Softly Falling

by Carla Kelly

  “Jack, do what you need to. If you want to take me to my house, I can get my clothes ready. I’ll just wait there for you or someone.” She tried to smile but failed singularly.

  It was a generous offer that touched his heart, because he knew she meant it. She probably already knew what a practical man he was.

  “I can’t do a thing for Stretch right now, and you’re cold, tired, and hungry. Keep walking.”

  Her little shack was as cold inside as outside, but at least the wind wasn’t blowing snow through it. He opened her portmanteau as she looked around. Then she put in books first before clothing because that was Lily. He helped her, because she was starting to shiver noticeably.

  The pictures went in next, followed by petticoats and underwear—glory, it was silk—and shoes. She closed the lid and pulled out a smaller suitcase from under her bed. Her corsets and dresses went in, and nightgowns—again that silky material. Working as quickly as she could, she spread out a blanket on the floor and bundled in all of her bedding and her father’s.

  “I don’t feel very good, so it’s enough for now.”

  As he thought about it later, in the relative warmth of the cookshack, that was the first time he ever heard Lily Carteret complain. She had no interest in food, even though he knew she was hungry. He took her straight to his two-room shack, sat her down, removed her shoes while she shivered uncontrollably, and told her to get in bed, clothes and all. He pulled the blankets high around her neck and went for help.

  When he returned with two pigs and Amelie, Pierre and Preacher were already digging in the snow, trying to free Stretch, frozen solid and welded to the ground. Jack walked on Amelie’s other side so she couldn’t see what they were doing, but she knew.

  “Did he suffer?” she asked.

  “I sincerely doubt it,” he lied. “He probably just lay down and went to sleep.”

  Amelie nodded, satisfied. It was probably going to be his best lie of the winter.

  Why wouldn’t people leave her alone? Lily had voiced her objections forcefully, but no one listened. Obviously nothing had changed from Bristol to the Bar Dot. She didn’t want to sit up, but Jack insisted.

  Amelie stood beside him, her eyes serious. “Do what he says,” she said in the same firm voice she had used on Nick.

  Dutifully, Lily held out one arm and then the other, until she found herself down to that union suit he had helped her into in the schoolhouse.

  “Stop!” she ordered, and he stopped. She stared him in the eyes. “You are not to take my clothes off,” she told him.

  “Wasn’t planning to,” he said with a grin. He said something else which she chose to ignore and then stated, “You’re a knucklehead.”

  Amelie giggled.

  He was holding out another pair of those long johns. “Raise your foot like a good girl,” he said. “Other one now. Stand up.”

  Standing up made her list to one side and then the other, so he sat her down quickly. The top went on next, then her nightgown over everything. “Foot up.” He slid on wool socks. “Other one.”

  She closed her eyes, shaking so violently now that her stomach hurt. He gave her a little push and she flopped on her side, nearly asleep again. Now if everyone would leave her alone . . . Something warm and hard pressed against her back.

  “It’s a pig,” Jack said. “No, not that kind. It’s iron and it holds hot water. It’s padded with a towel. I have one more pig. There. Amelie, your turn. Hop up and keep your teacher warm.”

  Lily relaxed as Amelie got between the covers, nestling down with a contented sigh of her own as they spooned together, stomach to back. Already Jack’s voice was farther and farther away, rattling on about “eat later,” “get warm,” and “we might add Chantal.”

  He pulled the coverlets higher on both of them, then rested his hands on Lily’s neck, rubbing it gently. “Sakes, you’re tighter’n a drumhead.” His warm hands went to her shoulders and he massaged them, which coincided with her last memory of the day.

  Or nearly so. At some point, something light jumped on the bed, turned around a few times, and settled by her feet. She reached out a hand, but Francis lay too far away.

  She woke hours later because she was hungry, and finally warm, even though the room was not. Amelie must have left her, but Lily remembered where she was and what had happened. She looked for Francis, but the cat was gone.

  There were others in the room. She looked around, startled to see Jack, Pierre, and Preacher. Will Buxton stood there too, but on the side, not mingling. I need to talk to him about that, she thought, even though she realized how irrational that was. She had learned something both terrible and wonderful during their ordeal in the school: they all needed to work together.

  “Are you warm now?” Jack asked. “Amelie went back to her mother, but I can get another hot pig.”

  “I’m warm, and I thank you,” Lily told him. She propped herself on one elbow, wondering about the delegation crowding the small room.

  “Food first,” Jack said, and he gave her a sandwich consisting mainly of bread and cheese, with a smidge of butter only.

  She took it but looked at the others. “It really isn’t polite for me to eat when no one else is.”

  “Lily,” was all Jack said, but she got the message. The sandwich went down faster than anyone at Miss Tilton’s would have approved of.

  “Much better.” Lily sat up. She had never worn so many clothes to bed in her life, but she still felt awkward with her audience. “And now?”

  “I just want you to know the lay of the land.”

  She didn’t understand that expression, and Pierre must have noticed. “How things are,” he said, and she nodded.

  “We’ve strung rope from my house here to the bunkhouse, the cookshack, and then to the barns. We’re not going to be caught flatfooted again.”

  The men nodded. Lily looked from grim face to grim face.

  “We’ve put Stretch in an unused shed,” Jack explained. “Can’t bury him because the ground is frozen.” Lily plainly saw the strain of the last few days on his face. “We can’t even straighten him up.”

  Lily shuddered. The foreman minced no words, but at least Amelie wasn’t there.

  “Everyone else is accounted for.” He gave a dry snort. “Mr. Buxton’s biggest worry seems to be that his cook has declared she is leaving on the next train from Wisner as soon as we can get her there.”

  “The cattle?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “The ones around the buildings? All dead. I doubt Buxton’s cook will like this, but our first task is to saddle up and see what we find.”

  “That doesn’t sound safe.”

  “It isn’t. What I want from you is to continue the school here in my house. The children are upset.” He sat on the edge of her bed, surprising her again. His eyes were so serious, and he leaned close as though speaking only to her. “I need you to keep teaching, even with the school gone.” He gestured to Pierre’s winter count, still folded and containing everything they had rescued from the Temple of Education. “We’re going to have a rough go of it, but the children. . .” He stopped, swallowed, and looked away.

  She took his hand. “Is it Sunday?”

  He nodded. His emotion touched her heart.

  “We’ll begin tomorrow.” She looked over his shoulder to Pierre. “Could you possibly get the True Greatness sign from the school?”

  “You’ll have it.”

  “I want it nailed over the door.”

  Jack dabbed at his eyes and smiled at her, his equanimity restored. “You don’t need a sign to have true greatness, Lily.”

  She released his hand and folded her hands in her lap, thinking of the incongruity of sitting there in a nightgown and two layers of long johns with men all around. “We might need to be reminded this winter.”

  Pierre was the last man to leave. Before he closed the door, Jack set what looked liked dried beef on the floor. “For the cat under your bed,” he told her as
he left.

  The men rode out the next morning, each of them bundled with every article of clothing they owned. Lily wondered that the horses could bear the weight. Before they left, Jack had made sure she could get from his house to the cookshack, walking with her. The men had shoveled paths between the buildings, and the snow on either side stood knee deep. The wind had created huge drifts against the north and west sides of the buildings.

  The Sansever children sat with her as they ate breakfast. She observed their faces, all of them older now, maybe even feeling, as she did, the weight of their situation. Jack wanted her to provide the normalcy they needed, so it was no time for her to show her own fears.

  Before he left the cookshack, he just stood there, staring at the room with its table and benches. Lily held her breath, wondering if he was already deciding what they would have to burn here. While the children carried the dishes to the sink, she went to him, just wanting a private word—or, if she was honest, some reassurance.

  He must have known that. Maybe her face wasn’t as calm as she had hoped. He put his arm around her shoulders. “Lily, you did everything right in the schoolroom,” he told her, speaking softly, truly for her ears alone this time. “You had never been in a situation like that and you didn’t panic.”

  “Oh, I did,” she whispered back. “I almost decided to let the children go.”

  His grip tightened. “What stopped you?”

  She considered his question, thinking back to that long moment when the snow swirled everywhere and Nick was urging her to let them leave before the snow deepened. Suddenly, she knew what it was, and she struggled against it, not because the idea wasn’t appealing, but because it opened her up to more honesty than she had ever admitted to in her life.

  “What?” he asked again, almost as if he already knew but insisting she say it.

  “I loved them too much to take even the tiniest chance,” she managed to say. The only thing left to do was rest her head against his chest for a small moment. “We would live together or die together. I . . . I’ve spent my life avoiding hurt, and now I want to care. This is harder.”

  He was silent, just hugging her shoulders, nothing more.

  She had her own question. “Why does that matter so much right now, when there are far bigger worries?”

  “Tell you later, if I have to,” he said, releasing her. He didn’t look at her again as he tied his Stetson down with what looked like Luella’s muffler.

  Irritating man, she thought, but she couldn’t help her own smile to hear him whistling after he closed the door.

  CHAPTER 34

  Lily and her children spent the day turning the front room of Jack Sinclair’s two-room shack into another Temple of Education. Before he rode out with the others, Pierre found the bedraggled cardboard True Greatness sign and shook his head. He came back an hour later with True Greatness painted on a wooden slab and nailed that in place instead, all without saying a word.

  Quietly at first, but then with smiles and finally laughter, Amelie, Chantal, and Nick swept the floor, conferred together about what to do for desks, and hatched a plan of their own, which impressed their teacher.

  “Jack’s table here isn’t much,” Nick said, eyeing the little drop-leaf table with something close to scorn. “It’s not even good enough for you, Miss Carteret.”

  “We’ll worry about that later,” she told him, secretly pleased. “Do you have any thoughts about desks for all of you? That’s probably the larger issue.”

  “We think we can get the men to move over one of the tables from the cookshack, and a bench,” Amelie said.

  “We can burn it too, if we have to,” Chantal chimed in, then burst into tears.

  “Oh, my dear one,” Lily said, scooping up the child and holding her close. Chantal sobbed into her shoulder as she sat down with her on Jack’s wobbly settee. She looked at the worry in Amelie’s eyes, and the way Nick clenched his jaw, and gestured them close. Soon the four of them crowded together on the settee as Chantal wept for them all. When the moment passed, they continued preparing their new classroom.

  Luella and Fothering came with lunch—cheese sandwiches and dried apples. By the time the men rode back to the ranch buildings late that afternoon, everything was ready for them to move in a table and bench.

  She hated to ask anything of the men, whose exhaustion was palpable, but they went right to work after a nod from Jack, who followed the table with a bench balanced on his shoulder. When they returned to the cookshack, he was smiling.

  “My place never looked so good,” he told her, as he peeled off layer after layer of outer clothes and left them in a heap on the floor by the other men’s clothes. “Good to get down to shirtsleeves again. Sure is hard to . . .” He stopped, remembering his audience as his face reddened. “Let me say, basic functions are more of a challenge, wrapped up thoroughly.” He brightened. “That sounded almost elegant, Miss Carteret,” he joked. “You’re good for all of us rough types.”

  Over beef stew, he told Lily about their search for cattle. Pierre kept the narrative going when Jack stopped to eat, and Preacher filled in where needed. The children listened, wide-eyed, and even Madeleine left her beloved domain to sit with Chantal on her lap and shake her head over stories of air holes where cattle had fallen in, and great mounds of snow where the cattle had gathered together for defense against the blizzard.

  “Some of them are still alive,” Jack said. “We searched as far as we could, and so did the other ranchers. We have a slight advantage on the Bar Dot because we seem to have more sheltering slopes where the beeves could hunker down. We’ll bring more of them closer tomorrow.” He stopped and drank deep from Madeleine’s good coffee. “Two days of that and we’ll see.” He looked around. “How’d school go, Amelie?”

  “Miss Carteret said we were perfectly excellent in our preparation.”

  Jack raised his eyebrows and glanced at Lily. “I believe you have quoted your teacher exactly. Only Miss C would say that.” He held out his cup. “Any more of that, Madeleine?”

  She filled his cup, scolding all the while that it would keep him up.

  “Not a chance. I’ll be out before I hit the pillow.” Jack looked at his men. “I never knew a better crew than this one,” he told the room at large, then looked at Will Buxton. “Will here found twenty cattle all by himself.” He raised his cup in salute.

  Lily watched the pleasure in Will Buxton’s tired eyes. She looked around and saw True Greatness everywhere.

  School began in the morning with spelling words on a makeshift blackboard made of tin, probably a remnant from the larger piece that rested underneath Madeleine’s cookstove. It had appeared mysteriously in Jack’s front room, left there during the night by someone determined not to waken her in the back room. She had her suspicions. Written on the tin sheet, its edges carefully turned under for safety, was “Teach me good judgment and knowledge, Psalm 119:66.”

  “Preacher, what are you doing here in Wyoming?” she asked the tin sheet.

  Before they left for another cold day, Pierre nailed his winter count to the wall and announced to her children that he had a handful of wheat to leave for the Wyoming Kid. More dried beef found its way by the inside door. She left it there, wondering if Francis would leave his place of safety under Jack’s bed. By noon, the cat was curled in Amelie’s lap.

  The men told the same story that night at supper, giving Lily and Madeleine a glimpse of the tragedy unfolding, precisely as Jack had predicted. They had found more cattle and trailed them closer, but other ranchers had horror stories of their own.

  “It’s only October, and barely that,” Preacher said.

  “Could you pray us good weather?” Chantal asked.

  Preacher shook his head. “I don’t think it works that way,” he told her. “I think sometimes the Lord has to deal with what He has before Him, when it comes to weather, same’s us.”

  “No miracles?” Amelie asked.

  He regarded the chil
d for a long time. “I’m starting to think the Almighty expects us to do everything we can first.”

  “And then?” Nick asked.

  “We wait and look for His mercy.”

  The miracle is we are still alive, Lily thought, too shy to speak.

  Silence settled over the group, broken when Lily took Ivanhoe out of a pocket in the apron Madeleine had loaned her. She ruffled the pages. “Jack and I are on chapter sixteen, but we’ll start over. Bring the lamp closer, Nick, please.”

  It snowed the next day, which meant that Fothering and Luella had to flounder through fresh snow, arriving just as Lily finished the spelling test. Her classmates waited while Luella took the test. The men rode south toward Wisner, coming back with enough cattle to make Jack’s pinched look of disappointment leave his face.

  “We’ve lost a lot, but not everything,” he told her after Ivanhoe as he walked her and Amelie back to his house. Madeleine had decided that her girls would take turns staying with Lily, which calmed her heart. Lily assured her children that she would be fine when her father returned from Cheyenne, which made Chantal frown.

  “We like to stay with you,” Chantal said. “It is a rare treat.”

  Jack laughed at that and nudged Lily. “They sound more like you every day.” He nudged her again, but gentler, making it almost a caress. “I have to tell you, as I ride and cuss and rope cattle out of air holes and deep snow, I still think about that first day, when you asked me if I tend cattle, like they were delicate creatures needing me.”

  “They are,” she told him and nudged gently in turn.

  The Buxtons’ cook forced the issue of a trip to Wisner, declaring that if she did not leave immediately, she would do herself damage. Oliver Buxton must have believed the old biddy, because he issued his own ultimatum in a rare visit to the bunkhouse the next morning. Jack groaned inwardly as his boss looked around the cluttered room, taking in the unmade beds and jumbled clothes, disdain all over his face.