Carla Kelly (53 page)

She heard Paul slap the lintel to his bedroom a little harder than usual as she softly read aloud: “And now I bid unto all, farewell. I soon go to rest in the paradise of God, until my spirit and body shall again reunite, and I am brought forth triumphant through the air, to meet you before the pleasing bar of the Great Jehovah, the Eternal Judge, both quick and dead. Amen.”

She knew people, some her own relatives, who saw the dead after they had left the earth, some returning to comfort the bereaved wordlessly, others to pass on messages. She saw nothing unusual that night in her little room, but she felt Iris's presence at rest in the paradise of God, which Moroni understood. Brother Gillespie had taken her aside the last time she came to Cheyenne to tell her nothing more than his belief that the view of earth from the paradise side is a lot more peaceful than the view the other way.

“If Iris could tell you something, Sister Darling, it would be to let it go. She's fine. We won't know that until we are where she is. Until then, we have to trust and hope.”

I know in whom I trust,
Julia thought for the first time since her lonely trip to Utah before Christmas.
Moroni didn't go through all this for nothing. Neither did Christ.

The thought sent her to her knees, a familiar place this spring. “Dear Father, when I asked Mr. Otto, he said he didn't need to pray to know if the Church was true. He meant it one way. I mean it another. I already know, don't I, Father? Have I always? Did I just lack confidence?”

She had always known; reading the Book of Mormon only served to firmly bind her to the Church and the gospel. Iris was out of her sight now but by no means out of her life. The temple was no pointless ritual. It led directly to the highest degree of glory. Because it did, she could no more entertain thoughts of a happy life with Paul Otto. Mortality would only be a torment when eternity without him loomed larger.

Not that anything lately pointed in that direction, she knew. He had grown more distant. It was up to her now to let him go. No matter that his mother's people had paid a huge price for the gospel. Brother Gillespie had also reminded her that everyone has his agency to choose. “We can't tamper with that right, Sister Darling,” he had told her, his eyes full of sympathy. She had never said anything to him about Paul. She hadn't even thought she had been so obvious. Now that Paul was away so much, maybe she could school herself into serenity. And after September, it wouldn't matter—at least, no more than every day of her life without him.

asy to think of serenity; harder to live it, especially as premature summer heat turned wicked, and the land baked like a deadly Queen Atlantic. She could tell the late spring roundup must have been more harsh and brutal than any before it. The men returned dirty and grim, sunburned and silent. It was an ominously quiet group of exhausted stockmen who sat around the kitchen table a few nights after their return—powerful men, ranchers used to hard work that always brought wealth. Paul regularly shook his head over coffee; she didn't offer it anymore. When he shook his head over gooey butter cake and just rested his head in his hands as one of the other stockmen spoke of early slaughter to avoid starvation, she felt a chill go through her.

My dearest, I would comfort you if I could,
Julia thought when some of the men filed off to nearby ranches while others from farther away bedded down in the parlor. She had no resource but prayer; it had already kept her on her knees until they became toughened by prayer. “Comfort me, Jesus,” was no longer an afterthought when all else had failed. It was the constant in her life as she expanded it to include Paul Otto, the men of the Double Tipi, the other stockmen, and the suffering cattle. She seemed to breathe the sentence in and out.
Comfort them; comfort all of us.

Through May and into midsummer, Paul was gone more than he was there at the Double Tipi—staying in the line shack, making trips to Denver. And when the range began to burn, he and his crew were in the center of danger. Julia could only cook when they were there and pray when they were not.

She came to dread each night, not so much anymore because she chafed that the love of her life was completely out of reach, but because of heat lightning. As tantalizing as a Lorelei luring boaters on the Rhine, the lightning promised rain and brought nothing except fire to parched ground. There was no water to put out the fast-moving range fires. The men roved in packs almost, beating out the flames with burlap sacks and quilts, trying not to get caught in the flames.

When the trouble began, they had brought one badly burned cowboy to the Double Tipi, his blackened skin falling off in sheets as he screamed and then died. Horror on his face, Paul had forced her and James into her room, begging her to cover James's ears. She did and sobbed into the pillow as the little boy shivered. “Comfort him, Jesus,” she prayed for the dying cowboy and for James, who must have been reliving his own winter terror when stockmen burned down his family's homestead around them, and he alone escaped.

A month passed. She watched James grow grim around the mouth with every breath of wind that blew now, bearing smoke and ash into his life to remind and torture and leave him bereft, losing his family over and over with each whiff of burning grass. There was nothing in her mind and heart except prayer. If she ever had a doubt, it was gone now, even though the heavens seemed closed. She prayed with all her might, even when her strength was gone.

She was on her knees one night in midsummer when Paul knocked on her door and entered without her permission.

“I'm so sorry,” he said and started to back away. “No. Julia.” He came to her bed and knelt beside her, burying his face in her shoulder as he sobbed. He was covered in soot and ash, and he stank, but she held him as tight as she could, splaying her fingers across his back and digging into his shirt until his sobs subsided. “There's nothing to forgive,” she murmured. “I do this all day, even when I'm not on my knees.”

She made him lie down on her bed and removed his boots, even when he protested and swore. She covered him with a quilt and kissed his filthy forehead and then sat on the floor for the rest of the night, dozing when she could and holding his hand when he cried.

“It was Willy Bill this time,” he finally whispered, as the murky sun rose.

“Comfort Paul, Jesus,” she whispered, resting her cheek against Paul's hand. “If you ever comforted anyone, comfort him.”

He slept a few minutes more and then sat up, looking around as if he couldn't remember where he was. He looked at her, perfectly in control again.
Thank you,
Julia prayed.

He still held her hand. He turned it over and kissed it. “I really needed this,” he told her.

“I know.”

“I said some unkind things.”

“Doesn't matter.” She rested her cheek against his hand again. “Paul, I hate to trouble you with anything, but I have to get James out of here. He's barely hanging on with all this smoke and what must be dreams as bad as the nightmare you're living right now.”

He didn't hesitate. “Take him to the Gillespies. You stay too.”

“No. I'll leave him and come back.”

He sighed his irritation, probably afraid of what he would say if he spoke. She understood him completely.

“You and other crews are coming through here day and night almost. I won't have you eating out of cans, not while I can do the one thing to fight this fire that you can't.” Her voice was firm, and she was struck by how much like her mother she sounded. “I'll get him down there, and I'll come back. Nothing you can do or say will stop me.”

“The contract is up in two weeks.”

“Forget the contract,” she told him calmly.

She made James share a horse with her in the morning, when the wind was low and the ash not flying. He was too frightened to ride alone, and they couldn't spare any horses anyway. The terrain they covered was deceptively free of fire. Gun Barrel looked almost normal, except at the depot. There were two supply trucks with US Forest Service stenciled on the canvas. She had crammed James's clothes and writing tablets into her valise, along with his books. James slung his Meccano set in a canvas bag over his shoulder. He had no other treasures.

In Gun Barrel, she had the presence of mind to send a telegram to the Gillespies. His face grim, Brother Gillespie met them at the depot, gathering James in his arms and carrying him to the car when the little boy started to sob with relief.

Julia stayed overnight at the Gillespies, sleeping with James and holding him close. “You may have to do this for a while,” she told Emma. Julia took a bath and washed her hair, sitting in the tub, wondering how the men of the Double Tipi were doing, until the water turned cold. She hated to put on her riding skirt again, grimy with soot, but she had nothing else.

Before Brother Gillespie took her to the depot, she asked him for a blessing. She knelt for it in the parlor, savoring the pressure of his hands on her head as he pleaded with the Lord to keep her and the men on the range safe from death. She hadn't realized how parched her soul was for a priesthood blessing until then. As the blessing calmed her heart and gave her purpose, she thought back to last fall, when her father had blessed her in their kitchen, asking the Lord to keep her safe from storm and fire, almost as if he knew.

She never felt so alone as on the train back to Gun Barrel, wearing her smoky clothes and knowing her hair was all over her head, instead of neatly wound into braided coronets or tucked in a tidy bun.
Mama, if you could see me now,
she told her reflection in the window of the railroad day car. She held her breath against a sudden urge to turn around and run back to the depot and take the next train home, where there was no smoke and no fire, and where a strong man didn't cry in her arms and a wounded boy wasn't tormented by the agent of his wounding. She thought how it could have been for Iris, growing up and marrying and taking on responsibilities on her husband's dairy farm. Iris was six years younger. “Grow up, Darling,” Julia murmured. “Iris would expect it.”

The air was smokier in Gun Barrel when she saddled up and rode her horse out of the livery stable. The liveryman tried to detain her, but she ignored him, digging her heels into her horse's flanks and riding toward the smoke. She turned back just outside of town to ride to the post office. A letter from her mother lay in the box, plus another letter, much thicker, for Paul.

She sucked in her breath as she idly scanned the return label: Albert Hickman, Koosharem, Utah. Hickman. “Papa, you found him!” she said, which made the postal clerk look at her and wink. She tucked the letter down her shirtwaist and opened her mother's letter, reading it as she rode out of town.