Sisters (2 page)

The girl nodded, and they
were both quiet a moment. Then the girl spoke. “Will there be
Indians in Cheyenne, ma’am?” She half-whispered the
question, contradicting the repugnance in her voice by the avid way
she leaned forward for an answer.

“Connie, my
grandmother was Indian. Shoshone Indian.”

The girl’s face
reddened. Her mouth dropped as though Sophie had announced she were a
native of some exotic isle or distant planet. “Oh, ma’am,
I had no idea…”

Sophie turned away sharply,
cutting off the girl’s explanation. She didn’t want to
hear it. It would only annoy her further. And being angry with Connie
served no good purpose. The girl was barely seventeen, after all.
She’d seen so little of the world, why should it be a surprise
if her ideas seemed to come from dime novels? [Editor’s note:
Like this one?]

Sophie put the girl’s
words out of her mind, thinking instead of her Indian grandmother.
Deer Woman, wife of Joe, who lay ill now in Cheyenne. Deer Woman,
remembered looking up with large eyes, her dark hair falling on each
side of her face. She’d become Joe’s woman when she was
young and he was young, a fur trapper in the mountains. And for the
rest of her days Deer Woman had cared for Joe, had shared his bed,
borne his child, made his home. “She was the best woman a man
coulda found anywhere,” Joe had said. Sophie remembered
precisely the moment he’d said it. He’d been astride a
horse, ready to ride back to Fort Martin from Cheyenne, where he’d
come to see Sophie as she was traveling through. “They used to
call me ‘squaw man,’ behind my back,” Joe said,
“but I never paid no heed. She was the best woman a man coulda
found anywhere.”

The memory troubled
slightly. Surely he hadn’t thought he needed to defend her
grandmother to her. No, surely not. He hadn’t meant that. She
dismissed the idea and focused on Deer Woman again. If she were alive
now, she’d be nursing Joe, offering one of her healing plants
or a magic potion. And if it were the season, she’d sit by his
bed in the evening and tell him stories. Sophie remembered the
stories, how compelling they had been when she was small, and then
how frustrating when she had grown older. They didn’t abide by
the logic she had learned from her schoolbooks. “But, Grandma,
why did Wolf do that?” she would demand. “And what was
Coyote doing there?”

Suddenly she recalled the
dream, and she saw the beast frozen in the moment she had discovered
him. Carcajou, yes, she remembered now. Carcajou, who’d ravaged
Joe’s traplines. Deer Woman called him Bear-Devil, and whenever
he appeared in her stories, it wasn’t very long before he had
blood dripping from his claws.

And then the frozen
picture from the nightmare widened. She saw the body, Helen’s
body. And then the picture came to life, the beast began to move, and
the dream came back, all of it, flooding over her in a fresh rush of
memory. Once again she heard the guttural sounds and saw the watering
fangs. The beast’s growl shot up to a scream--and an
involuntary shudder ran through her.

The Cheyenne depot was a
jumble of cartons and barrels and people milling about. As the train
pulled in, Sophie’s eye was caught by a group of boys climbing
on a tall stack of boxes near the platform’s edge. Scrambling
upward, fighting for the top position until the boxes threatened to
topple, the boys ignored a young woman who was holding a baby and
scolding them. A uniformed official joined the young woman, shook his
finger at the boys--and then the scene was lost to Sophie as two
workmen, pushing and sweating, blocked off her view with a layered
cart heavy with flour sacks. People moved around the cart, scanning
the faces in the train windows, some seeming to look for relatives or
friends, others just curious to see who might be arriving in
Cheyenne. A bleary-eyed old woman carrying a wide wicker basket
heaped with fruit cut through the crowd, sending up cries of “Apples!
Apples!”

As the center of the crowd
shifted to where most passengers would disembark, Sophie saw James
Stevenson come out of the Pacific Hotel. Dressed in dark suit and
derby, he had above average height, lean, yet powerfully
broad-shouldered. His high forehead and thick brown hair were hidden
by his hat, but she could see the finely drawn features, saved from
too much regularity by a nose bent and flattened at the bridge as
though it had once been broken.

Walking across the platform
toward her car, he started to go around a small group standing with
traps and carryalls, but at his approach, they moved aside. A
bonneted housewife nudged her neighbor and whispered behind her hand
as she watched James pass. What was she saying? Sophie wondered.
Perhaps just his name. Most people in the territory would have heard
of him. Or was she whispering that he was Scottish and grandson to a
baronet? James didn’t talk about his background, which no doubt
meant someone was always just discovering it.

As Sophie watched him
approach, she was suddenly struck that he carried himself differently
than she remembered. Before, he had carried himself with a kind of…
careless ease. But now there was an inwardness about him; what was
once nonchalance had edged over into brooding disregard. And as he
neared her car, she noticed dark circles under his eyes.

Well, it was hardly fair to
judge him from a train window, hardly fair of her to judge anyone,
considering the demons she had been letting romp through her mind.
She let herself out onto the private car’s rear platform,
waited while a conductor laid a bridge to the station platform, then
reached for James’ hand and let him help her across.

“How was your
journey?” he asked. There was the merest trace of a burr in his
words.

“It was long. How is
Joe?”

“Your grandfather is
failing, Sophie. Every day, he’s a little worse. It’s
good you could come.”

His responses were
meticulously polite. He leaned forward at just the right angle to
hear her--and to let her hear him above the hiss and clank of the
train and the depot confusion. But when he looked at her, he focused
slowly, as if reluctant to pull away from whatever scene was playing
out in his mind.

“The children are
well?” she asked.

As he nodded in answer, it
struck her that his melancholy distraction scarcely lessened his
attractiveness. He had a quality she had sensed in other rich and
powerful men, an attitude hinting at latent energy and vitality. She
wasn’t certain if it caused success or came from it, but Philip
Dymond had also had it, this aura, this almost perceptible glow, and
neither weariness nor distraction could very much diminish it.

“Mrs. Dymond! Mrs.
Dymond!”

She turned, her thoughts
interrupted, and saw a young man hurrying through the crowd, waving
at her with a notebook in her hand.

“Mrs. Dymond, I’m
from the Clarion. I’d like to talk to you.”

“She doesn’t
have time now,” James said, motioning him away. “No
reason you should talk to him,” he added when he caught
Sophie’s questioning glance.

“But I don’t
mind.” She put a mollifying hand on James’s arm. “Why
don’t you come by tomorrow morning,” she said to the
reporter. “Come at ten a.m. and we can talk about an
interview.”

“Not until tomorrow!
Wouldn’t you have time this evening?”

Now she saw the arrogance
in the young man’s bearing. He had a loose-jointed way of
holding himself and letting his head rock back so that he looked at
her from beneath half-lowered lids. There was an insinuating tone in
his voice, and it occurred to Sophie she should have listened to
James. “No,” she said, “particularly not for a
paper I’ve never heard of.” She wanted to put him in his
place, but after the words were out, she thought they were a little
brutal. “Do you have a copy I could look at before tomorrow?”
she asked, trying to be kind.

He handed her a folded
newspaper. “You know, I interviewed Lillie Langtry when she was
here.”

This information was
clearly meant to bowl her over, and she realized she should have
known better than to be merciful. “The question isn’t
whom you have interviewed, but whether or not you will be
interviewing me.” Before he had time to reply, she closed off
the conversation. “I’ll expect you at the Bellavance
house on Ferguson Street at ten a.m. tomorrow. We’ll discuss it
then.”

“You’ll be
staying at our house, Sophie,” James interjected.

“At the Stevenson
house on Ferguson Street, then. Ten o’clock.” She hid her
surprise. Her grandfather Joe was at Paul Bellavance’s, and she
had assumed she would be staying there with him.

James explained as soon as
the reporter left. “There’s a guest suite for you at our
house, Sophie, and there’ll be room for your maid. The
Bellavance house would be very crowded. Paul has the larger of the
guest rooms fitted out for Joe, and the nurses are in the smaller
room.”

She spent a few minutes
making sure Connie would see to all the details of the baggage; then
she took Tom from her, tucked him under her arm, and walked with
James to his carriage, a drop-front phaeton, deep green with a thin
yellow stripe. He helped her up, and as she was waiting for him to
walk around and get in himself, she happened to glance back at the
depot. Through the crowd she could see the Clarion reporter peering
into the window of her railway car, taking notes. She pointed him out
to James.

“I don’t know
why you bother to talk to him,” James said, flicking the buggy
whip so the matched bays headed briskly up Hill Street.

“I suppose I feel an
obligation. My publications have interviews in every issue. The
reporters who work for me are constantly asking people to talk to
them. It seems only fair that I at least consider it when someone
asks me for an interview.” After a moment she added, “Besides,
it’s usually the papers that don’t talk to me that write
the most unpleasant stories.”

He gave a small, sardonic
smile. “Yes, I’ve had that problem.”

“Really? How?”

“Not personally, but
you’ve read what the Eastern press has to say about the big
cattle operations out here. ‘Cattle barons,’ they call
us. Or sometimes ‘monopolists.’ And they never pass up a
chance to call us thieves. Just let President Cleveland take some
action against us, and the cheers are deafening. But do you think
they ever point out what we’ve accomplished? Look up ahead.
That’s an opera house, Sophie, an opera house that seats a
thousand people. That’s what Cheyenne is like now. That’s
what we’ve done. Made a civilization out here on this land no
one wanted, that no one thought was worth anything.”

As she looked to where he
pointed, she fit his words to what she remembered: hundreds,
thousands of emigrants passing through Wyoming on their way to
California and Oregon. Always they were headed someplace more
fertile, someplace where the brooks ran and the trees blossomed. This
elegant opera house of brick and stone represented a new day, the
recent awareness of wealth to be gained on high prairies. There were
few trees, but there was acre after acre of needle grass and
bluestem, of buffalo grass and gramma--and it was free. Cattle turned
loose on the prairies would feed on the grasses, fatten, and calve,
returning huge profits to their owners. And so the opera house was
possible, and all the other signs of prosperity.

While Cheyenne was not yet
the “Athens of the West,” as an overenthusiastic writer
for Dymond’s Illustrated News had recently described it, it was
rich now, and a certain sophistication balanced its brawling
exuberance. A showy example was pulled up alongside the opera house,
a shiny black landau, its soft leather calash tops let down for the
pleasant weather. As Sophie watched, two young women paused to admire
the fashionable carriage. Dressed in pastels, they inclined their
heads together, then linked arms and moved on. Ostensibly ignoring a
bearded expressman, who was boldly watching them from his trim
vehicle, they stopped a little farther down the street to look in a
shop window. Then, with just the slightest glance behind, they
disappeared into a milliner’s.

James slowed the phaeton.
There was confusion in the street ahead, where a long train of
freight wagons had got into difficulty turning a corner. Onlookers
had collected on the wooden sidewalks and spilled over into the
street. Children ran underfoot, adding to the dust in the air, and
somewhere a dog barked indignantly.

“Hey, Milt, ya can’t
turn a corner, how ya expect to get to Fort Laramie?” an army
officer shouted to the train’s skinner.

“Here’s the
problem,” someone else yelled. “This un hasn’t
stepped the chain!”

“Ah, ‘at’s
‘at god-danged new un,” the skinner yelled back.
“Stupidest god-danged mule I ever saw.”

James threaded his way
through the confusion, continuing up Hill Street. Preoccupied again,
he seemed deaf to the noise, unaware of the dust and steamy animal
smells. Sophie tried ignoring the thick, foul air, but finally gave
up and put a gloved hand to her face. Tom sneezed, gave his head an
ear-flapping shake, and, curiosity undiminished, continued his survey
of the passing scene.

As James turned the
carriage left onto Eighteenth Street, a cowboy staggered out of a
brick building near the corner. He balanced precariously on the
wooden curb, then stumbled into the street. Off-balance now, flailing
the air to stay upright, he took a few steps and fell--right into the
path of the carriage. James reacted quickly, bringing the bays to a
halt just short of the man. Then he started around to the left. But
the cowboy looked up from where he was sprawled in the street, and
with a drunken grin of recognition, scrambled awkwardly up from the
dust and moved to block the phaeton’s path.