The Legacy (26 page)

B
y the spring of 1904 there seemed to be infants everywhere. Several of the mares had gangling foals running at their heels, the yard hens bobbed on a sea of fluffy chicks, William’s howls could at times be heard in every far corner of the ranch, and a small wire-haired terrier belonging to Rook, the Negro cook, gave birth to a litter of blunt-nosed puppies following a chance encounter with a Woodward mongrel of uncertain provenance. The weather was turning warm again, the days longer. No more ice in the cistern, no more hailstorms and blue north winds. The young wheat and sorghum was pale green, and there was a brave scattering of blossom on Caroline’s spindly cherry trees. But, try as she might, Caroline could not be rid of the weight of her dashed expectations, or her fear of the open land that her husband loved so much.

They sat outside on the porch one fair Sunday afternoon, after a travelling preacher had called by to read a service for all the ranch’s inhabitants, and, because of the contentment she read in Corin’s face, rocking gently in his chair, Caroline felt a hundred miles from him.

“What are you reading?” he asked her eventually, startling her because she had thought him asleep beneath his copy of
The Woodward Bulletin
. She smiled and raised the book so he could see the cover. “What,
The Virginian
again? Don’t you get tired of reading it?”

“A little. But it’s one of my favorites, and until you take me to town to buy some others . . .” she shrugged.

“All right, all right. We’ll go next week, how about that? Once Bluebell’s foaled. You could always go by yourself, if you didn’t want to wait for me? No harm would come to you—”

“You don’t know that! I prefer to wait for you,” Caroline cut him off. Just the thought of striking out for Woodward alone was enough to turn her stomach.

“All right, then.” Corin retreated back beneath his paper. “Read some of that one to me then. Let’s find out what’s so special about it.” Caroline looked at the page she had been reading. Nothing was that special about it, she thought. Nothing but that the heroine, a civilized lady of the East, had made such a life for herself, had found such happiness in the wilderness; had been able to see beauty that Caroline could not, and to understand her man as Caroline could not. Caroline scoured the pages as if the secret to this was hidden there somewhere, as if she might be taught how to settle in the West, how to love it, how to thrive. But the passage she had been reading described Molly Wood deciding to leave—the dark spell before that girl’s sunshine happy ending, and Caroline hesitated before reading it out, sitting tall as she had been taught and holding the book high in front of her so her voice would not be hampered by a crooked neck.

“This was the momentous result of that visit which the Virginian had paid her. He had told her that he was coming for his hour soon. From that hour she had decided to escape. She was running away from her own heart. She did not dare to trust herself face to face again with her potent, indomitable lover . . .”

“My, what drama,” Corin murmured sleepily when Caroline finished, and she closed the book, running her hands over the cover which had become dog-eared and creased with rereading.

“Corin?” Caroline asked hesitantly, a while later when the sun was getting fat in the western sky. “Are you awake?”

“Mmm . . .” came the drowsy reply.

“I come into my money soon, Corin. I know I told you before, but I . . . I didn’t tell you how much money it is. It’s . . . a lot of money. We could go anywhere you wanted . . . you won’t have to work so hard any more . . .”

“Go somewhere? Why would we go anywhere?” he asked.

Caroline bit her lip. “It’s just . . . so isolated here—so far from town! We could . . . we could buy a house in Woodward, perhaps. I could spend some of the week there . . . Or we could move everything closer, move the whole ranch closer! I could . . . join the Coterie Club, perhaps . . .”

“What are you saying, Caroline? Of course I can’t move the ranch closer to town! Cattle need open grasslands, and the land nearer town is all given over to homesteaders now.”

“But you won’t need to raise cattle any more, don’t you see? We’ll have money—plenty of money!” she cried. Corin sat up and folded the newspaper. He looked at his wife and she recoiled from the pained expression on his face.

“If money was what I was interested in, I’d have stayed in New York. Sweetheart! This life is everything I’ve dreamed of since my father took me to Chicago when I was a boy and I saw Buffalo Bill Cody’s ‘Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World’ at the Columbian Exposition . . . That was when I decided to come out here with him, when he came looking for fresh suppliers. I watched those ropers and riders, and I knew that
this
was what I wanted to do with my life! Ranching isn’t just a job for me . . . it’s our life, and this is our home, and I can’t think I’ll ever want to move or live anywhere else. Is that what you want? Do you want to live somewhere else? Somewhere away from me, perhaps?” His voice caught when he asked this question and she looked up quickly, shocked to see tears waiting in the corners of his eyes.

“No! Of course not!
Never
away from you, Corin, it’s just . . .”

“What is it?”

“Nothing. I just thought . . . perhaps I might be happier, to have a little more company. More refined society than I have here, perhaps. And . . . perhaps if I was happier, we might start a family at last.”

At this Corin looked away across the corrals and he seemed to consider for a long time. Caroline, thinking the discussion over, sank back into her chair and shut her eyes, sad to her core and exhausted by this attempt to voice her fears.

“We can build. We could use some of the money to double the size of the house, if you like, and get a maidservant, perhaps. A housekeeper to take over from Magpie now that she has William to look after . . . An electricity generator, maybe. And plumbing! A proper bathroom for you, with running water indoors . . . How about that? Would that fix this?” Corin asked. He sounded so hurt, so desperate.

“Yes, perhaps. A bathroom would be lovely. Let’s see when the money comes,” she said.

“And I’ll take you to town very soon. We can stay the night, maybe even a couple of nights, if you like? Buy you as many books and magazines as we can carry back; and I need to go to Joe Stone’s for some new spurs. I’ve been idiot enough to break my spare pair and I’ve still not yet laid hands on the original ones . . .”

“They’re at Joe and Magpie’s place. In the dugout,” Caroline told him tonelessly.

“What? How do you know?”

“I saw them in there, when I was helping with the birth.” Hating herself, Caroline watched him closely. For signs of guilt or embarrassment, or a telltale blush. Instead Corin smacked a palm to his forehead.

“Lord, of course! I loaned them to Joe, months and months ago! Way out toward the panhandle that day we chased those thieves down—his snapped and since Strumpet was behaving and that gelding of his was being a brute, I gave him my spurs. I never thought to ask for them back at the end of that long ride—I was that ready to fall down and sleep! Why didn’t you say, if you saw them, love?”

“Well, I . . .” Caroline faltered, and shrugged. “I . . . just forgot, that’s all. The baby came and that was something of a distraction . . .” Corin sprang to his feet.

“You clever girl to remember them now! I’ll go over and fetch them right away, before we both forget again,” he smiled, and strode away from the house. Caroline watched him go and then she put her face into her hands for all the times since William’s birth that she’d pictured the spurs, lying there in Magpie’s home; all the times she’d imagined the haste and the urgency with which they might have been discarded there, flung aside by passionate hands in the desire to reach that hidden, adulterous nest of blankets.

A
fter her suggestion that they move to town, and as the second anniversary of their marriage approached, Caroline caught her husband watching her more closely—for signs of malaise, perhaps, or melancholia. He must have noticed, then, that she was increasingly quiet and visibly enervated, but there was little he could do about it. Caroline smiled when he asked after her, and assured him that she was quite well. She did not say that when she opened the door she felt as though she might fall out, might tumble into the gaping emptiness of the prairie without man-made structures to anchor her. She did not say that gazing into the distance made her heart wince and then bump against her ribs so loudly she was sure Magpie could hear it. She did not say that the sky was just too dizzyingly huge for her to look at. Only cradling William seemed to soothe her. She marvelled at his increasing strength as he struggled to reach for things, to grasp and chew her fingers. The movement of his small body against hers seemed to fill a dark and gaping hole inside her, and Magpie smiled to see the tender expression on her face. But Caroline always had to give the baby back to his mother, and each time she did the hole inside her returned.

The plants in the garden wilted and were choked beneath encroaching weeds. Unharvested vegetables split and rotted in the sun. Magpie agreed to take over the tending of the garden, but she too watched Caroline with a slight, appraising frown. She forced Caroline to oversee the pulling up of the spent winter plants and the rearrangement of the garden for summer crops.

“You must tell me what to plant, Mrs. Massey. You must tell me where to plant,” the girl insisted, although they both knew that Magpie was by far the wiser in such matters. Caroline demurred, but the raven-haired Ponca girl, with calm insistence, would brook no argument. As Magpie dug and hoed, Caroline remained always in the shadow of the house, her hands behind her, resting on the rough wood of the wall as if for support. Magpie jumped back with a gasp when she uncovered a rattlesnake in the shelter of the dying leaves, but then she killed it deftly with her hoe and tossed the limp coils to one side. “Think, now, if the white lady had done it this way in the Garden of Eda!” she called to Caroline, laughing. But the violence made Caroline sick to her stomach.

“Eden,” she whispered. “It was the Garden of Eden.” She went back inside without another word, her fingers never leaving the side of the house.

One evening, Caroline saw Corin stop Magpie as the girl, with William slung across her back, headed for the dugout where she would prepare another dinner, and keep another household. She stood at the window and held her breath as Corin jogged over to Magpie, put a hand lightly on her arm to stop her. Caroline strained her ears as if she might hear what her husband asked, for even from inside the house she could see questions written all over his face. Magpie answered him in her usual contained way. No gestures, no telltale facial expressions—or at least none that Caroline could read. When Corin released the girl and started toward the house, Caroline turned away and busied herself plating up the meal Magpie had made for them. Roasted corn chowder, with thick slices of roast beef and warm bread.

Corin was troubled by whatever Magpie had told him, that much was clear. Caroline felt a stab of resentment toward the girl, but she smiled as she put food on the table, willing him reassured, willing him unconcerned about her, because she did not know what she would say to him, if he were to ask if she was happy. What he said, as they settled down to eat, was:

“I do think, sweetheart, that you should learn to ride and come out with me sometime to see more of the land we live on. There’s nothing that lifts my heart more than a fast ride over the prairie, with the wind to buoy you up and the swiftness of a good horse . . .” But he broke off because Caroline was shaking her head.

“I just can’t, Corin! Please don’t ask me . . . I tried! The horses frighten me. And they know it—Hutch says that they can sense the way people feel, and it makes them act badly . . .”

“But you were afraid of Joe and Maggie, until I introduced you to them. You’re not still afraid of them now, are you?”

“Well, no . . .” she reluctantly agreed. Magpie she no longer feared, of course, but on the rare occasions that Joe came up to the house to speak to Corin, or to deliver supplies fetched in from Woodward, a knot of tension still clenched in the pit of her stomach. His face looked fierce to her, no matter what Corin said. His features spoke of violence and savagery.

“Well, it would be just the same with the horses. That mare you rode—Clara. Why, she’s as gentle as a lamb! And that side saddle I bought you is just sitting in the shed, gathering cobwebs . . . The season’s changing now, the weather’s better . . . If you would only come out with me and see the beauty of God’s virgin country here . . .”

“I just can’t! Please, don’t try to force me! I am far happier staying here . . .”

“Are you, though?” he asked. Caroline stirred her soup around with her spoon and said nothing. “Maggie tells me . . .” He trailed off.

“What? What has she said about me?”

“That you don’t want to go outside. That you stay indoors, and you’re too quiet, and she has much more work to do. Caroline . . . I . . .”

“What?” she asked again, dreading to hear what he would say.

“I just want you to be happy,” he said miserably. He watched her with his eyes wide and she saw nothing within them but truth and love, and hated herself anew for ever thinking he could have betrayed her, could have passed over her infertile body to make a son elsewhere.