Bittersweet (42 page)

“I don’t know.” Sarah looked away, out the window. In the houses opposite, the lamps had been lit, and several stars shone in the western sky. “I haven’t seen him in several years. We had a…falling out.”

Agatha Bonhurst sat quietly for a moment, stretching her lips like a horse taking sugar from an outstretched palm, lost in thought. She sighed and patted Sarah’s knee. “We’ll just sit tight and wait a bit. I’ll go tell Dr. White you’ve got a brother maybe coming. When did you telegraph?”

“Two hours ago…maybe closer to three. Can I see my husband now?”

The nurse straightened her skirt and squared her pinafore straps with a pert military gesture. “It’s not more than an hour from Virginia City by train. We’ll wait a while.”

“I want to go in,” Sarah said clearly.

“In a bit.” Sarah had risen with her, and now Agatha pushed her gently back onto the bench. “I’ll go talk to Dr. White,” she said soothingly, and rustled out of the room.

Sarah waited, listening. Agatha’s steps grew faint and died with the closing of a distant door. There was a newspaper on the far end of the bench. It was several days old, but Sarah leafed through it in a desultory fashion. The light was bad, and her eyes kept straying to Karl’s room. At length she gave up and put the newspaper down to watch his door.

Twenty minutes later there was the sound of footsteps on the gravel. The doors opened and David stepped inside. He’d gone almost completely bald, and his beard, red-blond and as shaggy as ever, had grown nearly to his belt. Sarah let out a sharp little cry and ran to him, flinging herself into his arms, hiding her face in his chest.

“David, I was so afraid you wouldn’t come.” And for the first time that day, she gave herself up to tears.

His arms were stiff, not returning her embrace. “I’m here, Sarah,” he said gruffly. “Though I’m damned if I know why.”

“Please, David, don’t.” She pulled away and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. Dr. White came into the waiting room then, and Sarah quickly dried her cheeks with the back of her hand.

“Is this your brother?” he asked without preamble.

“Yes. David, this is Dr. White.”

“Dave Tolstonadge.” David extended a hand.

“Mr. Tolstonadge.” The doctor shook hands with him. “I’d like to talk with you, if I may. If you’ll excuse us, ma’am.” He strode off, with David in his wake.

Bewildered, Sarah stood in the waiting room for a moment. “To hell with you all,” she said, then crossed the hall with a light step, and slipped into the room where Karl lay.

The lamps had been extinguished but for one, and it was turned low. Soft shadows filled the corners and fell in misshapen squares over the floor. On the narrow bed, Karl lay still, a white sheet pulled up over his face.

“No, please…” Sarah fell to her knees and hid her face in her hands. A yawning hole gaped black in her mind, a hole that the shrouded figure had filled with warmth and light, and a sudden terrible fear that her reason was toppling clutched at her insides.
Muttering childhood prayers, unremembered for years, she rocked herself gently. “Karl,” she whispered, “Imogene, lend me your strength, stay with me a little longer. I was never meant to live without you.” Sarah squeezed her eyes shut and prayed and waited, but there was no reassuring presence, no healing touch in her mind. Her old friend was gone. Thoughts reeled like leaves in a whirlwind, and the black hole spread like a malignant shadow.

Then the image of the broad face, plain and strong in the sunlight after the first time they had made love, came to Sarah from the emptiness and she clung to it. With a will she remembered the shared dinners, the evening walks, washing up together in the kitchen. She held their love in her thoughts like a talisman, and the darkness receded a little. Breathing deeply, Sarah slowed her heart and stilled her mind. “I couldn’t have borne it had I loved you less,” she murmured and, after a moment, opened her eyes to look again on the corpse.

Rude, ungainly, the stockinged feet protruded from beneath the sheet, robbing death of any dignity. Sarah rose and made her way unsteadily to the bed. A moment’s hesitation, then she folded back the cover from the face of her dearest friend, her lover. Loneliness welled up inside her, a dull ache that she knew instinctively would be with her each day of her life. She embraced the pain; without it she would be utterly alone. Silent tears streamed down her cheeks and dripped from her jaw. One spotted the sheet where her hand rested, as Sarah knelt to kiss the blood-blackened lips now empty with death.

“Get up, Sarah.” David filled the doorway, his face twisted and angry.

She looked up.

“Get up!” he repeated.

Sarah rose, but didn’t leave the bedside.

“Jesus Christ!” David exploded. “What the hell!” He took a couple of paces into the room. “Get the hell away from that bed!” he barked. “Jesus Christ, Sarah, what were you two playing at? The doctor asked me what was going on. What the hell was I supposed to say?”

Sarah fell back a step and threw up her hand as if afraid he would strike her. “David…Karl…”

“Imogene, goddamn you.”

Sarah let out her pent-up breath in a long sigh. “Imogene.” She
looked back at the face on the pillow. “Of course—you knew. She said you’d recognized her.”

“I knew it sure as hell wasn’t Karl. When she got off her horse, I hit her and she went down like a sack of potatoes. Then I placed her.” He looked a little shamefaced. “I thought it was a man when I swung.”

“I know you did. She told me. She was sorry she hit you, after. She knew you wouldn’t have fought back, knowing.” Sarah smiled down at her beloved Imogene, her beloved Karl, her husband and her friend. The lined face was burnt brown, rough with the desert and the years, the cropped hair white at the temples. “She was the most just person I’ve known.”

“You two been living as man and wife.” David turned away. “I’m half sick, thinking of it.” The dark look came back into his blue eyes and he balled his fists. The one he’d smashed against the wall in Round Hole wouldn’t close completely. “Did you two kill Karl?” He was hoarse with emotion and kept his back to her. “Sneak up on him while he was sleeping? Club him to death? Did you cut the poor bastard’s balls off and keep them, too?” Crossing the room he dragged Sarah from Imogene’s side.

“Stop it, David!” She jerked free and slapped him across the face. “Karl died of a ruptured appendix, we think. We were going to lose the stop, so after we buried him, Imogene put on his clothes and I cut off her hair. She was near as big as he was and made enough like a man that we thought…. We never hurt anyone.”

Softened by the light in his sister’s eyes and the somber touch of death in the room, David quieted and moved closer to the bed. “Why did nobody else recognize her? Some of those drivers had seen her more times than I had—Karl Saunders, too.”

“I met all the stages. If there was anybody she’d know, I ran a flag up the meat pole and she stayed hid out. After a while, all of the old-timers were pretty much gone, except for Ross, out of Fort Bidwell. The others had never known her as anybody but Karl.”

A high laugh startled them both into silence. Harland Maydley stood just inside the door, fingering the telegram Coby had sent from the Wells Fargo office. Over his left eye, a red ragged scar attested to his vivid memory of Miss Grelznik. “A lot of folks’ll be interested to hear that. Newspaper might even give me three dollars for a story like that.” He smiled at Sarah in an unfriendly way.

David’s arm shot out like a piston and nailed Harland Maydley
to the wall. “If I ever hear about this from anybody,” he growled, “I’m going to find you and break you into pieces so small they’ll have to bury you in a cheesecloth. If the doctor tells his mother-in-law and she tells her dog and I hear, I’m going to come looking for you and there ain’t no place to hide. You can’t run far enough—I am the railroad. Are you understanding me?” He banged Harland’s head on the doorframe to make his point. As he was about to impress him further, Coby and Matthew ran in from the waiting room.

His mad beard waving in the airless room, David looked as though he could snap Maydley’s head off with his teeth. Harland’s slicked black hair stood in a greasy fan against the white paint, and his chin was flecked with his own spittle. Sarah had retreated to the bedside, turning to Imogene, though her old friend was past helping her now and forever.

Eyes as round as saucers, Matthew looked to his mother. “Uncle David gone crazy again?” he whispered.

“Go back into the waiting room, honey,” she said quickly. “Go on.”

“Mr. Tolstonadge.” Coby laid a firm hand on David’s shoulder, though the man was a head taller than himself and broader of beam.

“Easy, Coby, we’re all done here,” David replied. He let Harland go, and smoothed the crushed coat front with a conciliatory gesture that nearly knocked Dizable & Denning’s representative to his knees. “See this fellow to the door for me. I want to talk to Sarah a minute.” He shoved Harland out, and Coby followed. David closed the door and turned a cold eye on his sister. “I’ll give you train fare home. That’s all I’m going to do, and a damn sight more’n you’ve got coming to you. You can move back in with Ma and Pa. Let them look after you and the boy.”

“I’m not going back.”

David laughed without humor. “You ain’t living with me.”

“I’ll live alone.”

“You can’t run that stop by yourself.”

“I expect not, but Imogene and I did pretty well for ourselves. I can sell the livestock.”

“Who’s going to look after you?”

“Damn you, David, nobody’s going to look after me! I’m going to look after myself. I am not the frightened girl you left on the farm, I’m a woman now. Imogene did that for me. She took care of me when I was too weak and too foolish to take care of myself.
She carried me for years until she could teach me to stand on my own, and no one—not you, not anyone—can take that away from me.”

David’s reply was stemmed by the strength in his sister’s voice and the stature her small frame assumed in Imogene’s straight-backed, square-shouldered stance. He took a long look at the woman before him. “I’ll be damned,” he said softly.

Sarah nodded slightly, as if accepting tribute, and turned her back on him. Bending down, she kissed Imogene gently on the mouth. “Good-bye, my love. I will be fine.”