Hattie Big Sky (6 page)

The game went on fast and furious. I was amazed at how quickly Chase picked it up. The boy had a knack for numbers. And his memory! He tracked nearly every card played.

“You must be the star pupil of your class,” I said in amazement.

He shrugged. “I do all right.”

I took the cards and shuffled them. We had played Five Hundred all afternoon. “Do you want to play a different game?”

“Let's play I Wish,” said Mattie. “I'll start.” She chewed on her lip. “I wish I had a doll made of china, like Sarah Martin.” She patted Mulie's bedraggled yarn hair. “So Mulie would have a friend.”

“I wish for cinnamon rolls every day,” Chase said. He laughed.

I leaned back on my lard bucket chair. “Well, I guess I wish it was spring and I could start planting wheat.”

Chase perked up. “First you plant flax, then the wheat. Karl says maybe end of April.”

“That's not a wish,” scolded Mattie. “That's work.”

“You've got me there.” I could imagine what a disappointing wish that would be for a six-year-old, but I had to plant crops. It was part of proving up. Part of my dream of having a place of my own. November was mere months away; the clock was ticking. Here it was the middle of February and I hadn't set one fence post or plowed one foot of dirt. I'd had to content myself with reading about it in that book Miss Simpson gave me.

“You can wish for anything,” Chase said. “There are no rules. Mama said.”

“Your mama sure is smart.” I added a precious scoop of coal to the stove.

The children got quiet—so quiet I could hear the coal hissing.

Mattie clapped her hands. “I wish for
two
dolls!”

“That's the spirit. Now, Chase, how about you?”

He looked over his shoulder at my library. He stood up and walked over, tracing his fingers down the spines of several volumes. “I wish I could live somewhere where there were books all around. In a real town, with a real library. And I could read about pirates or explorers or anything.” He gazed off into space for a moment, and I knew he was seeing himself in just such a wonderful place.

“I hope your wish comes true,” I said to him. “Yours, too, Mattie.”

“What's your real, true wish?” Chase asked. He came back to sit at the table, searching my face with an eight-year-old's earnestness.

I flipped my hands up. “Oh, I don't know.” How to explain to these two children the longing in my heart for what they had? To be part of a family. To have a place to call home. Better leave it all unsaid. I glanced over at my books. “So, Chase, shall you pick one out for a story time? That storm doesn't look like it's settling down any. I think you're here for the night.”

“We've never stayed away from home before,” said Mattie. Her elfin face clouded over. She drew her legs underneath her and rocked on the wooden crate. Silent tears dribbled down her cheeks. She cuddled her rag doll close.

“Now, now. There'll be none of that.” I cringed to hear Aunt Ivy's sharp tone accompanying my words. I softened my voice. “Or I'll feed you another slice of my bread.” That won a smile from both children. I reached over, took Mattie's hand in mine, and squeezed it,
one-two-three.
“That's a secret message,” I told her. “My mama taught it to me, and now you can teach it to your mama.”

“What's it mean?” Mattie rubbed the tears from her cheeks.

I blushed, embarrassed to say the words aloud. I leaned to whisper in her ear: “It means ‘I love you.'”

Mattie regarded me for a moment with her big brown eyes. Then she reached out and squeezed my hand,
one-two-three.
I blinked back a tear of my own.

Chase had made his selection. “Mr. Nelson's going to read us
Treasure Island
by Robert Louis Stevenson at school, so I pick this one.” He held out
A Child's Garden of Verses
and scooted his apple crate chair closer to the stove.

Mattie stood at my knee. I opened the book. She inched closer.

“Mama lets me sit on her lap when she reads,” she said.

“Oh.” I felt myself get all flustered. “Then I guess you'd better sit here.” I patted my legs. Mattie scootched up and snuggled her wiry body close. She smelled of coffee and jelly and damp wool. As I began to read, her body relaxed into mine, until it was difficult to tell where she left off and I began.

After two poems, she was sound asleep. After two more, Chase was snoring. I slipped them both into my bed and pulled the covers up tight. Then I got myself ready and joined them. Once Mattie cried out, “Mama!” but she didn't waken. I settled the covers over her again, then watched them both, amazed. With a sigh, I curled up on the edge of the bed and slept the soundest sleep of my entire sixteen years.

         

I woke to the jingle of sleigh bells. Two warm children were flung every which way across my bed. For a moment, my head was fuzzy. Children?

“Hallo!” A voice rose above the jingling bells. “Hallo, Miz Hattie!” There was an edge to that familiar deep voice. Not even Karl's thick accent could cover up fear.

I snatched up my overcoat and flung open the door. “They're safe,” I called out. “Plug led them here.”

Karl tethered his team and slid down off the sled. He caught himself—it was almost as if his legs weren't strong enough to hold him. I waved him inside.

“You're frozen!” I hurried to warm up some coffee.

“Karl!” Mattie leaped off my bed and into his arms.

I caught the glitter of a tear in his eye. “I'll warn you, Karl,” I chattered, “I've turned these two into card sharks. Corrupted them with coffee, too.”

Karl sat down heavily, Mattie still clinging to him.

“This cold air makes my nose run worse than Niagara Falls,” I said lightly.

He fished out a huge red handkerchief and blew his nose.
“Kalt, ja,”
he said.

I set the coffee in front of him. “I've got some bread and jam.”

“Danke.”
He nodded and reached an arm out for Chase.

“You might want to dunk it in your coffee,” said Chase. “Soften it up a bit.”

I laughed. “Insult my baking, will you?” I pretended to box Chase's ears. “Ungrateful child.” He wiggled away and grinned from safety behind Karl.

I don't know that Karl understood all of our silliness, but I could tell by his face he knew Mattie and Chase had been safe with me.
“Danke,”
he repeated.

“See, he does like my bread,” I said, cutting several more slices. I set some bacon to frying, too. “Let me get some warm food in you before you go on your way. Your ma's probably worn through the window glass watching for you to come home.”

Karl reached a cracked and bleeding hand for another piece of bread. Bits of white flesh dotted his cheeks. Frostbite. “Off with those boots,” I ordered. He obeyed. I swallowed hard when I saw his chalk-white toes. From the looks of him, he'd been out all night looking for Perilee's children. I blinked back my own tears.

“Hand me that tub there,” I ordered Chase. “A warm bath is the ticket for cold toes.” I kept my voice light and the children busy so they wouldn't get a look at Karl's feet.

Karl grimaced as I poured warm water over his feet into the tub. I soaked a rag in warm water and had him press against the bad spots on his cheeks. Some folks said rubbing snow on frostbite was the best cure, but it seemed to me that getting the flesh unfrozen made more sense.

As his toes and face turned purple, I questioned my wisdom. His feet swelled and sprouted blisters. I wasn't sure how he was going to get his boots back on, even after daubing the worst of the blisters with a paste made of baking soda.

I wasn't done doctoring, but Karl was done being a patient.
“Perilee macht…”
He left the sentence hanging, but there was no need to finish. He wanted to get the children home. We gathered up their now dry clothes from around the house. I helped them dress while Karl downed a second cup of coffee.

“I wish there'd been time to dry out your socks.” I rummaged through Chester's things. “Here, you must take these.” It wouldn't do his feet much good to be back in those cold, wet socks and boots.

He put on the dry socks, then his boots and mittens. He patted my hands. He opened his mouth as if to say something, then simply cleared his throat.

Mattie jumped into his arms again, and he tilted her toward me. “Mwah!” She gave me a juicy six-year-old's kiss. But I did not wipe the dampness from my cheek.

“Oh, wait!” I took two steps to the bookshelf. I pulled off the book we'd started and handed it to Chase. “On loan.” I squeezed his shoulder.

Chase tucked the book carefully inside his coat. “I'll take very good care of it, I promise.”

“Safe trip home, you three!”

They rushed out into the cold and into the sled. My one small window was placed so that I could not watch them leave, but I could hear them go. I strained to capture every jingle.

         
CHAPTER 7         

March 5, 1918
Three miles north and west of Vida, Montana

Dear Charlie,

The beautiful snow is melting, turning everything into pig heaven, what with all the mud puddles. I walked right out of my boots this morning on my way to milk Violet, the mud was that thick. I was ready to start planting last week, but Karl and Rooster Jim both laughed at me. “The seeds will drown,” said Jim. So today I will perfect my fence-building skills instead.

Your letter—the first one received at my Montana home—arrived so full of holes I thought the moths had got into it. The censors take their work seriously! It makes your letters a great puzzle to read. When the censor slices out the offending phrases on one side of the page, it creates a challenge on the opposite side as well. I was able to discern that you are now sleeping in barracks at your new camp instead of tents. Though they don't sound much better than tents if you must sleep with your raincoat to keep the rain off at night.

Over our last chess game (I lost), Jim was full of war news. He says the Allied forces pushed the Germans back in Paris, but my heart broke to learn of the
Tuscania
being torpedoed. All those sailors lost. I am thankful you are on dry land at least. When I am not worrying over our valiant doughboys, I worry over what's happening here at home. Every day there are notices of folks being charged with sedition; it seems anything can be interpreted as treasonous. I read that that funny little dachshund dog is now to be called a “liberty dog.” Can you beat that? There is even talk here of outlawing speaking any German at all. Jim says it will be pure hardship for Reverend Schatz and his parishioners over at the Lutheran church. “The padre might as well speak in Greek,” he said. “They won't be able to follow him at all.” Because Jim's vocabulary is particularly lively, I can't write everything he said. But I do wonder, as he does, what harm it is for our neighbors to worship God in their native language.

Sometimes I do not know what to think.

Your bewildered friend,
Hattie Inez Brooks

Since I couldn't plant, I turned to another big chore: fencing. It was the other part of the requirement for proving up on my claim. No way around it. Uncle Chester had made a stab at it, but a halfhearted stab. I could pace off the length of fence he built in ten strides. He'd laid in plenty of materials, enough for the 480 rods of fence that had to be built. One cold and lonely night I'd done the math to calculate how many feet that was. Sixteen and a half feet times 480 rods. Seven thousand nine hundred and twenty feet. I nearly cried. No wonder farmers talked of rods; it was an easier number to face. No matter how I calculated it, you can be sure I said a prayer of thanks that it was all paid for. There it was, stacked up behind the barn, waiting for willing hands. Which turned out to be mine.

“Lord, I am thankful for the gloves Charlie's mother gave me,” I said, starting my daily upward conversation. Wouldn't Aunt Ivy get a wrench in her whalebone corset to see me dolled up? Uncle Holt's old work boots on my feet, a pair of Karl's patched overalls, rolled up, those heavy canvas gloves on my hands, topped off with my straw hat. I chuckled as I picked up a roll of barbed wire, a hammer, and a sack of fence staples and prepared to slog my way to the far side of the coulee to pick up where I'd left off yesterday. I was fencing a line at the southeast edge of my claim, right where it butted up against Karl and Perilee's.

A person can take something commonplace like a fence completely for granted until that same person has to try to build a foot or two of it. Seems like it should be a simple thing. It's not. First you break your back trying to dig a hole in the ground. Then you wrestle a post into the hole. Then you bury the base in dirt so it's nice and sturdy. Then you go on to the next hole. And the next one. I spent a week with a pickaxe and shovel digging postholes. The first night, my hands were so blistered and sore, I couldn't even spoon up my supper. The second night, I applied a liberal dose of white liniment—Uncle Holt's own concoction of hartshorn, arnica, witch hazel, camphor gum, eggs, and cider vinegar. Thankfully, it was as soothing as it was strong-smelling. By the third night, I was too hungry and tired to even feel my hands anymore.

I'd rigged up a stone boat for Plug to pull. I'd felt a bit like Noah as I studied the countless boulders scattered across my claim. Noah looked to build a boat to float on the rising waters; I was looking for a stone boat to “float” on the rolling prairie land. Finally, I found a stone flat enough and solid but not too heavy for Plug. Karl put me wise to this trick when I saw him using a stone boat to bring his supplies out to our common boundary. It would've taken me till I was ninety to get the diamond willow posts and wire out to the field if I hadn't.

Now I lashed a load to the stone boat, clucked to Plug, and we were off. The day before, I'd stopped work near an enormous chokecherry. Today I planned to string wire to that spot and, with luck, plant a few more fence posts.

Plug and I battled through the gumbo mud to the fence line.

“What on earth?” I reached the chokecherry and dropped my tools. I looked back and took my bearings. This was the right bush, all right. But my fence didn't stop here. It now stretched out for another good ways, maybe forty rods or so. I moved in for a closer inspection. It wasn't hard to identify my handiwork of the prior workday: my staples were crooked, catching the wire in a haphazard but adequate way to hold it to the posts.

But from the chokecherry on, the nails were square in and true as true. I remembered a story my mother read to me long, long ago. It was about a shoemaker who used the last of his shoe leather to outfit a trio of fairies. After that day, each morning he'd find a handsome new pair of shoes on his workbench. The fairies repaid his brand of kindness with their own.

The one I suspected at this moment was not of the fairy world but firmly in this one. I picked up where my fairy fence builder had left off. As I stretched each strand of wire, tapped it into place with a staple, stretched and tapped, stretched and tapped, I thought again of that conversation in Wolf Point between Mr. Hanson and Perilee. About folks who called sauerkraut “liberty cabbage” in order to swallow it down with their supper. And of Charlie doing his duty, eager to finish off a German or two. I thought about all the fences that get built in this world—the ones that divide folks and tear them up, like the actions of the Kaiser and his henchmen, and the ones that bring folks closer together, like this stretch of fence Karl Mueller had built for me.

“Plug.” I patted the old horse. “It's like I wrote to Charlie. This world is surely a puzzle. I wonder how old I'll be before I get it all figured out.”

His only answer was to step sideways to a greener patch of grass.

I finished up what I could and headed back for dinner at noon. Mr. Whiskers perched himself on the still-empty chicken coop—I hoped to order some chicks soon from Sears and Roebuck—earnestly licking the mud from his white paws.

I started for the house—and stopped. There were noises coming from the barn. Decidedly un-cow-like noises. A chill crept over me. I couldn't imagine what—or more likely who—was in there. I swung up my hammer and eased over to the barn. Before I could make a plan, the door slapped open and a tall, bony woman stepped out. She took me in with a glance.

“You planning to knock me a good one?” She took a step toward me. That's when I noticed the shotgun leaned up against the wall.

“Who are—”

“Leafie Purvis.” The woman stuck out a large, four-fingered hand. “Came to pay a call.”

“Most folks come to the house, not the barn.” She may have told me her name, but I didn't know this woman or what to make of her.

That drew a huge laugh. “If that isn't a Chester remark.”

“I'm his niece.” I lowered my weapon. “Hattie Brooks.”

“I know.” She reached behind a stack of bundled hay. “Give me a hand, will you?” Pushed up against the back wall was a wooden chest fastened shut with three heavy leather straps. The initials
CHB
were etched into the leather strap in the center.

“This is Uncle Chester's?” I ran my fingers over the worn leather, stopping at the buckle. Did this chest hold anything of my past? Anything of my mother?

“He was the private sort,” said Leafie. “Asked me to move it out here when he got so sick. Wanted to make sure nobody went through it before you.” A wistful expression flickered across her lined face. “He so hoped to show you himself.” Leafie patted the trunk with her hand.

“You were here when he died.” I recalled Perilee's words. “Thank you.”

“He'd have done the same for any one of us.” She reached into the pocket of the man's shirt she wore and pulled out a pouch of tobacco. Aunt Ivy would've fainted dead away, but I watched with fascination as Leafie deftly rolled a cigarette.

I fought my curiosity about the trunk and managed to remember my manners. “Would you like to come inside for some dinner? Do we need to water your horse?”

Leafie's laugh rolled out with the cigarette smoke and turned to a cough. “I'm traveling by shank's mare.”

“I don't understand.”

She lifted her skirts to show sturdy boots. “I'm walking. Trouble with this gumbo is that walking means one step forward and two steps back.” She laughed again. “Only way I can get anywhere is to walk in the opposite direction.”

I laughed, too. It was hard to resist Leafie's enthusiasm. “And Rooster Jim says summer's worse than spring!” I exclaimed.

“He's right there.” Leafie wiped her brow. “I'd rather slip and slide than sizzle any day.” She pointed to herself. “So though I've no horse, I could stand to water this old beast.”

“I can heat up some coffee real quick,” I said. “And if you don't mind beans—” The ground rumbled and rolled as I stepped out of the barn. “What on earth?” I glanced around and saw the cause of the reverberations.

Several riders, maybe as many as six, pounded across the prairie. Ahead of them, at breakneck speed, they drove a cow. She zigged and zagged, frightened by the men and horses. Then she turned and bolted down the coulee. Right toward my cabin.

“No!” I screamed. “Watch out!”

The riders didn't slow. Now I could see there were four of them. Four horses and a cow bearing down on my home.

“Stop! Stop!” I ran toward them.

Ropes of saliva swung from the frantic cow's mouth. Her eyes rolled up in her head. All I could see were whites. I don't think she could even see me.

“Stop!”
I screamed at the top of my lungs. I thought I heard a rider laugh. Still they thundered toward my home. They were going to drive that cow right through it!

Ka-boom!
An explosion went off behind me. I whirled to see Leafie there, cocking the shotgun to fire again.
Ka-boom!

The lead rider pulled up short. He raised his arm in the air, signaling the others. They swung around, almost as one rider, and rode off, the cow forgotten. Its frantic pace slowed and it trotted to a halt beyond the house, sides heaving.

I realized I'd been holding my breath and let it go. “Who were they?” I wiped sweating palms on my overalls. “Do you think they'll come back?”

Leafie squinted. “If they get a burr in their britches about something, they will. But I don't expect you've got anything to worry about. Stay out of their way. That'd be my advice.” She handed me her gun.

“We better water that poor thing.” Leafie strode over, fearlessly grabbed the cow's heavy leather collar, and led it to the barn. “You've got a guest, Violet.”

I followed, carrying the gun in shaking arms. “What was that all about?” I sank down against Uncle Chester's chest.

She shook her head. “The last thing this county needed was Traft Martin on that so-called Dawson County Council of Defense.”