Mountain Solo

by Jeanette Ingold

  A night like that, you want to keep going forever.

  That's what I want to explain to Amy. But her sputtering breath makes me think she's gone to sleep, and so I don't struggle to find words for what I could say more easily with my violin. Instead, I repeat to mysel£ "Because I love it."

  Tess?" Amy says, tugging on my sleeping bag Rain is drumming loudly on the tent. "Are you awake?"

  "I wasn't before," I tell her. "I am now."

  "I need to go to the bathroom."

  "Wait a bit," I tell her "Maybe the storm will let up."

  She says, "I don't think I can."

  "It's up to you." I'm glad it's her and not me who needs to go out.

  "Will you take me?"

  "Oh, for..." Going out in such weather is the last thing I want to do, except for feeling as guilty as I will if I refuse "Okay. Yes."

  THE NEXT TIME I wake up, the tent is dim and the downpour continues with the steady, hard beat of a rain likely to last a long time. I squint at my watch and am surprised to see it's after eight o'clock. I don't hear Dad or Meg up, and Amy is a long lump in her sleeping bag I burrow deeper into my own, glad no one's rushing to get out in the bad weather I wonder if I actually heard thunder through the night or just imagined it. Either way, it was part of dreams I'd like to return to.

  Dreams of thunder and furious music and words printed above notes. Summertime. Turbulent summertime.

  I realize I must have been dreaming about Vivaldi's Summer Concerto that I played in Germany—or tried to play. There's a section where the rhythm switches to a torrent of headlong sixteenth notes, and the words above the music staff say there's a thunderstorm going on.

  The storm splits the sky... Those words belong to a poem that's been included with the music since the concerto was first published back in the 1800s. People think Vivaldi probably wrote it himself.

  I can hear the count of the music, the accent on the first note of each measure. It has a driving rhythm of four lightning-fast one-a-and-a notes for each beat, pounded into three-quarter time... One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. One,, two, three ... like hard, steady rain.

  Drowsily, I try to pick out the same pattern in the tain pounding down on the tent, but I can't make it work. Still, I think if I could choose music just right for this morning, the Vivaldi concerto would be it.

  I'd like some music right now. I'd just stay in my sleeping bag and listen.

  We eat breakfast hunkered under the tents' rain flies. It's a miserable affair cups of oatmeal and hot drinks that we hold in gloved hands.

  I wear every bit of clothing I have with me—long pants and two shirts under my sweatshirt under my rain jacket.

  Dad, looking like a dark green bat in a flapping poncho that covers him head to shins, asks, "What do you think? Push on or wait it out?"

  Nobody argues when Meg answers, "Let's hole up a few hours."

  We spend the morning in shifting combinations of people playing cards and napping and reading The rain gets harder if anything, and lunch is another miserable, wet affair because Dad won't let us take food inside the tents.

  "I won't spill anything," Amy protests, but Meg backs up Dad.

  And if you did," Meg says, "the scent would linger on as an invitation to wild animals. You want to get visited by a skunk?"

  "Yes!" Amy says. "I'd tell him to spray you and Pop and Tess!"

  When we finish eating, Meg disappears into her and Dad's tent, and the rest of us start a marathon game of hearts. Every so often, Dad steps outside to look for lighter skies, but each time he comes back shaking his head. We play until Amy, after a couple of disastrous hands, starts hiding the queen of spades.

  "Maybe, rain or not, you and I ought to go for a walk," Dad tells her "Tess, want to come?"

  "I think I'll go see what Meg's doing," I say.

  SHE'S WRITING in a notebook, and her Rattlesnake folder is open on her lap.

  "Hi," she says, looking up. "Who won?"

  "I'm not sure. Amy was keeping score and got the columns mixed up. What are you working on?"

  "Catching up my journal, or trying to. I keep thinking about Katharina Bottner and wondering what her family's story was. And where they fit into the overall scheme of things." She gestures toward a folded sleeping bag "Come in. Sit down."

  "I won't be bothering you?"

  "I'll be glad for your company."

  Leaving my boots at the tent entrance, I make myself comfortable while she continues to stare at her notebook with a little frown creasing her forehead.

  "Meg, why do you care so much?" I ask. "About things that happened so long ago?"

  She takes time choosing her words. "You're really asking why I'm an archaeologist, aren't you? I suppose because I'm fascinated by the mysteries that the past holds. And I believe our own time will be better if we understand how people have lived across history."

  Then she says, "I could ask you the same question. Why do you care about music? Or for that mattes why does anyone become passionate about a particular thing?"

  Her questions are the kind that my friends and I used to discuss in our coffee-shop gatherings. But that was us kids, and that we were passionate about our art was a given.

  Now I tell Meg, "I don't know. I used to Say I couldn't live without my violin, even though I knew I really could. I mean, lots of people don't play instruments, and if I'd never played one then I couldn't miss it You can't miss what you don't know, can you?"

  "I think you might feel something was lacking."

  "I suppose."

  Meg hands me the Rattlesnake folder "You're welcome to read through this if you want. It's got everything I could find on the Bottners and their homesite, as well as an assortment of other odds and ends."

  While Meg writes in her journal, I scan through photocopies of legal documents and then slow to read a newspaper story about a government land survey. Apparently the survey results started a dispute between a railroad company and some Rattlesnake residents.

  I go back to the beginning of the article and read more carefully, but the reporter doesn't provide much background, and his old-fashioned writing style makes it hard to understand the little bit he does give.

  Meg, noticing what I'm looking at, says, "I puzzled over that, also, wondering if Katharina's family was involved, but I think the legal hassles were mostly resolved before Frederik Bottner filed his land claim. It's more likely that the earlier Bottner—Johann Bottner—would have been caught up in that controversy."

  Other newspaper stories deal with ongoing issues like wildfire danger and timber sales, and a pair of brief pieces tell of the shooting death of a miner named Naill O'Leary and the related subsequent arrest of his son.

  I glance at a couple of maps and read a 1916 newspaper clipping about a dance where Frederik Bottner provided fiddle music, and then I turn to some photos. The first shows a small building that's apparently a schoolhouse. A woman in a long skirt, holding a large book, stands out in front of it, behind a row of seven children. "What do the letters and numbers on here mean?" I ask.

  "They're an archive reference," Meg answers. "The identifier for the original photo."

  The next picture has two labels in addition to its identifier The first, printed in ink in the photocopy's margin, says, "Acquired 1956; source unknown." The other label is written in old-fashioned script across the picture itself. It says, "So lonely! Deserted cabin, Rattlesnake Valley, 1908."

  "Was this Katharina's home?" I ask.

  "No. The dates are wrong," Meg answers. "She wasn't born for another couple of years."

  "Do you know whose place this was?"

  "No. That particular cabin doesn't show up in any other Rattlesnake pictures I could find, so it might have been destroyed early on. Actually, I meant to leave that picture in my office along, with some other material probably not relevant to the Bottners."

  I continue to study the photo, which is a very nice shot of a very sorry looking place. A window—the onl
y window on the whole front side—is broken. The cabin's door hangs by one hinge, and what appears to be a table is visible inside.

  "It looks like somebody left here in a hurry," I say. "They left their things."

  Meg says, "Doesn't it make you wonder why?"

  Just then we hear Dad shouting, "Helloooo!"

  A moment later Amy barges in. "You missed so much!" she says, shaking off water the way a wet dog does.

  "Stop!" Meg and I exclaim in unison.

  "We found this meadow with actual frogs," Amy says, "and Pop says it's just the kind of place where deer go to eat early in the morning Do you want to watch for them tomorrow, Tess?"

  "I think we're going to leave when the rain lets up" I tell her.

  "But if we're still here?"

  Dad pops his head inside the tent. "Hey, kiddo!" he says to Amy. "I thought you and I were going to make hot chocolate." He tells Meg and me, "We're going to mix it with orange drink and some mint we found. And we'll share!"

  "Orange drink?" Meg asks, looking dubious.

  "Orange chocolate," he says firmly. "A Thaler specialty."

  "Then I don't want to miss it," she says. "By the time you two get the stove cooking and the water hot, Tess and I will be along."

  I CONTINUE LOOKING through the Rattlesnake folder stopping at a 1906–1907 list of Missoula County High School students with the name Maureen O'Leary, a sophomore, highlighted. Behind it is a copy of a marriage certificate for Frederik Bottner and Maureen O'Leary dated March 14, 1908. "Are these Katharina's parents?" I ask.

  Meg nods.

  "But they're so young!"

  "Maureen O'Leary certainly was," she says. "I don't know Frederik Bottner's age, but she couldn't have been more than sixteen." She shakes her head. "You wonder why. Maybe it was related to the shooting."

  "Maybe they were in love," I say.

  "Maybe." Meg sounds unconvinced. "But sixteen is awfully young to make a decision that will affect the rest of your life."

  I glance up quickly, but if Meg's referring to anything more than the Bottners' marriage, her face doesn't show it.

  "Are you guys still talking?" Amy asks, ducking under the rain fly. "Come on! The chocolate's done, and I put in lemonade mix besides orange drink, and Bap says it's the most unusual hot chocolate he's ever tasted."

  Frederik 1909–1916

  They lost two ewes to a cougar before Frederik tracked and shot it. It looked as if all of the new batch of lambs might live, though, even the ones born during a late, brief blizzard and taken inside to be warmed to life by the stove.

  The lambs were children of the dozen orphan lambs Frederik and Maureen had started out with their first spring together Frederik had gotten them in payment for three weeks of hard work, and Maureen had raised them on bottles.

  Now, during the sleepless days and nights of lambing time, Frederik sometimes saw his thoughts reflected in his wife's eyes. We've made it through one whole year.

  As Frederik moved through the cold chores of a March afternoon, he looked forward to the evening He and Maureen were still living in the same shack, but now its walls were chinked and lined with newspaper and the outsides banked with straw and some lingering snow. It kept the wind out and the stove warmth in.

  Maureen would have a good dinner waiting—maybe venison with brown gravy, along with the sourdough rolls he'd seen rising When they were done eating, they'd talk awhile and then Maureen would ask him to get out his fiddle. He was getting pretty good on it, able to play almost any tune they could remember.

  And then, later they'd sleep safe together.

  AS THE LAMBS got older they became comic to watch. One June day Frederik and Maureen, resting against the trunk of a tree they'd just felled, laughed at the small band of them jumping back and forth across the stream. The littlest lamb, afraid to jump, bleated piteously whenever the others went to the far side.

  "They're going to wear themselves out," Maureen said.

  "What else have they got to do? You think we can teach them to pull a saw?"

  "It would be nice."

  Between clearing land and planting a large garden, they were working every daylight hour The garden was still soggy ground, but Frederik supposed that by midsummer they'd be hauling water to it, along with keeping up on everything else.

  "Someday I'd like to put in a ditch to divert water from higher up," he said, thinking about the one he'd built with his uncle. "It would make things easier down here and also let us flood-irrigate some pasture."

  Frederik, as legal head of household, had filed a homestead claim on the gulch. It had seemed a huge step to take, but now that he and Maureen were no longer squatters who might be driven off it, he was enjoying making plans for their place.

  The lambs wheeled about and tore through the woods, toward the nearest hillside, and as Maureen's gaze followed, the expression on her face hardened.

  In all the time they'd lived here, she'd not visited the mine once, and Frederik had gone up only long enough to board over its entrance and bring down what he thought they might use. One of these days he'd get around to cleaning up the junk Naill and Augie had scattered about, but right now there was too much else to do.

  Besides, Maureen didn't like him anywhere near the mine. She called it a hateful, mean place.

  It was August of another year and the land under Frederik's hurrying feet was dry and hard, and dead grass crunched with his weight. That was the loudest sound, except for Maureen's and his hard breathing as they carried water from the stream to their parched garden.

  It seemed hauling water was about all they'd done for weeks now, trying to keep things alive through the driest summer Frederik remembered. Even the old-timers said 1910 was turning out to be a drought year beyond their ken.

  Back in the spring, when snowmelt had turned everything green, Frederik had made plans to build a barn with a big loft that would hold all the hay he expected to cut this summer But then the spring rains that usually followed green-up didn't come, and after a while the stunted meadow grass stopped growing and turned brown.

  Now the garden was their best hope for avoiding disaster Dried, canned, or stored in the root cellar its produce would feed them this winter And anything extra could be sold, which would bring in money for buying hay, which might let them keep all their breeding ewes.

  He emptied a bucket of water around a circle of pole beans and another on the squash bed and then turned to go back to the stream for more.

  "I wish you'd stop," he told Maureen, as she passed him with two full buckets of her own. He worried about the baby she was carrying inside her "Or at least slow down."

  The next time they passed each other he saw her stagger.

  THEIR DAUGHTER was born hours later three weeks early. Frederik delivered her tending Maureen as gently as he could and praying that what he knew from birthing livestock would be enough.

  They named her Katharina, for Frederik's mother Maureen suggested it.

  Katharina Maureen. Frederik insisted on that.

  Once he was satisfied that Maureen and the baby were all right, Frederik returned to the garden, picked up the buckets, and resumed ferrying water.

  Frederik, sitting up in the wagon where he'd spent the night, looked out at the dawn-lit school yard in the middle of Spring Gulch. The spring morning was cold, and a friend who was starting a breakfast fire saw him and called, "Hey, fiddle player come give a hand making coffee."

  Maureen reached out to check that Katharina, going on six years old now, was still asleep beside her "Just a few minutes and then I'll get up," she told Frederik. "I want to think some mote about last night's party." She smiled up at him. "I was so proud of you playing so everybody could dance."

  "Stay there if you want to," he said, "but Mrs. Swenson's coming this way."

  "Oh, so early!" Maureen said, but she sat up and pulled a quilt around her shoulders. "Good morning, Mrs. Swenson."

  "Good morning, child," the older woman said. "I came to say
don't pass by my place without stopping I've got the best rhubarb in the valley, and I want you to dig yourself a good start."

  Maureen leaned down and gave her an impulsive hug "Oh, I am so happy this morning Have I told you that when we get home, Frederik and I are going to begin work on a second room for our house?"

  Frederik couldn't help smiling at her pleasure. He'd long since turned their home into more cabin than shack, but up until now, it hadn't gotten any bigger.

  "RIGHT HERE," Maureen said, using her toe to scrape a mark in the back corner of her garden. "Rhubarb's a long-lasting plant. I want this one growing where it won't be disturbed."

  "Right," said Frederik, stabbing his shovel several inches from the mark to tease her "How many pies is this going to buy me?"

  "None this year You're just going to have to work on promise."

  They ate lunch after the rhubarb was in, and after that they pounded stakes where they wanted the corners of the new room to be. They'd decided to put it on the side of the cabin that needed fixing, anyway.

  Maureen became briefly wistful. "Our place is so different now, I mostly forget it was ever Pa and Augie's mine shack. But now we're getting ready to fix it up more..."

  Frederik tilted his head in what he hoped looked like understanding He never had found the right thing to say about Naill O'Leary, and as for Augie—Frederik and Maureen had no idea what happened to him once he got out of jail. Maybe they never would.

  As they forced a temporary support under a rotting foundation log, Frederik said, "I've been thinking that as long as we're repairing and building, maybe we ought to run a porch across the front."