Night Fires in the Distance

by Sarah Goodwin

  I wished he’d never have to know. Never have to bury his own child, or his woman. Maybe that’s why I reached for him, to hold back that sorrow. I put my arms around him, feeling the roughness of his coat under my hands, pressing my cheek to his smooth one.

  For a moment he didn’t move, but then, slowly, his arms lifted and went round me. I felt hot tears in my eyes, falling down my wet face as the weight of his arms made my heart hiccup. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been held.

  For a moment I closed my eyes and let my chest squeeze with gratefulness. The sound of the kettle clanging onto the grate made us break apart, I hurried back to Beth’s side without looking at him, feeling foolish.

  Mrs Greaves had bathed Beth and laid her down again, with a fresh cloth on her forehead. Her fever was still high, her skin already dry again. I rubbed water on her lips and stroked her hair, sticky and dirty as it was. My poor little Beth, she could hardly open her eyes. Her little red mouth formed a word, and I had to lean closer to hear it.

  “Pa,” she whimpered, squeezed her eyes tightly shut, “want Pa.”

  “He’s on his way Beth, well on his way by now,” I soothed, rubbing her legs to dispel the cramps and aches that troubled her. If he did not arrive in the next hour, horses in a lather and dark circles beneath his eyes, I would never forgive him. Never.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Cecelia

  Laura slept in the back of the schooner with my coat over her. Beth, curled up beside her, was still feverish, but Laura was determined not to wear out the Greaves’s good will. As she’d made Beth comfortable in the schooner, I’d stood in the kitchen with Mrs Greaves, watching her put food and a full water skin into a sack.

  “You’re very kind,” I said, knowing that the food would embarrass Laura, who was so set on a fair trade for everything and who didn’t have any money with her to pay for the quinine and castor oil Beth had taken. I searched my pockets and found two dollars, it was luck that I had anything at all.

  Mrs Greaves took the money with a silent nod and slipped a pouch of quinine into the sack along with the food.

  “Do you think she’ll recover soon?” I asked. I knew she’d given Laura her assurances, but if tragedy was coming for her, I wanted to do all I could to lessen its strength.

  “There’s no telling, but…I will pray for the child and she seems strong, though she will need good care, as will your wife.”

  Stymied, my hands accepted the sack she handed me. In the time it took me to find my tongue she left the room to see to her first customer of the day. Hot spots glowed on my cheeks and I found myself caught between laughter and horror.

  After a long while of bumping over the ruts in the grass, I became aware of movement in the back of the schooner. Laura climbed up to sit beside me with Nora in the sling across her chest. Dark clouds had gathered on the horizon before us and the air was a cool breath that flattened the grasses and lifted the manes of my two mustangs.

  “Looks like rain,” Laura said, softly, so as not to wake the baby.

  “Hopefully we’ll be back before it hits.”

  We passed a moment in silence, and I sensed that she had something on her mind.

  “I’m grateful to you, for getting Beth to town so quickly. I think they thought we were married, the way we all pitched up.”

  I made a noise at the back of my throat.

  “I didn’t mean to let her think that. She said it and I should’ve set her right. Though I didn’t see the point.” She twisted her rough hands up in her filthy apron and glared out towards the clouded horizon. “Felt almost nice, having a husband with me, rather than one doing all he can to stay away from home. I don’t know why he hasn’t come with Rachel and Thomas.”

  I didn’t want to talk about the state of her marriage. Whether or not she was happy with William was no concern of mine. Tired and on edge from a night of keeping up my appearance as a man in front of strangers and worrying over the health of Laura’s daughter, I was not inclined to be charitable. I wanted her out of my schooner and back in her own house.

  “Are you angry at me?” she said sometime later, in a voice so soft and so unlike her own that I felt my temper waning.

  “Just tired.”

  “I couldn’t stand it if you were angry with me.”

  I glanced at her then and saw how tired she was, how bruised by the fear she had for her child and the disappointment in her husband. My heart of stone cracked a little and some kindness found a way to flow through. I thought of Charlie, of the sleepy weight of him in my arms. I wouldn’t wish a loss like that on my worst enemy and there I was, blaming her for her husband’s absence.

  “I’m not angry,” I said, “and I hope you don’t think me forward when I say that I was glad to help out a neighbour, and a friend.”

  She moved across the wooden seat and after a moment rested her head on my shoulder. It was almost as if she were a lady in my parlour, and both of us, swathed in silk, were comforted by our closeness, our ability to rely on our friendship. With the reins in one hand, I put my arm around her, and smoothed her shoulder through the faded calico of her dress.

  The feeling of familiarity lasted until we came to the soddie. The door to it opened and in its black maw I could see the faint spark of a lantern, and the shadow of William Deene’s body against it. The sight of him pulled Laura from my side, and within that instant we were separated again by my deception.

  I pulled the mustangs up and climbed down. By that time, Deene had come around the side of the schooner and was helping Laura from her seat. He went around to the back and lifted Beth from her bed, and she threw a feverish arm around his neck and whimpered. Deene’s beetle black eyes met mine, and he gave me a nod, before spiriting his wife and daughters into the soddie.

  Alone, I turned the schooner and headed back to my own house. Despite the difficulty of keeping my disguise around her, I hadn’t wanted to see Laura go. I wished I could tell her, tell anyone, what it was that I’d left behind me, but the risk was just too great. Leaving her with Deene meant going back to my soddie alone, to the ringing silence. So absorbed was I in hating the quiet around me that I was almost at my door when I noticed that things were not as I had left them.

  Firewood. The uneven lengths I’d cut myself down at the creek bed were stacked in a fairly well built pile against the side of the house. I stopped to examine it. My first thought was that Deene had brought it himself, but the pile was stunted, not the kind a grown man would build. With my hand on the rough surface of the pile, I remembered telling the children to stay inside the soddie until Laura or their father returned. Thomas had disobeyed her, perhaps Rachel too, though I doubted it. He must have carried the wood himself, making trip after trip to my home, to pile my wood against my house. I wondered what had happened to my deer, though if retrieving it meant speaking with Deene I’d prefer he kept it.

  Not for the first time I wondered that Deene’s son could be so much a gentleman, despite his father. I laid a hand on top of the rough pile and felt my heart break for Thomas’ good soul and the waste of it under his father’s disapproval. I ached so badly for my own little one that I could hardly see to close the door on the lonely night.

  *

  Mending my clothes gave me ample time to tell Franklyn of my journey west. I eased his mind by telling him how John was very proper about our arrangement. That while I slept in between his goods, he rested beneath the wagon and kept a watch. He even gave me a portion in his meals. The names of the places we passed meant nothing to me, so I seldom asked and didn’t often remember when he told me where we were. Each town was much the same as the last, the same rough people and dusty buildings.

  Fixing a hole in the knee of my trousers reminded me of the shameful day that I’d exchanged my dress for the rags I currently wore. I described the foulness of the woman I’d sold to and her wretched stall; the smell of old dust and slight damp, as though the clothes were piled into sacks in a shed when the customers wen
t home of a night. Her clothes looked cobbled together from all the worst rags, more like a laundry pile than a garment anyone would wear.

  Franklyn always had such trouble ordering dresses for me and Mother on our birthdays; I doubted he’d appreciate the fullness of the deception the seller had tried to play on me when she’d whistled through her brown teeth and offered me a simple trade, with no extra money from the sale of my dress and nightgown. However stained the hem, the dress was the height of fashion and well made from fine fabrics.

  I didn’t fall for her patter but though it was crushing at the time, I amused myself by impersonating her in my new home, imagining what Franklyn would make of her assessment of the very gown he’d bought for me that spring “I’m no fool Missus, cheap as chaff, that’s what that is and as for the boots, they’ll wear to nothing in a week, the leather’s tanned uneven, sewn as if by a blind man. I’m giving you a very good deal even trading you, never mind you asking for more into the bargain.”

  She told me the men’s castoffs were the last clothes I would need to buy. They were certainly the last ones I could afford.

  After the harrowing trip to town with poor Laura and her youngest daughters, it was good to laugh with Franklyn about it all.

  *

  After a fairly restful night’s sleep - I didn’t think I’d ever sleep soundly on a grass filled tick - I found the work of ten men waiting for me. I thought that the wood stacked against the soddie could not possibly be enough for the winter, when I’d need a fire all day and extra fuel for washing and cooking. I’d have to go and cut more. There were no chips in the pail by the stove, so I had to make do with drinking cold water that had been in the jug since before my impromptu trip to town. The leftover cornbread I’d kept aside for breakfast had grown fur in my absence and something had chewed a hole in my sack of cornmeal, spilling it over the floor. I’d need to make a rack of some kind to hang my supplies on.

  It was almost enough to drive me under my blanket and back into sleep. It was only the knowledge the no one would do the work for me that got me dressed and outside to tend to the mustangs.

  There’d been rain during the night and the grasses all around were wet with it, bent and heavy. The air was full of the scent of wet straw and soaked dust, above, the sky seemed a thousand miles higher than before. Finally, a reprieve from the fierce heat.

  The mustangs were not eager to be coaxed back into their harnesses and driven to the creek bed, but I urged them along. By the clear running stream, I left them to crop grass and took my axe from the schooner. Setting about a likely tree, I soon remembered why chopping wood had vexed me two days previously.

  I had half a load and was soaking my hands in the stream to take the sting from my blisters, when I realised that I wasn’t alone. The wet flick-flack of laundry being slapped against a rock downstream cut through the rush of water and grass. I went around a curve in the bank and found myself in the company of a stranger.

  “Hello.” I took in her wide, bare feet and calico dress as reassurance that she wasn’t a threat, though she was clearly an Indian. She was older than Laura, engaged in beating a man’s shirt against a rock, she paused to look at me from under dark brows.

  “Morning,” she said, voice heavy with a strange twang. “You’re Mr Clappe?”

  I nodded. “Are you - travelling - with Mr Neaps?”

  She nodded her head. Her hair was down to her waist, loose and enviably dark. She was the first Indian I’d seen up close.

  “I heard he was moving out here soon, has he come to build?”

  She nodded. “Before it snows. We need a house, barn,” she seemed unmoved, “many things.”

  “Your English is good, did he teach you?”

  A head shake. “I taught me.”

  Remembering my manners was difficult, being by a creek with an Indian instead of seated in a parlour with ladies, but I tipped my hat. “James.”

  She made no similar gesture. “Martha.”

  “Did you choose that name?”

  Again, her disinterest. “No.”

  There was nothing to say to that and I found her lack of warmth unsettling. “I’m sorry I interrupted you,” I said, hating her a little for her blankness, which was almost hostile. She was the first woman I’d seen, other than Laura, for some time. I’d been hoping for other potential friends to help me through the winter and ease my loneliness. I’d not planned on the only other woman for miles to be a tight-lipped native in a hand-me-down dress. Perhaps Jamison was a friendly sort, like Franklyn, or the traders that had helped me reach the west.

  “It’s good to talk to someone new,” she allowed, “I haven’t spoken with anyone since he brought Mr Deene to our camp. Jamison likes me to stay in the wagon when we’re in town.”

  Inwardly, I felt my hopes for my new neighbour dwindle. Another William Deene to contend with; possessive and suspicious.

  “I haven’t seen anyone for a while either,” I said, “only the Deenes, my neighbours.”

  “I’ve only met the man. The night before last, he came back with Jamison. They were drinking, talking.”

  While Laura and I were struggling to get quinine and castor into his daughter.

  “Well, I hope to make Mr Neaps’ acquaintance soon.”

  She wrung out the shirt, her knuckles pale as she twisted it as hard as she could, the way I’d seen the kitchen girl wring a chicken’s neck. I took it as my cue to return to my own business.

  Once I had the schooner fairly filled with wood, I climbed up onto the seat and started the drive home, my hands so raw from the axe handle that I could scarce hold the reins. I was thinking about Martha, about what she thought of being ‘wife’ to Neaps, when I noticed a figure by my soddie. My first thought was of Charles and I felt my chest fill with dread, my heart pounding in a panic - but it was William Deene at my door, I recognised his coat. What could he want to see me about? Surely he wouldn’t come in broad daylight to warn me away from his wife, he’d be too proud for that. I wondered if he’d been drinking.

  I climbed down from the schooner, taking my rifle with me.

  “Good afternoon Mr Deene.”

  “James,” he nodded his head in greeting and as he’d used my first name, I allowed myself to relax a little.

  “How’s Beth fairing?”

  “She’s looking a mite better, still down with the fever though.”

  “I hope she gets better soon.”

  He nodded, stuck his hands in the pockets of his worn trousers and glanced at the soddie. I followed his sloe eyes and felt a small sliver of pride for what I’d accomplished in building my house all alone. No matter that one corner was already sporting a leak, which I thought could be fixed easily enough. I’d just have to find out how.

  “It’s a fine house,” he said, as if following my thoughts, “better than I thought you’d build.”

  “You didn’t think I’d be building here at all, once you’d seen me off.”

  “I did think perhaps I’d seen the last of you, no point denying that. You should know that when we made our deal, I had an honest intention of helping you build.”

  “You just decided later that it was more worth your while to squeeze a few days’ work from me before leaving me to fend for myself.” I was surprised by my anger, so long dormant, compressed by every hard task I had encountered on my own. As I’d piled sod on sod to build my shelter, I hadn’t realised that I’d been building up a wall of resentment for him.

  “My wife paid you off, in the end. I know that.”

  The jars of chokecherry jam and bars of strong brown soap she’d given me. “Your wife does more credit to you than your actions.”

  His mouth, so like his eldest daughter’s, drew itself into a bloodless scar. “I’ve only come to tell you that the deer you left behind at my door is in the smoke shed, should be ready for you to come by and get it soon.”

  I looked on him without much trust, taking in as I did so his newly shaven face, trimmed up thatch
of dark hair and the neatly mended elbow of his clean shirt. I could see Laura in each favourable addition to his appearance. This was her gesture, something she had forced him to do, whether intentionally or not.

  “Let me know when it’s ready and I’ll come and fetch it.”

  He looked about ready to head back, but I stopped him out of a sense of duty. “I was about to put on some coffee, would you stay for a cup?”

  He shook his head. “I’ve work to do.”

  I realised too late that the invitation was all wrong. When I’d practiced my mannerisms I’d modelled Mr Clappe on my brother for his strength and personable nature, but he was a higher class than Deene. A man like Deene would have proffered whiskey, tobacco, perhaps just a seat and a comment on the state of the harvest. As he walked away I wondered what Jamison had offered to get him to his fire side. Perhaps all three, and the lure of his exotic companion besides. The two were probably already allies and I would be the one left in the cold, save for Laura. How would I survive with only my imagination for company and nothing on the prairie to feed it?

  Chapter Fifteen

  Laura

  Preparations for winter had me working from sun up ‘til the very last part of the sky fell into blackness. William was in a frenzy hauling wood and shooting deer to smoke. Even at night he brought axe handles in to whittle. There wasn’t a morning that didn’t start with me sweeping a pile of wood curls up for the stove.

  What with the days getting shorter and coming in colder, I was working on a pile of winter things for all of us. Sitting at the table with the kerosene lamp across from me I listened to the repeated scrape of Will’s knife as he made a set of pegs to hold a shelf on the wall.

  “Make sure you sew it on tightly now,” I warned Rachel as she looped her thread through one of the gilt buttons Will had paid so dearly for. “You don’t want it falling off and getting lost, we can use them on your new dress next year.”