The Fire Night Ball (25 page)

Let ignorant gossip-mongers make of us what they will
.

Poor Harry, Marlena thought at his funeral.

Like his grandfather, Harry had run after strong women but didn't know how to love them. Maybe there was something to that curse after all.

Sure is, kid. Lesson one learned. Pride goeth before a fall.

Aftermath...one year later

There were some surprising developments that followed the dramatic events of December 25, 1977.

Lila Drake proved to be an exceptional ally in Marlena's quest to save her small town from architectural corruption. Lila lent her the money to buy the pink house from the bank, rebuild it to historic specifications, and add a new wing for Faith to live in.

At the end of probate, when she received the bulk of Drake's holdings, Lila then executed a trust devolving control of her estate to Drake's heirs when she passed.

Lila also became the first investor in the Scattergood-Bellum REIT. The enterprise wasn't yet launched. The opening was slated for the summer of 1979. Its announced mission statement was "acquiring and preserving buildings of historic and aesthetic value in the Dakotas and Wyoming."

The operation was to be housed in a portion of Drake's Roost, which Lila had already turned over to the Northeast Territory Historical Society. NTHS planned to use as seed money the revenue from the increasingly popular public tours of the mansion.

It wouldn't be at all surprising to Marlena, still looking into that crystal ball which Chloe helped her scrub from time to time, if there turned out to be a hidden agenda in Lila's investment.

She believed Lila had her eye fixed on Bryce Scattergood.

"That's my prediction. She'll marry Bry," Marlena said to Ron.

Ron repressed a smile.

It was obvious to anyone who knew both of them, that as soon as Marlena completed the finishing touches to Sally's award-winning Shell Mansion in Key West, and as soon as Lila returned from Europe, the two women would become business partners.

His own wish for the future was certainly no secret. Ron was totally consumed with Marlena, a connection so deep that their lovemaking seemed to be a dance of hearts and bones, where one couldn't be felt apart from the other.

As she was learning to trust again, he knew the feeling she had for him was more than physical. He hoped one day they would marry.

In the past year, Marlena's life had become a joyous, inclusive juggling act. She was fully engaged in doing all the things she loved passionately and held so precious, child-rearing being uppermost among them.

The glorious natural childbirth had taken place in the best possible setting, the new Cassandra Vye birthing room, the first in Wyoming. Ron had presided over it, but the entire extended family was in attendance: Faith, Chloe, Annie, Lila, Coddie, Bryce, Apollo, Sally, and Stretch.

Ron and the others had become the choir before whom Marlena sang her causes. As listening to Marlena talk and watching her nurse were the twin joys of his life outside their bedroom, he now egged her on. She promptly set about explaining why Lila's investment was a sound one.

"It'll be a struggle, but we'll prevail," asserted Marlena in what Ron called her "mother-preacher" voice. “Affordable housing doesn't have to mean clear-cutting trees and pre-fabbed homes, my love. Solar panels, rehabs, and rooftop gardens are the future."

Ron pretended to play devil's advocate. "But, darling, will you still have time for your writing? You owe it to your readers to continue."

Marlena's self-published book,
Home Schooling: "How to Build a Happy Home/life
," which she'd co-authored with Dr. Chloe Vye, had been a phenomenal success. Written in seven months, its first printing sold out in three. It was a compendium of advice on feng shui and post-modern architecture fused with relationship and child rearing techniques--also tips on improving one's memory.

The final chapter, "The Glass Treasure Chest," had been on Marlena's lap immediately before she went into labor.

"Publish or perish!" Marlena sang out to Chloe on her way into the hospital. Part storytelling, part architectural drawings, part how-to-do it, the essay schooled modern readers on how glass brick, vaulted ceilings, and Navaho artifacts might co-exist happily in a sunny, whimsical, cheerful home environment.

Afterward, Chloe reflected that "the mere thought of our manuscript being so close to the finish line was enough to induce Marlena's labor."

"What did you say, Ron?"

"You owe it to our extended family to keep on writing."

However, Apollo had begun bellowing "Chattanooga Choo Choo" for Zoe Augusta Drake at the top of his lungs. Marlena shook her head at Ron, indicating she couldn't hear him. So Ron tried raising his voice.

"ALL OF US CHICKENS WANT YOU TO KEEP WRITING."

Marlena was seldom alone at the pink house. Ron was a constant presence. Chloe stopped by daily, as did Lila, when they were in town. Today, Apollo, the fledging firm's first employee, was balancing and bouncing Zaddie on his knee.

Apollo paused in his singing.

"The red-head wants you," he declared.

Zaddie was sucking on Apollo's knuckle with such greedy ferocity that it was turning purple.

"Hand her over, champ."

Frowning as she smelled breast milk, Zaddie clamped on, working the nipple furiously.

Just then, Faith appeared, coming down the central staircase in her chenille robe and slippers, having been awakened from her afternoon nap by Apollo. She frowned, and he ducked into the kitchen.

Faith sat down next to her daughter on the buttery-yellow leather couch.

She detested the color, but Marlena believed yellow makes people cheerful, so she dare not say a word. Faith first looked at and then diverted her brown eyes from Marlena's overflowing breasts and engorged nipples. Then she gazed proudly at her red-headed grand-daughter.

"Do you think you'll ever wear a bra, Lena? With your figure and your rise in the publishing world, I would think--"

Faith was interrupted by her daughter. "Think what you want, Mama. First hear me out."

"Uh, oh," said Ron. "Better take cover, Faith."

"Britain's next prime minister will be a woman named Margaret Thatcher. I foresee a young woman, perhaps even my red-headed daughter, on the cover of
Time
magazine in 2012 with her arms folded and the headline: 'What--Me Marry?' The old restrictions that held us back are falling like the Berlin Wall.

"Women are already well on their way to running the world, Mama, and we don't have to take our cues from outdated stereotypes. But here's what I'll do for you. If Zaddie asks me to do so when she turns thirty, then I'll start wearing a bra. But not before then. Deal?"

"Oh, have it your own way, Lena. You always do."

THE END

Readers may contact and follow Anne Carlisle on her website,
www.annehcarlislephd.com
. While there, please enjoy the free extras, such as discussion with other readers and the author, the main character's diaries, and excerpts from published or upcoming books.

Below is an excerpt from
HOME SCHOOLING: Cassandra's Story
by Anne Carlisle, coming soon.

Prologue: December 21, 1977

Flickering candelaria were everywhere, along the window sill and the hard pegged floor.

In her long white night gown, with her amber eyes glittering and her beautiful face serene, her cousin Chloe Vye resembled a white witch, or so thought Marlena Bellum.

Settling into the sofa, Marlena prepared herself to take in every syllable of the long-awaited secret story.

Cassandra's Story Begins: October 27, 1900

Cassandra crept up to her cold bedroom (Chloe began) and gazed out from her casement window, using her grandfather's spyglass. She scanned the cold, vast immensities of Hatter's Field.

To her impatient view, it appeared barren and immovable, as if nothing had ever changed here since the days of the glaciers, when woolly mammoths roamed the arid plain

She saw that at last twilight was approaching, and the gas-lamps of Alta’s three hundred or so settlers were coming on. The stars sprinkled across the sky and the home fires in the little mountain town appeared to converge in the emptiness where mountains end and the vast high plain begins.

Cassandra could remember her arrival last year when she was not yet twenty, just rounding the bend in the road from the south in a small brown surrey. She had strained forward eagerly to catch her first glimpse of the town where she'd soon be hanging her best lacy bonnet, unaware it would be hanging on a nail by a raw wooden door.

Progress had been slow behind the tired, single horse plodding along the lonely, narrow road past Hatter's Field. On each side of the muddy thoroughfare were frozen sheets of snow, layer upon layer, as far as the eye could see. A dark, brooding mountain towered over the town like a pitiless ancient god.

The terrain she'd stared at with mounting anxiety was constituted in a way so wild and resistant that even back in the greedy old homesteading days, no one had ever made a move to tame or claim it. The land had irregularities not caused by plows and pickaxes but rather by the geology of the last climate change.

Having flourished into young womanhood in the much more densely populated East, where she fancied herself a Progressivist, she could think only of how horribly isolated the town appeared under that endless, vast, unforgiving sky.

The native biddies had been very quick in picking up on Cassandra's disdain, and it wasn’t long before she became a target for malicious gossip. People are apt to be suspicious of a proud, beautiful, exotic creature who sets herself apart from them, and there was no hiding one's opinions from public scrutiny in such a tiny settlement.

In 1900, even the largest Western towns consisted in no more than a thousand men, women, and children living in pine cabins or frame clapboards. A handful of shops provided the necessities: saddle and leather goods, hardware, dry goods, barber-dentist, cobbler, blacksmith, and butcher—plus thirteen bars and one busy local jail, as a rule.

The three hamlets of the northeastern district were unusually tiny, with a population of no more than two or three hundred in each remote location. They also claimed the distinction of being an exception to the rule in regard to drinking establishments.

Among the three, there was only one bar, the Plush Horse Inn & Saloon in Alta. It had a ten-foot tall music box in one drafty corner, which also made it the sole entertainment center. The Plush Horse was owned by Augustus “Curly” Drake, who was a relative newcomer and therefore viewed with some suspicion despite his boyhood having been spent at a prestigious school in Scotland. The fact that he had a law degree, was a handsome bachelor, and owned property made him immensely popular with the native daughters.

His deceased father had been president of the Colorado Silver Mines, but none of Drake's history cut much mustard with the local religious faction, given his choice of business. It didn't help matters that the Plush Horse was located not fifty yards from the graveyard of the Methodist church, where every proper citizen of Alta was expected to attend on Sundays.

Noted (and frowned upon) exceptions to the rule were the new inhabitants of Mill's Creek and, excused on a monthly basis, the native sons who were having their hair cut. This service was performed free of charge and regardless of the weather by Mr. Fairwell, by trade a cobbler, on the broad, pillared porch of his pretty Victorian house on West Street, as it had recently been named.

As any Western historian could confirm, a town where women and the church dominated the social order rather than the saloon-keepers was an anomaly. In Alta, the natives' piety was an tradition passed down from a severely strict, “low” sect among the original homesteaders. Only a few of those families remained, including the Brightons, Fairwells, Bottomlys, Harrisons, Simmonses, Hawkers, and Browns.

One native daughter, Widow Zelda Parker Brighton--she was also the biggest landowner and thus the most respected person in Alta--had descended from families of missionaries led by the Reverend Samuel Parker and Dr. Marcus Whitman.

As the church denomination was Methodist, so the church structure was plain, with no steeple. The itinerant pastor was Bill Dodge, a well-liked man with a wife and three small, solemn children. Attending church on Sunday was not only a requirement for being in good standing in the community but it was also a prime source of gossip.

For the natives of what had been a remote, sparsely settled U.S. Territory, gossip was no inconsequential matter.

News traveled slowly. The assassination of President McKinley that would occur in Buffalo the following September was not heard of in the district until Christmas, as the telegraph lines were down.

Sometimes not knowing the social trends back East was disastrous. For example, the collapse of the fur-trapping business back in the 1840’s, which decimated entire communities and the fortunes of most mountain men in the West, was directly attributable to the decline in fashion in the East of the beaver hat. But who knew?

For the all-important dissemination of gossip, besides church services there were the Plush Horse, the community grapevine, and a series of bonfire celebrations held at the end of October, Thanksgiving, and Christmas night.

Fire Nights, as they were called, were the time-honored, surefire way to find out who was traveling south to Casper or east to Rapid City and whose husband had been spotted making cow eyes at Diane, the buxom barmaid at the Plush Horse.

The tradition went back a century or more to rituals of the local tribes—first the Shoshone and later the Lakota Sioux—who had used the base of the Hat as a place to congregate and worship their nature gods. They set ablaze pine logs and sagebrush and danced solemnly. The dancing was of a pattern that held dire meaning for those white settlers who knew of the Ghost Dancers.

By the dawn of the twentieth century, the lighting of bonfires during autumn and winter had been assimilated by all homesteaders as a venerable practice and, by some at least, constituted an excuse for a night of unbridled debauchery.

The one at hand was very special indeed, being the first Fire Night of the brand new century. The highpoint of the evening would be dancing once the bonfires were lit, beginning with the largest at the Hat.

The exact locations and times for the firings were announced in church and posted at gathering places. The order was strictly followed, a throwback to earlier notions about appeasing an Indian god. The district’s native sons would use a firing technique that resembled a modern telephone chain. Brush would already have been collected and the faggots bundled in all the outlying hamlets and neighborhoods of the district; the male citizens of Alta, Aladdin, and Bulette were to a man expected to participate.

The bonfire at the Hat would be answered as quickly as possible by a second, a third, and so forth, until all the fires were raging, sometimes as many as thirty, sometimes as few as eight, depending on the bitterness of the weather.

The quickness of the teams in answering would be a matter for bragging rights, as was the size of a particular fire, its color, and its visibility from miles away. Once lit, beginning precisely at nine o'clock, the bonfires would be manned for several hours by boys and men, designated by virtue of a foolish willingness to risk their lives, as lightning strikes were very common during fall and winter up along the Hat.

As to the color of the fire, it was generally agreed that the best appearance to be had was at Mill's Creek, which was graced by the largest grove of junipers. It was a disappointment, then, when its new owner had let it be known he was declining to participate.

"There will be no bonfire at Mill's Creek pond tonight," Captain Marcus Vye had sworn as recently at four o'clock. He was at Bottomly's Butcher Shoppe, where the native men congregated each morning and also in the afternoons before community activities.

In truth, Vye's wood was very dear to him, as he was saving it for the last Fire Night, on the evening of Christmas day. It was his secret plan to throw a Christmas Fire Night Ball in honor of his beautiful grand-daughter Cassandra, who had graced his bachelor residence since the preceding winter.