, then slept, Dawn watching over him. Nora joined Michael on the porch. Her heart lurched at the sight of his rigid profile. “I’m that glad you’re alive. I wouldn’t know what to do if. . .”

  Michael glared from pain-sunken eyes. “Are you? Yeah, I know you are. But I want to know everything. Is it true? Did I shoot down my own father yesterday? Who was he? Who are you?”

  Nora locked her gaze on the craggy, indifferent peaks across the river. She felt Michael and herself, the others as well, to be so small. Belief in their insignificance soothed her, gave her courage to start. She told everything, from meeting Bat on the train to Butte, to Tade’s death, to Bat as her lodger and finding out he had a family, to her pregnancy, to Helen’s death, to meeting Jim and working at Lillie McGraw’s, and finally the fire and the ring and sending Michael to Butte. She even told about selling it to Sean Kehoe.

  Michael stared at her when she finished. “Who else knew about this, about this Bat Moriarty?”

  “The Murphys. Bridget and Michael. A priest, no two priests. But don’t you see? It doesn’t matter. If Tade had lived, he would have been your father.”

  “Well, he didn’t. This scarred-up, murdering, drug-fiend gambler was. Hell, I have brothers and sisters. You should have told me. You were a whore, too, weren’t you? You’re still not telling everything. I killed my own father.” His voice broke and he twisted, turning his back on her.

  Nora flared in anger. “I never was. I never was an upstairs girl!”

  Michael only gave her a bold look, shrugged, and strode back inside.

  Nora heard Beartracks’s voice speaking to Michael from where he was having a late breakfast after his grim task. “You killed a man. I remember my own killing of a liquored-up trapper one rendezvous. I was barely twenty. That man wasn’t even a relative, and I still hate the memory. But you have a life here. Whatever Nora’s done, it’s been to have and provide a decent life. She and Jim have been fine parents to Dawn.”