Sisters (34 page)

“They’ll
understand,” said Anna May. “They’ll come pay their
respects outside.”

Anna May unfolded the chair
in a small patch of shade near the front rose garden. “Sophie,
about Paul’s mother—you don’t need to be worried.
She’s locked in her room.”

“Locked in?”

Anna May nodded. “There’s
a nurse with her. And it’s for her own safety too. She cut
herself quite badly on the picture glass.”

Sophie settled herself into
the chair’s tapestry sling and decided against telling Anna May
she would rather sit by the side of the house where she could look
out over the prairie. Anna May was trying so hard to please, she
simply hadn’t the heart.

Anna May went back into the
house, and Sophie shut her eyes and rested her head on the chair. She
heard a train whistle in the instance, hooves clopping not far away,
a gentle rustling of leaves from the late-afternoon breeze.

“Sophie?”

She opened her eyes. It was
James. He had his hat tilted back.

“Hello,” she
said. “How is Esther?”

“She’ll be fine
now.” He shook his head. “Imagine all these months, her
thinking… Well, she’ll be fine now. I’m so sorry
about your grandfather.”

“I miss him. It’s
like something fine and strong I measured against myself is gone.”

He nodded. “Did you
talk to Paul again?” he asked after a moment.

“Not really. It’s
awkward. I think it’ll be a long time before I get used to the
idea that he’s my father…”

“Is there something
else troubling you?”

“Yes, but I can’t
say what exactly. It’s… it’s as though there’s
something I still don’t understand, something that would
explain, for instance, why the widow wanted to kill me when she
thought I was Emile.”

“She’s a very
old woman, not entirely rational.”

“It’s still not
altogether right in my mind. Perhaps it comes from being uneasy about
Helen’s death. I have been for months, long before I came to
Cheyenne. I would never have said the things I said to you Friday
night if I hadn’t been thinking about it so long, plagued by it
really.”

“You still think
someone killed her?”

“I just can’t
believed she died accidentally, though. I don’t know, perhaps I
should accept it.” She was silent a moment. “Well,
there’s no sense going on about it. Would you help me move my
chair around to the side of the house? I’d like to be able to
see out across the prairie.”

“Of course.”
James picked up the chair, and they walked around the corner of the
house. Sophie heard a noise coming from out back, a sound like
someone picking up a heavy object and dropping it. While James set
out her chair for her, she went on around and looked. There was a
wagon in back with a blinkered horse harnessed to it. The wagon had a
high driver’s seat and a U-shaped cover over it on which the
word “ICE” was painted in foot-high letters. A man was
lifting a block of ice out of the wagon with large metal tongs.

Sophie half turned away and
started back toward James when she realized what the ice was for.
Joe. For Joe’s body. The women would pack it in ice so it
wouldn’t… turn. “That’s why Anna May had put
her in the front yard, so she wouldn’t see the ice wagon.
That’s why Anna May had suggested she go outside, so she
wouldn’t see them carrying the ice to his bedroom.

She sat down, feeling weak.

“Will you be all
right now?” James asked. “I really should go inside and
pay my respects.”

“Yes, I’m quite
all right,” she said, sounding much surer than she felt.

As she arranged her skirts,
she felt something in her pocket. It was the book Amy Travers had
given her. She opened it to the title page. “The Friendships of
Women,” she read, by William Rounseville Alger. The book had
been published in Boston in 1868.

She idly leafed the pages.
Alger had gathered together a whole history of female friendship.
Here were the Ladies of Llangollen, here Mrs. Thrale and Fanny
Burney; Madame Recamier and Madame de Stael; Bettine von Arnim and
Gunderode. “Though art the sweet cadence by which my soul is
rocked,” Bettine had written to the canoness, and Sophie read
the words over, charmed by their poetry.

And here with Mary Milford
and Mrs. Browning… Sophie looked up from the book, thinking of
the way the world associated Elizabeth Barrett Browning with her
husband and their romance. But there were passages in her poem
“Aurora Leigh” about how comforting it could be for a
woman to love another woman. Sophie clearly remembered a few of the
lines, because at the time she had read them, they had been so
apropos of frustrations she sometimes felt with Philip. Aurora Leigh
comparing the woman she loved with the man, for instance:

She at least

Was not built up as walls
are, brick by brick

Each fancy squared, each
feeling ranged by line,

The very heat of burning
youth applied

To indurate form and
system! Excellent bricks,

A well-built wall, --which
stops you on the road,

And into which you cannot
see an inch

Although you beat your
head against it—

The memory started a train
of associations in Sophie’s mind: Tennyson in “The
Princess” showing Psyche and Ida in love; Clarissa, that purest
of all pure heroines, who had only one true love, her friend Miss
Howe. And Ruth, yes, Ruth in the Bible. Almost the whole world
assumed it was a man to whom she pledged, “whither thou goest,
I will go,” but it was a woman, her motherin-law, Naomi.

Sophie sensed someone
standing beside her. She looked up and saw Lydia Swerdlow. “I
don’t know how I didn’t see it before,” Sophie
said.

“Perhaps you were
blinded by thinking women incapable of bonding fast together,”
Lydia said. “Much of the world is. Here, Alger says it right
here in the preface.” She took the book from Sophie, turned to
one of its first pages and read: “ ‘I was often struck…
by the commonness of the expressed belief, that strong natural
obstacles made friendship a comparatively feeble and rare experience
with them.’ “ She looked up at Sophie. “I’ve
sometimes wondered if passionate friendship is considered too
important for women to be capable of. Or perhaps it’s that
anything women do is generally considered beneath notice.”

“A little of each, I
suppose.” And a third factor had been at work in her own case,
Sophie thought. She understood passion so differently from the way
these women did that she had been frightened by the fire with which
they burned, afraid to recognize it.

“Perhaps you’d
like to come inside now,” Lydia suggested.

“Yes, yes. Thank
you.” As they walked into the house together, Sophie spoke of
Helen. “It’s odd, but the more I find out about the
differences in our lives, the less I feel we are different.”

Lydia was thoughtful a
moment. “I’ve heard it said the hardest thing any human
being can do is fully to acknowledge the actuality of another. To
admit, truly admit, that their thoughts and cares, their ardors and
aversions are—or were—as real as our own.”

“Perhaps that’s
so,” Sophie said. “Perhaps that’s the beginning of
wisdom.”

“Or of love.”

*

The day of the funeral, the
sky was gray, threatening rain. Sophie rode to the graveyard in the
Stevenson family carriage. James was driving; Esther and Sally were
in back. The air was very still as they rode along, and Sophie
thought how different everything appeared in the gray light. Colors
were subdued and yet at the same time more noticeable because they
didn’t have to compete with the golden sunlight or blue sky.
Gold and blue, especially blue—those colors dominated the
palette with which the West was painted, and in their absence, the
landscape looked unnatural.

“Sophie, there’s
something I must tell you,” James said. “I regret having
to bring it up now, but I don’t want you to be surprised by the
news.”

She looked at him
expectantly.

“The sheriff’s
no longer trying to find Huber.”

“Why not?”

“The witness he had?
The one who said Huber was part of the group with Rodman? He’s
disappeared. And so have two others who named names of those in the
party with Rodman.”

“So the sheriff’s
just giving up?”

“There’s not
much point in his doing anything else. There won’t be an
indictment without witnesses.”

“I’ll testify.”

“And say what? The
way I understand, you saw only one man besides Rodman, and you
weren’t sure he was Huber or not.”

She was quiet a moment;
then: “Disappeared! Where’d they go? What’s
happened to them?”

“I suspect someone’s
bought them tickets to California or back East or wherever they
wanted to go.”

“The Stock Growers’
Association.”

”Probably.”

“But they can’t
get away with that! These men can’t get away with hanging
Baby!”

James didn’t answer.

“Do you think it’s
right?” she demanded. “Do you?”

“No,” he said
finally. “I don’t think it’s right, but my reasons
are different from yours. I think it’s wrong because you were
involved. You were threatened, harmed, and I’d like to see
whoever did that punished. And it was wrong for them to hang Baby. No
matter what kind of woman she was, she was a woman, and they
shouldn’t have hanged her.”

“But if she’d
been a woman, it would’ve been all right?”

He looked at her directly.
“Yes.”

“Didn’t they
deserve a trial? Some impartial assessment of their guilt or
innocence before they were strung up?”

“There aren’t
any impartial assessments out here. Not yet. A jury would have found
them innocent, and they were guilty. That’s why this sort of
thing happens. There’ll never be an end to rustling and
thieving if we don’t put an end to it.”

“You sound like that
wretched fellow Coover at the Clarion.”

“I don’t happen
to like him either. But that doesn’t mean that what he has to
say is wrong.”

She was angry, furious with
him for being so confined within his own thinking he couldn’t
see the other side. She knew it was useless to argue further, so she
turned away from him and stared straight ahead in silence until they
reached the graveyard.

*

James and Paul helped lift
the pinewood coffin from the glass-sided hearse. They put it down so
that it rested on two long ropes beside the open grave. As Sophie
went to stand beside the coffin, she paused for a minute at a
headstone near where Joe would lie. “Helen Stevenson,” it
read. “Beloved wife and mother. April 10, 1849 – August
12, 1885.” A half-dozen or so white carnations lay at the foot
of the stone.

As she took her place
beside Joe’s coffin and looked down into the grave, Sophie
found herself thinking what effort must have gone into digging it.
The earth was reluctant in this dry land, and fiercely resisted
penetration.

Anna May came and stood by
Sophie. Across the grave was the Widow Bellavance with her right hand
bandaged. Lydia Swerdlow was standing on the other side of her, Amy
Travers on the other. They were watching over the widow, Sophie
realized, so that Anna May could be with her.

“Dear Lord,”
the minister began, “thy son Joseph loved this land, and we ask
thy blessing as we lay him to rest in its bosom.” At a nod from
the minister, James, Paul, and two other men began lowering the
pinewood box into the grave. It was hard word, with each of them
having the watch the others closely so that the coffin wouldn’t
slip. The sky was growing darker by the minute, and when they had
almost put the coffin to the grave floor there were rumbles of
thunder.

“As we commit thy
servant Joseph to the darkness of the grave,” the minister
intoned, “we pray that you will receive him into your
everlasting light.” He threw a handful of dirt into the grave.
“From dust we come, to dust we return.” Sophie’s
head was lowered, but her eyes were open, and most of the dirt, she
saw, was dry and hard and bounced off the coffin.

The mourners sang:

Rock of Ages, cleft for
me,

Let me hide myself in
thee;

Let the water and the
blood…

A drop of rain fell on the
coffin, leaving a dark spot on the new wood.

Be of sin the double cure,

Save from wrath and make
me pure.

There was another drop and
another. Sophie found herself counting them as they spotted the
coffin.

Foul I to the fountain
fly,

Wash me, Saviour, or I
die.

The group began to sing
more rapidly, many of them casting anxious glances at the sky. And as
soon as the hymn had finished, they broke apart and moved quickly
toward the carriages.

Sophie and Anna May
happened to fall in behind the Widow Bellavance and her two escorts.
“How is Paul’s mother?” Sophie asked. “How is
her hand?”

“I hope it will be
all right. I worry it will heal slowly. She’s so old.”

Sophie nodded, regarding
the widow’s back, thinking of all the old woman had seen in her
time. “Now that Joe’s gone, she and Paul have probably
lived in Wyoming Territory longer than anyone else.”

“Probably so. They
came out more than forty years ago. It was well over fifty years ago
your grandfather came out. He used to tell me the date.
Eighteen-twenty-eight. That’s almost sixty years now, isn’t
it? He was a real young man then, don’t you know. And so was
Paul’s father, Emile. He came about the same time.

“Emile was out here a
long time before he brought his family. Paul said he was fifteen when
his father brought them out.”

“Emile’d get
back to St. Louis to visit them every couple of years. But the rest
of the time he was in the mountains. Joe was his family. Joe and Deer
Woman.”

The rain started coming
down hard now, but instead of hurrying for the carriage, Sophie
grabbed Anna May’s arm and stopped her still. “They were
his family, Joe and Deer Woman.”