Darkness at Morning Star

by Joyce C. Ware

  “And of course the more he said it,” Belle added, “the more Bazz resisted doing what was expected.” She tossed her head toward the piano. “The piano’s arrival was the last straw.”

  “‘You oughta be out brandin’ calves ‘stead a’playin’ them fool scales,’“ Basil quoted in an exaggerated drawl.

  “Well,” I ventured, “I suppose from a rancher’s point of view it’s understandable that—”

  “Ranching is one thing, justice is another,” Basil broke in. He gripped the arms of his chair and leaned forward. “If you can’t understand’ that—”

  “Easy, Bazz, easy,” Belle whispered. “You see, Reenie, a month after their row, Ross died as a result of a riding accident, but in the meantime he’d changed his will. Knowing Ross, he likely would have changed it back again once he cooled oft, but his new will left Morning Star to Quinn.”

  I was stunned. “All of it?”

  “All of it,” Basil answered in a tightly controlled voice. “Even the holdings my mother inherited from my grandfather. Quinn has to pay me what the court has determined the Wohlfort land is worth, but ...” He shrugged.

  “But the judge, besides being a rancher himself, spent many an evening playin’ cards and drinkin’ with Ross,” Belle amplified, “so you can imagine how fair his opinion was. It’s purely a scandal, if you ask me,” she added heatedly.

  “Isn’t there someone ... somewhere you can appeal?”

  Basil grinned, but there was no mirth in it. “Out here, Serena, all the judges are either ranchers or lawyers whose fees are paid by ranchers.” He threw up his long hands. “Quinn has given us no choice but to leave Morning Star as soon as he has the funds to satisfy my claim and my father’s bequest to your sister.”

  “It’s not much, Reenie,” Belle said, “but I’m grateful Ross thought to leave me anything. I’m young and healthy, so I can make do, but Morning Star is Bazz’s home.”

  Home. The word echoed mockingly through my head. I watched as Belle perched on the arm of Basil’s chair and rested her head on his, an unconscious gesture born of long familiarity. I ducked my head, willing away the sudden sting of tears. They, at least, had each other; as for me, the promise of the home Belle’s letter had tantalizingly offered had vanished like the smoke from the bridges I had so blithely burned behind me. Not that I wished to return;

  Malcolm Wilcox had been laid to rest in Jericho; my mother was long dead and buried I knew not where, and my father had chosen to give me away. The bitter truth was I had no one back East to love and nowhere else to go. ...

  Except for the fire, the large room was dark now, the long, curved-top windows framing the fast-advancing night. A long, sobbing wail broke the stillness, followed closely by another in a higher key. I sprang to my feet, heart pounding. What on earth!

  Basil chuckled. “Nothing to be alarmed about, Serena. It’s just the coyotes’ nightly serenade. On moonlit nights you can see them sitting out there on the rise, muzzles pointing toward the sky, sounding as if their wild little hearts were breaking.” He rose and stretched. “I’m starving, Belle, what’s for dinner?”

  “I put a stew on to simmer earlier, and I bullied Rita into making that corn flatbread you like so well. I thought it might be a treat for Reenie, too—”

  All of sudden I began to cry.

  “Lord love us, Reenie, whatever is the matter?”

  “I thought that Morning Star ... I thought that we...” I wiped my streaming eyes with the handkerchief Basil silently offered and took a deep breath. “I ran away, Belle. I have no place else to go.”

  “Good heavens, darling, did you think I was going to let you go now that I’ve found you? We’ve loads of time yet... we’ll work something out.” She took my hand in hers and patted it. “Why, we’re family, aren’t we, Bazz?”

  “The only one I’ve got now,” Basil agreed.

  As I followed them and the savory aroma of Belle’s stew out to the kitchen, I couldn’t help wondering why it was necessary for them to leave Morning Star. The house was very large, large enough to comfortably accommodate even persons who were not on the best of terms. Regardless of legal entitlements, how could anyone deprive a brother of his lifelong home? What a selfish, heartless man Quinn Cooper must be. I did not like him, I decided. I did not like him at all.

  Chapter Three

  I awoke the next morning to a room flooded with sunlight. I sat up in bed and stretched, luxuriating in the uncommon novelty of sleeping until mid-morning. I could remember it happening only once before, during my first winter with the Roggs when I suffered a weakening bout of dysentery. It had been a grudgingly granted favor lest I develop a taste for slothful ways.

  I stretched again, feeling wonderfully refreshed. I had awakened briefly during the night from a dream, but the memory of it—I vaguely recalled climbing up and down an improbable number of staircases—had already largely eluded me. Only the tip-tapping sound of dream-slippered footsteps teasingly remained. Had the nighttime excursions of resident mice been thus transmogrified? More likely squirrels, I decided, recalling their rackety invasions of the Roggs’ attic. Either possibility would be better than the twitchy-nosed, red-eyed rats I had occasionally seen scuttling along the cobwebby timbers above the laundry tubs in the orphanage’s cellar. How Belle had hated that dank, dark cellar! I smiled wryly to myself, recalling how, more often than not, I somehow ended up doing her laundry chores as well as my own.

  My recollection of those long-ago days, however, proved no match for the present bright reality of the Kansas sunshine streaming across the floor, warming both the wide boards and my bare toes as I scampered to the washstand. Once dressed, I wandered down into the kitchen, which I found as disordered this morning as the rest of this puzzlingly unkempt household. The top of the vast wooden table that dominated the center of the room was littered with a bewildering variety of pots, jars, strainers and funnels, and dried herbs hung in bunches, together with strings of red peppers, from crude iron hooks screwed into the stout beams crossing the ceiling.

  My breakfast consisted of cornmeal flatbread left from the previous evening’s meal slathered with preserves of an unfamiliar but tasty sort. There was no milk. Rita, silent, stolid, seeming more a copper-sheathed statue than a living person, received my request uncomprehendingly, and resumed her preparation of something that smelled of beans and spices.

  I reached beyond her to pour a cup of coffee from the pot set at the back of the blackened range and cleared a place on the crowded table lop for my plate. It was there, perched on a high stool, that Belle found me.

  “I was beginning to think you’d decided to dream the day away, Reenie.” She kissed my cheek. “You’re lookin’ mighty perky this mornin’.”

  “Do I? I certainly feel so.” Taking a last sip of the bitter, gritty coffee, I shuddered. “I wouldn’t mind tea instead of coffee with my breakfast, though—if you have any, that is.”

  Belle laughed. “China or India, take your pick. But if you’re plannin’ on bein’ a real westerner, you’d better get yourself a liking for coffee brewed to a rancher’s taste.”

  Any plans I might have had in that regard would seem to have already been dashed, I thought, but I smiled brightly, determined to put the best face on things.

  “Bazz and I decided that today, your first full day at Morning Star, is yours to plan as you wish. We can go to the corral and meet your pony ... but maybe you’d rather explore the house or stay in your room and read; you always were such a reader, Reenie. ...” Her trailing, offhand tone was accompanied by a rapid downward sweep of her lashes that alerted me:

  Belle had not lost her teasing ways.

  I grinned, calling her mild bluff. “I’ll save my reading for a rainy day; today is for riding!” My smile brightened further, then dimmed as I looked down at my gray, schoolmarmish garb. “This dress and a blue one like it and the brown stripe I wore last night... it’s all I have, Belle.”

  “Never you mind about that,” she
countered briskly. “I put out some riding clothes of mine in your room, so you just scoot up and change and meet me at the front door. I got a few things to tend to here.”

  I whirled toward the door, then hesitated, torn between excitement and guilt. “I shouldn’t take you away from your duties—”

  “Fiddlesticks! I was just stirrin’ up a batch of healing salve for the stock; it can wait.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Belle turned to face me; her chin assumed a defiant tilt. “No one tells me what to do or when to do it, Reenie. It can wait.”

  How many times in childhood had we faced each other in this fashion? Her pugnacity used to unsettle me, but for now at least, I found its familiarity endearing. As instructed, I scooted.

  * * * *

  I didn’t walk down to meet Belle; I strode. They say clothes make the man, and from the minute I slipped on her soft leather riding skirt, boots and wide-brimmed, fawn-colored felt hat, I felt a different person altogether. Belle clapped her hands at the sight of me.

  “You look a proper cowgirl. Almost,” she amended, her blue eyes narrowing. She tapped the hat a little forward and down on the silver hair I had braided into a single sleek plait, and pulled her loaned belt two unused notches tighter, sighing enviously as she did so.

  She opened the door and waved me out into the brightest, bluest day one could imagine. The tops of the prairie grasses bowed in deference to the urgent wind that rattlingly propelled the metal blades of a tall windmill churning beside an old wooden trough a couple of hundred yards to the west of the dooryard, its homely mossy squatness in striking contrast to the formality of the stone-pillared portico in which we stood. Beyond it stretched the prairie, featureless except for the battalions of wire-bound stone posts that marched, lockstepped, to the horizon. There were no other structures in sight.

  “It was the first thing Ross Cooper built when he bought this land,” Belle said, when I voiced my curiosity about the trough. “Lottie used to nag him about getting rid of it, but he’d just laugh and say it was good for a man to be reminded of his beginnings.”

  A swirling updraft scudded up the stone facade behind us, trailing in its wake the fragrance of the lilacs flanking the wide doorstep. I was about to ask Belle’s permission to cut some of the voluptuous purple trusses for my room, when something—an after-scent of cloying, almost rank sweetness hinting of decay—stilled the question even as my lips parted.

  “Is this where you grow your herbs?” I asked instead.

  She nodded happily. “It was Lottie Cooper’s idea to plant them here when she saw how tall and thick the grasses grew behind the pillars Ross had erected on this spot. She told me the roots had spread so far and deep it took a team of oxen to pull them out! In the spring, just about the time the morning star first shows in the sky, my herbs start greenin’ up, earlier than anywhere else I know of. There’s not a garden like it anywhere in Kansas,” Belle declared, “nor an herbal book the match of Lottie’s. It was brought over from Austria, handed down through generations of her mother’s people. She added receipts of her own once she got familiar with the plants out here; I did, too, after she died.”

  I could tell Belle was proud of her contributions. “What accounts for it?” I asked. “This ... lushness, I mean.”

  Peonies planted beyond the lilacs thrust up flower stems as stout as walking canes topped with apple-sized buds eagerly seeking the light. Their leaves, darker and thicker than any I had ever seen back East, were massed so densely they seemed more a carapace than a canopy.

  Belle shrugged. “The pillars protect them some from the wind, and I reckon they draw up water from the same source as the trough—that prob’bly accounts for the roots reachin’ down so far. And manure, of course.” She grinned at me. “Lots of that on a ranch, Reenie.”

  She put her hands on her hips and surveyed the crowded beds with satisfaction. “The poppies’ll be coming along soon, all white and purple, then the foxglove and monkshood, and near the pillars, briony and nightshade.” She pointed toward the arc of stones. “They’re climbers, you see, and the nightshade’s purple flowers and red berries look real pretty against that pale honey color. And, oh, Reenie, wait’ll you see the jimson weed! It throws out these great big trumpet-shaped white flowers. ...” Belle’s eyes shone. “Why, I reckon they turn the angel Gabriel green as pea soup with envy! Course, this is the best time of year: everything always grows lickety-split through June, but come the hot weather in July and the garden droops along with the rest of us.”

  As I stared at a huge peony bud groping mindlessly toward the light, I found it difficult to share Belle’s enthusiasm. Mrs. Mossbacher’s garden had enjoyed similar advantages, thanks to her living next door to a dairy farm, but I could never recall it ever producing anything quite so... so out of the ordinary.

  Belle’s mention of manure prompted my next question. “There must be barns and stables and quarters for the hands, Belle, but where?” I searched the wide landscape in vain from under my wide hat brim.

  Belle linked her arm companionably through mine and led me out of the courtyard down a wide, dusty path ribbed by the passage of many wagon and buggy wheels.

  “That was all part of Ross Cooper’s plan, Reenie. He wanted the grand stone mansion he built for his bride to grab all the attention of visitors to Morning Star, so he tucked the working part of the ranch out of sight. It’s all hunkered down around Beacon Rock. That’s the rocky spine you see first thing when you top the rise. The early settlers looked for it like sailors do a lighthouse, to mark the trail west to the mountains. Bazz calls it Rattle Rock, ‘cause of it lookin’ so much like a snake.”

  Seeing my look of alarm, Belle patted my arm reassuringly. “Rattlesnakes are part of living here, darlin’. There’re worse things than that back where we come from. Lots worse,” she added, as it to herself, her soft mouth twisting in a sudden grimace. But before I had time to reflect on her bitterness, it had passed.

  “Oh, yes,” she continued matter-of-factly, “we have snakes, and blizzards, and cyclones, too. In fact, accordin’ to Bazz, his grandpa Wohlfort refused to let his precious little Lottie marry Ross until he dug her a cyclone cellar.”

  I wondered at Belle’s sneering tone. “A cyclone must be a terrible thing,” I said.

  “I reckon so. I saw one once, great black thing whirlin’ like a top off on the horizon ... I remember how still it was, the air so hot and heavy it seemed the birds could hardly fly, and the sky a queer greeny gray....” Belle’s voice hushed, and her eyes, remembering, looked unseeingly beyond me. “But it was way far away,” she resumed briskly, her walking pace picking up with her speech. “So far’s I’ve heard no cyclone ever came near to touchin’ down at Morning Star. If it did”—she turned and pointed up in the direction from which we had come—”why, we’d just scoot down into Lottie’s cellar. See that door set low off the north side of the house, slanting out in the shadows?”

  Squinting, I nodded.

  “Stays lovely and cool down there all summer, lined with stone the way it is. We use it to store my elixirs, as well as preserves and root vegetables.”

  “Do you grow vegetables in the dooryard garden, too?”

  Belle laughed. “Rita takes care of the table food. Carrots, onions ... she even keeps chickens. Lord knows where she gets ‘em, but I can always tell when Rita’s back when I hear chickens clucking in the pen between her vegetable patch and her shack. Hard to see it from here. It’s above us, beyond the cellar entrance, overlooking the corrals.”

  She shook her head and placed her fisted hands on the rounded swell of her hips. “Listen to me, going on and on about such dull old things—wouldn’t you rather go meet Bingo?”

  Without waiting for my eager nod of assent. Belle strode ahead, her heels sending up little puffs of dust. The path continued curving down, its verges clothed thickly with short- and tall-stemmed grasses boasting what to my eastern eyes seemed an astonishing variety of color and texture, the
whole starred with blue and yellow florets dancing to the tempo of the tireless breeze.

  Near the great twisting spine of rock, shrubs grew. For the most part they were unfamiliar sorts, but the unfurling reddish leaves of a scrubby patch had an oak-like look about them, and from their midst there presently issued a melodious fluting whistle that made my heart leap up.

  “Just a meadowlark,” Belle said in answer to my hushed inquiry. I found it hard to comprehend how such a glorious song could be so carelessly dismissed. “Common as cottontails,” she added, as a young rabbit, disturbed by our passage, zigzagged wildly across our path, its huge, moist eyes fixed with terror.

  “Have you mice here, too?” I asked, thinking of the pitter-pattering in my dream.

  Belle laughed. “Oh, Lordy, yes! I swear they come in regiments sometimes.”

  As we rounded Beacon Rock, low wooden buildings, a large barn and fenced enclosures came into view, and I was able to differentiate the pulsing sound I had been aware of for some few minutes as loud rough-voiced exchanges punctuated by shouts of laughter and a barrage of whinnies arising from a group of handsome, oddly marked horses protesting their confinement. Cobby Hawley sat hunched on the top rail of the nearest corral, a corncob pipe protruding upside down from pursed lips, aloof from the half-dozen or so rangy, scruffy men lounging on either side of him. A change in the tone of their banter and a shuffling rearrangement of postures alerted him to our presence.

  “‘Bout time.” He squinted at Belle. “Bring the salve?”