Showdown at Buffalo Jump

by Gary D. Svee

  But Max wanted to talk, to meld Catherine’s time with his own, and he wanted an answer to a question that had been needling him.

  “Saw Phillips last night.”

  Catherine stiffened. She wasn’t ashamed of her battle with the banker. He had it coming. But in the heat of the battle, she had betrayed Max’s confidence about the money he had hidden on the homestead and made him vulnerable to that despicable man. She felt like a Judas.

  Max continued, “Horses nickered, and I walked down along the creek by the corral. There was the banker, digging a hole. I watched him for a minute or two and then came up quiet behind him and asked him what he was doing. He jumped straight up about three rails high. Said he was going fishing. Not too many people go fishing in the middle of the night without a pole, but he said that was the way he liked to do it. Said he could cut himself a willow. He didn’t have a can, so I asked him where he kept the worms. He kind of hemmed and hawed and said he always carried them in his pockets to keep them warm. So I helped him pick worms until his pockets were pretty well filled. Didn’t even say thank you, just started off downstream like a little kid who had had an accident in his pants, and he walked right past a patch of willows without stopping to cut a pole. Might be he decided he really didn’t want to go fishing, after all.”

  Max looked at Catherine, but she avoided his eyes. Her fight with Max was personal, and she had shared it with a man who would use it to hurt Max if he could. She felt shame for what she had done and anger at Max for having put her in such an untenable position.

  But just as she was about to speak, she was saved by the rumble of wagons and Jake Thomsen’s high, clear voice. “Max, about time you got out of bed. We came out here to get some work done, not to sit here getting splinters in our behinds.”

  Max grinned a little despite himself. Jake and a couple of others from town had arrived early with the lumber he had ordered.

  When he glanced back at Catherine, she was rigid by the stove. “Don’t you bring them in here,” she said, her voice brittle as shore ice in winter.

  “They’ve been in here before.”

  “Not with me.”

  “No, not with you.” But then neither have I, Max thought, except for a few moments around the table in strained silence or in heated battle. “They’ll be expecting breakfast.”

  “We don’t always get what we expect.”

  “We sure as hell don’t.”

  Catherine’s eyes sliced into Max’s. “Mr. Bass, that language is probably acceptable to your friends. It is not acceptable to me.”

  “If you find something that is acceptable to you, I would be obliged if you would let me know. I’d rope it off and sell tickets to it as the eighth wonder of the world.”

  Catherine looked at Max out of the corner of her eye. “Sometimes you surprise me, Mr. Bass. Somewhere behind that plate of bone you call a forehead, there lurks a light, a dim, dim light, but a light nonetheless.”

  Max sighed. “These are my friends. Please be nice to them. It is just one day, and then they will be gone.”

  “You do, then, allow some people to leave this … palace of yours?”

  Max’s voice edged sideways through gritted teeth. “Damn it, woman, don’t you ever stop?”

  “If I trouble you, please feel free to send me on my way.”

  “I don’t want to talk about that now.”

  “I do. I want your friends to know what kind of a man you really are. Do you think, then, that they would come to this place and build a barn in your honor?”

  “Whose part do you think they will take?” Max spat. “They were all standing there at the Patchucks’ when you promised to take me for better or worse. You want them to know what an easy liar you are?”

  Catherine gasped. In a flash, she was standing by Max’s chair, her fork—the only weapon she had—describing a vicious arc toward his face.

  Max caught Catherine’s wrist, and the two were still struggling as Jake Thomsen poked his head through the door.

  “Max, you still in bed?” Jake’s grin faded as he saw the two. “Sorry,” he said, ducking out the door.

  Catherine’s voice was like a late fall wind keening through the naked limbs of cottonwoods, reaching in supplication toward an unpromising sky.

  “Mr. Thomsen, you said you would help if I needed it. I need it. Please take me to Prairie Rose. Please take me away from this, please … please.”

  Thomsen pretended he hadn’t heard her, trying to carry the smile he had taken to the dugout back to the wagon, but it was too heavy a burden.

  Max stumbled for the door, taking a deep breath before plunging through. He appeared outside as though surfacing from the depths of a pool, gasping for air. Max tried to grin, but the effort twisted his face into a macabre mask.

  “Miss Catherine is frying chicken. You boys will have to wait on your breakfast,” he said, his voice little more than a croak.

  And Catherine stood at the stove watching the frying chicken through a veil of tears, as though from behind a rain-streaked window. She would escape this place. One way or another, she would escape.

  8

  Max and Edna Lenington stood silent, unmoving as though by some magic they were taking root, becoming the second and third parts of a cottonwood grove on the creek bottom.

  It was full light now, and most of the men were laying the barn’s foundation downstream where a flat, bare slab of sandstone overlooked Max’s natural corral. The foundation was taking shape, a rough rectangle built of sandstone hauled from an out cropping below.

  The families had come just after the sun set fire to the day, children poking solemnly from the beds of slow-moving wagons like sentinel gophers. Once the wagons stopped, the children spilled over the sides and flowed to the creek as naturally as rainwater, sometimes quiet as a meadow brook and sometimes raucous as a mountain torrent, but always to the creek.

  The children knew the importance of water instinctively. It was hammered into their subconscious by murmured conversations of their parents, desperate eyes seeking dark clouds.

  Consciously, they knew that a creek, open water, would be as close to a carnival as most of them would ever come. Creek water was cool on feet that went dry except for second- or third-hand bathwater on Saturday nights. It was a strange environment inhabited by soft-skinned frogs and snakes that didn’t bite and fish that did. And the stream was edged with grass, green and soft, not hard and brittle like August bunch grass.

  None of the children could resist the creek: None of them tried.

  A barn raising was a holiday, but not from the labor that hardened the homesteaders’ hands and stiffened their backs. They would work as hard today as they did at home, harder perhaps, pitting themselves against one another in unannounced contests of skill and strength.

  But the day was special. They would share scarce gossip, tap into the rich vein of kinship felt by those who shared life on the Montana prairie. They would tease underused muscles into grins and guffaws and share pieces of their lonely lives with others of their kind.

  The men were already at work, following a few quick instructions from Max.

  But wives and older daughters stood rooted in the creek bottom with Max and Edna, awaiting the resolution of a breach of prairie etiquette. Catherine was hostess, and she should have been outside to greet the women as they came, to tell them what they needed to know to prepare the day’s feast, but still she had not emerged from the dugout. None of them were willing to step in, awed yet by the dignity with which she carried herself at the wedding.

  So they fidgeted, watching the doorway of the dugout, awaiting some signal from Catherine.

  Signal, they got.

  Catherine swept aside the dugout’s blanket door and stepped out, pausing a moment for effect. She was wearing a beautiful blue dress, a copy of one she had seen in Boston. It had taken her months to save enough money to buy the material for the dress and weeks to make it, stitching each detail from memory.

>   She had sewed in secret, knowing that the other servants would laugh at her for believing she would ever have occasion to wear such a dress. But as Catherine sewed, she dreamed of the stir the dress would create among young gentlemen admirers. And today, she glided down the steps from the dugout as though she were leaving the veranda of a Southern mansion to mix with guests on the lawn.

  Much to Max’s relief, when Catherine spoke she was the model of civility.

  “Mrs. Lenington, I’m glad you could come.” Then Catherine turned to Max, her smile cold as the moon on a winter night. “Mr. Bass, I thought you would take it upon yourself to set up a table down here in the shade of the cottonwood tree.”

  Max scurried off.

  “Mrs. Lenington, perhaps you wouldn’t mind helping me carry the chicken and potato salad to the table?”

  Edna nodded and then called to the waiting women. “Table will be here, might as well bring down the food.” The women exploded into a rush of talk, walking back to their wagons, eager to get to work.

  One said in a stage whisper as she walked away, “Certainly dresses well for a woman who lives in a hole in the ground.”

  But the woman’s companion brought her up short. “Not all of us can live in a nice tarpaper shack like you do, Lucille,” and that ended the discussion.

  The men had framed the barn’s walls on the ground and had them up well before noon. Mean while another crew was working on the trusses for the roof. After the walls went up, the trusses were hoisted into place. Then one crew went to work flooring the loft, and others divided up to side the building.

  The men swarmed over the emerging barn like ants, moving under the direction of some central intellect or instinct. No one really seemed to be in charge, although occasionally one man or another would approach Max, ask him a brief question, and then return to the barn. His coworkers would gather for a moment and then go back to their tasks with renewed fervor.

  Catherine watched, fascinated, until the shade and Edna called her back to the long tables set up along the creek. She found that she was enjoying herself as the day wore on. The shade of the great cottonwood was filled with the buzz of conversation, and hungry women and giggling children.

  The Sunday supper was ready. The children, of course, had already been picking at the goodies on the table, snatching a piece of chicken whenever opportunity presented itself. There was much to-do made about these raids with stern looks for the children and grins for the other grown-ups.

  The work had been steady since first light, the crew pausing only for long draughts of water hauled in buckets to the barn. The men, women, and children were hungry, but Max didn’t want to break for supper until the barn was substantially finished. Once the men had cleared the heavily laden tables and tapped the keg of beer cooling in the creek, work would be swallowed in a vortex of beer and talk and horseshoes.

  The tables were covered to protect the food from the flies that gathered for the feast. Catherine, wishing she had worn pants rather than a dress, settled on a rock by the creek when she would have preferred sprawling on the cool grass.

  A moment later Edna settled beside Catherine. They sat quietly for a moment, enjoying the shade and the sounds of the creek and the children’s laughter.

  Catherine had been watching one child about four—too old for his mother’s skirts and too young for the rough and tumble play of the older children—hanging about the periphery of the mob that swirled around the creek bottom like a flock of drably colored birds.

  The boy was dressed as most of the children were, in cast-off clothes from older children, patched and pinned, held together more from habit than anything. He was easy to pick out from the crowd, and not simply because his hair shown like a shock of wheat in the sinking summer sun. The boy wasn’t part of the play, but he seemed determined to do each of the things the others did, to prove to himself, at least, that he was capable of playing with others, given the chance.

  And more than once the boy’s determination had caused Catherine to catch her breath. There was a rock wall on the other side of the creek, thick and slick with summer moss. The older children, amid shrieks and dares, had edged each in turn out on a narrow ledge on that wall, grasping for handholds and footholds that would take them across without falling into the creek below.

  The creek ran deep and swift under the ledge, and most of the prairie children didn’t know how to swim, never having been around a large enough accumulation of water at any one time to learn. So crossing the ledge was dangerous for the older children, and much more so for the towhead.

  But after the other children had passed their test of courage and agility and gone on to other things, the little boy crept out on the ledge. Catherine held her breath as he inched along to the point where the ledge had broken long ago, leaving a thirty-inch gap. He stopped there as the other children had, gauging whether he could step that far while hanging from the only handhold available above him.

  And then he stepped. His foot missed the other side by inches, and instantly he was hanging by one hand over the water below, feet scrambling for purchase.

  Catherine was too shocked to move, to speak. She sat helplessly, watching the drama played out on that tiny stage. Still he scrambled, his arm stretched tight and thin. It was then that Catherine realized the boy wasn’t trying to find his way back to the ledge where he had been standing. He was trying to inch across.

  Just as Catherine’s lips were forming No! the boy found footing and made his way to the other side. Through it all, only Catherine watched. Everyone else was busy with work that needed doing, saying words that needed saying.

  And then Edna took Catherine’s attention away from the little boy. “Thought Max would have been over by now to pick up the horses.”

  “Horses?”

  Edna clapped a hand over her mouth. “Lordy, I’m sorry. I guess he wanted to surprise you, and now I’ve let the cat out of the bag. Honest, I didn’t mean to. You won’t tell him, will you?”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Lenington …”

  “Edna, call me Edna.”

  “Edna … I don’t know what you are talking about.”

  Edna hesitated, and then continued. “Not long after we came—Max had already been here more than a year—Max disappeared early one spring. Didn’t tell anyone where he was going or how long he would be gone.”

  “Came back about a month and a half later, riding the most beautiful horse I’d ever seen. Kind of gray, he is, and white across the rump with spots. Max calls him an appie, picked him up someplace out in Idaho.”

  “Anyway, right after you agreed to come out here, Max disappeared again, only this time not so long. Guess he had the herd spotted by then, and back he comes with a three-year-old filly, maybe prettier than the stud.”

  “I swear those horses are smarter than most folks, seem almost able to read your mind sometimes. Max says he’s going to build a herd of the best horses in Montana.”

  “What does that have to do with me?” Catherine asked, a quizzical expression on her face.

  It was Edna’s turn to look perplexed. “Everything Max does affects you, and the mare is to be yours. Max has already bred it to the stud. Should foal next spring.”

  “The mare is mine?”

  “That’s what Max said.”

  Catherines jaw jutted into the conversation. “Then, who the hell does he think he is to breed my horse without permission?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Edna said, taken aback by the drift in the conversation. “I guess you’ll have to talk to Max about that.”

  “No! Max will have to talk to me about that.”

  Edna was in a quandary. She respected Max more than most men, and she had helped him bring Catherine to Montana. She wouldn’t intentionally embarrass him or endanger the union for the world.

  Still, gossip was as scarce as people on the plains of eastern Montana. It was passed about with such enthusiasm that it often made two or three rounds—with a few additions an
d deletions here and there—before it wore out. Edna sensed a bit of real gossip here, and she was torn between her loyalty to Max and her need to dig it out for future reference. Edna was still pondering that dilemma when Catherine poked into Edna’s thoughts.

  “Whatever in the world are those children doing?”

  The children were gathered two deep in a circle on the creek bottom, boys reaching in with sticks, bedeviling some creature in the center.

  At first, Catherine thought it was a child’s game, with the person “it” in the middle, but the circle was too rigid and there was too little movement inside. And then the game changed. The little towheaded boy broke through the ring and edged into the circle, leading with his right leg, stamping it ahead of him. The children shrieked and hands flew to their faces. A moment later, the boy ran from the circle. Then the children goaded him on, and he entered the circle again, thump, thump, thump, and run.

  Catherine turned to Edna, who was already rising, distraught.

  “Little Zeb, get that boy away,” she shouted. She ran toward the children. Catherine followed, embarrassed because she didn’t know why she was running or where, because she didn’t know whether it was ladylike to run.

  Edna reached the towheaded boy just as he started into the circle again, thump, thump … Edna caught him by the shirt collar and jerked him backward. He struggled there a moment like a fish on a line, but Edna had already turned her attention to the other children.

  “I’m ashamed of you!” she said. “You know better!”

  “He wanted to, Ma.”

  But Edna cut through that argument as conclusively as the axe cut short the lives of chickens the day before.

  “You wanted to jump off our house to see if you could fly, remember that? What do you suppose would have happened if I had let you do that?”

  “I’m sorry, Ma.”

  “You should be. Little Joey doesn’t have anyone to watch him, and you all egged him on to do this. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!”

  Then, snatching a stick from one of the children, she shouted, “Now, all of you kids git!”