Authors: Nonnie Frasier
“Well, Patrick Burgess, that’s all fine and good, but she isn’t here. She left with her ma and Lettie. Fine women, both of them!” Grace glared at him. “Now your getting what you deserve. Your beautiful, faithful wife went back to Denver with the people who know how to show their love for her!” Grace regretted her blunt and angry explanation as she watched Patrick’s eyes fill with tears of shame and regret. His broad shoulders slumped wretchedly, and he fell to both knees in front of her.
“Oh Patrick. I’m sorry.” She quieted her tone and knelt down next to him. “It’s just that I am so angry with you for hurting her. Ada is a good woman, and no man’s hand but yours has ever touched her. She had a difficult childhood, but Ada is an amazing woman because of it. She needs to be able to tell you the whole story herself,” Grace said, trying to comfort him. “Patrick, she tried to live up to your expectations, but she couldn’t erase her past. When you confronted her at the train station, Ada couldn’t hide it anymore. She always wanted to tell you. She was afraid you wouldn’t listen or understand. Ada’s a fine and respectable lady that got tired of not being true to herself.”
Patrick’s voice expressed the pain he was feeling. “I hurt her terribly. Do you think she will ever have me back?”
“That will depend on you. Ada is a passionate woman,” Grace said as she gave his slumped shoulder a playful shove. “You’d better get down to Denver just as soon as you can. A train leaves in the morning. You better be on it, with your hat in your hand, and an apology in your heart.” Grace picked his hat off of the floor and put it firmly on his head. “I’ll have Frank take you into town in the morning, and we’ll be glad to look after the animals for a few days.”
Patrick gave Grace a grateful hug. As he opened the door, a cold blast of dousing rain struck him in the face. “You better take Frank’s slicker,” Grace said as she pitched the heavy, waterproof cloth to Patrick. “That rain has been soaking everything since you got here, and the wind is pushing the clouds west. It hasn’t frozen yet, so I hope we don’t see much snow, but when those clouds get stuck up against the mountains you never know what will happen.”
Grace escorted Patrick out the door and looked to the clouds swirling down from the mountains. “It’s only October, so it shouldn’t be that bad but you better get home so you will be ready to catch that train in the morning.” Patrick gratefully pulled the slicker over his head and set off into the soaking rain to his ranch.
Patrick was cold and wet when he returned and opened the barn door to check on the animals once more. Even though he had cinched the slicker as tightly as he could, his hair and clothes were dripping wet. The rain was still heavy but was now mixed with snow. He pulled the slicker off and shook it in the barn. “You girls should be happy you are inside tonight,” he spoke soothingly to Sheba and Buttercup. Checking their mangers and water troughs, he was happy to find that they were all still full.
“The other girls,” he continued, motioning to the cows in the pasture, “all have pretty good coats so they should be fine. You girls are going to have to do without me for a few days. Frank’s taking me to the train so I can go get our Ada back.” Sheba nuzzled his shoulder to acknowledge her forgiveness and reaffirm their friendship.
Once in the house, he toweled his head and put on dry long johns. Patrick was too tired to start a fire so he just stocked wood for the morning. He decided to retire early and crawled under the thick down comforter. With his redemption plan in place, he listened to the rhythmic pattern of the rain falling on the roof and soon fell asleep.
***
T
he house was very cold when Patrick woke. He knew that it must be time to get up and get the milking done, but it was so dark inside. The silence was interrupted by a gust of wind hitting the house at full force, making it shudder. The wind howled down the stovepipe and whistled at the chinking in between the cabin’s heavy logs.
Getting up, he tried to look out of the bedroom window, but a sheet of solid ice distorted the dark grey scenery outside. Patrick looked with horror at the window’s nail-heads holding the frozen windowpanes in place. Every head was so cold that pinpoints of frost covered each nail. The inside corners, where the glass met the wood frame, were filled with small piles of snow.
Remembering that Ada had already hung his winter clothes up, he headed to the parlor. Soon heavy canvas trousers covered his woolen long johns. Putting on a heavy wool sweater and the buffalo coat that he used in the most severe weather, Patrick knew he was ready to brave the outdoors.
“I have to check on Sheba and Buttercup and the cows,” he said as he pulled heavy winter boots over his feet. “Hopefully, I can make it to the barn!” he shouted to himself, above the shrieking wind.
Opening the front door and taking a breath the frozen air burned his lungs. His eyes and face were blasted with suffocating snow. “Damn it’s cold!” he uttered. Securing the door behind him, he fought his way toward a hazy shadow that slowly materialized into a snow-besieged barn. The wind and snow were like wild creatures, seemingly attacking Patrick as he made his way. Only when he had pulled the barn door shut did he find shelter from their bite. “Sheba? Buttercup?” Patrick yelled into the silence of the barn. Sheba nickered nervously as Buttercup mooed her dissatisfaction.
“OK, girls. You will be safe here, but I’m a bit worried about the cows in the pasture. I can’t see anything past the barn. I sure hope they huddled together under the willows. I really wasn’t expecting a blizzard this early,” Patrick said to the animals.
Going outside once more, he forced himself against the wind. Moving away from the barn, he tried to see beyond into the pastures. The blowing snow erased any details. Everything was blank white, confusing his sense of direction. Patrick decided it was time to return to the safety of the house or run the risk of getting lost in the white out. As he headed back he thought,
I’m afraid you cows are on your own.
The dark curly fur of the buffalo coat was firmly impacted with the fine white snow. When he pulled himself up on the porch, he stopped to listen for any sound that might bring promising news from the animals in the pasture. Patrick’s ears strained, but only the sounds of the screaming wind escaped from the blizzard. Defeated, he let the force of the raging wind drive him through the cabin’s front door and propel him into the cold, dark interior of the house.
“What can I do? I’m powerless against this storm. I can’t save the animals! I can’t even save myself or my marriage!” he screamed at the howling wind. He quickly stripped out of the frozen clothes and placed them by the cold fireplace.
His fingers still tingled from the icy wind as he opened the wood stove. Patrick’s heart ached once more when he looked inside. Ada had prepared the fire before they went to the rodeo. One spark from the tinderbox filled the kitchen with light and the promise of heat.
Oh Ada, I hope she’s safe. I’m sure she made it to Denver before the storm hit,
he thought.
But how am I going to get to her? Why was I so stupid?
For the rest of the day Patrick paced like a caged animal as the blizzard continued to taunt him. He cursed at the wind and snow as their strong blasts shook the cabin walls. Finally, he sought consolation and warmth under the down comforter in bed, and fell into a restless and nightmare-filled sleep.
Morning dawned and again it was quiet ... too quiet. The winds had now stopped and deafening silence terrified him. He tried to whistle, but even his cheery notes seem to freeze and fall flat. Once again pulling his heavy clothing over his woolen long johns, he started to head for the kitchen. He tried to look out of the bedroom’s ice-coated windows, but they would not even allow a weak glimmer of light to shine through.
Water stood frozen in the teapot, and he blew on his fingers as he made a fire in the wood-stove that had gone cold overnight. It crackled to life, but the house remained silent and fearfully cold. Inquisitively, he tried to gain information about his world through another ice-encrusted window and finally worked up the courage to crack open the door.
Silence, lethal and cold assailed his senses. Again the frozen air burned his nose and lungs. He caught his breath as he surveyed the terrible wonderland that sparkled before him. Overnight the storm had moved out and now the morning sun sparkled off the fresh snow making it glitter like diamonds.
How could anything so awful look so beautiful?
Donning his heavy buffalo coat, Patrick looked over the snowdrifts between him and the barn that were taller than his head. He then closed the door behind him to conserve what little heat had built up in the house.
Dark swaths of wind-driven dirt, ripped from the pasture, striped the towering white drifts, which blocked his passage to the barn. The fickle winds had left some areas completely barren of snow, while others were feet deep and crusty hard. Patrick began shoveling at the stone-hard drifts between the cabin and the barn. Impelled by worry for the animals, he tore at the drifts until he could clearly hear Sheba’s urgent neighing.
Finally, as he cleared the last of the snow from the blocked barn door, he was able to open it. The opened door allowed shafts of sunlight into the dark interior where the two animals stood forlorn but safe. “I'll be right back,” Patrick spoke soothingly to the animals. “I have to check on the other girls. I hope they found shelter under the willows before the rain saturated everything.”
The warmth of the October sun soon overpowered the unseasonably cold blizzard snow, and water began dripping freely from the roof. Patrick left the barn door open, allowing warm sun to filter into the interior, as he turned to the windswept pasture and stepped over the fences, now solid with heaped snow.
Patrick saw what a good job Ada had done shoring up the fences and he was reminded again how much he missed her. “God, will you please soften her heart? I will never take her for granted again, but please, let her find forgiveness for me,” he prayed. Patrick continued to pray as he shoveled through another large drift in the middle of the pasture.
“Odd. There’s nothing that would cause a drift this size to collect here,” Patrick whispered as his shovel caught something at the bottom of the drift. The snow of the drift wasn’t hard and unyielding like the wind-compacted snow. It was soft. The shovel easily lifted the ice crystals that looked and felt like sugar.
Another shovelful disturbed the fine white powder, and it settled between what looked like red branches.
There are no bushes here,
Patrick thought. He fell to his knees as he dug around the curly red fluff revealed by the shovel. “No, God, No!” Patrick screamed as his frantic fingers explored the drift. Exhuming a cow’s lifeless head, his gloved fingers moved furiously until he found the white face with the soft curly locks. “No, no, no!” he shouted, to the serene eyes permanently closed in death.
Desperately digging deeper into the frozen mound, his panic intensified. “No! No! No! No!” he screamed. Patrick’s actions became more frenzied. He dug faster until, one by one, the soft white face of each dead heifer was exposed. The icy rain had soaked their unprotected bodies. As the temperature had dropped and the rain had turned into a driving white blizzard, they couldn’t stay warm. Quietly they had huddled together and fallen into the deep sleep of death.
All of the beautiful animals lay still. Patrick moved from each silent form to the next hoping that there might be a flicker of life in at least one, but there was no movement. He stood still as the reality of what he was seeing stunned him into disbelief. The drift had taken the lives of his entire herd and with it the life of his ranch.
“I have lost everything! I can’t ask Ada to come back now. Without the herd, I’ll never be able to provide for her. Even if we were to survive this winter, we would starve next. I have nothing! Everything is gone and I will not subject the woman I love to certain death here in these frozen mountains.”
The realization of his fate started at the root of his soul and migrated through his being. His dreams were crushed; his future lay cold and bleak before him. The painful reality drove him to his knees in the frozen turf as a scream slowly built in his chest. The first moan was soft, but it developed into a wail of agony, reaching a crescendo with a grief-stricken, tortured scream.
“Oh God! My God, What have I done?” His cry resounded through the frozen canyon, echoing until the blizzard’s frigid snowdrifts consumed it.
P
atrick spent the rest of that dreadful day as well as the next, cleaning and skinning the lifeless shells of animals that had previously been his future. He let his thoughts wander to the happy day when he and Sheba drove the heifers from the stock pens in Fort Collins, through town and on the road to his ranch. He could still hear the man from the mercantile teasing him. “Cut those sweet heifers up into little pieces, dry them into jerky, and I’ll sell them to the miners and railroad men for twenty-five cents a pound,” the man called playfully as he waved his hat to Patrick.
“Not on your life,” Patrick laughed back. He knew that his cattle would be far more valuable as breeding stock. Now the man’s playful words echoed through Patrick’s aching spirit, and he hoped he could get twenty-five cents per pound for the wasted meat that lay before him. Patrick finished skinning another dead heifer and tossed the raw hide onto a heap beside the barn wall.
These hides will make good leather,
he thought as he surveyed the growing pile.
Suddenly, a wonderful idea surfaced:
I could have a leather coat made for Ada.
But just as quickly as the thought emerged, it was dashed as reality washed over him again.
Ada is gone. This ranch has no purpose without her
, he thought.
Hours passed as he worked steadily into the night until exhaustion and loneliness overwhelmed him. He found his way to an empty stall filled with warm, sweet hay and lay down. His barren soul open, he expressed his torment as he prayed, “My heavenly Father, please forgive me and my foolishness. I can’t do this alone, but I don’t know how to make things right.” As he finished his plea, his fatigue engulfed him, and he fell into a dreamless slumber.