The Legacy (17 page)

“It can’t be you! You’re dead! I know you are . . . I
saw
it . . .” she wailed.

“It’s OK,” the girl said, backing away from the old woman. Beth and I watched, fascinated, as tears began to slide down Caroline’s cheeks.

“Don’t hurt me . . . please don’t,” she croaked.

“What’s going on here?” Meredith demanded, appearing next to her mother, glaring at the hapless waitress, who could only shake her head, at a loss. “Mother, be quiet. What’s the matter with you?”

“No! Magpie . . . how can it be? I was sure I didn’t . . . I didn’t mean for it . . .” she begged, putting trembling fingers over her mouth. Her face was aghast, haunted. The waitress moved away, apologizing, smiling an uncomfortable smile. “Magpie . . . wait, Magpie!”

“That’s quite enough! There’s nobody here called Magpie! For goodness’ sake, Mother, pull yourself together,” Meredith admonished her, sharply. “We have guests,” she said pointedly, leaning forward to speak right into Caroline’s ear. But Caroline just kept staring after the black-haired girl, frantically searching the crowd for her.

“Magpie! Magpie!” she shouted, still weeping. She grasped Meredith’s hand, fixed her daughter with wide, desperate eyes. “She’s come back! Don’t let her hurt me!”

“Right. That’s enough. Clifford—come and help me.” Meredith beckoned sharply to her son and between them they turned Caroline’s chair and manoeuvred her in through the tall glass doors. Caroline tried to fight them, kept craning her head to look for the girl, kept saying the name, over and over again.
Magpie, Magpie
. It was the first and only time I remember feeling sorry for her, because she sounded so frightened, and so very, very sad.

“M
agpie, that was it. Funny name,” I say, as Beth stops speaking, undoes her own long plait and runs her fingers through her hair. “I wonder who she thought that girl was?”

“Who knows? She was obviously pretty confused by then. She was over a hundred, remember.”

“Do you think Meredith knew? She was so brusque with her about it!”

“No. I don’t know,” Beth shrugs. “Meredith was always brusque.”

“She was horrible that night.” I get up, clatter the kettle onto the hotplate for coffee.

“You should go and have a root around in the attic if it’s old pictures and papers you’re after,” Beth says, suddenly keen.

“Oh?”

“That old trunk up there—when we came here for Caroline’s funeral I remember Meredith putting everything she could find of hers up in that old red leather trunk. It was almost as if she wanted everything of Caroline’s out of her sight.”

“I don’t remember that. Where was I?”

“You stayed in Reading with Nick and Sue next door. Dad said you were too young to go to a funeral.”

“I’ll go and have a look up there later, then,” I say. “You should come up, too.”

“No, no, I’ve never been that bothered about family history. You might find something interesting, though,” she smiles. I notice how keen she is for me to investigate this distant past rather than our more recent one. How keen she is to distract me.

Longing

1902–1903

A
s spring became summer, Caroline grew more used to the presence of Joe and Magpie and the other Ponca women, who were Joe’s mother White Cloud and widowed sister, Annie. She did not call upon them again, but Corin warned her that it was traditional for Indian womenfolk to drop in on one another, and to exchange gifts, and she received several such visits before the Ponca seemed to lose interest. Caroline dreaded seeing the trio approach the house, and she sat awkwardly through their visits, crippled by nerves, unsure of how to speak to them, or what to give in return for their gifts of honey, mittens and an elegantly carved wooden ladle. In the end she usually gave them money, which White Cloud accepted with a closed expression on her face. Caroline made them tea and longed for them to leave, but when their visits ceased she could not help but feel that she had failed in some way. And she watched Joe from the window as he went about the ranch, her eyes ever curious for the alien oddity of his features, his black mane of hair. He wore a long knife in a tooled leather sheath on his hip, and each time she saw it a cold shiver scurried down her spine.

She did not get used to the heat, which increased with each passing day. By noon the sun was a flat, white disc that seemed to press like a giant hand on her head whenever she stepped outside, pushing her down, making her heavy and half-blind. When the wind blew it seemed as hot as the blast from an oven. Accustomed all her life to rising at ten in the morning, Caroline now took to getting up with Corin, at first light, in order to have some time to exist, some time to live before the heat became unbearable. At that hour the sky in the east was violet and azure, pricked by faint, glimmering stars that winked out of existence as the day broadened. Corin drove her back to Woodward to order fabric for curtains, and rugs, and a large mirror to hang above the mantel, and he paid for all of these things with a slightly bemused expression. Caroline chafed with impatience in the intervening weeks it took for the goods to come by train from Kansas City, and she clapped her hands with excitement when they arrived. Gradually, she dragged the furniture in the house into a better arrangement, and she swept and swept to keep the sand out on windy days, until her hands blistered and she gave up in frustration, stopping up whatever gaps she could find around the windows and doors with rags.

It was even harder for her to get used to the work required, on a daily basis, just to keep the household up and running. She knew that as Corin’s wife she should make his coffee and breakfast in the morning before he set out onto the ranch, but by the time she had put up her hair and washed her face and laced herself into her corsets, he had provided for himself and gone out to work.

“Why do you take such time with your hair, love? There’s nobody here that’s going to think badly of you if you just pin it back in a simple fashion,” Corin pointed out gently, scooping her hair from her damp neck and running his thumb across the fine strands.

“
I
would think badly of it,” Caroline replied. “A lady can’t go around with her hair unbound. It’s just not decent.” But she took what she thought to be his meaning and began to rise even earlier in order to make herself presentable and still have time to cook breakfast.

When the cistern was dry, water had to be drawn from the well at the top of a rise to the north of the house; a well Corin was quick to point out was nothing short of a miracle, since most of the county’s groundwater was tainted with gypsum that rotted the guts and tasted foul.

“Not even the finest house in Woodward has a supply of water this close and this sweet. They’re still hauling it in from the south by wagon!” he told her proudly.

It took a long time to boil water on the stove and, since timber was so scarce, more often than not the cow chips Caroline had encountered in Hutch’s camp fire were the only fuel. Upon finding out what these were—chunks of dried-out cattle manure—Caroline promptly refused to collect them, and could only be induced to use them by poking them into the stove with iron tongs. Not far away from the ranch was a shallow stream that the ranchers referred to as Toad Creek, along the banks of which grew a thin line of straggly cottonwoods, sand plums and walnut trees, giving the ranch a welcome dash of foliage.

“Why can’t we just cut timber from the creek?” Caroline asked, wrinkling her nose as Hutch, a little disgruntled at the task, delivered a basket of cow chips to the door.

“Well, ma’am, we could. But only for a couple of months and then we’d be back to the chips and without any trees to pretty up the view,” Hutch told her, drily.

And each morning there was the water to bring in, the stove to sweep out and re-lay, breakfast to make and then pots to clean, laundry to wash—Caroline was used to dirty clothes being taken away and then returned to her two days later, clean, pressed and neatly folded; she was astonished to discover how much work went into those intervening two days—and then the endless battle with the sand in the house and on the porch. She had also to tend to her wilting, stunted vegetable garden. Corin had presented her with the seeds proudly, having traded them with a neighbor. Watermelons and marrows, peas and beans. He also bought her two tiny cherry trees, which she watered with great care and attention, fretting when the wind buffeted them. They struggled in the red soil, and did not flourish no matter how she cosseted them. Then there was lunch to prepare, clothes to be mended and then dinner. Caroline was not a good cook. She scorched the eggs and forgot to salt the beef. Vegetables went soft, meat went tough and stringy. Her beans had hard, gritty centers. Her coffee was weak, and her bread refused to rise, emerging from the oven solid and chewy. Each time she apologized, Corin reassured her.

“You’ve not been brought up to do it, that’s all. You’ll get the hang of it,” he smiled, manfully swallowing down whatever she put in front of him. Every time her hands got grimy she washed them at once, hating the feel of dirt on her skin, the dark crescent of earth and smuts beneath each nail. She scrubbed her hands so many times in a day that the skin grew red and angry and began to crack, and she sat mourning their lost softness, cradling them in her lap at the end of the day.

Hot baths could only be had by laboriously filling a large copper drum and lighting the fire beneath it, and then filling the tin tub by the bucketful, behind a wooden screen that Caroline had ordered for the express purpose of private bathing. Corin chafed at such wanton use of precious water, but at the end of her day’s labor, with her movements hampered by her corsets, Caroline’s body ached from fingertips to toes. She could feel each knobbly protrusion of her spine as it uncurled against the back of the tub, feel a tender crease between every single rib. Her hands, as she wrung out her washing cloth, trembled with fatigue. In the yellow glow of the kerosene lamps, she examined her broken nails and the tan color of her arms where she had taken to pushing up her sleeves in the heat. She rubbed her thumb over her calluses now, massaging rose-scented vanishing cream into them to soften them, as lonely coyote song filled the darkness outside.

She did not complain of the work, not even to herself. Whenever she caught herself flagging, she pictured Bathilda, smiling in mocking triumph; or she thought of Corin, so full of admiration, calling her brave and beautiful, and how she would hate to prove him wrong. But on the occasions that her spirits did begin to sink, Corin seemed to sense it. He brushed the sand from her hair at the end of the day, singing softly as he pulled the bristles through in long, smooth strokes; or telling her tall stories to make her laugh: about the super-smart cow that drank beer and had learnt to count, or the impatient settler who’d painted himself all over with the wet red mud of Woodward County to pass himself off as Indian and settle on their lands. Or, as she lay in the tub and rubbed her calluses, he would appear around the bath screen and work his fingers into the tight muscles of her neck and shoulders until she was all but drowsing in his hands; then he would gather her up and carry her, dripping wet, to the bed. In the consuming, blinding joy of his lovemaking, she forgot all other aches.

One night they lay side by side on the bed, catching their breath after their exertions. Propping himself up on his elbow, Corin wiped the commingled sweat from Caroline’s chest and slid his hand down to her stomach. She smiled and shifted under the heavy weight of it, the hot press of his skin.

“Boy or girl to start with?” he asked.

“Which would you rather?” she replied.

“I asked first!” he smiled.

Caroline sighed happily. “I truly don’t mind. Maybe a girl . . . a little girl with your brown eyes and hair the color of honey.”

“And then a boy?” Corin suggested.

“Of course! You’d rather a boy first?”

“Not necessarily . . . although it would be good to get him up and running, get me some more help around the ranch . . .” he mused.

“Poor baby! Not even born yet and you’ve got him out riding the fences!” Caroline cried.

Grinning, Corin put his lips to her belly and kissed her damp skin. “
Psst!
Hey, you in there—come out a boy and I’ll buy you a pony!” he whispered.

Caroline laughed, putting her hands around Corin’s head to cradle it, no longer noticing their roughness.

It was two months before a neighbor dropped by to visit. Caroline heard a shout at the front of the house, as she was glumly examining a sunken honey cake that she’d just taken from the oven.

“Hullo, Masseys!” the shout came again and, startled, Caroline realized it was a woman’s voice. She smoothed back her hair, brushed flour from her apron, and opened the front door, stepping onto the porch with regal grace. Then she gaped. The woman, if such she was, was not only dressed as a man—in slacks, leather chaps and a flannel shirt tucked into a wide leather belt—but she was sitting
astride
a rangy bay horse, slouching as comfortably in the saddle as if she had been born there. “You’re home! I was beginning to think I was hollering at an empty house,” the woman declared, swinging her leg over the horse’s back and dropping abruptly to the ground. “I’m Evangeline Fosset. Pleased to meet you, and do call me Angie since everybody else does,” she continued, approaching with a smile. A long ponytail of orange hair swung behind her, and although her face was as tanned as Corin’s it was also strong and handsome. Her blue eyes shone.

“I’m Caroline. Caroline Massey.”

“Figured you were.” The keen blue eyes swept over her. “Well, Hutch told me you were a beauty, and Lord knows that man never lies,” she said. Caroline smiled, uncertainly, and said nothing. “I’m your neighbor, by the way. My husband, Jacob, and I have a farm about seven miles that way.” Angie pointed to the south-east.

“Oh! Well . . . um . . . won’t you come inside?” Caroline faltered.

She cut little squares from the outside edge of her honey cake, where it was indeed more or less like a cake, and served them on a large plate, with tea and water. Angie took a long draft.

“Oh! How I envy you that sweet well of yours! To have water not tasting of gyp or the cistern is something wonderful, I can tell you,” she exclaimed, draining the glass. “Did Corin tell you how they found it? The well, that is?”

“No, he hasn’t . . .”

“Well, they’d tried digging about a hundred different holes and found nothing but gyp, gyp, and some more stinking gypsum water. They were relying on the creek but that dries up half of the year, as you’ll soon see. And they were being so darn careful with the supply that not one of the men on this ranch had washed himself for more than a month. I tell you, no word of a lie: I could smell them from my front step! Well, one day a funny old man came riding by on a beaten-up mule and said did Corin want him to find sweet water on his land? Ever one to give a person a chance, although he didn’t see how the old fellow was going to achieve what he hadn’t managed in months, Corin tells him by all means.” Angie paused for breath and popped a square of cake into her mouth. Caroline watched her, mesmerized. “This old fellow takes out a narrow, forked branch of wood that’s all worn smooth with years of touching, and off he goes, wandering here, there and everywhere, holding this twig in his fingertips. The midday sun starts pounding down and still he goes hither and thither, back and forth, until he gets to the top of the rise and bam! That twig of his twists in his grip and points straight down at the turf like an arrow. “Here’s your sweet water, sir,” the old fellow announces. And digging down, sure enough, there was the well. Can you believe that, now?” Angie finished her tale with a nod and a smile, and watched Caroline, expectantly.

“Well, I . . .” Caroline began, her voice sounding frail after Angie’s bold narrative. “If you say so, of course,” she finished, smiling slightly. Angie’s face fell a little, but then she smiled again.

“So, how are you settling in? You getting used to ranch life?”

“Yes, I think so. It’s rather different . . . to New York.”

“I’ll bet it is! I’ll bet!” Angie chuckled; a low, throaty sound.

“I’ve never seen a woman ride astride before,” Caroline added, feeling rude to mention it, but too astonished not to.

“Oh, it’s the only way to travel around here, believe me! Once you’ve tried it, you’ll never go back to fiddling around sideways. When I heard Corin was bringing a gal back from the city, I thought, that poor thing! She can’t know what she’s getting into! Not that I don’t love this place. It’s my home, although Lord knows Mother Nature can be a bitch around here at times, pardon my language—but really, she can.” Again, Angie looked at Caroline, and Caroline smiled nervously, at a loss. She poured her guest some more tea. The china cup, with its pattern of pink roses and blue ribbons that had seemed so charming in the catalogue, looked as fragile and childish as a toy in Angie’s strong hand. “The loneliness gets to some women. Not seeing anyone—well, any other women—for weeks at a time. Months, sometimes. It can get to a person, being in the house by yourself all day.”