by Liz Harris
‘I’m Carter townsfolk, too.’
He stared at her thoughtfully for a few minutes. ‘I can’t force you to do anythin’ you don’t want, Charity. I hope you’ll mind me and make a friend of Su Lin, but whether you do or not is up to you. I like to think of you havin’ someone to talk to when I’m gone, but that’s me bein’ selfish, I guess. I don’t like to think of you bein’ alone.’
‘Then don’t leave me alone,’ she said bluntly. ‘You said you might be gone for years. Don’t go, Joe. Please, don’t.’ A sob caught in her throat.
He turned slightly to face her. ‘Yup, it could be years. I’m not gonna lie to you about that. This drive will last roughly two and a half months from its start to the delivery at the end, and when it finishes, I’ll be at the top of Montana Territory. That’s a long way away. I’m keen to see the place, and also to see a bit more of Wyoming, so I thought I’d probably try to get on one of the fall round-ups.’
‘But you could come back after that, couldn’t you?’
He shook his head. ‘I’m afraid not. Wherever the fall drive ends, it’ll be a real long way from Carter, and with winter about to set in, I’ll immediately have to find somewhere to stay where I can work through the winter months.’
She stared at him. A tear trickled down her cheek.
‘Won’t I ever see you again?’ she asked, her voice a frightened whisper.
‘Sure you will,’ he said, and he laughed reassuringly. ‘You and the family are here, aren’t you? But I’m never again gonna live in Carter – I’ll never live in any minin’ town again. No, sir. Every day I’m drivin’ them cattle, I’m gonna be keepin’ my eyes open for a place where I’d be happy to settle. One day I’ll find it, and then you can all come and live with me. I’d like that.’
Her face broke into a broad smile. ‘You promise to let me come, too?’
‘I sure do,’ he said, his voice warm. ‘I found you, didn’t I? I didn’t leave you behind by the river and go back home on my own. Like I’ve said before, that makes me responsible for you. ’Course you might choose to stay on here, but that’d be up to you.’
‘I wouldn’t wanna stay here, Joe,’ she said eagerly, wiping her eyes with the back of her hands.
He smiled at her. ‘That’s what you think now, but in a few years you could think differently. You’ll be older by then and you might not wanna move to a place that’s far away. You might have a special friend here and wanna stay near your friend.’
She started to speak, but he put his finger gently to her lips.
‘I don’t mean the Chinese girl. I mean that someone might be courtin’ you. I reckon you’re gonna be real pretty, Charity, and if I’m away for years, by the time I come back you might be wed. You might even be a ma. Just think of that!’
She put her hand in front of her mouth, and giggled.
‘That just sort of came out,’ he said slowly. ‘But when I think about it, I suppose it’s not impossible,’ he added with a wry smile.
‘I’ll marry you, Joe, and I’ll always look after your house for you. I’ll keep it clean and make you cookies every day.’
He laughed. ‘A smart gal like you can do a lot better for yourself than someone like me. And now we’d better get back.’
He stood up and wiped the dust from the seat of his jeans. Charity stayed where she was. She pulled her knees up to her chin and hugged them to her.
He looked down at her, and a wave of emotion came over him. ‘I’ll come back and see you again, Charity,’ he said gravely. ‘I promise. But now,’ he added, forcing a cheerful note into his voice, ‘I want you to practise smilin’. I want a smile on your face when I ride off, ’cos that’s how I wanna remember you.’
Joe went wearily back into the house. Martha was sitting at the table. She glanced round at the sound of his steps.
‘She stopped cryin’ yet?’ she asked.
‘Just about,’ he said, sitting down opposite her. ‘But she wants to stay out there a bit longer.’ He looked at the empty chairs by the range. ‘Where’s Pa and Sam?’
‘In town.’
‘Figures.’ He paused. ‘I meant what I said, Ma; I’ll send you money from wherever I am, and one day I may even have a place of my own that you can come to if you wanna leave Carter. I know you’d like to live on a ranch again.’
Martha nodded. ‘I believe you mean that, son, but it’s easy to say now. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.’
He leaned across the table towards her. ‘Before I leave, I want you to promise me somethin’. It’s about Charity. She’s a good kid. She helps you all she can, and it’s not because she’s afear’d of bein’ thrown out.’
She gestured dismissively. ‘I know that. The gal’s got a kind heart.’
‘She’s earned her right to be here, and I want you to promise you’ll never let Pa and Sam turn her out, and that you’ll never do anythin’ to make her feel she’s gotta go. I want her here when I return, unless she’s wed, of course. And if she’s wed, I want it to be ’cos that’s what she wanted and not ’cos she thought you all wanted her out. You owe it to her. Promise me she’ll always have a home here.’
‘For my part, she will. And your pa’s too soft to force anyone out. But I can’t answer for Sam.’
‘Promise me you’ll not let him throw her out,’ he repeated, his voice hardening.
She stared at his face, at the set of his jaw. Her lips tightened into a thin line. ‘I promise you’ll find her here when you get back, unless she’s gotten wed; and if she has gotten wed, that it’ll have been her choice to have done so.’
He nodded in satisfaction, and sat back.
‘But that means you gotta come back, Joe.’
Chapter Nine
Three weeks later
May, 1878
The midday sun beat down on the hard mud track that snaked across a plain scored by horses’ hoofs and the wheels of the many covered wagons that had carried the early pioneers along the trail in the years before the railroad had opened up an alternative way of making the long journey from east to west.
Joe reined his horse to a halt, stretched himself and made an effort to pull his sweat-slicked shirt away from his skin.
Leaning forward against the pommel, he stared across the clumps of wind-bitten sagebrush, the once-green foliage crowned with small yellow and purple flowers that had been silvered by the bright light of the sun, to the mass of wooden houses lying in the distance – to Cheyenne, the town where his new life was about to begin.
Wisps of white smoke rose from the many stovepipes and drifted slowly up to meet the low white clouds that were floating idly across the wide blue sky, and there they dissolved.
As he sat staring at the sprawl of houses and shops ahead of him, the strains of the life and activity in the town were carried to him on the back of a gentle breeze. Not a single mine chimney, he thought, and no sound of a mine pump.
Excitement, flattened by eight days of hard riding, rose again within him.
On a sudden impulse, he twisted in his saddle and looked back down the track he’d ridden – a track that had led him across rivers and streams and miles of emptiness, that had brought him far from Carter Town, which now lay hidden beyond a horizon hazed deep blue by shadowy mountains.
All of a sudden it hit him with force that he was a long, long way from his home, and from the life he’d always known and the sense of security it had given him without his realising it. He was now alone in a way that he’d never been before, and whatever happened in the future, nothing would ever be the same again.
From the moment he’d packed his saddlebags and headed east, a part of him had realised this. He’d known that he’d be a different person when next he saw his family, and that they would be different, too. Time wouldn’t stand still for them while it allowed him to grow from a boy to a man, and they would never again appear to him in the way that they were now lodged in his mind.
He’d known all that when he’d left
Carter, but he hadn’t really felt it. But now, on the threshold of his new life, he felt it deeply. His family were far from him, and soon they’d be still further away. And not just his family, but Charity, too, with her wide happy smile and her funny childish ways.
A wave of anguish swept through him, the force of it taking him by surprise. A lump came to his throat, and he felt momentarily winded by the powerful sense of loss that engulfed him.
He sat still in the saddle, breathing deeply.
He knew he’d done the right thing in grabbing with both hands the chance to live the life he’d long yearned for. But vivid memories of what he’d left behind for an unknown future crowded fast and furiously into his mind, stabbing him sharply, and he couldn’t do anything for a moment or two but stare back at the way he’d come, his vision blurred.
At last, drained of emotion he turned again to face Cheyenne. Then, pressuring the horse’s flank with his left heel, he started to gallop towards the future he’d chosen.
Chapter Ten
Charity stood on the sun-bleached boardwalk and stared up at the sign above the entrance to the wood-frame shop. On it written in large letters she read the words ‘General Mercantile Store’. Nervously nibbling her lip, and frantically hoping that Chen Fai wouldn’t be in the store, she lowered her eyes to the entrance, drew in a deep breath and took a step forward.
The flurry of air caused the slender wind chimes hanging above the doorway to jingle, and she winced.
She took another step forward and found herself inside the store. The wind chimes jangled furiously behind her. In a sudden panic at being in a place where whites seldom went, she turned and ran out of the shop and back to the dusty track, and stopped.
Her heart beating fast, she anxiously glanced along Main Street in both directions.
The only person close to her was a Chinaman wearing a coarse cotton knee-length jacket over baggy blue pants, and a peaked straw hat on his head. His eyes on the ground, he was coming from the direction of the railroad, a large piece of raw meat hanging from one end of a long branch balanced across his right shoulder, and a sack from the other.
There was no one else around.
With a sigh of relief that she hadn’t been seen going in or out of the Chinese store by any of the Carter townsfolk, and that Chen Fai hadn’t come out to see who’d disturbed the wind chimes, she turned and went back to the entrance.
She stared at the doorway. She was going to have to go through it again if she wanted that letter. And she did.
A scroll hung from either side of the doorway, with Chinese letters on each and words under them written in English. ‘Ten thousand customers constantly arriving’, she read on one scroll. ‘Profit coming in like rushing waters’, she read on the other.
Swallowing the sudden desire to giggle, she peered through the open doorway into the dimly lit interior. The wind chimes lightly tinkled. She took a step back.
‘You not go,’ she heard a voice say from within. ‘Please honour my father’s unworthy store with your presence.’
Frowning slightly, Charity stared into the store, squinting as she did so.
The Chinese girl emerged from the gloom and stood facing her, her hands flat together in front of her as if in prayer, her neck bent in a slight bow.
Charity stared at her. ‘How can I?’ she asked, a smile playing across her lips. ‘This is a small shop and there are already ten thousand customers in it.’
The girl unfolded her hands, put them in front of her mouth and giggled. ‘Unworthy self can welcome ten thousand and one customers to humble mercantile. You come in.’ She backed into the shop, her eyes inviting Charity to enter.
Charity slowly followed her, the sound of her boots on the wooden planks echoing loudly in her ears; then she stopped and looked around.
A small potbellied stove stood to her right, just inside the store. A number of wooden barrels and kegs were clustered between the stove and a long sawn-plank counter that ran from the front of the shop to the rear, parallel with the sidewall. A similar counter ran the length of the store on the opposite side.
Halfway along the right-hand counter stood a small pair of scales. She’d seen scales like that before. Joe had once pointed some out to her when they’d been in a store in the whites’ section of town, and she knew they were for weighing gold dust. At the far end of the counter, there was a boxed area marked out with a grille. A chair had been placed behind the grille.
In the middle of both of the counters, a coal-oil lamp threw out a pungent cloud of oily smoke that almost hid from sight the items piled at the far end of the shelves that lined the walls on both sides of the store.
All of the shelves looked as if they were about to collapse beneath the weight of the goods on them, Charity thought. She’d never seen such a jumble of items for sale – groceries of every kind, cured fish, wheels of cheese, canned goods, soap, coal oil, hairpins, lengths of cloth, bundles of Goodwin’s miners’ candles, and far more things than she could take in at a single glance.
She sniffed the air. A strange, aromatic smell seemed to be coming from the counter on the left-hand side of the store. Curious, she went across and stared at the assortment of small bags and boxes spread out across the top of the counter. The smell was definitely coming from the packages, but she couldn’t read the unfamiliar squiggles on them so she didn’t know what was inside them.
She picked up two of the bags closest to her, sniffed them, pulled an expression of distaste and put them down again, then she turned back to the store, and to Su Lin, who was hovering nearby, watching her.
‘What’s that?’ she asked Su Lin, indicating the grille at the end of the right-hand counter.
‘People who likee send letter, give letter and money to honourable brother. Honourable brother pay man to take letter to train or stagecoach. Another people send letter back here to unworthy store.’
Charity nodded. She glanced around the store again, and then looked back at the girl. Her eyes now more accustomed to the lack of light, she saw that the girl was wearing a short dark blue quilted jacket over loose pale blue cotton trousers. Joe was right – the Chinese girl looked about ten, too, when you got up close to her.
Su Lin wriggled uncomfortably under Charity’s stare. ‘Name of this unworthy girl is Su Lin,’ she said.
Charity frowned. ‘I know your name, but I don’t know why you keep sayin’ that you’re unworthy and your store’s unworthy? Why don’t you just say, My name is Su Lin, and just say store, not unworthy store?’
Su Lin looked at her in surprise. She slipped each hand into the opposite sleeve and shrugged slightly. ‘Is Chinese way,’ she said. ‘I Chinese.’ She hesitated. ‘You also Chinese.’
‘I’m an American girl,’ Charity said firmly.
Su Lin shrugged her shoulders again, and smiled. ‘You not likee, but you Chinese girl. You got Chinese face. You got Chinese mama and baba.’
Charity glared at her. ‘You’ve got a letter for me,’ she said sharply. ‘Ah Lee told me so last night when I was leavin’ the bakery. Your brother told him it was here. Give me my letter, please, so I can go.’
Su Lin didn’t move. ‘Big brother not want us be friends. But I want us be friends. I learn good English so we able to talk,’ she said, a shy smile on her face. ‘Big Brother teach me so I able to help in shop.’
‘Well, I don’t want us to be friends. My letter, please.’
Su Lin’s face fell. She went across to the far end of the right-hand counter, took something from the pile of papers in the area behind the grille and brought it back to Charity.
‘I likee us be friends. If you also likee, you come see me again,’ she said, holding out the letter.
‘I said I don’t wanna be friends. I didn’t come to see you – I came for my letter,’ Charity said curtly, and she snatched it from Su Lin.
She looked down at the letter, and excitement welled up inside her. For a long moment, she stared hard at it, unable to move.
&
nbsp; Then she ran her fingers across the words directing the letter to General Mercantile Store, Carter Town, and looked up at Su Lin with wonder in her eyes. ‘This is the first letter I’ve ever had,’ she found herself saying, impelled by something outside her to share the moment.
Su Lin nodded her understanding, and smiled. ‘I not yet have letter. But honourable parents soon go home to China. When they in China, they send letter and I send letter back. You bring letter here and I send letter back.’ She indicated Charity’s letter. ‘Letter come from who?’
‘From Joe. He went away three weeks ago.’
‘Joe is man in livery stable? Is big like Chen Fai. But man Joe is not big brother. He not have Chinese face.’
Charity shook her head. ‘Joe’s my friend. He found me.’
‘He found you? I not understand.’ Su Lin looked at her in friendly curiosity.
The warmth of the friendship on offer reached out to Charity and touched her. A tightness grew in her throat, and she swallowed hard. She opened her mouth to explain what had happened ten years earlier, and then she stopped. She was an American girl, not Chinese; she shouldn’t be talking to a Chinese person. Carter townsfolk weren’t friends with the Chinese.
She shook her head and took a step back from Su Lin. ‘I don’t wanna talk to you. I’m an American girl. I’m gonna go home and read my letter now. Thank you.’
Trying not to see the disappointment that filled the eyes that were the same shape as her own, she turned away and went quickly to the door.
‘M goi,’ she heard Su Lin call after her. ‘Zoi jin.’
She stopped and turned round.
Su Lin was standing in the middle of the empty shop, a lonely figure. Silence hung in the air around her.
‘What do those words mean?’ Charity asked, feeling the need to say something to remove the sadness from Su Lin’s eyes, and the loneliness.
‘M goi mean thank you. And zoi jin mean goodbye,’ Su Lin said quietly.
Charity stared at her, hesitating, wondering whether she ought to say something else out of kindness. Then she shook herself inwardly. I’m an American girl, she told herself firmly, and she started to go out through the doorway.