Bittersweet (25 page)

Imogene tried to pull away, but he hardened his grip and held her. “I got money now,” he went on. “That’s where I been. I got money and I bought a little spread south of here. Big enough to raise a family on and make a living. I been building her a cabin and it’s done now. You tell her, by God!”

Imogene wrenched her arm free. “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“You know.”

Mac came out of the darkness from the direction of the wagons at the same time that Fred reached them from the dance floor. Mac spoke first. “I found little Sarah crying her heart out, all hid back there in the dark.” His eyes lit on Nate. “Nate. You’re back. It’s about damn time. Have you been annoying Sarah?”

“Yes,” Imogene said.

Mac’s face darkened and he took Nate by the arm. Mac’s remaining thumb and finger were as strong as a crab’s claw. “Come on, Nate. You bother either one of these ladies again and I’ll set the law on you. Hell—I may pin your ears back myself.”

Nate stood his ground. “You tell her, Miss Grelznik.”

“Come on, son,” Fred said. “You’re making a stink.” Nate went, walking between the two men. They stopped on the far side of the wagons, out of earshot of the revelers. There were angry gestures and Nate broke away to join a group of young idlers who
had been watching the festivities from a distance and passing a bottle between them.

Mac left Fred and spoke briefly with a big-shouldered, big-bellied man leaning against one of the pavilion posts. Mac pointed to Nate, then picked his way back to Imogene’s side.

“I had a talk with Sheriff Graff. There won’t be any more trouble. He said he’d keep an eye on Nate. If Graff says he’ll keep an eye on somebody, it usually means both eyes and his boot heel. I don’t think Nate’ll make trouble; he’s not a bad sort,” Mac reassured her.

Imogene found Sarah leaning against the side of Ozi Whitaker’s carriage. The schoolteacher led her back to the dance. They abandoned the blanket by the steps to sit in the cool darkness with the bishop and Mrs. Whitaker; the other teachers had gone back to town. Sarah was quiet and withdrawn, but Imogene chatted with the girls when they spun by, breathless and shining from the dancing, to fling themselves down a moment. Mac stood apart, gossiping with his cronies and watching Nate.

Nate Weldrick watched Sarah and drank. The bottle occasionally flashed in the moonlight as it passed from hand to hand or, empty, was tossed into the meadow grass, a new one then being dredged from one of the saddlebags. And Sheriff Graff watched the knot of men who’d come to the dance and kept themselves outsiders, drinking and joking beyond the circle of light.

When enough liquor had been consumed, a fistfight broke out. The sheriff broke it up as quickly as it had begun, arresting four men, Nate Weldrick among them.

Mac came over to the bishop’s party after Nate and the others had been escorted back toward town, and asked Imogene for a word in private.

“Weldrick’ll be cooling his heels in jail for a day or two,” he informed her. “He give me this to give to Sarah. Seeing as how he upsets her, I figured you’d better have a look at it and give it or not give it as you see fit.”

Imogene thanked him, and as soon as she was alone she unfolded the note and read it.

The hand was steady; he’d written it before he was drunk. Imogene folded it carefully and put it in her pocket.

“Do-si-do and swing your partner. Swing your corner ’round and ’round,” the fiddler called. Wearily, Imogene turned her back on the music to return to the bishop’s blanket.

“Sarah, would you go for a walk with me? You have been sitting a long time.” Imogene linked her arm through Sarah’s.

The dance was beginning to break up, and the early-to-bed people were folding their blankets and packing picnic baskets back into the wagons. Imogene stopped at Fred’s wagon to get their shawls.

Away from the dance floor, in a swale in the meadow, a lone boulder pushed its face into the moonlight. Imogene led Sarah to it. Strains of the banjo and fiddle floated across the meadow with the light, high sound of women’s laughter, thrumming above the beat of leather boots.

Imogene spread her shawl over the rock to protect their dresses. “Sarah, would you be happier married?”

Sarah thought for a moment before she replied. “I should, I know.”

“Do you want to marry Mr. Weldrick?”

“He put Wolf out in the rain.”

“What if he hadn’t? I mean, what if he’d not been responsible for what happened?”

“I would marry him. If I was sure. The six months are almost gone.” She said the last defiantly. Imogene didn’t understand but was too engrossed in her own thoughts to pursue it.

A night bird swooped low overhead, its wings whistling as they cut the air. Imogene listened and it was gone. She pulled the note from her pocket and stood to shake the dampness from her skirts. The moon was at her back, full on Sarah’s face. Imogene looked at
her, young and soft in the moonlight. Between her thumb and fingers she held the bit of paper with Nate’s proposal and his declaration of innocence.

“My dear, would you love Mr. Weldrick?”

Sarah was quiet for a long time, then she replied, “No.” She shook her head slowly. “I love
you
, Imogene.”

Imogene started to cry and, hugging Sarah fiercely to her, she crumpled Nate Weldrick’s note in her hand.

DUST MOTES DANCED IN THE SUNLIGHT AND THE ROOMS WERE UNNATURALLY
still. All the girls but those who’d stayed for the dance had gone home for the summer. The others were in church, and Bishop Whitaker’s School was empty but for Imogene. She sat at her desk, looking over the neat rows of inkwells, chairs, pencil trays. After two years of use, everything still looked new and smelled slightly of furniture polish. She sat motionless, her chin resting on her folded hands, sunlight pouring in through the open door of the recitation rooms on the east side.

“I thought I’d find you here.” Kate Sills appeared in the doorway, her neat Sunday hat pinned squarely on her head, her white gloves immaculate. “I met the bishop’s wife before the service; she told me you’d handed in your resignation.”

Imogene smiled wanly. “Oh dear, I’d hoped to slip away without good-byes. I’m glad I didn’t. We’re leaving Reno, Kate.”

“You love Bishop Whitaker’s.”

“I love Bishop Whitaker’s. But we’re leaving today, on the morning stage.”

Kate unpinned her hat and set it and her gloves on a desk. “You’re certainly not doing things by halves, are you? Where, may I ask, is the morning stage bound?”

“Round Hole—among other places.” Imogene laughed. “I’m going to be an innkeeper, Kate.”

“At Round Hole? The stop on Smoke Creek? Imogene, you must be unbalanced! Have you ever seen the Nevada desert? It is truly a land God forgot.” Kate gave Imogene a hard look. “You’re in trouble. Let me help. I am not without influence in this town.”

“I’m not in trouble. Sarah hasn’t been very well—even before Wolf died. Innkeeping is something we can both do. Something we can do together. I used to think teaching was my life, but it takes me from Sarah and she needs me.”

“We need you too, Imogene. You have a gift for teaching.”

“There are other teachers in the world. Sarah Mary needs me.”

“As an innkeeper? Just the two of you? You’ll break your backs and your hearts.”

“It’s a stage stop. Mac says it’s isolated; he goes through it twice a week on his run. It will do Sarah good to live out of town; she’s too easily influenced by what people think.” Imogene gave vent to a small bitter smile. “Or what she thinks they think. We need to get off by ourselves if she’s to get away from that.”

Kate sat on the edge of the desk, cool and unblinking, regarding Imogene. “Is that all?”

Imogene sighed and pushed impatiently back from her desk. “The sheriff is letting Nate Weldrick out of jail this afternoon. Mac told me.”

“And Mr. Weldrick will push Sarah into marriage if you stay.”

“It would be a mistake. Sarah won’t stand up for herself; she’d be little better than a servant.”

“So you’re going to push her into innkeeping—stagestopping.”

“That’s right,” Imogene said without remorse.

“The desert will make her little better than a slave. It is not work for a woman like Sarah,” Kate said.

“I’m strong as an ox. I can do the work of a man. Two, if they are small.” She won a dry smile from Kate. “Sarah needn’t work herself to death, I will see to that. You have never seen her around Mr. Weldrick. The man reduces her to a child. In her own mind as well as his. Sarah can’t fight that right now. It would destroy her spirit.”

Kate heaved a sigh and reached out to take Imogene’s hand. “My thoughts are with you, you know that.”

“I know it, Kate. It’s one of the many things that will make it hard to leave Bishop Whitaker’s.”

Dizable & Denning’s representative shared the Wells Fargo office with Judge Curler and Harland Maydley. His name was Ralph Jensen. He was a slim man of middling height, sandy-haired and colorless, with watery blue eyes. He stood behind the counter, one hand splayed over the lease, the other holding a letter. When he’d finished reading it, Imogene asked for it back, folded it in a businesslike way, and put it in her purse. “Mr. Ebbitt has asked us to secure a position,” Imogene lied easily. “He’ll be coming out to join his wife within the month,” she said.

“We’re in a hell of a fix, with Van Fleet pulling out the way he is, or I wouldn’t send you two out without this husband of yours showing up to do his business himself.” Ralph Jensen pulled on his nose. It was long, the end flattened like a spade, as though he’d tugged it out of its natural shape years before.

As Imogene reached for the lease, he pulled it back over the counter. “Now wait a damn minute. I’m going to have Mrs. Ebbitt sign this, and you can give me the twenty-seven dollars. Harland or the Judge or anybody can witness. But it’s not legal. A woman signing a lease won’t hold water, even if she has got a letter from her husband with say-so. Take the lease with you and as soon as Mr. Ebbitt shows, have him sign it and send it to me. Understood?” He waited until Imogene and Sarah had nodded like obedient children before he removed his hand from the paper and shoved it and the ink across the counter.

“Round Hole’s a ways from anywhere,” he warned as Sarah stepped forward to take the pen, and she hesitated.

“Isolation won’t bother us, Mr. Jensen,” Imogene assured him.

“This ain’t isolation, lady, this is right damn in the middle of nowhere.” He took in Sarah’s soft uncertain glance, Imogene’s solid answering gaze, and he shrugged. “Go on, you’re holding up the stage. Noisy’ll tell you the particulars and the Van Fleets said they’d stay on a day or two and show you the ropes.”

The leavetaking was subdued. Lutie and Fred saw them off. Fred was to send their things after them by freightwagon. Lutie and Fred were confused and hurt by the sudden departure, and Harland Maydley, newly promoted to the post of Jensen’s assistant, puffed about officiously.

The two women climbed quickly into the mudwagon—a coach smaller than a Concord, with an even more jolting carriage. Mac was on top with the driver, Noisy Dave. Noisy was a rubber-faced man of middle years, with thinning blond hair. A belly as big as that of a woman eight months with child hung over his belt. A mustache of startling proportions, a soup-strainer, completely hid his mouth; the tips were waxed and pointed toward his ears. The driver hawked, spat over the side, wiped his mustache, and, with a bellow, shook the reins and the horses pulled the mudwagon down the main street.

Imogene and Sarah were alone in the coach, seated side by side so neither had to ride backwards. Dust boiled from under the horses’ hooves and was churned into the air by the wheels. Sarah leaned back against the upholstered seat and pulled the shade down.

The ribbon of green that the Truckee unfurled through Reno was quickly behind them. Sarah raised the shade a couple of inches and looked out. They were traveling through a dry valley bordered by hills of sage and rock. “I’m not sure about leaving Reno,” she said, and dropped the shade.

“It will be all right. As Mac says, ‘I can feel it in my finger bones.’ It will be better, we’ll have something of our own. A lease is almost like buying,” Imogene said with more confidence than she felt.

“We had teaching,” Sarah said after a while. “You loved it.”

“I’ll learn to love innkeeping.
We’ll
learn. This time we’ll learn together.”

Sarah looked out the window again. At the end of the valley, a mountain of rock reared shimmering in the heat, its broken sides supporting nothing but rust lichen and an occasional patch of sparse desert grass. “It’s so dry,” Sarah observed. “Mac says it’s as bad at Sheep’s Hole. Worse.”

“Round Hole. There’s a round spring there. The stop is close to a big lake. How bad can it be?”

Sarah tried to read to pass the time, but the jouncing moved the book so violently she couldn’t follow the text, even using her finger. Eventually she leaned back to wait out the journey.

The coach road wound north through the Carson Range and a little east of Reno toward the Pah Rah Mountains and the western shore of Pyramid Lake. Desert mountains, devoid of any vegetation but the constant gray-black sage, crowded close. Old avalanches had
tumbled rock down the mountain faces and lay like scabbed wounds below the ridges. Boulders the size of houses thrust out from the jagged summits. And always the terrain grew dryer, until at last it could scarcely support even the sage, and the bushes grew stunted, ten or fifteen feet apart.

Around three o’clock in the afternoon, a sharp rapping brought Imogene and Sarah out of their torpor. A ghostly face appeared upside down in the window, and Sarah squawked at the apparition before she recognized Mac behind the white alkali dust.

“Told you it was bad,” he snapped, without preamble. “Look lively now, we’re almost through the Pah Rahs. You’ll be able to see the lake in a few minutes, and it’s a beauty.”

Revived by the promise of water and green growing things upon which to rest their eyes, the women sat up straighter and took an interest in their surroundings. But the approach to Pyramid Lake was as desolate as the land they’d been traveling through for the past hours. Alkali flats, blinding white in the afternoon sun, stretched away on either side until they reached mountains spotted with sage. There were none of the soft announcements that usually herald water, neither green foliage nor the soft feel of humid air.

“It’s a little cooler,” Sarah ventured as the stage came to the top of a barren rocky rise.

“Pyramid Lake,” Noisy hollered down.

Below, spreading out across the desert floor, was a lake of the same hard blue as the sky. The shores were crusted with white and nothing grew. Even the sage and the coarse brown desert grass retreated from its shores. Gray, cone-shaped bubbles of stone frothed up fifty, seventy-five, a hundred feet in a skyline of fantastic castles at the north end of the lake. The eastern shore abutted against the foot of a mountain range, and in its shadow several more volcanic cones pushed up out of the lake.

“How bad can it be?” Sarah said.

The mudwagon jolted on, plowing up its plume of white dust. A hot dry wind buffeted the coach and drew the moisture from the lips and throats of the passengers. They rode in silence, occasionally passing each other the canteen Mac had provided. The water was tepid and tasted of metal.

They rounded the end of the lake at sunset. The mountains had turned rose, lavender, and gold. Shadows stretched long over the mountain faces, and the sage dotting the valley floor stretched out
dark fingers five times its size. Mac rapped on the side of the coach and called on Sarah and Imogene to witness the mammoth bubbles and spires of rock. Pyramids of liquid stone, frozen in shape by the waters of an ancient sea, lay exposed on the lake shore. They clustered at the water’s edge like a ruined dream of Baghdad. Bats circled the spires and turrets, streaming from hidden caves in black ribbons.

Apathetic with the dust and the rolling of their stomachs, the women stared blankly through the moving frame of the coach window, then fell back against the seat to look at nothing.

Past the lake, the road curved northeast up a sand and gravel hill to a pass in the low hills that marked the end of the Pah Rah Range, northwest of Pyramid Lake. Noisy Dave pulled up at the summit, bellowing boistrous whoas. “Sand Pass,” he hollered. “There’s Round Hole below. If you gals want to step out, take a look, and stretch a bit, go ahead.” They climbed stiffly from the coach, not trusting their cramped legs to support them.

Winding down the shadowed side of the pass, a white wagon track snaked through a sea of sage; mountains, rounded and covered with the same coarse blanket of vegetation, rose to the northeast. To the south, rock-faced and sharp, the granite peaks of the Fox Range curved away in a jagged wall. Held between these pincers of rock and sand was the Smoke Creek Desert.

Near the middle of the broad valley floor, the sagebrush stopped abruptly in a wavy shoreline; beyond, there was nothing but the white glare of an immense alkali flat baked until the crust had cracked into a crazy network of lines. On the edge of the flat, in a blunt finger of sage that poked out onto the dead lake bottom, huddled Round Hole Stop. In an oasis of green the size of a postage stamp, its few trees looking like refugees in an alien land, three buildings, bleached the same drab gray as the sage, clung to the green skirts of a spring.

“Oh my Lord,” breathed Imogene.

“You gals change your mind?” Noisy asked.

“I knew it was desert,” Imogene replied crisply, but still she stared down on the desolate valley.

“Imogene,” Sarah whispered, “nobody can live down there.”

“Staying or not,” Noisy put in, “we’re going to be there tonight. There’s no place else within a half-day’s ride.” He started talking to the team as Imogene and Sarah climbed back into the mudwagon.

Stars were shining in the long desert twilight when they at last pulled up at the stage stop. A low, open-faced building formed one side of a square of hard-packed earth. Flanking it were a stable and a long two-story building with a veranda and two chimneys. The fourth side of the quadrangle, across the coach road, was the spring itself, a barn, and a squat icehouse.

The spring was aptly named, a round hole about forty-five feet across, with high, grass-covered sides. Under the darkening sky the spring lay black and placid, but the sound of moving water was everywhere. In the parched desert landscape it fell on the ear like music. A windmill pumped water to fill a trough in the small meadow to the south—forty acres of green crowded on all sides by the thirsty Smoke Creek. A narrow irrigation channel gurgled in front of the house and down through the paddock beside the barn, and another ditch ran full behind the stables and out across the square of dirt between the buildings. Planks had been laid over it where the paths to the shed and the stables crossed it.