She moved on to the cabin, practicing with her crutches, planning on starting a meal with those vegetables. She stopped. Her eyes were drawn to Logan as his arm slashed across the canvas—the intensity of his expression, the passion of his movements. The fixation on the boiling, advancing storm was like music.
Drawn closer, she knew he hadn’t even noticed her. This is what he’d been talking about when he said he’d neglect a wife and children.
Dark gray splashed across white canvas. The violence and danger of the storm was there. Sally could feel it moving, threatening, as surely as the clouds did. She wondered if a man had this kind of gift and this powerful calling from God, could a woman maybe, just maybe, rejoice in that? Embrace all that was different about her life? If that man turned all that power and passion on a woman, could she live with the problems that came with a man obsessed with art?
It was like ripping away her skin to pull her gaze from Logan’s work, but she did it. Forced herself to do it. Turning to the cabin, she thought of practical things like supper and learning how to walk on crutches.
With one tiny movement, she caressed the beads along the collar of the doeskin dress. Then she ran her hand over the seam where she’d hidden the tiny ribbon. She wouldn’t have to hide that ribbon any longer if she stayed here. Logan wouldn’t expect her to be boyish in her dress. Logan thought she was beautiful in anything she wore. The intensity of his art was there when he was drawing her, too.
Going soon was essential or she very much feared she’d never be able to go at all.
Wise Sister scolded her into staying home, and another week crawled by.
The only surprising fact was that Sally kept from strangling someone. “Let me ride out with you tomorrow.” Sally and Wise Sister had retired to Wise Sister’s cabin to sleep. Sally cared for the cabin while Wise Sister did her sneaking around.
Logan painted.
“Can’t sneak. Broke leg.” Wise Sister prepared for bed quickly and lay down on her pallet.
Sally hated putting Wise Sister out of her bed, but the plain truth was Sally still hurt. It was doubtful she’d have gotten any sleep on the hard floor. “My ribs are fine and my leg hardly hurts anymore since we put on the cast.”
It might be more accurate to say Sally had gotten used to her leg and ribs hurting, which wasn’t the same as not hurting, but she saw no reason to bury Wise Sister in details.
“Too many men. I go on foot. You need horse. Can’t sneak on horse.”
“Have you seen any of the men yet, even a glimpse?”
Wise Sister reached for the lantern she’d left burning until Sally was settled. “No, I see no one. Sleep now.”
“Wise Sister, wait!”
To Sally’s surprise, the Shoshone woman’s hand paused. Usually Wise Sister did as she wished, and Sally had very little success changing the elderly woman’s mind about anything.
She’d never get Wise Sister to agree to take her along, but she had a few other things she wanted to say. “The things in this cabin are beautiful.”
Wise Sister sat up on her pallet with a small smile. “My home. I make it to please myself.”
“Yourself and your husband, Pierre.” Sally wondered at the lack of talk of Pierre. Though of course Wise Sister didn’t talk much about anything.
“No, my home. My things.”
Looking around at the handwork, the leather, the weaving, the soft animal pelts, the collection of feathers and stones and carved wood, Sally knew that was the truth. “Your husband wasn’t here much, then?”
The smile on Wise Sister’s face remained but was a sad sort. “Gone a lot. A wandering man, my Babineau. Didn’t care after a while.”
“You didn’t like your husband?” Sally thought of Mandy. From the bits and pieces in her letters, Sally suspected Mandy didn’t like her husband one bit.
“At first, yes. Very much. But he couldn’t stay. Always itchy to move. At first I moved with him. Then the children came and I stayed in one place. I was a woman for home. He was a restless man drawn to the distant places.”
“You have children?” Why hadn’t Sally known this?
“Six children. Two girls, four boys. The boys took to the mountains like Pierre. The girls married to my tribe and left for the reservation. No one is near.”
“That’s sad.” Sally knew how they all missed Mandy, hurt to know her babies were growing up as strangers.
“Just life. Not sad.”
But Sally heard in Wise Sister’s voice that it was sad.
“Those”—Wise Sister pointed to a woven mat on the wall, six sides, brightly dyed in six colors—“are my children. I find things of six. One for each child.”
Suddenly Sally saw the sprays of feathers, spreading in six directions. The circle of stones, six stones, each a different color. A beaded wall hanging showed a six-sided sunburst. The number was in nearly everything. And in the midst of it hung that painting of Wise Sister and Babineau.
“Does Logan’s painting of you and your husband please you, then? Or do you not like your husband’s likeness on your wall?”
“Babineau was mine. I was his. We were together even when we were apart. I learned to be content in his absence and his presence. He was strong. He knew the land, and I respected that. I cared for him. A man who stayed with me would be good. But I chose him, not really knowing him, and I lived with my choice.”
“I think—I think my sister is married to a man she doesn’t like. I think that would be hard.”
There was an extended silence as Wise Sister looked at the painting.
Quietly she said, more to the painting than to Sally, “Life is hard. There is right and wrong. We make our choices and live with them. Do what is right especially when it’s hard.”
There was wisdom in Wise Sister’s eyes, and Logan had captured that perfectly in his painting. Patience. Suffering. Contentment. It truly was a beautifully done work. Sally looked closer at Babineau and saw strength and a look in Babineau’s eyes of restlessness, wildness. But contentment was there, to match Wise Sister’s. They’d found a way to exist together, even though they were very different.
In the end, Sally decided that’s the way most marriages worked. Her ma and pa got on well and seemed happy. A painting of them would show little suffering. Beth loved Alex. Some of her sorrow for Mandy’s life eased. Mandy would find her way somehow with no-account Sidney.
Sally almost spoke aloud of her confusion about marriage and adult feelings and Logan, but she turned from that, knowing the answer without asking the question. There could be nothing between them. And somehow that made it all the more important that she get out of here fast. “Let me go with you tomorrow, please. If we could ride straight to Luther, he’d protect us from the men who hunt me. We wouldn’t have to sneak around.”
“Too much hurt. You rest.”
The light snuffed out. Sally barely controlled the urge to scream in frustration.
But whether because she was battered and healing took its toll or the high mountain air just agreed with her, Sally fell asleep.
Sally awoke to Wise Sister gone. It was the first night she’d slept through without a single nightmare, and Sally wondered if maybe, finally, she was getting well.
She dressed in her pretty doeskin and hobbled herself over to Logan’s cabin. She came upon him standing near a ledge fifty feet in front of his cabin. From that ledge, the ground fell away, swooping to lower mountains, gentle swells, and jagged peaks.
They lived up where the eagle soared. Below the drop, the herd of elk stood in a circle watching a battle. The bull who led the group and the young upstart who challenged him. They’d played at this many times. Sally had seen it. But today seemed more serious. The two huge males snorted and charged, slammed their antlers together, fell back and charged again.
The steep drop reminded Sally of her fall. She hadn’t had a nightmare last night. It might well be the first night she’d gotten through without one. But now, looking down, it wa
s like she was plunging again. She had a moment of dizziness. She quickly backed away and sat on the chopping block. She saw his Stetson, pulling it on to block the view, and turned to watch Logan as a way of taking her mind off the memory of her haunting, plunging fall.
He stood, almost attacking his canvas with his knife. His strokes, wild, sweeping, almost violent, left trails of color behind that cried out with strength and vitality. The blue of the sky, the green of the grass, the gray of the rocks, all swirled into a blur around two bulls locked in mortal combat. Their massive antlers clashed, their heads down. Sally could hear the collisions, feel their anger and courage, smell their exertion.
It wasn’t a proper painting, where the elk looked like real critters. It was a picture of motion and danger and power. Sally had seen a realistic sketch he’d made when the elk had battled another day. She didn’t understand how he took that real world and turned it into feeling and motion and anger.
Sally thought he must be angry. But she watched him look from his canvas to the landscape sweeping away before him and the battling animals far below. Instead of anger she sensed power. Vitality. Strength. Passion.
It didn’t sit well to think of him as strong. It wasn’t a kind of strength she understood, and respecting something she didn’t understand felt … dangerous. It was tied up with her sister Mandy marrying a man no one in the family respected. And Beth marrying a strange man that they all ended up loving, but who looked like a poor bet at first.
Thinking of the two times they’d kissed had awakened a feeling inside her that was as unfamiliar as it was alluring. Sally gritted her teeth. She wanted no part of a man who didn’t feel like she did about the land and ranching. She wanted a man like her pa. Her second pa, Clay McClellen. Her ma had married a poor excuse for a man first time out, too.
Sally was determined that, when the day came for her to marry, which she didn’t intend to do for a long time yet, she’d pick a sensible man who fit in her life. A man would make a partner for her pa at the McClellen Ranch. Or a ranch very close at hand.
She wanted no part of the nonsense that had afflicted her sisters and ma the first time, when they did their choosing. Sally intended to use her God-given common sense to pick a sensible kind of man, and she’d be happy from the first day.
Logan took one more slash with his paint knife and left a trail of blue on the canvas that exactly matched the blue of the sky in front of him. How did he do that? He had a flat piece of wood in his hand that looked like a dinner plate, streaked with several colors. He’d mix them together with his knife and somehow come up a perfect shade. That in itself was a strange gift.
Sally had helped her ma dye fabric, and she knew how tricky it was to make colors do exactly as she wished. How did he, with sure, racing motions, mix his colors to capture a shade so rare and glorious?
He glanced over. He held another paint knife in his teeth, this one coated with a vivid shade of green. A knife in his teeth, another in his hand, the paint board he’d called a palette in his grip. He had paint on his face and in his hair and on his shirt, and his eyes burned with fire that drew her like a moth.
It was to her shame that he drew her, a man who looked and acted like a complete lunatic.
He set the palette on a chair loaded with small pots of paint and removed the knife from his teeth, so he held one in each hand. He jabbed his blue knife at a second painting sitting beside the first. The one painted with his knives was wild, a confusing clash of color that almost vibrated with Logan’s passion for art and the life and death battle of the elk. The other was of the area visible far below them. He’d painted, with complete realism, everything that swept away before them.
He had smeared green paint on his face from clutching the knife in his teeth. He didn’t care one bit about being a mess. “I wish you could go down there with me and really be close to the land, hear it, smell it, touch it, taste it. I want all of that to come through in my painting.”
“You want someone to be able to taste your painting?” Sally arched a brow.
A lighthearted laugh answered her skepticism. “No, I want someone to see my painting and imagine what it smells like and sounds like and tastes like.” He wiped his hands on a paint-stained cloth.
“No one can do that. Painting is about seeing.” Even as she said it, she glanced at his odd, unrealistic painting and knew she hadn’t spoken the pure truth. Sally had witnessed this fight, and Logan had brought it to the canvas in a way that was more than seeing. Logan’s work called to all her senses.
“I planned to be out there in nature, ready to catch the sunrise or the racing wind.” He stabbed at the landscape and the humor faded from his expression, his eyes snapping with impatience.
Sally saw in them the same passion that showed in his painting. She knew just how frustrated he was. “You’re not the only one who’s under lock and key, you know. I can’t go down there either. Wise Sister scolds. Tells me I’ll end up dead.”
Logan looked at Sally’s crutches.
With two she got around really well. She could do everything, except of course for the one thing she wanted to do most. Escape.
“Too many bad men.” Logan frowned down at the view. “Her exact words. I’m going to have to paint this from a distance instead of from down there close. What’s the point of being in the Rockies if I’m locked away on this hilltop?”
“I thought you built here because you loved the view.” Sally came closer to see the detail of his painting. He hadn’t used his knives and a blob of paint with the landscape painting. He’d used the same style she’d seen on her portrait.
“I do love it.” Logan wielded his knife at the awe-inspiring panorama. “But Babineau built here for me because his cabin was already here. I wanted to see the whole area, and this was a good central location to all sorts of natural beauty.”
“And why did Babineau live up here to begin with?”
“Because it’s off the park.”
“What?” Sally squinted her eyes to focus on his nonsense.
“Wise Sister’s husband has done a fair amount of trapping in Yellowstone over his lifetime, but that’s not allowed anymore. And they made it illegal to hunt, too. They’d been in these parts for years so they didn’t go far.”
Sally couldn’t imagine a land where hunting wasn’t allowed. What were animals for except to eat and ride?
“The first time Babineau took me up here, the view almost stopped my heart it was so beautiful. After that, I wanted to see more. I’d paint. Babineau hunted. Wise Sister cooked and sewed and tended a garden. I’d go off for a few days and camp. It gets so cold up here that it can snow even in August.”
Sally thought of August in Texas and tried to imagine snow. It had snowed during that rainy spell, so she knew it was true. Wise Sister always kept a fire going at night in their fireplace.
“Wise Sister knows this area even better than Babineau, so they were content to stay here. It’s close to where she grew up. Babineau built me my own cabin with the huge windows. It wasn’t done when I left the first winter, but Babineau had it finished in the spring.”
Sally moved closer to Logan’s more outlandish elk painting, strangely drawn to it. She thought it was a waste of his life, but she couldn’t deny it was skillfully done. She studied it and was only distantly aware that Logan was watching her.
He made a sudden movement of his head that drew her attention. He shook himself as if he wanted to shed water then smiled. “I’ll bring a chair out.” Logan set his knives aside and hurried into the cabin and back out with a chair.
“Thank you.”
“We can sit together and watch the beauty we can’t touch.” He set the chair down. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m fine.” Sally gratefully sank into it, careful to disguise her aches.
“You’re still in pain. I can see it in your eyes.” Logan leaned close and studied her in the strange way he did that seemed to be looking at the parts of her, to draw them.
It made her feel bad, but she wasn’t sure why.
Sally glared at him.
His eyes refocused, obviously seeing all of her. “What?”
“You’re staring.”
Logan flinched. “I do that. Always in my head I’m imagining the picture I want to draw. I’ve been told by plenty of people that it’s a very irritating habit.”
“Can’t you stop?”
“I don’t want to. That’s part of why I live out here, mostly alone.”
“You live in a wilderness in the West because you have the manners of a pig?”
A smile broke through Logan’s discomfort. “No. Well, yes, but not only for that reason. I don’t want to stop. I want to be who I am. Who God made me to be. I stare. People don’t like it. So I stay away from them as much as possible.”
Sally was a little tired of Logan blaming everything on God. “It’s clear as day that God gave you an ability to draw. Most folks aren’t born with such a talent, so it must be a special blessing. But don’t tell me it’s God’s plan for you to be rude.”
Logan’s brow furrowed. “But it’s all part of it. Part of the calling to art.”
“No.” Sally shook her head. “God sends each baby into the world with strengths—intelligence, a strong will, an easygoing nature, a sturdy back, quickness, or sharp eyes. You should see my sister Mandy shoot. It’s a pure gift, no denying it. And Beth, her voice, the way she can whisper to a scared animal or comfort an injured child. I’ve tried to copy that when I needed to calm a horse. I do all right but it’s nothing like what Beth can do. So I know God gives us gifts, but He just gives them to us. The raw material comes along with the baby. What a child grows into is all about his own choices in this world.”
Sally thought of Wise Sister and what she’d said the night before about making a choice and living with it. Doing right. Doing one’s best.
“Choices?” Logan shook his head.
“Yes, a child can follow the manners taught by her ma, or she can be rude. A little boy can take after his hard-workin’ rancher pa, or he can chase after book learning, or he can be a no-account bum. And the choices can come from what their lives are like. How were they treated? Is a child the youngest of ten kids, pampered and babied and fussed over and never disciplined? Is she the oldest with heavy responsibilities resting on her shoulders that make her older than her years?”
Sophie's Daughters Trilogy Page 47