by Gary D. Svee
“That wasn’t a banshee at the Lannings last night,” he said, eyes fixed on the horizon. “That’s where I dumped the banker Phillips, naked, after Jake slipped him the knockout drops.”
“But why?”
Max hesitated. He had meant to spare her, but he wanted her to understand, and he didn’t want her to speak anymore of banshees.
Catherine broke in, “It was I he was spreading stories about, wasn’t it?”
Max looked at her in surprise.
“I thought so,” she said. Then she told Max about the stagecoach ride into Prairie Rose and how Phillips had gloried in humiliating her and how she had retaliated by sticking her hat pin deep into his leg. As a grin spread across Max’s face, Catherine told him about the incident in the bank.
“You stuck him with a hat pin?”
Catherine nodded, and Max laughed, peals of unrestrained laughter. Then Catherine laughed until the prairie filled with it. They rode to the dugout like that, the laughter of one pulling the other along.
13
Max was up before daylight, eager to be with his horses. He shook the hay from his clothing before slipping on his shirt and pants, shivering a bit as shirt touched skin still warm from the bed. There was a bite to the air, and it followed him down the ladder and into the barn proper. Wouldn’t be long before he had to change his sleeping arrangements. That was one battle he wasn’t eager to join.
He filled two buckets with oats and shook them as he walked toward the corral. The mare nickered and danced over to him, a prima ballerina and adoring aficionado. He dumped the oats into a feed trough and told the horses how beautiful they were until the sun cracked the eastern horizon. Then he pitched hay into the corral with a fork left standing by the stack. He was occupied with that as Catherine walked up the path to the outhouse. She joined him at the corral a moment later.
“Winter has passed already, Mr. Bass?”
Max had been so bewitched by the horses, he hadn’t noticed that the sun had risen hot as a brand. The day would be more like August than early October.
“Indian summer.”
“I hope it will last until November … when I leave.”
“Might,” Max said, but his mind wasn’t on November. Something about today didn’t feel right, and he peered over his shoulder at it as though he could feel something coming up behind him.
Max wiped imaginary sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. “You wanted to ride Lady. I’ll be checking stock and fences this morning. Might be you’d like to come along.”
“That I would.”
“Better get some trousers. No sidesaddles within five hundred miles of here. And wear my Sunday boots. They won’t fit, but you can’t ride barefoot.”
Max had the horses saddled when Catherine returned from the dugout. He explained the basics: mounting and dismounting, neck reining, heels and knees, and then stood back to watch the show.
Catherine was a natural rider. She sat astride Lady with the easy grace with which she did everything, back straight as a soldier’s. The mare seemed to sense the spectacle she and her rider created, and she stepped a bit higher, head held even more regally than usual.
When Max nosed the stud north, Catherine pulled up beside him, and they rode that way, neither speaking to the other, each immersed in the magic of the moment.
They crossed the eastern shoulder of the ridge and then turned west, holding close to patches of shadow hugging the rimrock. The day had become almost intolerably hot, and there was tension in the air, a sense of expectancy.
They were following game trails carved over hundreds of years by the hooves of deer, elk, antelope, and buffalo. Now only deer and an occasional antelope used the path, and Max noticed few tracks of either animal. Some predator was working the ridge, and then as though to confirm his suspicions, he spotted the tracks of a wolf, padding its way through the soft soil at the bottom of a gully.
Max pointed out the tracks to Catherine and promised himself he would lace some deer guts with poison. Wolves don’t make good winter neighbors.
The cattle were fat and scattered, seeking shade in the lee of trees and ledges strewn over the prairie. The four-strand, barbwire fence shone in the sun like a spider’s web, and the springs were full and clear, pocked at the edges with the tracks of cattle and game.
Max wiped his forehead with his sleeve. Something was wrong, and he couldn’t put his finger on it. The wind was picking up, but not the dry wind that haunts the prairie in the fall, shaking the last bit of life from grass and bushes. This wind didn’t blow the earth stinging into the rider’s eyes. Instead, the soil seemed anchored, waiting.
They were nearly to the west end of the hills when Max heard a low rumble in the distance. He nudged the stud into a trot until they broke free of the western shoulder of the rim. Off to the south west lay a wall of black, broken occasionally by the flash of lightning.
“Storm coming up,” Max said. “We’d best get back. You up to a gallop?” Catherine nodded, and Max put his heels to the stud.
He watched the storm out of the corner of his eye as they flew toward the dugout. It was too late for a thunderstorm like this in Montana, and it had been too hot today for this time of year. And then there was the rain, a whole week of rain. Something wasn’t right, and Max didn’t know what it was.
He reined the stud to a stop by the wagon and waited for Catherine to join him. Her face was flushed from the ride, and she wore the same expression she had that first day in the swing. Catherine seemed reluctant to climb down.
“Gather up what counts most for you, and put it in that trunk of yours. I’ll put the horses in the barn and be back in a minute to help you get it up to the wagon.”
Catherine’s face shone. “Are you then going to set me free?”
“Can’t talk, now. Hurry! Hurry!”
Max wheeled the horses and ran them to the barn. He opened the door, shooed Lady inside, and then dropped off the edge to the creek bottom, returning a few moments later with the mare and Percherons. He drove them into the barn and led the stud inside, leaving a moment later with a rolled-up tarp under his arm.
By the time he reached the dugout, Catherine had her trunk packed. She was wondering which dress she should wear to Prairie Rose, when Max burst through the door.
“Best get moving,” he said, slamming the lid of the trunk.
Catherine’s anger surged. “I’m not ready, and I will thank you to keep your hands off my things.”
Max ignored her. He draped the tarp over the trunk and lifted it, the tendons of his neck and shoulders straining from the load.
“Shut the door on the way out.”
Catherine’s lip curled, and she stalked to the entrance. Mr. Maxwell Bass was about to get another lesson in manners. But when Catherine stepped outside, Max was gone. The sky had gone black, and the cottonwood was bowing to a wind exercising its dominion over the prairie. Max must be on top. Catherine climbed the hill, hearing the rumble of thunder off to the southwest.
Max was under the wagon. He had spread the tarp on the ground and placed the trunk on it. He glanced at Catherine and then trotted toward the dugout, calling over his shoulder, “Climb under the wagon. I’ll be back in a minute.” He disappeared in a cloud of dust running ahead of the wind.
Catherine stood beside the wagon. She could see no earthly reason to crawl under it. She hesitated a moment and then marched toward the dugout, only to meet Max on his way back. Without a word, he grabbed her arm and tugged her toward the wagon. She struggled, and the two fought each other silently on a battleground of wind and dust while thunder rumbled like artillery in the background.
Catherine battled Max to a standstill until he reached down and encircled her waist with his arm, carrying her to the wagon.
Max threw his rifle on the tarp and turned his full attention to Catherine. He trapped her arms at her sides and kneeled. She was lying on her back, eyes stung with dust, helpless as a child, and for one long moment she was
afraid that Max intended to rape her. Perhaps he was taken by the electricity in the air, the rumble of thunder that grew closer and closer by the moment, the flashes of lightning crashing down upon the earth.
But once he had Catherine under the wagon, Max turned his attention to other matters. He pulled the canvas over their backs for shelter, and they awaited the storm in swirls of dust, the canvas snapping over their heads in the wind.
The storm marched in like an army following a celestial barrage, God hurling bolts and rage upon the earth.
The day was black as night, lit only by threads of light. The bursts burned instant images on the eye: the cottonwood poking from a cloud of dust, the ridge ominous in blue-white and black. The earth heaved, and it seemed that the day of judgment had arrived.
And then Max was shouting in Catherine’s ear, and she couldn’t hear him above the shriek of the wind and the crash of the thunder, and then one word—“chickens”—and she was left alone on the tarp. The wind had picked up, and Catherine wondered whether her weight and the trunk could hold down the tarp or if it would billow like a sail and carry her away.
Her eyes searched for Max, and they caught him, here and then there. He seemed frozen in the flashes of lightning, only darkness and the crack and rumble of thunder pushing him toward the creek. The lightning outlined him leaning against the wind, and one bolt struck so close that Catherine thought he had been killed. But the next light revealed him just as he stepped over the edge of the hill on the way toward the chicken pen.
Catherine was alone in the midst of a heavenly barrage, the sole focus of God’s power and anger, and she cringed deeper into the folds of the tarp. The electricity in the air tugged at her hair, and the nape of her neck crawled. And then Max appeared suddenly beside the wagon, a tin soldier on an Empyrean field. Just as he settled in beside her and pulled the tarp around himself, the first drops of rain sprayed against the wagon like rifle fire.
“Here it comes!” Max shouted, and Catherine’s nerve almost broke. If what to come was worse than what had been, it was a matter of great dread, indeed.
The rain settled the dust, and the sky was not so dark as it had been. And then the torrent came. Rain fell in sheets, blocking everything but itself from the eye, flowing in over the edge of the tarp to drench Max and Catherine. She started to rise, but Max grabbed her arm, and together they sat, wet from the bottom up in a freshwater sea deep as the clouds. And then the sea turned to ice. Hail, sporadic at first, peppered the land, rattling against the wagon box like shrapnel.
But Catherine wasn’t watching the hail. A chicken freed by Max and terrified by the storm ran in circles in a futile attempt to escape the hail. One pellet struck her at the juncture of the neck and body, and she turned belly up, feet clawing vengeance on the storm that had killed her.
The storm rolled past, and Catherine watched it go, wondering at the terror it would strike downwind, wondering how many dead and twisted creatures it would leave in its wake. Max crawled from beneath the wagon. Catherine was sitting in a little curl on the canvas, and he offered her his hand, but she ignored him. Max took her arm, and she struggled against him instinctively, much as the chicken had clawed at the storm.
The hair on the back of her neck crawled. The air crackled still with electricity, and she felt exposed, as though she were standing in the presence of God.
“Why did you drag me out in that?” she whispered. “Why didn’t you let me sit that out in the dugout? We could have been killed.”
“Storm came in from the southwest,” Max said as he led her toward the bank overlooking the dugout. “Same as the creek drainage.”
When Max released her arm and stepped ahead to spread the tarp again on the ground, Catherine said, “Mr. Bass, if there is more to this show, I don’t want to see it.”
“We don’t have much choice.”
When Catherine reached the lip of the hill, she understood. Pishkin Creek was over its banks, brown as the wheat field and wild as a mountain stream. It surged against the sandstone wall on the other side as though it intended to break that stricture and roar out on the prairie, claiming the land once again for its own.
The creek was eight feet above its banks and only four feet below the entrance to the dugout, and it was rising by the moment.
Catherine was taken with the sheer power of the flood, appalled at the death it paraded past. A two-year-old steer twisted and turned in the current until it lodged against the cottonwood, mouth open in a macabre grin at the spectacle it created. Here and there, an animal struggled still against the flood and death.
And then near the other side of the creek was a rattlesnake, head high, writhing through the water, then two and three and four and more.
“Must have gotten into a den,” Max said, rising to return to the wagon. He came back, jacking a shell into the rifle. He sat down a short distance from Catherine and fired into the stream, and Catherine wasn’t sure if he was shooting at the snakes or at the creek.
But the creek seemed to take umbrage. It reared up, riding a wall of water broken loose from Max’s earthen dam upstream. The logs he had buried in the dam had washed loose and were bumping their way down the creek.
One of the logs, longer than a telegraph pole, poked through the back of the swing and lodged. The current swung the other end, thump, against the trunk of the cottonwood like a battering ram. Then the creek raged against the log as it raged against anything that slowed its wild ride downstream. The tree groaned and twisted with the burden.
“Shallow roots,” Max said in answer to a question that had not been asked. “Cottonwoods have shallow roots. Doesn’t take much sometimes to push them over.”
Max picked up his rifle and began firing at the log—slugs splintered the wood, leaving patches of yellow and gray bobbing down the creek. Then he changed his aim, loud clangs marking the times his slugs found the chain that held the swing to the tree.
But in the end, Max laid his rifle on the tarp. This battle was between forces beyond his control. The creek had fed and watered the cottonwood for a hundred years. If the bill had come due, the cotton-wood would pay it.
Max’s hands needed something to do. He rose and walked to the chicken, lying now in a melting mound of hail. He picked up the bird and twisted her head off so she would bleed out as he carried her back to the tarp. There, he opened her with his pocketknife, reaching into her body cavity and pulling her guts free. He stood and threw the entrails, writhing through the air like snakes into the creek.
“You missed one,” he muttered to himself, kneeling at a puddle and rinsing his hands of the blood and stench.
“Now, we’ve got something to eat if we can find somewhere to eat it.” Max nodded at the steps leading into the dugout. The water was lapping at the last one, only inches away from the bottom of the door. Max turned his attention to the cottonwood and the swing he had hung from it and the flood that was trying to push the tree out of its way.
“It took my hay,” he said. “All we’ve got left is what’s in the loft. This is my fault. I was bragging about having hay, about beating this country. You rear up on your hind legs like that, and you get slapped down.”
“Should I bow to you?”
Max’s eyebrows knotted.
“I’ve never been in the presence of a man so important,” Catherine said, “that God would subject the rest of us to a storm like that just to humble him.”
Max’s eyes disappeared into thin slits. He looked at Catherine as he had looked at the flood moments before, but whatever he was about to say was interrupted by a groan and crash from the creek. Pressure behind the log had finally become unbearable, and the swing had broken—almost burst.
As Catherine watched the log shake itself loose from the tree, she remembered the first day she had seen the swing, the promise it had held for her, and the despair she felt when she learned the truth. Her mind was playing with that as she heard the sound of a galloping horse behind her.
It w
as one of the Lenington boys: Andrew, she thought. Water sprayed from the horse’s hooves as the boy made his way to them. The horse slipped and almost fell as he pulled the animal to a stop.
“Ma wants you to come quick as you can. Little Joey’s lost in the creek.”
Catherine sucked in her breath. She remembered Joey from the barn raising, hanging from the ledge across the creek, fighting Edna’s grasp to go into the circle of children to face the rattlesnake again.
“I want to go,” she said.
“Might as well,” Max said. “If your eyes are half as sharp as your tongue, you’ll be the one to spot him.”
Catherine ignored Max’s jibe in her rush to the barn for Lady.
The Toomey place was already teeming with neighbors as Max and Catherine rode up. Klaus was standing lost and alone in the middle of more people than most of them had seen since the barn raising.
Nobody seemed to be paying much attention to him: They were all busy with the search. Some of the men had ropes tied around their waists and were wading chest deep in the creek, feeling with their feet for Joey’s body. Occasionally, the current would upset one man or another and he would be swept down stream until the crowd on the bank could drag him to shore, wet and dripping like a big fish.
The children, left to entertain themselves, eddied and swirled about the homestead, never free of one mother’s eyes or another. And in the eyes of each of those women was relief that her child had not been the one taken and guilt for feeling that way.
One of the men from the barn raising—Catherine couldn’t remember his name—stepped up to Max.
“Klaus thinks Joey went in down there. He was playing by the creek, and then he was gone. Long slide mark by the water. Feet probably went out from under him. We figure he caught up in that barbwire downstream, and the current held him under until he drowned.”
“Klaus was in the tack shed oiling harness when it happened. Doesn’t know how long Joey’s been gone. He hightailed it to the Leningtons for help, and he’s been standing there ever since like he’s to blame.”