by Judy Alter
I began hesitantly, but she was so open, so interested that words were soon tumbling out of my mouth: about my roping, about Billy, the convent, even my dreams of the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show. Louise sometimes said, "Oh," and sometimes, when I talked about my dreams, "Good for you," but mostly she just looked directly at me with a kind of soft smile playing on her face.
"But I don't understand why you're here," she said, when I finally stopped for breath.
"I think," I said slowly, "for punishment. When I told Papa I wanted to be off the ranch, it angered him—and I guess he thought he'd show me that I wouldn't like being in town any better than I liked St. Louis."
"And he brought you to me," she mused. "It's logical in a way—he knows me better than anyone else here—but it was wrong of him. Wrong to do that to your mother."
"You know my mother?"
"I've met her," she said.
I could tell she wasn't going to explain. Nor would she answer questions about my father. Instinct told me not to ask right then, and later I was glad I hadn't.
"Let's get you settled," she said, "and then we can think about this some more and figure a way to get you to that Wild West show." She led the way through string portieres to a parlor chaotically papered with several patterns of ferns and roses, including a rose paper on the ceiling. A player piano stood cater-corner at one end of the room, with player rolls on the shelf of a nearby music stand, and across the room a Victrola sat on a center table. Louise was apparently bound and determined to provide her boarders with music. There was a brass spittoon, for those who must chew—something Mama never allowed—and stacks of books on several small tables, for those who would read. Rugs were of Mexican design, pillows sported Native American motifs, and the carpeting smacked faintly of Oriental patterns, so that the whole was a wild cacophony of movement. I loved it.
The room I was to occupy was in the northwest corner of the second floor, with windows looking out over the prairie on two sides. I could almost, I thought, look toward home. Determinedly, I pulled the roller blind on the northern window and stared west. Obviously, it was a room meant to rent to a woman, for it was papered with a pale medallion-patterned wallpaper, and a rose-pattern rug covered most of the floor. There was a brass bed with a comforter on it—rose-patterned, of course—and a wicker rocker beside a side table that was covered with a drawn-work scarf. A landscape painting hung on one wall, and on the other, a ribbon-hung series of portrait photos. I deliberately ignored them, fearing that if I looked too closely, I would find my papa among the faces.
But it was a sumptuous room, overflowing with pattern and warmth. I felt disloyal to Mama for even thinking that this room was far grander than mine at home, but it was. When that thought struck me, tears suddenly started down my cheeks, and before I knew it, I was sobbing into the pillows. I think I was crying for Mama, whom I really did love, and who I wished understood me, and who I wished was happier. My disloyalty deepened when I thought about the differences between Mama and Louise, who gave off a kind of happiness and who was already my ally. I had the feeling she liked me. I wasn't always sure about Mama in that regard.
After a while I slept so soundly that I woke with great puffy red eyes and a throbbing head. There was water, tepid but wet, in the pitcher on the bedside stand, and I splashed it on my face, made a pass at my hair, tried to smooth the wrinkles out of my clothes, and went downstairs.
Louise, a white apron over her dress, was cooking supper, large quantities of food that suggested she had several boarders.
"I—I'm supposed to help you," I said tentatively, realizing that concentrated exposure to housework was supposed to be part of my punishment.
Turning from the stove, she looked at me but never said a word about my red eyes. "And so you shall. Here, take this flatware and set the dining table for ten." She motioned with her head toward the dining room, and I obediently did as she said. Flatware was followed by fine china, in a blue willow pattern, and crystal goblets. We'd never had such service pieces at home, and I was surprised to find them in a boardinghouse.
"Remnants of my marriage," Louise said, seeing me look at the table. "My late husband inherited them, and he would have wanted me to use these things, not let them collect dust. Besides, my boarders deserve the best."
My curiosity about her grew.
"Do you cook?" she asked.
"Yes. Mama taught me. I can make bread and pies and pretty good mayonnaise."
This time her laughter burbled gently. "Good. When we need mayonnaise in the middle of winter, I'll let you know. Meantime, you can stir this stew, and I'll see about the bread. It's already rising, or I'd let you show me what you can do."
Dinner was delicious—hearty stew filled with chunks of beef, potatoes, carrots, and onions, bread fresh from the oven and as light as any I'd ever tasted, and an apple cobbler for dessert. Even the coffee smelled so good that I was tempted to taste it—Mama never allowed me to at home, saying it would stunt my growth. One bitter sip convinced me that Mama was right.
There were eight boarders besides me—three men who looked like traveling salesmen and ate their dinner silently and quickly, a schoolteacher who asked me pointedly about my education and frowned when I said that I had mostly been educated at home, a lawyer who had the bad manners to read some papers at the dinner table, the man who owned the printing company and was delighted when I told him how it fascinated me—"You must come for a tour, my dear"—and two ladies who were milliners, so Louise had told me before.
"We will make you a beautiful hat," one said, "in time for church on Sunday."
"Thank you," I said nervously. "The only hat I've ever worn—"
"We know," interrupted her companion. "We saw it on the hat rack and asked Louise who the cowboy was." This struck her as funny enough to send her off into giggles that lasted long enough for me to wish she'd choke.
"We'll make you a hat with feathers on it," the first one said. "Show me your church dress so I'll know the colors."
Seeing that I looked helpless, Louise said, "Tan and gold will do fine." Later she said, "I figured tan and gold went with almost any winter dress."
Later she was taken back to find my one good challis dress was navy blue. At least it had gold trim. "I could find something of mine for you in brown," she said thoughtfully, then giggled when I pointed out that a dress of hers would hit me midcalf and probably not fasten around the middle.
"You're good-sized, like your mother," she said, and her tone made it a compliment.
The boarders all disappeared as soon as they were through eating, and Louise and I cleared the table and did the dishes. "It's a great blessing to have company while I do this," she said. "I'd be grateful, even if you didn't help."
"Papa expected me to help, and I want to," I said, balancing a stack of dirty plates.
"We're going to have a good week," she said confidently.
We did have a good week. The best part was that Louise and I became fast friends. Bit by bit, she told me about herself. She, like Mama, grew up in St. Louis and followed a cowboy west—I thought that was a remarkable coincidence, but I didn't realize that St. Louis was a popular big city with cowboys, and cowboys appealed to lots of women. Unlike Papa, Louise's cowboy was rich, the son of an English lord. They'd ranched in Texas briefly, but he was killed in a barroom fight in Guthrie, where he'd come to buy cattle.
"Poor Billy," she said, wiping a real tear, "I never could convince him to stay out of the saloons and out of the fights. I came up here to collect his body and decided I'd as well stay here as anywhere. Billy'd left me enough money to build this house and take care of myself—and so that's what I do."
"And that's what you'll do for the next forty years?" I asked. The prospect seemed as confining to me as endless years on the ranch.
"I don't think you can look at life like that," she replied. "Something comes along, and your life changes directions. That may happen. Maybe a handsome prince will come along and sweep me
away. But if he doesn't, I'm happy here." She looked away for a moment, and then said, "There's an old Chinese proverb that says if you keep a green bough in your heart, the singing bird will surely come. I believe that."
I thought for a minute, fully convinced that a prince would sweep her away but less sure that a Wild West show would adopt me, green bough or not. "Papa?" I said timidly, daring to ask.
"Your papa is a bit of spice in my life once in a while, nothing to be taken seriously. He loves your mama, and she loves him. I'm just a diversion. And he's the same for me."
How could I ask if that was right or wrong? Who made the rules? I said nothing.
When Papa dragged me to Guthrie, I thought I was going into exile where time would drag, but I couldn't have been more wrong. I couldn't exactly play the piano like I did at home, but I wound endless rolls into the player piano and listened to all kinds of new music—waltzes and marches that I'd never heard before. Louise had a wonderful glass-front bookcase in the parlor, filled with books new to me. I dutifully read something called Self-Effort, which she treasured because her father had given it to her, but then I plunged into Walt Whitman's poetry, Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, a volume of Poe short stories, and finally The Virginian, which Louise ordered specially after I mentioned it. That novel carried me away like no other, and the Virginian soon replaced Billy in my fantasies.
Louise and I cooked together every night, and almost every day she took me shopping, introducing me to curious shopkeepers as Sandy Burns's daughter without batting an eye. We went to the butcher's for meat, to the newspaper to withdraw her boardinghouse ad—"I'm temporarily filled up"—to a ribbon store where she bought grosgrain for her new hat and a hair ribbon for me—"I'll show you what you can do with it"—and we went to church on Sunday.
"I always sit in the second pew from the front," she said lightly. "It's best for a single woman to be visible in church in a town like this."
So I sat with her through the Methodist service—my only earlier exposure to religion had been that abrupt immersion in Catholicism—and I quailed before the preacher who spoke thunderously of heaven and hell, mostly the latter. I watched admiringly as Louise sang all four verses of "Oh for a Thousand Tongues to Sing" without ever looking at the hymnal. That, I thought, was true devotion.
"What are you doing with that cup towel?" she asked one night from the dishpan where her hands were hidden in boiling-hot soapy water.
I looked down, as though the towel and the hand that held it belonged to someone else. The towel, twisted like a rope, was spinning in a circle. "Uh... spinning it, I guess," I said sheepishly.
"You miss the feel of a rope in your hands, don't you?" She scrubbed at a skillet and shot her question over her shoulder.
"I suppose so. I haven't thought about it—but yes, I do." Longing hit me with a force, as though it had been hidden inside me until she unlocked it with her words. I missed Sam and riding and practicing my roping and all the things I did at the ranch. I even missed Papa and Mama.
"It's time for you to go home," she said. "I'll send word to your father that he's to come get you."
Mama never gave Papa orders like that, and I asked softly, "Will he do it?"
"He best," she laughed, "if he knows what's good for him."
Later that night as I modeled a new split skirt Louise had made for me, I reminded her, "We never did talk about getting me to a Wild West show."
"Of course," she said. "We were having such a good time, and you never mentioned it." It was a slight accusation given with a smile but nonetheless a hint that I take responsibility for my own problems.
"All right," I said boldly, "I'm mentioning it now. What should I do?" I emphasized that pronoun.
"I have a friend who has mentioned something along that line," she said vaguely. "I'll write a letter."
First she scolds me for not taking responsibility, I thought, and then she takes matters into her own hands. Just like Mama!
Mama and Louise were more alike than different, I realized, but Mama lived with Papa all the time, alone on the ranch. Louise was the master of her own fate—had I read that in a poem somewhere?—and saw Papa only when it pleased him, and maybe only when it pleased her. That complicated realization put a whole new light on things for me, and I held on to it.
When Papa delivered me to the veranda of our house, where Mama stood waiting with a soft smile on her face, I hugged her fiercely. "I missed you," I said, and then in the next breath, "She's a nice lady. I—I liked her." I wasn't sure, afterward, why I felt compelled to tell Mama that.
"I'm sure she is," she said, her arms still holding me tight.
The two women had been in Papa's life for a long time. Now they were both in mine.
Chapter 4
In spite of all my dreams, it wasn't the Buffalo Bill show that got me off the Luckett Ranch. A letter arrived one April day, addressed to Tommy Jo Burns and bearing a return address of The Miller 101 Ranch, Bliss, Oklahoma. Papa brought it home from Guthrie one day, and I know it cost him not to open it, but the letter was sealed when he handed it to me.
"Been there awhile," he said. "Postmark is 'bout two weeks old."
I'd not been the recipient of a whole lot of letters in my lifetime, so I didn't know to look at that. The return address caused me enough confusion.
"The Miller 101?"
"Louise knows those folks," Papa said. "Big spread, east of here a ways. Owned by three bachelor brothers—Zack, Thomas, and something else, I disremember the third one's name. Go on, open the letter." Impatience was getting the best of him.
Carefully, like a child opening a Christmas present, I slit the envelope and drew out the folded paper. The message was written in an expansive but: straightforward hand: "We are planning a ranch exhibition for the National Editors Association meeting in June. Could you be part of the entertainment? We would like you to ride and rope. Please answer to me directly." It was signed Colonel Zack Miller.
"Well," Papa demanded, "what does it say?"
"They're going to have an exhibition," I said breathlessly, "and they want me to be in it." I wasn't sure how I felt. Here I'd been hoping for the Buffalo Bill show, and what I got was a neighbor—well, almost—who was having a show for a bunch of editors. I wasn't even sure who editors were, what kind of gathering it would be. But on the other hand, it sure was a change from the ranch, and I wasn't about to object—or decline.
"What kind of exhibition?" Papa asked, though his eyes danced with excitement and I knew he was pleased by the offer.
"For some editors or something."
"Well, I don't know," he said. "I'm not sure if that's the thing for you to do."
I looked straight at him. "Papa," I said, "it's the thing for me to do. It's better than not ever getting invited to rope anywhere."
He huffed and puffed and said nothing.
Mama was a little harder to convince. "Of course you won't rope and ride in public like some cowboy," she said, turning to bury her face in the clothes she was folding.
"Yes, Mama, I want to do this," I said as calmly and carefully as I could.
"This is not," she said stiffly, "what I raised you for."
I took a deep breath. "Maybe not, but it's what I want to do. And I'm seventeen years old now, Mama."
She folded laundry.
The next morning, well before daylight, I crawled out of bed and pulled on my divided skirt, a wrinkled shirtwaist—who had time to worry about wrinkles at five o'clock in the morning?—and a warm shawl. It was April, but mornings were still almost fiercely cold. Then I scrawled a note for Mama and Papa: "Cone to Guthrie. Love, Tommy Jo."
Propping the note on the kitchen table, where they couldn't miss it at breakfast, I snuck out the door, ran to the barn, arid feeling my way in the darkness, saddled Sam. Casey and Wilks, still asleep in the adjacent bunkhouse, never stirred, in spite of Sam's welcoming nicker and my voice, which got louder than I meant when he offered a friendly early-morning pitc
h or two. It occurred to me that Papa's security wasn't too great—someone could have ridden off with all the horses, and no one would have stopped them.
Once I turned him loose at a fast pace on the road, Sam forgot his early-morning friskiness and settled into getting me to Guthrie. Overhead the sky was still midnight blue, dotted by bright stars, and I would have stared upward long and hard except I knew that would lose me control of Sam. The horizon turned a faint pink just as we left the main gate of the Luckett Ranch, and by the time we were two miles down the road, the eastern sky was a deep, rosy red.
"'Red at night, sailors delight / Red in the morning, sailors take warning,'" I recited to myself. The air was crisp and clear, and I couldn't believe a storm was coming. "Come on, Sam," I whispered in his ear, and we flew toward Guthrie.
I was at Louise's before breakfast. "Need help?" I asked, as I let myself in the back door.
She whirled from the stove. A white apron covered her chambray dress, and her hair was sort of temporarily put up—good enough to get her through breakfast but not fixed enough to go shopping or such. "Tommy Jo!" Dropping the spoon into a batch of grits, she held out her arms. "What're you doing here so early?"
Walking into her hug, I told her, "I wanted to talk to you. But let's get breakfast on the table."
We served eggs, grits, bacon, and stewed apples. Most of the boarders were the ones I'd known a few months earlier. The schoolteacher, the milliners, and the printing company owner were the same, but there were new traveling salesmen. One, with a droopy mustache and pale rheumy eyes, asked me how I'd arrived so early in the morning and seemed astounded when I said calmly, "I rode horseback."
"How far?" he asked weakly.
"Fifteen miles about," I said.
"And you're a girl," he muttered, though I thought that was pretty obvious. He said nothing more for the whole breakfast and actually avoided looking at me.
I ate Louise's food with relish, my appetite increased by the ride. "Don't they feed you at that ranch?" she asked teasingly, when I helped myself to more grits and bacon. Pretending offense, I ignored her.