Far as the Eye Can See (23 page)

They was pretty happy with the toilet water, but when Eveline opened the box with the gowns in it, they both started weeping and carrying on. They each give me a kiss on the cheek. “I wonder if this will fit me,” Eveline said, holding hers up.

“Of course it will,” Christine said. “They are just exactly the right size.”

They was long gowns, and would cover them from neck to feet, but maybe Eveline’s would be a bit tight. She was more ample in the middle than Christine, and the gown looked like it hung down without any kind of blossoming in the midsection. But it didn’t dampen the mood none that she wondered about how it might fit. She was so happy when she kissed me, there was tears in her eyes.

“We have something for you,” Christine said. She handed me a box that was pretty heavy. I hoped it was cartridges for my Evans repeater, or maybe a new pistol. The weight fooled me. When I got it open, I found another leather-bound volume that looked like a Bible—this one said
The Complete Works of Shakespeare
.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said.

“I know you loved to hear me read from this,” Christine said. “So we wanted you to have it so you can read it any time you want, no matter where you might be in your travels.”

“Thank you kindly.” I didn’t know what to do with it. It was the heaviest book I ever lifted. “I will read this wherever I go.”

“And when you do, you will hear Christine’s voice.”

“I expect I will.”

“Read it in remembrance.”

“In what?”

“In remembrance of us and our time together.”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “Of course.” I opened it and looked at the pages. There was a lot of space on most of them, but the print was so small I could barely make it out, and it was bunched up in such a way I didn’t see how a body could read it. I was happy to see that it did have some pictures, but mostly they was far apart and there wasn’t enough of them.

Later that night, the wind kicked up and froze the air again. It come from the north and blew on the side of the wagon where the vent for the stove was, so it kept banking down the fire and causing smoke to leak back into where we was sitting. We sipped coffee and tried to keep warm by the stove for a while, but I known we’d have to turn the wagon around out of the wind if we was going to be warm on this night. I didn’t want to go out there yet and get started on it. I figured I’d have to drag Cooney out from under first, then hitch at least one horse to get the whole thing turned. Eveline got all bundled up with buffalo robes so she could help me.

“Well?” she said.

I got up and climbed down in the cold wind. Eveline said there was no need to hitch up a damn horse. “Just you and I can pull the tongue and it will move.”

“We gotta get Cooney out of there.”

“Leave him where he is. We only have to pull it a little bit, turn it some out of the wind.”

I shrugged. If she wanted to lead the way, I figured I’d go along. If she was right, we wouldn’t have much to do, and if she was wrong, then we had the horse. I walked around in front, kicking snow out of my way as best I could. Eveline come behind me. I picked up the one side of the trace and she picked up the other. We straddled each side, and when I give the signal, we started pulling as hard as we could. The wheels of the wagon didn’t budge.

“We gotta get Christine out of there. Maybe a few other things to lighten it.”

Eveline laughed. “You think Christine weighs that much?”

I could barely hear her in the wind. Christine, inside the wagon, heard her plain as day. She come to the opening in front. “What did he say?”

“I didn’t say nothing.”

“He wants you to come down out of there so we can pull this thing.”

“Oh, get the horse,” she said.

“I didn’t say you was that heavy,” I said.

“Get the horse.”

“That’s what I thought I’d have to do,” I said.

I trudged to the stable and got my packhorse. He didn’t want to go. I had to drag him out and put him in front of the wagon and hitch him up, The whole time he’s doing everything to discourage me. I finally got him in the trace and hitched to the wagon, but then he wouldn’t move. I started cursing to beat all, and Eveline didn’t like it.

“On the Lord’s birthday and you say things like that.”

“I ain’t addressing the Lord.” I pulled harder on the reins, standing in front of the horse, and he kept bobbing his head and moving back away from me.

“Please don’t curse like that.”

“Just leave me alone right now,” I said.

Finally the horse begun to move with me. He pulled and his hooves slipped a little in the snow, but he got it moving and I turned it around so that the wind was blowing at the back corner and I seen smoke beginning to billow out of the pipe that vented from the stove. “That ought to do it,” I said. “You might ought to put a elbow on that pipe so it sticks straight up at the end. Then it don’t matter which way the wind blows.”

Eveline come up to me, put her hands on my face, and leaned in real close. “Tonight I will come to you again,” she whispered. She waited there, looking into my eyes. In the cold moonlight, with steam coming out of her nose and mouth, her eyes gleaming, she didn’t look like just a woman. She looked like a kind of spirit—beautiful and free. But I known she was a woman, a capable, strong woman. She made herself frail in a sad kind of way. I looked in her eyes and it was like the first time I really seen her. I was looking in the face of something that hit me like music, like a fine song, and I known for sure I was never going to forget it. Them eyes softened something in me I didn’t like to think about. She was warm and alive and I come to see I had formed a attachment and that surprised the hell out of me.

I didn’t know what to say. I put my arms around her and smiled.

“Do you want me?” she said.

“I guess I do.”

She looked away, and I put my hands on hers, which was still up against either side of my face. “Eveline,” I said.

“What?”

“I’m right taken by surprise here.”

I think I was still smiling. I hope I was still smiling. Her face changed when she looked at me again. “I wish . . .” I started to say, and she put her head on my chest and said, “No. Please do not say it.”

“This is something I ain’t ready for.”

“I know it.”

“But listen,” I said. “I don’t mean that like you think I mean it. I just mean I’m taken by surprise here.”

She didn’t say nothing. I heard a little sound from her voice, but it was not clear to me if she was trying not to cry or laugh.

“I ain’t never felt like I’m feeling right now,” I said.

“Please.”

“Please what?”

“Do not wish for anything.” She let go my face and turned and climbed back up in the wagon, and I think a part of my soul went on up there with her. I unhitched the horse and walked him back to the stable, thinking about what I might be getting myself into. I guess it pleased me to think Eveline would be riding me again once I remembered it. When I thought about it, I felt kind of sorry for thinking of her in that way. On the walk back to the stable, and while I was putting the packhorse back in his stall, the only thing I could see in my mind was her eyes in that frozen moonlight and the sound of her name. Eveline. It rhymed with “fine” and “wine.”

When I got back to the wagon and climbed up inside, they had fed the stove some and the heat hit me like sunlight at first. I took off my coat and settled back a ways from the heat, then eventually I bunched up the blankets and laid down again like I’d been doing. Eveline settled herself right at my feet but she didn’t touch me none. We both just set there looking at each other, wishing Christine would leave off that Dickens fellow. She just kept on a-reading and feeding the stove and outside the wind wouldn’t quit.

Both me and Eveline fell asleep finally, with Christine reading on into David Copperfield’s adulthood.

I waked up the next morning in a pretty foul mood. Bright sunlight broke through the back flap of the wagon, but the wind had not settled yet. It was still cold air flying in and the fire in the stove had banked. I thought I’d go on over to the bathhouse and get cleaned up, but Eveline come over to me, real quiet, like, and started trying to get me to take off my breeches.

“Not now,” I said.

“She is asleep still. We have time,” she whispered.

“I don’t know.”

“Shhhh. This is your Christmas present from me.”

Now my back ached something fierce, and it was Christmas morning, for Lord’s sake. She was pawing at me, and I grabbed her hands. “Listen,” I said. “It’s too late for this now.”

“You will be gone soon. You will be out on that prairie, in this weather. You want to have something fine to remember me.”

“I already got that,” I said.

“I never met a man like you. General Cooney was an animal compared to you, and he was older and a lot sicker.”

“You was with General Cooney?”

“I had to say no to him a hundred times, as sick as he was.”

“I ain’t sick at all.”

“Well, what’s wrong, then?”

Christine snorted in her sleep, but she didn’t move none. I nodded in her direction and said, “She punched me good yesterday. She don’t like us doing this.”

“It is not her business.”

We was both whispering pretty loud. “She thinks you’re my intended. Since we been—”

“It is not her business. Do you remember holding me last night outside in the cold?”

“What if she wakes up?”

“I will handle her.”

“You’ll keep her off of me?”

She wrapped her arms around my middle. “You have nothing to fear from her.”

I’d of rather wrastled a big Indian than Miss Eveline Barkley. Before long she was on top of me again, trying not to make too much noise. The air in the wagon was cold enough that we was chuffing out a lot of steam with every quick breath and we was sure breathing fast. Christine was snoring on the other side of the stove, near the front of the wagon.

Strange as it may seem, that early in the morning I was ready, and I finished a long time before Eveline did. When she commenced to shuddering and thrashing and all, I held her close. I can’t explain it, but I felt as sad as I ever did in my life at that moment. I’d lost a friend or two in the war, and it was sad leaving Theo and then Big Tree. I sometimes felt bad that I didn’t have Morning Breeze with me. But at that moment, with Eveline a hunched down over me, slowly falling back to normal breathing and all, I felt like I might just start crying. I ain’t felt like that since I was a little boy.

“That was a nice gift of a Christmas morning,” I whispered.

Then I noticed she was crying—just a-snuffling in the crook of my neck. “Hey,” I said. “Are you okay?”

She said, “I miss my husband.”

I didn’t know what I should say to that.

“I am not the kind of woman you think I am.”

“I think you’re a fine woman.”

This made her cry even harder. I was afraid she’d wake Christine and she’d know what we was up to. There was something damn sweet about how sad I felt, and it was good enough I didn’t want nothing nor nobody to make me feel no different. Eveline kept a-squeezing me.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. She snuffled her head against me some more. “Should I be sorry?”

“No,” she said out loud. She sat back up a little and looked at me. “You should not be sorry.” Her face was wet, and her hair stuck to it in crazy patterns. Her nose wasn’t too dry, neither, but by God she was a beautiful woman.

She moved off me and got herself proper. She wiped her face clean with a piece of linen. I pulled up my britches and set there looking at her. “What if something happens now,” I said.

“I won’t get pregnant,” she said. “It’s not the right time of month for that.”

“No, I mean what if something happens to me?”

“Don’t say it.”

“Are we intended now?”

It was quiet for a while. Christine stirred a little, and when she opened her eyes, Eveline offered to make some coffee. “You go get some wood for the stove, honey,” she said to me. She was back to her normal self.

I climbed out into the frosty sun. It was early in the morning, and not a lot of folks was up and about. I started pulling small pieces of wood out from under the back side of the wagon. I piled it high in the back just inside the flap. Christine got up and brushed her hair. I noticed while I was placing one handful inside that she and Eveline sprinkled on a little of that toilet water. It hit me that I would soon be back out with the army. I’d have my lodge and a fire in it and maybe I’d be alone and wouldn’t suffer no sadness over a little minute of animal pleasure with a person I come to care for. Maybe you think I was feeling guilty, but I really wasn’t. It ain’t guilt if you don’t think you done nothing wrong, and I wasn’t feeling that way. Hell, I was fairly certain I’d do it again if I was given half the chance. It was a pleasure, after all. It ain’t fair, but what made me sad was affection. I liked Eveline. I couldn’t get her out of my mind, and I known I wasn’t going to be with her much longer and I didn’t have no way of thanking her or Christine for making me feel comfortable and warm during those short days and long nights in the Bozeman winter. Maybe I was grateful for the time of peace and comfort. I never did feel so warm and sheltered. Like sleep was a peaceful retreat from life, instead of a temporary quest for a little rest before you got to open your eyes and look out for trouble again. It was restful as death almost, but it was alive and feeling good, feeling real good. Maybe I was sad that life don’t ever stay that way for long. Those two women give me respite from strife and struggle. And they didn’t even know it.