God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana

by Carol Buchanan

  In the early evening, Dan walked Martha toward the cabin on Jackson Street, opposite the Melodeon Hall. Plump snowflakes sailed in the lights from windows, and Dan guessed the temperature hovered somewhere around fifteen above zero. Give or take. He only half-heard her chatter about Dotty’s progress at school. The question choked him, so he could not speak. Would she share this cabin with him? Unmarried, scandalous, beyond the pale in all decent society, would she live with him as man and wife though married to McDowell? If she did, he would keep her safe. Or if she did not. If McDowell came back, he would kill the bastard. He could do it. He had hanged fifteen men. Gallagher. Such he had become, that he could know himself able to take another man’s life.

  Inside the house, he lighted a lamp, gave it to Martha. His leg quivered where Pizanthia had shot him, and fear fluttered its wings in his stomach, seeking escape.

  Martha looked around. This main room had chairs and a table, and a cook stove any woman in the Gulch would envy. Even Lydia. Proper cupboards, too, though not much in them. A pot, a pan, a few mismatched plates. What she’d expect from a single man who put his feet under her table every night.

  “Do you like it?”

  She could hear the hope in his voice, and knew like a revelation that he’d be wanting her to share it with him. How she would love that! Like she loved him, though she hadn’t said it to him yet, being cautious, and because he was aiming to go back to New York. Tears stung her eyes, so all she could manage was, “It’s real nice.” It was, too. A big cabin, well chinked, with a lamp hanging from the ceiling beams, and two doors that led to other rooms. A real window, with glass, on either side of the front door. But it had a waiting feel to it. Like something was missing. From his silence she felt his disappointment, so she turned around and smiled at him. “It’s beautiful. There’ll be lots of light.” His own smile told her how relieved he was, how important it was that she like it, and she knew that her revelation was true.

  He did not touch her. “There’s more,” he said. “Would you like to see?” The next room might be a child’s room. It had two windows, one on each wall facing south and west, night-black now but in the daytime bright as outdoors. Light. She craved it as a starving person craved food, her little cabin being so like a cave. She pulled herself back from thinking that – this cabin, this small house, was not hers. She did not live here, could not live here, not with him, they were not married, could not be married as long as McDowell lived because she could not divorce him. The preachers said so. Once married always married, till death do them part, and the world had words for women who went to men they were not married to. Adulteress. Whore. She was afraid, like standing on a cliff, or running toward a buffalo jump, only maybe she wouldn’t jump. She didn’t have to, did she? She could stay like she was. In her cave. Waiting for McDowell to come home. Dreading that.

  Dan saw the fear in her corded neck and stiffened shoulders before she turned to him with the eyes of someone facing a precipice. He knew that fear, had felt it when he accepted the other boys’ dare to jump into the quarry pool. He wanted to seize her, crush her to him, but he knew he had to move softly, for she was intelligent and she knew where they were going, what choice he would ask her to make. Seeing her fear, an answering fear pecked at his stomach. He had not been so afraid when Pizanthia shot him, or when the water closed over his head.

  “There’s another room.” He nearly whispered the words, so intent he was that she not run. “Will you see?”

  She nodded, and he led her to the third room.

  It was larger than the other bedroom. In one corner stood a round stove, banked for safety, and some warmer than the other. The iron bed, with four tall legs, stood fully made up. What a tidy man he was. He poked at the ashes in the stove, and put in two or three more sticks. Martha trembled at the edge of the buffalo jump.

  He set the lamp on a chest of drawers and stood by it, like he was waiting for her to say something. She could feel him holding back, while she stared at the bed.

  She turned her head to see on his face such a longing that she felt she might see the blood move through his veins, she saw him that plain, or like he was naked, and she wanted to see him that way, oh Lord, she wanted to be with him, just the two of them a new Adam and Eve, and it could not be while McDowell lived.

  She fled. From him and from her own wanting, away from the edge of the buffalo jump. His steps, halting because his leg was still healing, came after her, but stopped before she put up the hood of her cloak and reached for the door latch. Martha half turned toward him. “I will not be your –” She could not bring herself to say the word.

  He heard what she meant as if she’d said it, and it knocked the wind out of him, though when he had caught his breath he cursed himself for a fool. She thought that could be what he was asking of her. How could she think he would do that, that he only wanted to make her his whore? How could she? She was fastening her cloak.

  “Wait!” he said. “Please!” This pain was worse than any bullet, and in his pain he opened his mouth to accuse her, when he realized she mistrusted him because he was a man, because of McDowell, what a man might be capable of. And herself because she had been wrong about McDowell and feared the same mistake again.

  As gently as might be, though his voice shook, he said, “I am not asking you to be my – anything else. I am asking you to be my wife.”

  “How?” Martha pivoted, the table between them, and flung the word at him. She was so cold, with a chill from inside her, because if he only wanted her that way, she might as well have packed up and gone with McDowell. She looked over the edge of the buffalo jump to the animals below, where wolves and coyotes fed on them, tearing living flesh from their bones. What would Isabel Stevens’s life be now?

  “When Chief Justice Edgerton returns from Washington, this will be Montana Territory,” he said. He would talk politics, now? She and the young’uns heard it every night at supper, and she swung away from him, heard him plead, “No, please, wait, I’ve thought it through. How we can marry. Please, listen. Please.” She turned back, but her hand rested on the latch. “The law here says a husband or wife can sue for divorce on grounds of desertion after two years. After two years, you can divorce McDowell and we can be formally married.”

  “Two years! How can we wait two years? What if he comes back?”

  “When this becomes Montana Territory, we’ll have our own Legislature, and I’ll run for representative. If I’m elected, I’ll get you a legislative divorce.”

  “What if you’re not elected?” He would not hold her hostage to some bye and bye, to all them if’s, she wouldn’t have it.

  “I can get you a legislative divorce even if I’m not elected. I’ll lobby them until they agree. They won’t dare say no to me. Then, if you’ll have me, we will marry. But in the meantime, what shall we do?”

  If, he’d said. If you’ll have me. The lamplight showed clear the planes and angles and shadows in his clean-shaven face, too thin and drawn with everything that had happened since they’d found Nick, and the fear darkening his eyes. He was plumb scared. She’d never had a man afraid before of what she might say, not even McDowell. But she wasn’t the only one in this. “I have to think of the young’uns.” Something in her voice must have made him bolder, because he moved toward her, lifted back her hood, and took her face in his hands.

  “I want us to be a family.” He looked into her eyes. “You know that. I’ve said so, and they understand it, but if we have to keep separate until we can make it legal, then we will.”

  It was a supreme offer, and his hands trembling on her face told her what it cost him. As she thought it over, he waited a moment before saying, “We can marry sooner.”

  “What on earth do you mean? There’s no preacher in five hundred miles, and no real preacher would marry us, currently.”

  “I know. How about an irregular one? A lay preacher, maybe?”

  An irregular marriage. She watched his face, how his eyes looked
over her right shoulder as he thought, and she waited for what he would say. “Someone can do a form of words in front of our friends. People will know that I take you for my wife. We’ll do it right when we can.” He bent his head toward her. “It will change nothing, because right now, for better worse, richer or poorer, till death do us part, I give you my life.” His voice broke, and he blinked fast.

  He held her face up so she had no choice but to look at him while she poised on the edge of choice. She thought of the dark little cabin, of waiting in fear for McDowell to come back, of how tongues would wag, of the words they would call her. Of life without Daniel. What the preacher said. How she loved his narrow face, the blond hair falling across his forehead almost to his green eyes. What the preacher said. How she loved him. “The preacher back home said this was wrong. But he also said slavery was right, God’s will. It appears like some folks can find in the Bible anything that’s convenient for them.”

  She put her arms around him, under his overcoat, his jacket, and laid her palms against the strong muscles of his back. Resting her head against his chest, she said, “Yes.” Her voice croaked, and she cleared her throat. “Yes.”

  Dan threw back his head and let out a great booming jubilant laugh that caught her and carried her with him. They clung to each other, all the weeks of uncertainty, of wanting, dissolved in their laughter. Dan kissed her. Her lips opened to him and he felt her tongue exploring behind his teeth. She would have him. They would be together.

  “Shall we be together, now?” he asked, and shouted with laughter when she whispered, “Yes.” They went into the room the stove had warmed.

  Martha soared over the edge of the buffalo jump, and music caught and held her like an eagle’s wings and flowed like water to quench her long thirst, while his shadow made from firelight moved on the pale, muslin-covered wall, his shoulders over her protected her, and she welcomed him, and floated on the music until she settled to earth and folded her wings.

  He leaped from the quarry rim into the water, and gathered all the cards into his hands, the full deck, dealt them, picked them up, laid them down, one hand dissolving into the next, and he bet, called, raised, and did not check, and the stakes were richer than he’d ever dreamed, and he risked it all, terrified and thrilled at once, while the firelight in the round stove romped against the walls, across her face and her wide, dark, unseeing eyes whose depths promised undiscovered seams of gold deep, so deep underground; and he augured down, probed and thrust down and down, drilled hard toward the gold. Her thighs vined about his body, twined about him as he dove deeper, delved down to the earth’s core, drowned in her and lay on the floor of the quarry with long water vines above him, and resting beside him, all the gold. He had found the Mother Lode.