10

THE UNION PACIFIC out of Salt Lake pulled into Beech, Montana, at six in the morning; the dining car had not yet opened and Emma Sweringen looked forward to a good cup of coffee which she knew she would not get at the hotel in Beech because the water there smelled of sulfur and so did Beech. Alkali seeped up through the ground there and hardened to a white crust. Nothing grew. The town was nothing. A combination grocery and dry-goods store: canned goods, overalls, house-dresses, gingham stuff. Two saloons did a good business, she imagined, when the ranchers drove in their cattle in the fall; the stockyards huddled down by the stinking creek that ran through them so the cattle could drink. The hills around the place were steep and bare; wild horses wandered up the sides, half-starved. The wind was never still and whined like some living thing.

Nothing of interest in the town except a polished granite slab like a tombstone informing strangers that here Lewis and Clark had passed on their way to the Pacific Coast, guided by the Indian woman Sacajawea who, at this point, recognized the country she had left as a child. Rather touching. Emma Sweringen knew what a pleasure it was to recognize one's own land.

It was not yet quite light; an electric light glowed upstairs in the yellow-painted Union Pacific depot. When she stepped down off the train with several others she heard the putt-putt-putt of the gasoline electric light plant, a strangely lonely sound. The paler light of a kerosene lamp was upstairs in the store. The hotel was dark, but now the train was in, it would light up.

The wind still blew. The G&P waited across the town, the headlight of the locomotive a bright path through the dawn. Switch lights blinked. She felt a sudden affection for the little train, couldn't help but think of it as hers, part of her life anyway, a sense that it played a part in her life, always would.

Yes, now the lamps in the hotel were lighted. Over the entrance, Mrs. Forest had had somebody tack a bleached set of elk antlers. Emma made it a point to be kind to Mrs. Forest who lived there with her little son. God knew what had become of Forest. Mrs. Forest was an apologetic woman with a habit of placing the palm of her right hand against her cheek where there was a frightful scar all the way down to her throat as if somehow she had spilled acid there.

Several well-dressed drummers were sitting at the tables in the small dining room. On each table was a jelly glass of paper flowers to spruce things up. One drummer was so sleepy he held his cup in both his hands. She would know them all before the day was out; they'd be her companions on the G&P.

Mrs. Forest came through from the kitchen and asked how she was.

“Now that's kind of you, Mrs. Forest,” she said. “I'm first-rate and trust you are. So now tell me about that boy of yours.”

Mrs. Forest went right ahead and did. “And he's back in school now and doing so much better. He was sick so much last winter, Mrs. Sweringen. That wind goes right through you.”

“Indeed it does.”

“And so much more active now. Mr. Bradley over at the store, he's so kind to children now his own boys have gone away, Mr. Bradley has taught him how to fish. I think it's good for a boy to fish, don't you, Mrs. Sweringen?”

“Best thing a young man can do. Teaches 'em how to be alone, what it's worth to be alone. You can do a powerful lot of thinking when you're alone, Mrs. Forest.”

Her own thoughts were on the awesome accident of birth. Mrs. Forest's boy, to succeed, must escape his background, a vanished father, some tragedy that had resulted in that ugly scar on Mrs. Forest's throat. He must escape the hotel — what would you call it, a poor little boardinghouse for transients? — and he must show the town of Beech, Montana, a clean pair of heels. With all her heart she hoped that his struggle and adversities would make such a man of him he would be heard of, one day.

Tom-Dick, on the other hand, had only to accept his background, stay right where he was and improve and expand what he already had. Seemed so blamed unfair! Well, she for one was going to keep an eye on young Forest; the time might well come when she could be of service. She would be of service simply because his mother and she had something in common.

Sons.

Simply something in common? If having sons in common wasn't something, she didn't know what was!

“Mrs. Forest,” she said, “you just hang on right here while I open this bag of mine.” She knelt before all those sleepy drummers, opened the bag and began to rummage through it. She was no good at packing bags. At last she brought out the package of Royal Coachmen. “I picked these up for my own little boy. I know he'd be happy to share them with your little boy.”

“Oh, Mrs. Sweringen!” Mrs. Forest cried, and placed the palm of her right hand against that scar. Mrs. Forest refused to accept payment for the coffee, and Emma Sweringen did not press the matter.

A few minutes before seven she walked in the everlasting wind over to the little train, followed by the drummers with their sample cases.

The little train chugged on up towards the Divide where the tunnel was. It slowed and paused at Brewer on the Montana side to take on water; nothing but a wooden water tank like a huge teakettle on stilts and a spout that swung around. The station was a dark-green boxcar relieved of its wheels. The sun was high now and bright on the big log house of the Brewer ranch maybe a quarter of a mile across the valley. The house looked deceptively like a story-and-a-half bungalow until you got close to it. It was said to have sixteen rooms. The Brewers were looked on as special people in that valley; they had come out with a great deal of money from Boston at about the same time she had come out with little more than her sturdy luggage. It was said that Mr. Brewer dressed always in suits, never rode a horse but inspected his holdings from the seat of a buggy behind Orloff trotters. Some said Mrs. Brewer dressed for dinner which everbody else called supper. They were said to use finger bowls. Their barn was quite different from hers, long, low, and constructed of logs whose chinks and bumps would discourage anyone's painting signs there.

However, Mr. Brewer was not the Cattle King of Montana as she was Sheep Queen of Idaho. There were many of him; one of her. She looked with detachment on the house of sixteen rooms and possible finger bowls.

There were three Brewer sons. Only one of them was married.

Now the train passed through the tunnel, not a tunnel long enough for the conductor to bother lighting the lamps overhead, but voices fell silent and mouths did not speak again until you were out the other side into a new state. That brief darkness, like going out of a stuffy house out into the night under the stars, had long been a time of reflection for her when she returned to her valley. Closed in that tunnel perched high between Montana and Idaho, she felt humble, and thanked her stars things had worked out as they had.

And here now in the full light was the state of Idaho, the Land of the Shining Mountains.

She liked talking with men; she was glad of a political discussion with two of the drummers, both unusually well-spoken and both comfortably Republican. She could not discuss politics with Thomas; he remained a stubborn Democrat, States' rights and all that when anyone with any gumption knew power had to be centralized. He favored wild legislation that would help them who would not help themselves — his politics were of the heart, not the head. He favored a low tariff and the first thing you knew you'd be competing with Argentine beef and Australian wool. He favored silver and first thing you knew you'd be off the gold standard and there'd be a panic, the country in ruins, the rabble in the streets. Three times he had voted for William Jennings Bryan, and so had Nora; three times when Bryan had been defeated the two of them had walked around, sad as orphans. Bryan was a charlatan who used that voice of his to move those who wanted to be moved.

Thou shalt not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!

The man must have thought he was God. Beware of such.

“Did you ever think of running for the Legislature?” one of the drummers asked.

“I doubt if the world's quite ready for anything so radical as that,” she said.

“Don't forget there's Jeanette Rankin right over there in Montana and there's that Wyoming woman. Let me tell you, Ma'am, the day is coming when women will be considered almost the equals of men.”

“Now, you certainly don't believe that,” she said, smiling.

“Indeed I do. Mark my words.”

That got her to thinking a little about the Legislature. And after the Legislature?

The train was now running through a right-of-way on her own land. She would wager she was the only woman in the United States who rode on a train that paid only slightly more than she in taxes, a train that ran through her own land for a good twenty minutes. Believe me, it was a good feeling, and old White was a sound man.

And there across the field was her solid sandstone house; they would be watching for her. She wondered what they'd been up to.

And there was her great white barn.

“Is something wrong, Mrs. Sweringen?” the drummer asked.

Not surprising that Tom-Dick and not Thomas met her at the tracks with the buggy. Thomas avoided a situation until the last minute, as if time would alter it and, altered, he could handle it.

Her eyes were still narrow but her anger had begun to subside. The letters that spelled out EVERFRESH PRODUCTS loomed a foot high; the windows of her barn had been cleverly included in the bars of the letter E and every letter was black, black, black. The legend, black against the pure white of the barn was as garish as a circus poster, shocking as a funeral announcement. Well, it would be somebody's funeral.

Tom-Dick took her bag and set it carefully in the rear of the buggy. “I'm glad you're back, Mama.”

“I missed you, Tom-Dick. Where are Beth and your father?”

“They rode up the creek early about some cattle.”

“I'll bet they did,” she said.

She saw it all. With Beth, young Burton had used his looks. With Thomas, young Burton had used his youth. Thomas had a soft spot for the young; it was irritating how he continued to think like a young man and even to look like one. And Thomas would be moved by Burton's wandering to Siberia and joining the circus, seeing in those perversities an appealing rootlessness, a suggestion that Burton had no home, needed friends. Thomas was a great one for taking in strangers, opening his wallet, extending his hand. A wonder it was not more often bitten.

Tom-Dick drove her to the front steps and carried in her bag. No sign of the girls, but she knew small sounds in that house, the careful footfall, creaking floorboard, opening door; they were upstairs, waiting.

She sat at the dining room table piled high with the newspapers that marked her days away — among them the Salt Lake Tribune. The sight of it was depressing, like old letters one has written and never addressed and sent.

After a few minutes Roberta appeared in the hall, having come down on tiptoe. “Oh, Mama!” she cried in a rather small voice. “You're back!” Roberta laughed uneasily, and then she and Maude and Polly — instead of gathering around her for their presents like bum lambs at feeding time — fled before her like quail. She knew they took up positions in the grove of tall trees beside the house where they could be on hand to see or hear what happened next, as interpreted by Roberta, who was old enough to begin to understand situations still mysterious to the younger girls.

She drew one of the newspapers to her and prepared to wait. When at last Thomas and Beth found the courage to face her, there she would be, ready to be faced.

Within the hour the shrill triangle down at the cookhouse sang out for the hired men to come to dinner. Dogs barked; she heard the splash of water tossed out from basins through the bunkhouse door; the men talked and whistled. Knowing she had returned, they would seat themselves at the table and then wait a few minutes for her to join them before they leaned to their food: mutton, boiled beans, boiled beet greens, canned fruit and cake. Hired men are as suspicious as children of altered diets.

Young Burton would be staying at the Shenon House in Salmon; there was no other place for him. Mrs. Cook at the Irvin-ton Rooms no longer took salesmen because they stole soap and towels and sometimes moved furniture. It was up to Thomas to telephone Burton, for it was Thomas who had allowed the desecration of her barn. It must be Thomas who saw that the sign was torn down and Burton himself who did the tearing, whether or not in his fine summer suit. No reason on earth why Thomas or a hired man should repair damage caused by Burton. In years to come Burton might look back and thank her for a lesson taught — that you do not alter other people's property; surely it had occurred to him why her barn was spotless in a valley where every other barn was a crazy quilt of announcements and appeals. She could not believe that Thomas had not warned Burton of her views. For whatever else Burton was, he was not stupid, and meeting him she had made the force of her personality felt.

When Beth and Thomas got back, they would take as long as possible to unsaddle their horses. They would walk slowly to the house, stopping as they often did to look back at their magic mountains — they were both pagans at heart. She had not seen Thomas in church since she married him; how uneasy he looked in his new and only suit; at any sudden noise he would have bolted…

… and when at last there was no earthly reason for them not to come into the house and face her — she who had had no dinner because of them, was tired from her trip, had been left waiting some hours at a table reading stale newspapers — when they walked up the steps to the back porch and in through the kitchen and pantry past the water bucket and dipper into the dining room, there they would find her with her eyes on the paper before her, and she would look up and order Beth upstairs and she would have it out with Thomas then and there!

Time passed.

The younger girls, tired of hiding in the trees, had gone on down to the cookhouse to eat and now chased each other like wild young things through the tall grass in the front yard; Roberta who now fancied herself a young lady, flung herself about like a filly. By and by they wandered in for their presents, accepted them and, without opening them, went upstairs; they knew this was no time for exclamations. The giving of the foolish robe to Beth had been ruined. It would be days, weeks, before the time was ripe even to speak of it. She put it away in the library.

Nor did she like having to speak to Thomas. Usually she did not have to speak. He seldom opposed her so things ran smoothly; after twenty years he understood she was usually right. When she was not, he didn't twit her with the fact. Only when the lightning rod man came around had he adamantly opposed rods on the house in the belief that they attracted rather than tamed lightning.

“Set them up on the barn, if you will,” he told her. “When it storms you can go out there.” So when the electric storms crashed down from Hayden Creek and like monstrous spiders the lightning stalked the valley and the air was sharp with the smell of ozone, she sat it out in the barn — some circumstance for the Sheep Queen of Idaho, but by and by she could even laugh about it.

“How was it out there?” he would ask later on. “Damp?”

Now the dogs were barking. She got up, walked over and looked out through the geraniums on the windowsill. The plants had grown so tall and thick it was hard to see around them. One of them she had nursed for almost twenty years; its growth and the moist green shade it cast were so closely woven into her satisfactory life with Thomas and her children she had begun to look on it as a talisman just as Thomas looked on a small, smooth agate he had picked up and dropped into his pants pocket the first time they had walked together.

There halfway between house and barn Beth and Thomas made over the dogs who leapt, chased their tails and fawned. Beth and Thomas were putting things off. And then their feet were on the steps of the back porch; she sat down quickly and put her eyes to the newspaper; it is wiser to be seen gainfully occupied. Then you have the advantage. He who approaches you is unoccupied and feels not only an intruder but inferior.

“Emma!” Thomas said, as if she were unexpected.

“Mama!” Beth cried.

She looked up. “Beth. Run on upstairs.”

But what was this? For Beth hesitated.

Thomas said, “It's all right Beth. Go on up.” Their eyes met.

Beth left the room.

She waited long enough for Beth to go upstairs, into her room, to close her door and to sit on the edge of her bed with one foot tucked under her. They all did it. Thomas, the girls, even Tom-Dick. When they sat, they tucked one leg and foot under them.

But Thomas spoke first. “Emma. You're wrong in taking a high hand. She's a grown woman.”

“I won't discuss how I rear my daughter. After supper you will telephone young Burton to come tear down that poster.”

Thomas turned to the gunrack. On the top one of the many clocks he attended ticked away. It was five o'clock, four hours too early to wind it but wind it he did. When he had finished he closed the little glass door firmly. “I'll do no such thing, Emma.”

“Won't, won't you? Yes, I can understand why you wouldn't want to. You have never liked to discipline anyone and you have never been able to say no.”

“I am saying no, now.”

“It seems to me that putting up that poster is as much your doing as his. If you won't call him, I'll call him. I can tell you I'll be a good deal harder on him than you would.”

“Why would you want to be hard on him?”

“Because he's an opportunist.”

“Why shouldn't a young man make use of an opportunity?”

“You don't understand the word opportunist. Nothing wrong in a young man's making use of opportunity. But an opportunist makes use of you. Let me tell you, Thomas, I can smell an opportunist. He operates at another's expense.”

“Expense? That sign cost us nothing. And we get something. He's giving us two cases of Everfresh Products.”

“He's doing no such thing. I will not be obligated to him. Will you call him or shall I?” She fanned her broad hands before her as if to rise and move to the telephone in the library.

Thomas spoke quietly. “If I were you, I wouldn't call him. Not until I'd talked to Beth.”

“What does that mean, sir?”

“Beth can tell you better than I.”

She lived to be eighty-five and in all those years maybe a dozen moments in her life stood apart like signposts where the road forked or turned, or stopped, and that trip upstairs was one of them; upstairs past the elk head on the first landing — it struck you if you didn't remember to duck. She recalled her foot on the fourteenth stair that always creaked; she never forgot the wan north light through the window at the top of the stairs; in any season, it prompted thoughts of winter. It was cold upstairs; it was seldom anything else, for even in midsummer, something of winter lingered. She paused beside the window, leaned a moment against the sill for the stairs had tired her. She looked across the valley to Gunsight Peak. Through the deep notch at the summit from which it took its name, God himself might have trained His eye on the wild behavior of human beings. Yes, cold. The stairs and the walls and the floors had absorbed so much of fall and winter and early spring there was little room for the brief summer; the stoves up there were never used because of Thomas's fear of fire. Upstairs had a climate all its own.

An atmosphere of its own, not exactly secrecy. Privacy? When the children were little, she had each evening stepped into each room and sat a few minutes on each bed and said goodnight and kissed them. As they grew older, she respected their closed doors; they might as well have been locked. All the keys, except that to the door of Roberta's room, had disappeared. Roberta locked her door when she wrote in her diary. The diary, too, had a key. It had occurred to Emma that if she truly wanted to know her children, she should look in that diary. More than once she was about to demand to see it but she knew she would be met with such an outburst of temper, with such flashing eyes and an outrage so like her own, before she had learned to control it, that she hesitated. When, a few years before she had sat on the edge of Roberta's bed and had remarked that it was now time to start thinking about St. Margaret's School, Roberta had hurled herself out of bed. “No! I'll throw myself out the window! I won't go there. I'm not as pretty as Beth!” So Roberta went to high school in Salmon and stayed with Nora.

Now it was in Tom-Dick's room alone that she felt welcome. When at night she stepped into his room, he would move over in bed. After she had sat, the first thing she did was lay the palm of her hand on his forehead as if feeling for fever, but really for love. Then Tom-Dick would smile.

“Hello, Mama,” he would say, and then she would hum him a little tune.

“My boy.” Oh, but her heart would swell, and she would thank God for him. She saw him at twenty and thirty and forty, sitting straight in the saddle, lord of all he surveyed. In him, she lived. Because of him she did not regret the passing years — she rejoiced in them. It was he who would stand last at her deathbed, he who would comfort and support the others.

“Want to see my birds' eggs, Mama?” He kept them in a wooden salt-cod box filled with sawdust. He would recite, like a poem:

“Bluebird, robin, snipe.

Blackbird, sage hen, crow.

Magpie, sparrow, grouse.”

And she would finish:

“And that's about all

The eggs in this house.'”

What a crazy pair they were!

Against one wall was his old toy box filled with the fancies of his first eight years, never opened now, but one day he would lift its cover to the wondering eyes of his own little boy. Leaning against the wall in the corner was his BB gun. With it he had learned to shoot, as a man must. As a man must learn that death is present in the Pattern. One of the milestones was that moment she gave him his first rifle, that .22 leaning against the wall, oiled, polished, ready.

Yes, it was cold up there. The younger girls were in Roberta's room, the door closed. Beyond that closed door was a lively silence; they had heard the warning of the fourteenth step of the stairs. Roberta would be leaning forward with a finger vertical against her lips, her eyes bright with mischief.

She passed on down the hall and stood before Beth's door.

And hesitated. The door had become a wall and Beth, on the other side, a stranger. Whether that was because of what she — Emma — had been at twenty-one or because of what Beth had become at twenty-one, she did not know. Anyway.

She knocked.

“Come.”

Beth stood beside the window, looking off down the valley, her profile in the cool, pale light of that awful afternoon as perfect as Liberty's on a silver dollar.

“Beth — your father suggested I speak to you.”

“Yes. He said I would know when it happened. I told him.”

“Told him what?”

“That I'm in love.”

“With that young man?”

“With Ben Burton.”

Love — that emotion stronger than greed. In the name of love a man deserts wife and child. In the name of love a woman goes hungry, will beg in the streets, will walk the streets. Oh, yes. Love. Excuse for violence, selfishness, cruelty. In the name of love, men murder. She spoke carefully, evenly, wishing the words like links in a chain to shackle Beth to her.

“Beth. Do you know what love is?”

“I didn't, until now. All my life I've been told I was beautiful. If I have beauty, I can tell you it's not much to have. It means you can sell me to the highest bidder.”

“What an ugly thing to say.”

“I had to. I was about to be sold. I would never have known what love is. I would never have been allowed to know. And if sometime later on I met somebody and I did know, I couldn't have done anything about it. Because, Mama, I'm a good person. I think I am. I would not hurt anybody.”

“Beth, please.”

“I'll tell you what love is. To want to touch. To be able to touch. All my life.”

Now the Sheep Queen of Idaho reached into myth, legend and experience as into so many bags and brought out a collection of nouns: honor, respect, friendship, worth, security, future, Family, responsibility, education, duty. As if these were blocks she began to build in her mind an argument against what Beth thought was love.

“Now see here, Beth …”

There is a family story, probably Roberta's, that on at least one occasion she locked Beth in her room, but surely she was not so foolish as to have done that.