They had met Shepp, an old Klondike argonaut, near the start of the Buffalo Hump rush when he filed a claim on the west fork of Crooked Creek and rode down to buy produce from Polly. Two years later, Pete, a young man who had left his parents’ Minnesota farm to seek adventure in the West, joined Shepp. Unlike Polly, Pete had wanted to leave farming behind him, but neither the mine nor the brewery company he and Shepp started was successful, and when the Northern Pacific made a survey for running a line through the canyon, they bought Tom Copenhaver’s claim on the Mallick farm.
“You think the railroad will come to the canyon?” Polly asked.
Charlie pushed Teddy, their black and white terrier, off his chest and rolled over in the grass. “We’ll never see the railroad here.”
Teddy scooted over to Polly. She scratched his ears with her left hand, continuing to paint the hen house with her right. “Pete say he and Shepp homestead one hundred thirty-seven acres.”
“One hundred thirty-seven,” she repeated, shaking her brush for emphasis. “I busy all day with twenty.”
Charlie snatched his fiddle out of reach of the drops of carbolic acid and coal oil sprinkling from Polly’s brush. He tucked it under his chin. “Don’t forget they have two men working the place. You only have yourself. Besides, Pete is less than half your age, and both Shepp and Pete are twice your size,” he said, drawing the bow across the strings.
“Pete handle the stock and the team for plowing and haying, but he still do assessment work to bring in cash. Shepp take care of all the garden work by himself and he is also carpenter and cook,” she said, squirreling inside the hen house to paint the mite-infested roosts.
“Makes a fellow tired just thinking about it.”
Polly stuck her head out. “Not too tired to hunt, I hope. I tell Shepp and Pete since they have so much work, you will hunt fresh meat for us all.”
Lifting her hems, damp from the last traces of morning dew, Polly skirted a thorn bush and took Charlie’s hand. Clammy. She reached up and felt his forehead. Beneath a fine film of perspiration, it was cold to her touch. He had told her his eyes were weakening and he needed her to sight the game for him to shoot, but he had not said how difficult the climb uphill had become for him.
He coughed. In the aftermath, Polly detected the same rattle that had worried her during his attack of pneumonia the winter of the Buffalo Hump rush.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Fine,” he panted, propping his Winchester against a pine and collapsing onto a soft bed of ferns. “Just need a few minutes to catch my breath.”
Polly knelt beside him. “You sure?”
“Polly, I’m sixty-three years old and winded. That’s all.”
Teddy hurtled back down the steep wall of the canyon. Panting, he threw himself down at Polly’s feet.
“See, even Teddy needs a break,” he said, stretching out.
Polly leaned back against a fallen log, thoughtfully chewing a blade of sour grass. Beneath them thundered the Salmon. Swollen ten, twenty feet above its summer level, it swept along fallen trees, rolling rocks, the last few blocks of unmelted ice. In the distance, a lone buck rubbed its new antlers against a pine tree, scraping off the velvet, polishing. Closer, on the creek bank, a beaver sat, combing its fur with its toe nails. Everything smelled alive, fresh, newly green.
Teddy, eager to be off again, nuzzled inquiringly, his nose wet and cold against Polly’s cheek. She scratched behind his ears, burying her face in his fur. Perhaps Charlie was right and she was just over anxious. Wasn’t she almost sixty herself, her hair white, her brown face wrinkled as a walnut, her fingers beginning to gnarl?
“Look,” Charlie said, pointing to a golden eagle circling the sky above a rocky ledge.
As Polly’s eyes followed Charlie’s finger, the huge bird tucked in its wings and dove. When the distance between ledge and bird narrowed, it spread out its wings. Then, barely touching the ledge, it soared back up, its claws weighted down with a yellow bundle.
Charlie stood. He dusted off dirt, bits of twigs and dead leaves. “What is it?” he asked, squinting.
“Some kind of cub I think.”
“Any sign of a mother?”
She caught a quick movement on the ledge, but it was far too small to be a grown cat. “No. Maybe another cub.”
“Not like a nursing mother to leave her babies, let’s go check it out.”
TWENTY-NINE
Charlie picked up the cub. “A cougar. She can’t be more than six weeks old.”
“I make a bottle for her.”
“She might refuse cow’s milk. Like those motherless lambs you tried to raise,” Charlie warned.
But unlike the lambs which had stubbornly locked their jaws against the bottle, letting the milk spill into their tight curls until they reeked of sour milk, weakened, and died, the cougar cub sucked until her stomach bulged, then yawned and stretched. Teddy, his furry brow wrinkled comically, hovered while the cub sniffed at the furniture and the plants outside, turning over pinecones, tossing leaves and feathers, and tumbling over fallen branches. When she strayed, he picked her up by the scruff of her neck and brought her back, dropping her at Polly’s feet, and as the cub grew, they romped together, wrestling.
By the time the cottonwoods turned yellow and gold, the cub was the same size as Teddy. By midwinter, stretched out, she was as big as Polly, and by spring thaw, larger than Charlie. Sitting on the floor, she could reach and eat from the tin plate Polly had nailed onto the table for her, and when she raked her claws along the trunks of trees, the marks ran deep.
“It isn’t natural,” Shepp said, pointing to the cougar sitting across from him, licking her plate clean.
Polly, coming in from the kitchen, set generous portions of peach cobbler in front of Charlie, Pete, and Shepp. She poured fresh coffee all around. “Amber make you nervous?”
“Any animal that can break a buck deer’s neck with a snap of its jaws makes me nervous,” Shepp said, digging into the cobbler.
“She won’t hurt you.”
“Try telling Tom that,” Charlie laughed. “He came down from Warrens last week. Got here after dark and before he knew what was happening, Amber had leaped out of a tree, knocked him off his horse, and pinned him to the ground.”
“She only want to play.”
“Well, get her to play outside,” Pete said.
He shoved back his chair and opened the door. Charlie grabbed Amber by the scruff of the neck. She arched her back and hissed. Teddy rose to his haunches and growled protectively.
Charlie dropped back onto his chair. “You get her,” he told Polly.
Polly stroked Amber’s arched back, smoothing the fur which had bristled. The cat licked Polly’s face wetly.
“Outside,” she ordered.
Amber padded obediently toward the open door, her claws clicking on the plank floor. Teddy followed. Polly shut the door behind them.
“There, now you feel safe?” she asked the three men.
Grinning sheepishly, they concentrated on their cobblers and coffee. Pete held his mug out for a refill.
“If prohibition goes through, you could take that cat up to Warrens to guard Charlie’s saloon from federal officers,” he said.
“Only problem is, she’d scare the customers away too,” Charlie said. “But no need to worry, winters will be no problem. The officers, no matter how zealous, will never brave twenty-foot drifts, and in the summer, there are telephone lines between most of the ranches, so it’ll be easy to give warning of anyone coming in who looks suspicious.”
“A telephone’s not too different from the crystal set I made,” Shepp said. “I could put a line between our two ranches.”
“What for?” Polly asked.
“Maybe they’re thinking of going back into the brewery business,” Charlie said.
Pete shook his head vigorously. “Never!”
“But a telephone could come in handy,” Shepp persisted. “Just think, if we have
a line, we can call ahead and have Polly get Amber out of the way before we cross the river.”
Teddy, his muzzle spiked cruelly with porcupine quills, squirmed under Charlie’s firm grip while Polly tugged at the quills with a pair of pliers.
“Poor Teddy,” she sympathized. “You think just because Amber can jump a porcupine and eat the quills, you can.”
“Maybe Shepp’s right,” Charlie said.
The quill Polly was pulling snapped off close to the flesh and Teddy whimpered. “You want to get rid of Amber?”
Perspiration from the strain of holding Teddy mottled Charlie’s forehead. “No, of course not. I mean about the telephone. Some day, if we really need help, that signal we use, the white towel on the bush, might not be fast enough.”
“They get over here plenty quick enough for fish fries.”
Charlie coughed. “Polly, be serious. We’re not getting any younger, you know.”
She worked the broken quill free. “Years, white hair, and wrinkles mean nothing. They’re just a way to mark time. Like the rings in a tree. Uncle Dave Lewis is more than seventy and he live alone on Big Creek and run a pack string and hunt cougars. And Goon Dick is older than that, but every spring he come back all the way from Seattle to placer in Warrens.”
She extracted the last quill, dropped the pliers, and rubbed Teddy’s nose tenderly. “Sure I need spectacles for close needlework, but I still farm a big garden. And,” she added, laughing, “your fingers are still mighty quick with cards and fiddle.”
“Look at me,” Charlie said. “I mean really look at me and tell me what you see.”
The intensity in his voice startled Polly. She released Teddy and studied Charlie’s face. Each morning, when she woke beside him, she was surprised anew at the dark smudges beneath pale, watery blue eyes, the thin wisps of hair, the shock of white beard, the way bones protruded under finely wrinkled skin. But then, during the course of the day, when they talked and laughed, he became the same Charlie who had saved her that first night in Warrens, camas blue eyes dancing, coppery hair and beard a blaze of flame, and she allowed herself to forget how easily he tired. How he made fewer and fewer trips into Warrens. How his pale cheeks flushed as afternoon wore into evening. How her cough syrups and herb teas were losing the fight against the cough which had become a part of him.
She looked away. Amber, head lowered, crouched in the grass, creeping along noiselessly, her tawny fur a slither of gold in the waves of green. She leaped on top of Teddy and they tumbled down the slope, a blur of black and white and gold.
Polly had seen the same scene reenacted many times, and it always made her laugh because she knew Teddy saw Amber long before she jumped. But she did not laugh now. For like Amber, she had allowed herself to be fooled. Refusing to acknowledge what her eyes, her years of nursing the sick had told her.
Polly turned to face Charlie. “We tell Shepp yes, we want the telephone,” she said.
THIRTY
The sun dipped behind the canyon walls, its afterglow casting a silvery sheen on the bleached roof shingles still steaming from an unexpected afternoon shower. Polly, laughing, wiped her hands clean on a tuft of damp sour grass. She leaned on the lard bucket, half full of chestnuts, and pushed herself upright.
Pete eyed her quizzically.
“When a person start picking up horse nuts instead of chestnuts, it’s time to quit,” she chuckled.
Pete picked up the two lard buckets of chestnuts. “I’ll take these up to the house for you.”
Teddy, his gait stiff and awkward, hurried after Polly and Pete. She slowed, partly to accommodate him, partly because her own feet pained her now after a full day’s labor.
“Your harvest good?” she asked.
“Better than our first one.”
Polly laughed. “I remember. You plant too early and everything come up and just sit. You have enough seed for ten years!”
She opened the door for him. “You say you pack produce up to the Jumbo tomorrow?”
Pete set the buckets down. “Yes.”
“You have room to take a few things to friends for me?”
“Sure.”
From the shelves beneath the stairs, Polly brought out jars and bottles, a crocheted cap. “This liniment is for Jessie, the preserves are for Nellie Shultz, and the crocheted cap you give Four-Eyed Timothy to take to his mother in Dixie.”
She wrapped them up in clean flour sacks, tucked them into a well-lined coal oil tin, and headed for the kitchen.
“Whoa!” Pete said. “I’m only taking one mule, not a whole string.”
“You mean you have no room for sauerkraut I make like your sister teach me?”
“Well now, that’ll just go across the river and I didn’t say there wasn’t room in the boat,” Pete said quickly.
Chuckling, Polly wrapped two jars of sauerkraut and added them to the tin. She followed Pete back out onto the porch. “Thank you for bringing the mail. Charlie like to keep up with the news.”
“How is he?”
“Last year, after he give up his saloon and stop going to Warrens, he eat a little more, and drink a little less. For a while, I think he get better. But this year is almost over and he not come downstairs one time. And this month he not get out of bed at all.”
“Well, remember, anytime you need help, you give us a ring. That’s what the telephone’s for.”
She glanced up at the thin black wire suspended between the two ranches, thinking of how she had joked when Shepp had suggested it four years ago, how grateful she was for it now.
“You and Shepp already do too much,” she said. “You order my seeds, my spectacles, my shoes.” Laughing, she pointed to the stream of clear water now officially designated on maps as Polly Creek. “You even order survey men to make me a famous person!”
Pete nodded at the tin loaded with Polly’s gifts. “Small payment for this, all the surprise fish fries, and good suppers,” he said.
“You come over after you get back from the Jumbo, I make you a chestnut pie and good venison jerky to take with you when you go set your trap line.”
Pete patted his stomach. “Don’t worry, I will.”
Back inside, Polly chopped some leftover chicken for Teddy who had grown toothless, then took down a clean jar to make gum arabic water to soothe Charlie’s cough. She poured water, sugar candy, and gum into the jar, set it in a saucepan of water, and stirred.
As she waited for the gum and candy to dissolve, she thought of all the remedies, Chinese and Western, which had failed to cure Charlie’s cough or restore his strength. Not for the first time, she wondered if the cough was perhaps a symptom of a more serious illness and not the illness itself. If only Li Dick had not left Warrens, she could ask him, but he had gone back to China and A Can, the retired packer who had taken his place as herbalist for the dozen or so remaining Chinese, did not have Li Dick’s skills. Nevertheless, she tried the powders and herbs he ordered for her from the Big City, just as she tried the medicines friends and strangers suggested, the receipts for cures Charlie found in his books.
Steam rose fragrant from the saucepan and she poured the mixture into a mug to take up to Charlie. At the bottom of the stairs, Teddy raised his forepaws expectantly. He was too old, too stiff to climb more than one or two steps, and he pawed at the treads, whining, begging Polly to carry him up too.
Careful not to spill the gum arabic water, she leaned over cautiously and scratched behind his ears, his chin, ruffling his fur. “I come back for you,” she promised.
Charlie was asleep. Polly set the steaming mug down on the table beside him and laid the back of her hand against his forehead, his sunken cheek. How thin he had grown, his flesh melting despite custards and rich broths, leaving mere skin over bone. And his cheek, falsely rosy, burned to the touch.
His eyes opened, brightened at the sight of Polly beside him. He pulled her down onto the bed and pointed to the photograph album propped open on his chest. “Look,” he said hoarsely.
It was her wedding picture. She stood, stiffly corseted, dress dark and sober, face serious, sad almost, right hand resting awkwardly on Charlie’s thick family bible. But underneath, where no one except Charlie and herself would see, she had been afire in scarlet. From her long crimson petticoats to her embroidered corset cover and ruffled drawers.
Polly smiled, remembering. “I dare not wear red outside or everyone think I am shameful, but in China, red is a happy color, a wedding color, so I want to wear it. That’s why I look so serious. I’m trying not to laugh and give away our secret.”
“It’s been twenty-seven years,” Charlie said. “Fifty if we go back to the day you first rode into Warrens, trying to act brave when any fool could see how scared you were.” A spasm of coughing shook him.
Polly propped him up on his pillows and rubbed his back. She passed him a square of clean sacking. He spat into it. Phlegm threaded with red wisps. Blood.
She felt the moment freeze. Blood meant the spitting blood disease. The same spitting blood disease she had seen kill men much younger than Charlie.
Blinking back tears, she snatched the soiled piece of sacking and threw it into the can already spilling over with phlegm-stiffened squares of cloth, some traced with the telltale brown of dried blood.
“If only life could be held captive like memories,” Charlie sighed.
Unable to speak, Polly closed Charlie’s wasted fingers around the mug of gum arabic water and walked over to the window opposite the bed. She rested her forehead against the chilled panes of glass.
Outside, dusk gathered into darkness. Soft and gentle, it rolled down the canyon walls, obliterating the mahogany and scrub oaks flamed red between blue green spruces and lemon yellow aspens and willows. It marched on, relentless, devouring her garden, the vine-covered hen house, the porch, until there was only blackness. A bit of gold flashed, Amber hurrying home? But Amber, shot by a faceless stranger, was dead. Like Bertha Long’s second son, a soldier in France, and her husband, John, snatched by death at the end of a dance.
Thousand Pieces of Gold Page 15