Buffalo Girls (41 page)

“Well, she couldn't help that,” Doosie said. “The child just grew.”

“I don't think she will be able to live,” No Ears said.

“You don't know anything do you?” Doosie asked. She was feeling desperate and would have liked to pass the burden of being the one with knowledge onto an older person; she would have liked a wiser person to contradict what she knew, which was what No Ears had just said.

“One of my wives died of this too,” No Ears said. “She was too old to be making children, and the child she made was too big.”

The old man left; Ogden slept; there were no sounds from downstairs. Calamity had gone somewhere to drink. Now and then the baby would wave its hand, a small shadow in the moonlight.
Doosie slept a little, hunched over her knees. Then she felt Dora's hand moving on the quilt; she straightened up. Dora's eyes were open, shining, watching her. Doosie felt her forehead; there was no sweat, but when she searched for a pulse she was long in finding it, and it was very faint.

“I hope you'll stay and raise Bob,” Dora said, her voice scarcely louder than a breath.

Doosie felt too broken to answer; dying women were an old story to her, but she had not expected to sit by while this one died.

“Did you hear me? I want to know if you'll do it,” Dora said.

“Hush, miss,” Doosie said. “You know I'll be staying. Where would I go?”

Dora reached for Ogden's hand, but could not find it. Not being able to reach him troubled her; she wanted to reach him. Doosie went around the bed and touched Ogden on the shoulder. Ogden didn't really wake up, but he put out his hand and Dora found it.

“Martha can help—where'd she go?” Dora asked.

“I don't know,” Doosie said.

“She nursed all those boys with the smallpox,” Dora said. “Why won't she stay and nurse me?”

“You, you, though,” Doosie said. “She can't stand it when it's you.”

“But you're going to stay. You said it!” Dora insisted. “You're gonna stay with Bob.”

“Yes, miss. I said it. I'll be staying.”

“Bring me Bob,” Dora said. She felt that the deep rest was near; she wanted to see her boy again. Doosie brought him—Dora touched him, put her fingers on his cheek, saw him wiggle, make a fist, rub his eyes. She uncurled his fist and put her finger in it. “Put him back to bed, he's sleepy,” she whispered.

As Doosie took the baby to his box she looked out the window and saw Calamity standing below in the street. Calamity just stood there, looking up at the window, which was open.

“You better be coming up,” Doosie called. “You better come on.

Calamity just stood there; she didn't think her legs would make it up the stairs. She stood there, feeling bad. Finally she made her slow way up, but when she got to the bedroom, Dora's eyes were closed.

“Is she gone?” she asked, shaking—she couldn't see well in the dim room.

Doosie shook her head. “Not yet,” she said.

Dora held onto one of Ogden's fingers, as Bob had momentarily held to one of hers. Rest surrounded her, easy rest, and yet there were things nagging at her: she wanted pretty glass in the front door of the hotel—and another thing nagged, too.

“Martha, you better go tell Blue,” Dora whispered. “Or if that's asking too much, make Ogden do it.”

“Tell Blue what, Dora?” Calamity asked. She sat down in a chair by the bed.

Dora tried to wake up to the question but she couldn't, she wanted to accept her rest.

“Just tell him, I guess,” she said.

Later in the night, No Ears felt a difference in the house. He went into the sickroom. All the weary people in it slept—the baby in its box, Martha, the black woman, in chairs. The big youth slept in his chair, too; the parrot was silent on its perch.

But the woman in the bed wasn't sleeping; her spirit had gone where spirits go. No Ears closed her eyes.

D
ORA
D
U
F
RAN WAS KNOWN THROUGHOUT THE
B
LACK
Hills; she was known in Montana and Dakota, in Wyoming and down the plains and the cattle country, all the way to Texas. Some who had admired Dora did not hear of her death for months, or even years. On the day of her burial in a grave on Mount Moriah, the hill was crowded with boys and men, miners and cowboys mostly. Mr. Fortescue wept profusely; he had lost a light hope, and also had to grapple once again with the problem of that deuced hotel.

Bartle, who had left Deadwood the day after the move, heard of the death before he reached the Missouri. He gave the news to Billy Cody in Buffalo, New York. The show was in camp and Billy was doing a stage show called
Pawhaska, the White Scout.
The white scout stumbled through his role that evening; he locked himself in his dressing room for two hours, and later was seen dead drunk in a saloon. Because of his stumbling performance, the show closed a week later.

In the days after the funeral, Calamity thought of Blue. Doosie looked at her reproachfully whenever his name came up. Doosie thought Calamity ought to set off at once and do what Dora had asked her to do; but Calamity wavered. She felt too sad to set off alone. In the mornings she felt so poorly that it seemed she might die herself, and she didn't care if she did. She
attempted to postpone the question of Blue by helping Doosie with the baby, but that didn't work very well. The baby didn't like her; he squalled every time she picked him up. Also, she was shaky and nearly dropped him once or twice when he wiggled. Doosie didn't really trust her with the baby and kept snatching him from her before she could win his confidence.

Calamity felt out of sorts with Bartle Bone for leaving. She missed him, and she also felt sure that if he had been there to go with her to find Blue, she could have worked up to taking Blue the sad news. But he wasn't there to go with her—which left No Ears or Potato Creek Johnny as the likeliest traveling companions. She sounded out Johnny first and found him not at all enthusiastic about the trip.

“Why go?” he asked. “It'll be the same news, whoever he gets it from. Some cowboy will run into him and let him know, I guess.”

“Dora asked me special, though,” Calamity said. “It was the last thing she asked. I know I ought to do it. Blue's
my
old friend, too.”

That night, she asked Ogden abruptly if he would mind taking Blue the news. She had found Ogden difficult to talk to, more so since Dora's death. He did little but sit on the porch of the hotel, looking sad. Occasionally he would rock his baby. Mr. Fortescue had been to see him about running the hotel, but Ogden didn't want to run it. He didn't want to do anything. All his vast energy had left him; he felt too tired to move.

When Calamity came to him and asked if he would find the man named Blue and tell him Dora had died, Ogden had a hard time figuring out what she was talking about. Dora had babbled about a man named Blue as she was dying, but he had been too stunned by the fact that she was dying to pay any attention. He just wanted her not to die; she had died anyway, and now he felt he had to wait out his life before he could die too. He didn't know why Mr. Blue would need the news of Dora's death, or why Calamity wanted him to take it to the man. He had never heard of the Musselshell River and had no idea how to find it.

“I might get lost,” Ogden said. Although very sad, he still tried
to be polite, and it didn't seem polite just to give Calamity a flat no.

“It's northwest of Miles City a few days,” Calamity said. “Everybody knows T. Blue. If you just ask cowboys, you'll find him easily.”

“What if I don't see no cowboys?” Ogden inquired.

“Oh, there's plenty of cowboys around,” Calamity assured him. “There's nobody else much in that part of the state—just a few Indians and the cowboys.”

No Ears heard the conversation, and to Calamity's surprise volunteered to guide Ogden. Once Ogden heard this, he wondered why No Ears couldn't just take the news himself.

“Well, he could, but Dora asked special that it be one of us,” Calamity said. “It was just before she went. You were asleep.”

“I'll do it, since she asked,” Ogden said. He had no will to refuse.

The morning they left, Calamity felt odd—part of her wanted to go with them, but part of her didn't. Mainly, she didn't want to have to see Blue struggle with the terrible news. She herself had struggled with it alone, and probably he would want to, also.

But she felt wrong, all the same. No Ears looked so dried up it was hard to believe he could walk to the Musselshell and back, though she knew he had just walked from the Mississippi, a distance vastly longer. The old man looked so thin, it made her sad to see him—though almost everything made her sad these days.

“Why do you want to go?” she asked No Ears. “Ogden's a big strong boy. He could just do it himself—it ain't gonna hurt him.”

“I want to see the Greasy Grass again,” No Ears said. “I might stop there on my way back. There might be some Cheyenne around—I always liked to visit with those Cheyenne.”

“Will you come back?” Calamity asked. She had an apprehension that No Ears was going away to die—and he was the one person left she could depend on. Johnny was a fine fellow to drink with, but you couldn't depend on him for much. She didn't want No Ears to go away and die.

“It will depend on the road, and whether I find those Cheyenne,” No Ears said. He realized that Martha Jane was very troubled, but he still felt the question to be inappropriate. It was not good to ask a person about such things—particularly an old person who had to keep alert and watch his thoughts in order to continue to keep his soul with him.

Ogden was too tired to walk; he rode one of the wagon horses. No Ears was offered a horse but declined. He considered them unstable animals and preferred to use his own two feet while he could.

B
LUE WAS OUT WORKING WITH
T
EAT, TRYING TO PULL A COW
out of a bog, when he saw the large boy and the tiny old man coming. The boy rode a dusty sorrel; the old man was walking along spryly, as if he had just started life's walk that day.

That Blue at first felt no apprehension was probably due to exhaustion from an hour of struggling with the bogged cow. It was one of those mornings when grim circumstances caused him to wonder why he had chosen the life of a rancher. After all, it meant a lifetime of working with animals who were often as stupid as the present cow; it was not easy to find a bog in northern Montana in a dry year, but the old hussy had found one and proceeded to lead her calf into it and then bog herself well past the flanks. He and Teat had both turned themselves into mudmen getting the calf out; it was a big yearling, and it fought their efforts vigorously.

Teat was amused by such doings and grinned at Blue with white teeth from out of a mud-coated face; but then, Teat had just been a cowboy for a few months and was still amused by the many absurdities that ranch life involved one in. Teat still thought that being thrown off a bronc was amusing; the efforts of cattle to escape being roped amused him so much that he could scarcely ride, much less rope. Swimming in mud to rescue a cow and calf didn't discourage him in the least.

Blue had been at the whole business longer; his livelihood depended upon saving as many cows as possible; on the whole he found being coated in mud to the collarbone less amusing than he had when he was a young sprout trying to impress his bosses with his fervor. He yelled at his horse to pull on the rope attached to the cow's horns, he pulled on it himself, and Teat, the brown mole, twisted the cow's tail and pushed from the rear. The effort gained perhaps three yards before both gave out and had to rest. The mud, disturbed for a moment, flowed back around them.

“I don't want this cow anyway,” Teat said. “She should not have come in the mud. Why don't we let the mud have her?”

“Because she's young,” Blue said, wondering why Dora's husband was wandering around the Musselshell with old No Ears. “She might have ten more calves that I can sell—she might even have a dozen. It ain't her that we're saving, it's the ten calves.”