River With No Bridge

by Karen Wills

  Michael’s response broke Nora’s heart.

  “Well, not to me.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  For six weeks, Michael let only Dawn change his bandage, using a mix of beeswax and tallow on the wound. He ate on the porch and slept in the barn. As the cut healed, he resumed what chores he could, never speaking to Nora.

  One day he went to the barn to throw his gear together.

  Dawn Mist appeared in the doorway, her form flat against the outside light.

  “How is Jim today?” he asked. He hadn’t spoken to Jim either, but remembered the conversation between Jim and Nora the night he’d arrived . . . Jim trying to convince Nora to be truthful. He understood now what it had been about.

  Dawn took his hand. “Mama and Papa are resting in their room. They’re so troubled. Can’t you forgive her?”

  He shook his head. “I can’t stay around them.”

  “You can’t leave me.” Dawn’s voice rose in protest.

  “We can both leave.”

  “Leave here?” Fright sparked her eyes.

  “Ride with me.” He stroked her cheek. “Come with me. I love you. We’ll get married.”

  “But Mama needs us. Beartracks says Jim won’t be able to work for two more months.”

  “Neighbors will help. Beartracks will provide meat. Come with me. I can’t stay. I can’t be around her.”

  “What will we do?”

  “I’ll hire on somewhere. It’ll be all right.”

  “You mean to leave no matter what, and I can’t be apart from you even if it breaks their hearts. All right, but you know Mama loves you.”

  Camped in the meadow that night, leaning on one elbow as he poked at his small campfire, Beartracks heard, then saw, the gray with two riders pass by under the vast sky with its countless stars. He sighed. There’d be the devil to pay with Nora and Jim, but he didn’t think anyone could stop the youngsters. The boy had to be on his own for a while and Dawn had to be with the boy.

  He’d start following in the morning, tracking them until they settled somewhere. Then he’d report back to Nora and China Jim. He lay back and gazed up. A long-tailed comet crossed the constellations in impersonal silence, the ancient stars unshaken, unmoved.

  A good thing for them, he decided.

  Next morning Nora gave vent to her regrets while giving Jim a gentle sponge bath. “If we’d never taken that cursed ring. I’ve wished it before, but never more than now. Of course, I know for certain you believed you took it from a dead man.” She fixed tormented eyes on Jim’s. “I kept my promise to the Father in Helena and gave its worth to Deirdre.”

  “Do not think you create that much difference in this world. We cannot remake the past. There is nothing to do. Just bad fortune for us all.” Jim reached out, wincing at the pain in his shoulder.

  She wept against his good shoulder. “I don’t even know how Bat found us.”

  “How does an owl find a rabbit? If it waits long enough, it spots some little sign.” He tipped her chin up and they kissed. “Beartracks will return as soon as he sees where our fledglings light to build their nest. We haven’t lost them forever.”

  Nora tried to stifle a wish that Jim had been more alert when Bat stalked him in the soft ground, in the hushed green by the creek. She shooed away the thought that there must have been some foreign smell, some shadow, or at least some flight of startled birds.

  Beartracks followed Michael and Dawn, camping one night, then on to his cabin at Apgar where they spent a second one while he camped down the beach. In the morning they rode east toward wind-blasted Marias Pass. They rode for days along the bare, sun-drenched eastern slopes, the terrain turning to prairie.

  At Midvale, the two visited the clapboard Catholic Church. Beartracks assumed they might be saying confession. When they emerged, however, shaking hands with the priest who followed them to their horse, Beartracks grinned. “Married, by damn,” he muttered.

  They remounted and rode on to a ranch, a huge spread with the finest house for hundreds of miles. There the journey ended.

  Beartracks waited two days before cantering under the brand-inscribed arch. Piano music, perhaps Chopin, wafted through the tasseled parlor curtains to evaporate in the dry, ceaseless prairie wind.

  He knocked. The tune broke off. He doffed his hat and bowed slightly when the door opened. A tall, elegant woman lifted her eyebrows. Beartracks introduced himself and asked if Michael and Dawn worked at the ranch. The woman frowned, asking if there were trouble.

  “No. No trouble at all. I know their folks, though, and they’d never forgive me if I passed this way and didn’t bring back news of the youngsters.”

  The rancher’s wife invited him to follow her through the house and back door. Dawn hung flapping sheets on the line, wind tugging at her braids and skirts. Two little girls played with dolls nearby in the shade of a cottonwood. Once she took in Dawn’s joy at seeing Beartracks, the woman waved at her daughters and returned to the house. Dawn and Beartracks visited to renewed strains of Chopin.

  Dawn wept as she told Beartracks she felt homesick. Their employers behaved in an impersonal and firm manner. Not mean, but with something unsaid, some attitude that announced Dawn was not and could never be as good as they. She, who had been cherished in Nora and Jim’s cabin on the North Fork.

  She sniffled as he patted her shoulder, but told Beartracks she now carried the name Dawn Larkin. After all the confusion, that’s the name they chose to use. “All these changes. Sometimes people act so rude. You should have seen the stares we got in Midvale. I saw some Blackfeet women. I think I’ll visit to see if any of them knew Sweet Grass.”

  Beartracks nodded. “I know something of this life in two worlds. You won’t find it easy. Your mother’s cousins live on the Blackfeet Reservation. You’d do well to find them.” He fought to stifle a flash of anger. Michael should have kept this lovely, happily sheltered girl away from so-called civilization.

  He left, telling Dawn he’d visit from time to time. He told her to greet Michael.

  He pulled the brim of his hat in a cool, polite gesture to the rancher’s wife as he left.

  Jim healed over the next months. One morning in late spring he returned from a long walk to tell Nora of a dance being held at some new neighbors, the Muellers’.

  “Oh, I don’t believe I’m in a dancing mood. They’ll all ask about Michael and Dawn. You and I do best to keep to ourselves even now we’re all legal and legitimate.”

  Jim persisted until Nora changed her mind. On the afternoon of the dance, she took pains to look better than just tidy for the first time since the children ran off. She wore a soft blue dress, trimmed in white lace and buttons. Her hair, less fiery, more the color of bracken in autumn, still caught the light. Waiting for Jim, she pulled a white shawl around her shoulders and gazed toward the mountains. The Blackfeet were right to call the Rockies the backbone of the world.

  “Backbone. Sure and I need backbone, too,” Nora spoke aloud. “That and pride. Folks will know our Michael left. All our business. As bad as in Ireland.”

  Leading the horse, Jim walked to her. He put his long fingers on her waist, lifted her easily, and sprang behind her. His breath stirred the blue ribbon and unruly tendrils at the nape of her neck and she felt for a moment like the hopeful young woman who’d arrived here so long ago. Leaning lightly against him, grateful for his recovery from the bullet wound, she felt her mood lift.

  The ride took them overland through heavy forest to Mueller’s meadow. Outside the house, a middle-aged woman seated at a piano on one corner of the wooden platform played “In the Good Old Summer Time” while dancers turned and swayed. Tables laden with bread, pies, salads, and roast game strung in a line away from the house. Neighbors greeted them with welcoming shouts and Nora realized they were recognized now for themselves, not just an Irish-Chinese oddity.

  Nan Hogan put her arms around Nora in a welcoming hug. Others did as well. After all the years, Jim had ear
ned the respect, if not the affection, of his neighbors. There were smiles and friendly calls of, “China Jim!”

  The piano player commenced “In the Good Old Summer Time” again.

  “It’s a lovely tune, but doesn’t the woman at the piano know any other melodies?” Nora asked.

  “No. As a matter of fact, she doesn’t,” Nan answered. “But it’s a good tune to dance to. We’d be in trouble if she only knew hymns.”

  Nora felt almost happy dancing in Jim’s arms. No more stares, at least among these neighbors. Stars wheeled behind Jim’s head. Nora relaxed into the fun. She danced with bewhiskered men and shared news with neighbor women. After keeping to herself since Bat’s raid, she blossomed in the nearly forgotten ease of simple neighborly chats.

  At midnight, the North Fork residents shared a feast, toasting the Muellers with homemade rhubarb wine, transparent as air. The pianist resumed “In the Good Old Summer Time.” A nearly forgotten sense of belonging washed over Nora.

  “Here,” Jim said, taking off his deer hide jacket and swirling it over her shoulders like a cape. She drew the jacket around her, aware of the heat from his skin and the wild, earthy scent of pine and wood smoke that clung to his clothes.

  Jim watched her with a little smile. “There can be almost nothing like doeskin,” he said, “for keeping us warm.”

  The night tinted indigo to lighter blue just before the pink flood of dawn. The exhausted pianist played the last chorus and punchy, laughing dancers stopped for a breakfast of fish and sourdough pancakes served with elderberry or huckleberry syrup. Afterward, they prepared for their long rides home. Jim lifted Nora onto the big appaloosa. They crossed Trail Creek, water sparkling over its rocks until Nora turned away, dazzled by the brightness. She saw them then, a stag with magnificent antlers, one notched in a distinctive mark. The doe beside him paused at the water’s edge as if to see what this human couple meant, entering their morning.

  “Look,” Nora whispered. “Hart and hind, as we’d say in the old lands.”

  “Stag and doe. A pretty sight,” Jim said. “We’ll see their fawn with the doe soon.”

  The appaloosa moved through light slanting over pale lichen-draped green branches down to curving ferns. “But, it’s an enchanted place. I never think otherwise. I still expect to see the wee folk.”

  Jim said, “If one showed himself, somebody would shoot him or put him in a cage and haul it over to Apgar like Andre L’Hommidieu does with his mountain lions.”

  “Perhaps not. They’re clever, more so than we mortals.”

  “That would not require too much.”

  They rode on in silence. As the sun warmed her, Nora’s head drooped, nodded, and the landscape’s images doubled. She leaned back against Jim. Then, remembering his shoulder still gave him twinges of pain from time to time, she straightened.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “My shoulder can still stand the weight of a little wife like you.”

  Nora leaned back again, feeling slight movement as he continued to guide the appaloosa past shining spider webs and scolding squirrels.

  She woke at the cabin. Jim lifted her down and gestured toward the woodpile, indicating he’d chop wood after seeing to the horse.

  “We’re about out of meat,” Nora said.

  “Not for long. I’ll hunt.”

  They left early next morning to go to the Kintla cabin. Nora dressed in men’s pants and braided her hair in one thick rope below her wide-brimmed hat. When they forded the creek near the rustic cabin, Nora using a walking stick for balance from flat rock to flat rock, they saw two deer again. Jim raised his rifle, but Nora put her hand on his arm.

  “Wait. I don’t know how it can be, but look at that great boy’s antlers.”

  “It’s the same one all right. Look at the gouge on the one point.”

  Later, before the small blaze in the rough fireplace, Jim released the ribbon fastening Nora’s braid, loosening the three bright plaits one by one. Then he spread the undone hair over her shoulders. He bent to kiss her. They moved into long-familiar rituals of an old love, understanding each other in passion as in all necessary things.

  In a year, Nora proved up her claim. Without Michael and Dawn she lacked the joy she’d anticipated holding the deed would bring, but Jim and she acknowledged it as the culmination of all their efforts. Jim went with her to Kalispell, but refused to enter the church. She said her confession, rejoining him afterward with a troubled expression. “Oh,” she said in answer to Jim’s question, “the priest believes you should be a practicing Catholic, you know.”

  “He may keep his belief,” was the response. “Let’s buy the supplies we need and go home.”

  “Let’s go home,” Nora agreed.

  At Evening Star, Nora tried to stop herself from looking to the river several times every day to see whether Michael and Dawn might not be riding over the bank toward home. “Evening Star is your home,” she whispered to her absent children. “It’s where you belong. Jim and I are keeping it for you. Forgive us for the mistakes of the past and come home.”

  But as the pale light of late summer rested on the quiet mountains only deer moved toward her from the river except for the occasional hunters or settlers. There was talk of a national park to be established on the east side of the North Fork. Nora and Jim heard with relief that the west side would not be included in the government’s plans.

  “Everything has to stay as it is,” Nora fretted. “Michael and Dawn will come back to us one day. They must be homesick for Evening Star by now.”

  She began to lose weight, looking thin and strained. As they lay in bed one night, Jim tried to comfort her. “They are young. We moved across the world when we were young. Alone and much farther than they are from home.”

  “Ah, yes. I was younger when I sailed from Ireland than Dawn is now. Just fourteen I was, even younger than Michael when he showed up here. What a day that was when he walked back into our lives. You were right. I should have told him the truth that night. I only wanted to keep him here with us. What would he have done, then, I wonder?”

  They had switched sides of the bed after Jim’s shoulder wound. It felt backward to Nora to be on the outside. She burrowed against him. He stroked her hair.

  “You weren’t ready to tell him, so we’ll never know if Michael would have been ready to hear the truth. All we know is that there is sadness now. Let’s hope that from it will come a day of joy. I believe they will forgive us and return.” He winced. The shoulder still hurt after a day’s strenuous work.

  Nora waited until he slept, then slipped away to the kitchen. She sat at the table over a cup of coffee, recalling the past. She’d sat like this at her kitchen table in Butte, waiting for Bat to return. Now she waited for Michael. She shook her head in annoyance, stood and rinsed her cup before setting it on the counter.

  As she sometimes did, she touched her framed copy of the deed to Evening Star, hung on the wall next to a map of the world Jim had used to teach Dawn. A memory of their two dark heads bent over books at the table pierced her. In many ways she missed Dawn more often than Michael, especially inside where they’d cleaned, prepared meals, and sewed together. Nora felt short of breath, closed within the silent rooms.

  She stepped outside. The full moon illuminated the earth near and far. Their work shone before her, cabin, outbuildings, fences, gardens, and meadows. The cattle and horses moved a little, restless at the sound of her steps on the porch, then as she walked toward the river. Nora turned and surveyed Jim’s and her accomplishments. The sight comforted her. Whatever else changed, she and Jim had their life here, the buildings and animals on the ranch something she could grasp in her hands.

  The mountains weren’t human; therefore, weren’t subject to all the skittering dramas creatures like Nora and those she’d encountered seemed destined to engender. The glacial peace never failed to calm her. “Well,” she whispered to the range to the east. “You’ll not be going anywhere. Remote as you are, yo
u’ve always brought me the peace of my insignificance. Still, I miss Michael and Dawn.”

  She walked on toward the river’s soft gushing. Another constant. The land had settled into its steady, dark, indifferent nocturne of forest stillness, broken only by the twig snaps and brushings of little night creatures. The permanence comforted her. As moonset began, Nora felt hope, then certainty. All her immigrant life she’d experienced gains and losses in waves. Some buoyed her, some threatened to pull her under, but she’d held her dreams above any rising tide.

  Michael would come back and Dawn with him. She couldn’t see them now, but this place, her and Jim’s land, would draw them back. It waited for them, what she and Jim had created to bequeath. And what if those were right who said we can’t ever truly own land? Well, here she stood, her own ranch behind her . . . a pretty good illusion of landowning, for certain. But in the end it wouldn’t really matter. She belonged here as the creatures around her did. Her children as well. It owned them and they owned it, by virtue of belonging. They’d made themselves part of the permanence.

  Nora kept watch through moonset until first light peered over the peaks. She tipped her head back as the first light of morning rose over the timeless peaks. She heard the cabin door open and footsteps approach. Jim Li came to be with her.

  In time, their children would do the same.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Karen Wills lives with her husband just a few miles from her beloved Glacier National Park in northwest Montana. Their children are grown. She loves to write, hike, read, and visit with family and friends. She is also an active volunteer for social justice. Karen has practiced law, including representing plaintiffs in civil rights cases. She also taught English and writing at the college and secondary public school levels, including at the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, and in the Inupiaq Eskimo village of Wales, Alaska. She’s encountered bears, both grizzly and polar, and still believes passionately in the value of wild creatures and country.