Frustration proved to be a mighty fine incentive, for Clint seemed to do twice the work in half the hours on the Brinkerhoff cabin Thursday morning. It helped that he’d managed to convince Katrine to stay home and make use of Evelyn’s sewing machine. It didn’t help one bit that he’d gotten the walls up far enough to begin setting the holes for the window—windows, he corrected himself with an unsuppressed smile. The thought brought a whole mess of distraction with it.
He stood inside the walls, looking overhead to judge the angle of the sun. One window facing east, one facing west. Only not directly opposite each other, so as not to give a strong wind too much of an invitation in winter. Squinting to measure against his raised hand, he tried to imagine the best height. She was nearly as tall as he.
Hang it, he knew exactly how tall she was. His chest remembered the exact place where her shoulders had fallen against him as they rode from the fire. He knew, without actually remembering if she had ever been that close to him, exactly how she would tuck under his shoulders if he held her. His memory had somehow catalogued the angle of her neck as she looked up at him. It was as fixed in his brain as the sideways glance she gave Lars when she was annoyed with him, or the way her entire face changed whenever she spoke to children.
He pulled a pencil from his pocket, marked a spot on the wall log and went to fetch the ax.
“I hope that’s not for me.” He hadn’t even seen Lije come around the corner of the cabin.
“Very funny.”
Lije walked around the half-built walls, giving a low whistle once he’d made the complete circle. “You’re in the wrong line of work, brother.”
“I thought you were in favor of my being sheriff. Peace and justice, order and such.”
“Oh, I am.” Lije pulled a bandana from his pocket and wiped his brow. The morning had been hot and windless. Clint’s own shirt was already soaked. “Only I never realized how fast you can raise a cabin. I think this is going up even faster than Gideon’s did, and there were a whole mess of folks helping out with that.”
Returning the ax to its place among his other tools, Clint eyed his brother. “What’s it to you? You two newlyweds missing your privacy?” It came out sharper than Lije deserved, but his brother’s overflow of marital happiness last night stuck in Clint’s craw.
Clint deserved every bit of the scowl Lije gave him. “You know me better than that. And I know you better than to wonder just what it is you’re chopping out here.”
This was the hard part of having a minister in the family. Lije was forever tending to the state of souls, and brotherly souls were entirely too close at hand.
“I’m chopping wood.” Clint overemphasized the words, as if explaining it to young Walt rather than a learned older brother. “Takes such a thing to make a cabin.” Trying to outguess Lije’s thinking, Clint added, “And no, I’m not working out my grief over Lars. Although I’m not sure what it’d be to you even if I was.”
Lije always looked after his brothers, but now he wore what Clint privately called his “Pastor Face,” a compassionate look usually accompanied by a firm hand on a shoulder. “You’ve lost a dear friend in the worst possible way. No one would fault you for taking it hard.”
Clint chose not to reply. Not that it stood any chance of ending Lije’s pastoral care, but it was worth a shot.
“Still,” Lije went on, “this doesn’t look like grief to me.”
Clint shifted back on one hip and wiped his chin with the back of his hand. “Really, now.” This felt too much like the time Clint cut down one of Cousin Obadiah’s apple trees and Lije decided he’d been showing the guardian how much he hated him. Truth was, Clint was just tired of getting stung by the bees gathering outside his bedroom window. Lije was always stuffing emotional complications into simple actions. “What all does this look like, other than a man building a cabin? And if I tell you I don’t really want to know, will that change anything?”
“Gideon likes to take things apart when he’s frustrated. You, you like to put things together. Judging by the rate of speed here, I’d say you’ve got a king-size bee in your bonnet.”
“I’m not much for bonnets, if you haven’t noticed.”
Lije narrowed his eye, as if analyzing why he’d chosen to respond about the bonnet rather than deny his irritation. Some days talking to Lije was like poking a path through a field of bear traps. “Bothered by a bonnet, are you?”
“No.” Clint nearly growled the word, feeling like the aforementioned bear who tread wrong and heard snap. He picked up the ax again, hoping to cue Lije into an exit.
Lije simply removed his coat and picked up a hammer. “Need some help?”
Not from you. It comes with too much conversation. Against his better judgment, Clint nodded toward eight shaved planks and a tin of nails. “Think you can square those up?”
“Miss Katrine’s pair of windows?”
Suddenly Clint was sure he didn’t want help, not especially with Katrine’s beloved windows. Still, if he changed his mind, Lije would be on him like flies to honey. Lije was looking at him funny enough as it was. “Yep. But you won’t help me much if you can’t square ’em up.” He hoped Lije would take his scowl as perfectionism.
Lije put the hammer down. “I have many gifts, but despite the example of our Lord, carpentry has never been one of them.”
Clint laughed. It was true. Gideon and he had enjoyed several laughs at Lije’s expense over what the Brave Rock Church would be like if the reverend were required to build it. The structure was coming along nicely, but only because Lije supervised rather than lent a hand. “I think God sets fine stock in men who know their limits.”
He immediately regretted uttering a sentence with the word God in it. There were no short conversations about faith with Lije. “I think God sets fine stock in men who save lives. Still, building Miss Katrine a new cabin doesn’t have to be your penance for not being able to save Lars.”
Clint didn’t look up, but sunk the ax blade into a log to start the notch that settled it into the log underneath. “That’s what you think this is?”
“I think you’re working too hard at something others could help you do. I don’t know why you think you have to do this alone.”
It hadn’t struck Clint until just this moment that he had, indeed, taken it on himself. Only it wasn’t as Lije thought—it wasn’t some self-inflicted punishment. It felt more like the only true part he could play in Katrine’s life. There was no “have to” about it—this was a “want to” kind of thing. “You know I like doing things on my own.” It sounded like a weak excuse even to his own ears.
“No, I don’t think you really do. I’ve seen you at our table, at church, with folks. Gideon may prefer the company of animals, but you deny yourself the company of people. I think you believe you have to do things on your own because—”
Clint cut him off with a mighty swing of the ax—so hard it split the log instead of finishing the wedge cut. “That’s about enough, Lije.”
“I know it’s not—”
“I said leave it.” He kicked the log off the rack that held it in place. “Go tend your flock however you like but I’ll ask you to back down off this right now.”
The look in Lije’s eyes, however, held little yield. A silent standoff began between them, Clint shifting his grip on the ax and Lije holding irritatingly still. Clint hated when Lije got this way—it always made him feel as if his private feelings weren’t all that private.
“Lars’s death is not your fault.” Lije’s words were low and steady.
Clint came dangerously close to shouting “Lars’s death isn’t even real!” Short of his own blood, Lars was about the only man whose safety would drive Clint to the extreme of keeping such truth to himself. Honestly, if Lije stayed one more minute, Clint couldn’t be sure if he would tell his brother, or sock him. Instead, he did the only thing he could think of to do: he turned his back and walked away.
Let Lije think it was guilt that drove him to work so hard. Clint knew what it really was. And he knew why it was so much worse.
* * *
Some June afternoons Katrine found the Oklahoma territories to be as close to Heaven as she could imagine. When the heat let up and the whole prairie turned out in freshly sprung color, Katrine could tell herself the happiest of stories. Almost without effort, she could build a picture in her mind of a big noisy family tending a bursting vegetable garden, of pink roses turning their faces up to fluffy white clouds like the ones that filled Friday’s wide blue sky. Days like today she could almost lay aside the dark images of their burned house, replacing them instead with the vision of a white board cottage with blue calico curtains fluttering in the breeze. Someday—soon, she prayed—Lars would come down out of his hiding place and back to life. They’d put this whole awful episode behind them and make new lives. Big, wide-open-space lives filled with happiness.
Years ago she and Lars had talked about such details, dreaming together about the families they would raise side by side. Of course, back then it had taken much more imagination, and never had she dreamed it would be so far out west as Oklahoma. Still, she and Lars had invented their futures together often—it had served as their favorite diversion on the nights when that future felt far away. Their sharing had offered distraction from hungry nights back east when all they’d had to eat was what she could scrounge together from scraps at the saloon. They had sat on the floor of the tiny, dingy boardinghouse room and taken turns describing their houses, losing themselves in complicated, flowing Danish descriptions, never having to reach for the right English word. They’d shared stories again as they ventured out west, using the same distraction when hunting was poor or Lars’s traps would come up empty. Now, she used the diversion to keep her from loneliness or worry.
“Pjusket blå gardiner,” she wrote in her journal, forced to dream of “ruffled blue curtains” in writing rather than aloud because Lars was hidden away. She went on to describe a table set with sunflowers, piled high with big white pottery bowls bearing blue-striped trims. A bursting table groaning under heaps of food, set to feed a dozen people at least—her and Lars’s great big American families. Giggling, she expanded her story to write of a tall, handsome American cowboy riding in off the range to this well-deserved supper. In the American family of her daydreams, Katrine’s husband was far from Danish in his features; she would cast her imaginary hero as ruddy and dark-haired with a thick stubble and a cowboy swagger to match. And their children—all eight of them—would be a mix of features. Her imaginary sons would have dark, American eyes while her daughters would have big blue Danish eyes to bat at their many beaus.
“Do you write in that?” A different dark-eyed male—eight-year-old Dakota Eaglefeather—stared at her from the edge of the tree’s shade. He nodded toward Katrine’s journal as though writing were a puzzle he could never hope to solve.
“I do, Dakota.” She offered him a smile. As the son of a Cheyenne and a white cavalry officer, Dakota suffered too much scorn from too many of the full-blooded Cheyenne boys. Winona had reason to worry about his future among the tribe of Cheyenne. His lighter skin was no fault of his own, and Katrine could see that Winona did her best to give him confidence, but it was a challenge. It didn’t help that there had been enough people back in Boomer Town ready to look down on his skin for being too dark. Lars had said more than once how glad he was that Brave Rock was not home to men who considered Indians as only savages to be conquered or avoided.
“Your stories?”
“Something like that.” She looked behind the boy but did not see Winona’s dark braids anywhere in the yard. “Is your aunt with Reverend Thornton?”
Dakota nodded.
“I think it’s too nice to stay inside, too, even if I still want to look at books.” She closed her journal and patted the ground next to her. “Shall I tell you a story?”
He smiled and moved to join her under the tree. Even though she guessed he could understand not much more than half of her words, he still loved to hear stories as much as she loved to tell them.
She began to tell the Danish tale of Trillevip, the dwarf who helped a girl asked to spin twenty full spindles in a single night. Trillevip’s price for his help was the hand of the spinning girl in marriage. Dakota knew what spinning was, for she could mime the actions. She was just getting to the part of the story where Trillevip would let the girl out of her bargain if only she could guess his name, when a shadow fell across the boy and herself.
“Trillevip’s boasting reveals his name and he loses his bride.” Clint’s deep voice offered the next point in the plot. “She outsmarts him.”
“Ah, but she is still in a fix,” Katrine went on, “for the young man has chosen to marry her for how fast she spins, not knowing it is the dwarf who has made it happen.” She looked up at Clint. “Did Lars tell you this one?”
The sheriff settled down on his haunches. “Not half as well as you do.”
Katrine felt ill at ease continuing the story with Clint’s dark eyes watching her. Stories of marriage and rescue and clever tricksters seemed somehow odd and wrong to tell in front of him, although she couldn’t really say why.
“So Trillevip tells the maiden he will send three old crones to her wedding banquet, and she must call them mother, aunt and grandmother and be very kind to them.”
“Our chief says we must always be kind to guests,” Dakota offered. He was such a bright, considerate child.
“That’s always true,” Katrine agreed, “but Trillevip had a special reason for asking this of the maiden. The first crone showed up with horrid red eyes that drooped to her chin.” Katrine looked up to see Clint making an awful face, pulling his cheeks into a clumsy droopy shape and crossing his eyes. Dakota erupted in giggles at Clint’s theatrics. “She told the groom her ugly eyes had come from staying up late to spin too much yarn.”
She mimed spinning and yawning, smiling herself when Dakota did the same.
“The next old woman was even uglier with a frightfully large mouth that stretched from ear to ear,” Katrine went on, falling into more laughter as Clint spread his mouth with his fingers in a ridiculous face. “She told the groom her mouth had grown wide from licking her fingers to spin smooth yarn.” Katrine watched as Clint made a grand show of licking his fingers. This was a side of him she had not seen—he was always so serious.
“The third old woman was the ugliest of all. She was bent up and old, barely able to walk even with two crutches to help her.”
Sure enough, Clint leaped to his feet and began lurching around the tree, hunched over and dragging one foot. Dakota laughed so hard he nearly toppled over.
“This time the groom asked the old lady why she walked so, for he assumed all three of these old women were kin to the spinning girl. This old crone told the groom her bent legs were from treading the spinning wheel, and that no one should ever have to work as hard as she did or they would surely end up looking like her.”
“What did the man do then?” Dakota asked.
“He told his new wife he never wanted to have her spin again,” Clint offered, staring a moment too long at Katrine so that her cheeks felt hot, “for he wanted his wife to stay as young and beautiful as she was.” His smile was warm and not at all for Dakota’s amusement.
“And so it was,” Katrine said after a moment, “that the spinning girl knew Trillevip had helped her one last time.”
“Even though the clever little dwarf could not have the pretty young spinning girl as his wife, for now she belonged to another.” Clint’s words held just the slightest tinge of regret, making Katrine wonder who had just told what story to whom. “Trillevip could not have what he wanted.” Katrine held Clint’s pained eyes, even though it seemed unwise to do so, until Dakota’s huff broke the moment.
“That is a silly story,” the boy declared, evidently far more amused by Clint’s antics than Katrine’s storytelling skills.
“The best ones are always silly,” Clint said, putting his hat back on.
Not always, she thought to herself as she watched the lawman walk away. The best ones leave everyone happy when they are done. It always bothered her that the clever, loyal dwarf ended up alone.