Fervent Charity (27 page)

Lena swatted at a mosquito and considered. “I’m too late for the train.” She could go into town and stay with Ella or Ragna. They would take her in because they had to, not because they were glad to see her. But they were stingy with food and had no space. She wouldn’t be comfortable there. She didn’t feel like bunking in Joe Gruba’s back room at the depot, either.

“No, go that way.” She pointed right, to the south. “I know a place I can stay right down by the lake.”

He turned Bob to the right, and they followed the trail until they mounted the crest of a slight rise and just ahead of them, Crow Kills appeared like a prairie mirage, blue and glistening.

“If you go in just a little farther, Bob can turn around easy where the grass isn’t so high. Right here, see? I can walk from here.”

“Okay, Ma’am.”

“There won’t be anybody there now but they won’t mind if I bunk in overnight.” Lena thought there might be some coffee, maybe a little flour to stir up a pancake for supper. Or she could go fishing. That would be fun. She could cook out under the stars. Maybe even take a dip in the lake. It had been ages since she’d been for a swim. She’d wash her clothes and wrap up in a blanket till they dried and watch the sun set while her fish cooked, relish her good fortune, thank God for His deliverance, and apologize for being mad at Him. She would go to bed, and in the morning before it got too hot, walk back to Wheat Lake. Joe Gruba would give her a ticket to Charity. She’d be home in time to pick up Gracia and put the supper on for Will.

“Thanks, Rusty. And thank your Pa for me again.” As he disappeared over the rise she called, “I won’t forget to tell my friend to write to you.”

When she turned back to the cabin, the pipe that poked slantwise through its roof coughed out a wisp of smoke. Either she hadn’t noticed it before or someone just lit a fire. Fiddlesticks! Some Indian was squatting there while Jordis and Gustie were gone. Lena almost turned around and headed back to town and Joe Gruba’s back room, but she was so close. She might as well take a look. Maybe whoever it was just stopped to make some coffee and would be on their way. If it was a woman, it might be all right, even if she had to share the cabin for the night. The Indians were hospitable. Nobody ever had a bad thing to say about them in that way. She would at least check it out. If she had to, she could make it back up to Joe’s before dark if she stepped on it.

This place had clearly seen only a small amount of rain. The wagon trail was muddy, and Lena didn’t want to do any more damage to her shoes than she had to. Will had promised her a new pair in a week when he got paid for his well at Ackerman’s. Hank always paid on time. But in the meantime, the ones she had on were still lined with cardboard and she didn’t need to get them wet. She picked her way through the lumpy prairie grass where it was cut down by the side of the trail. The evening sun was bringing out the mosquitoes and she kept her hands waving in front of her so they wouldn’t land. Large green grasshoppers bounced high away from her with each step. One, confused perhaps, landed on her skirt and stuck there. She shook it off. A red winged blackbird a yard or two away, eyed her with malevolence. “What are you looking at,” Lena asked, pulling the hem of her dress out of some prickly weeds. She was either going to do damage to her shoes or her dress. She shook her head, and then got a whiff of something delicious. With all her attention focused on avoiding insects and prickly plants, she hadn’t noticed the steam rising from the black kettle on the tripod out front of the cabin.
Well, it’s more than coffee they’re making.
But Lena was so hungry that she was relieved not to have to wait till she caught a fish and cleaned it to eat.

When she was within a few yards of the cabin, the door opened. Lena emitted a squeak and stopped. Betty Torgerson stood stock still on the porch that fronted the cabin, her eyes the size of pie plates. “Mrs. Kaiser!”

“Betty!”

“What are you doing here?” They spoke in unison. Actually, Lena said, “What in Sam Hill are you doing here?”

Betty opened her mouth but nothing came out, so Lena said, “Well I got blown to Kingdom Come in the twister and now I’m going home. When did you get back from Philadelphia?”

Betty remained speechless. Behind her, Gustie appeared in the doorway. She stepped out beside Betty. A little smile appeared on her face. “Hello, Lena.”

“Gustie! What in Sam Hill? Where’s Mary?”

“She’s here. She’s lying down now.”

“When did you get back? Did she have the baby already? It’s early. Is she all right? She didn’t leave the baby…”

“No, she hasn’t given birth, yet.”

“Then…”

“We never went to Philadelphia.”

“Oh. I thought you were going to Philadelphia.”

“That was the plan.”

“But… I got a letter from you from Philadelphia! So did Alvinia. She showed me a lot of letters from Betty from Philadelphia.”

“Lena, come up here out of the sun and sit down.” Gustie offered her the rocking chair that still held its place where Dorcas used to sit and rock. “You look tired. As a matter of fact, you look absolutely horrible. What happened to you?”

“Well, I’m not sure anymore.” Lena climbed up the steps and sat down gratefully, fanning herself with her hat. “First, there’s dead tigers and dogs all over the place and a woman with orange hair in a tutu, and then there’s this. I’m not sure I’m not dead.”

“You’re not dead, Lena. I’ll get you some water. Supper will be ready before too long.”

Jack Frye woke up, startled out of a deep sleep by something. Where the hell was he? Had he gotten drunk and fallen asleep...no, he hadn’t been drunk for days. Not since he got down to his last two dollars. He ached all over, he was wet. And there was a sharp pain in his left shoulder. He raised himself up and looked. He’d been lying on a rock. He tossed it.

He scratched at his neck, already swollen from something that had bitten him. Running his hand along the back of his neck and then behind his ear, he felt something, a growth which he pulled at, swearing. He looked at it. A fat tick, swollen with Jack Frye’s own blood. Bastards! Little buggers! He smashed it between two rocks. He knew he’d be covered with them, because he now remembered where he was and what he was doing here.

In the night, he had bellied through the sparse brush that sprouted along the bank of Crow Kills. Waiting for daylight, he’d fallen asleep.

Jack Frye had fallen on hard times. Through no fault of his own. He’d been frugal. He’d lived in the bunkhouse summer and winter. He’d fished and caught frogs and cooked them up as often as he could. The frogs were only good in the fall, when they were fat and the legs were good eating then. A little frog, there wasn’t enough meat on the legs to justify the time and energy that went into catching it. He had fished the southern loop of Crow Kills where he could hunker down, not attracting the attention of the Indians, and watch his pole. He fried up his fish outside or sometimes, in the winter, on the stove in the bunker.

He had kept himself in tobacco and whiskey. A man had to have his smokes and a drink now and then. But when he opened his coffee can that he hid under his cot and saw there were only two dollars left he had to have a plan. Oscar Kaiser had told him that the old maid was gone. That meant, there would only be the squaw out at the lake, and maybe not. He hadn’t seen her in town in awhile. Maybe she was gone too. He walked out of Wheat Lake in the middle of the night so he wouldn’t be seen leaving town, and just before dawn he had come to the southern loop where he knew the cottonwoods and underbrush would give him a little cover. From there he walked east till he got in sight of the cabin and then he crawled. The brush wasn’t thick enough to hide him if he didn’t approach it like a weasel. His plan had been simple. Wait and watch till he was sure the cabin was empty and then go in and steal what he could. It wasn’t like they didn’t owe him. They surely did. Maybe there would be money in there. Maybe things he could sell or trade. Blankets, clothes, food. He would take whatever he found. But he’d fallen asleep and slept almost all day. The sun was already behind him. He was only about 15 yards away, looking up at the cabin. He saw people there and he didn’t dare move so he squinted and tried to clear his vision. His mouth was dry, but until they went inside or left, he didn’t even dare elbow his way down to the lake for a drink.

The evening sunshine settled over the land like a benediction. Stories were passed back and forth while Betty stirred the pot over the fire, and Gustie kept the coffee cups filled and supplied Lena with bread and butter to tide her over till the stew was served. When Mary joined them, Lena went over her story again, leaving out, as she had in the first telling, the reason she had gone off by herself to the Sauer house.

Lena didn’t know whether to be more amazed at her own flight in a twisted-airborne house that took her over thirty miles in fifteen minutes or her friends being right here at Crow Kills all winter and nobody finding out about it. Nobody, that is, except Joe Gruba, Clark Llewellyn, Fathers Gregory and Flagstad and, it seemed, every Indian on the reservation. Lena sniffed, “All of these people knew you were out here, all this time?”

“More coffee, Lena?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

All these people had known, had helped them, and had kept quiet. Father Flagstad, whenever he could get away from the mission, brought them loaves of his fine white bread. “He is a good baker,” said Gustie. “You’re eating his bread right now.” Lena had to agree, it was very good bread. One night when Mary had complained of stomach pains, Gustie had ridden for Clark Llewellyn who diagnosed indigestion from eating too many of Minnie Gruba’s homemade sausages. After that he checked on Mary regularly. Father Gregory had been asked to come and had become a weekly visitor, because Mary longed to hear the Mass, and Betty wanted to continue her instruction in Catholicism. Carrie Red Horse (Lena learned about the Dakotah having to change their names and wondered what the fuss was about) had brought Gustie her new winter moccasins and saw Mary suffering with cold and swollen feet. She returned the next day with a pair of fur-lined moccasins for Mary, who almost cried in relief even as she told Lena about it. Little Bull and Jimmy Saul provided them with rabbits and fish and sometimes kindling to start their coal fires. “We’d have been a lot colder and hungrier without them,” Gustie said.

“Well, that’s sure something,” Lena said when the whole story had been told, and still taking in the strangeness of it all, stared across the lake, darkening under the passage of a stray cloud. She brought herself out of her deep mood and turned to Betty. “Your mother is going to have a fit!”

Betty cast her a wry look of agreement.

“What’s in the pot?” Lena, who was getting hungrier by the minute in spite of the bread, got up to join Betty at the tripod.

“Rabbit stew. With turnips and carrots and wild onions.”

Lena peered into the steaming kettle and decided that, although it smelled good, it looked undressed. “No potatoes?”

“We are all out.”

“Do you have eggs?”

“Yes, plenty of those. Joe brought us a pail yesterday.”

“Get me a couple then and some flour.”

Lena demonstrated the fine art of making a decent dumpling. She believed that with Betty getting married soon, she should know, and she wouldn’t learn it from her mother. “You crack your eggs into a bowl, like this. Give them a few beats with a fork till they get cloudy. See? Not foamy. Then you add your flour. I like to add it a little at a time. It’s easier to keep the lumps out that way and also you’ll never add too much if you add it slow like. You can add a little salt, too, if you want. Now here’s where you don’t add the baking powder. (Lena was sure Alvinia added baking powder.) Baking powder makes them all airy. Cakes should be airy. Dumplings should be a little chewy. Otherwise they get soggy and nasty in a stew and ruin the whole thing. Now you add enough flour so it’s sticky, like this, see? It’s thicker than cake batter, and a lot stickier than bread dough. Then you add it to the hot stew a teaspoon at a time. When they rise to the top, they’re done.”