Buffalo Girls

Dora didn’t confirm it; instead she went upstairs and stayed in her room all day, with only Fred for a companion. She felt that if prizes were to be given for doing everything wrong, she would win them all. The memory of Blue’s face—the white spot at the edge of town—was still fresh. How it haunted her. Why had he stopped and looked that way, unless it was a last look? He never meant to return again; he hadn’t said it, but she knew it. Their love had become too awkward, too much a strain on both of them, now that both were married.

  So why, after all their years, had she waited to take a child from him until their very moment of parting? Of course, maybe she was wrong; maybe she held Ogden’s child—Ogden had vigor enough to make plenty of children. And they had been married two months before Blue came. Everything argued for Ogden—except her heart and her instinct. And through the day, in moments when her spirit lifted a little, when she felt some touch of excitement at the thought that after all her disappointments—there had been two miscarriages, also—she might finally have a child, the thought that it was Blue’s was part of the gladness. He might never come back, might never know about the child, but she would, and maybe, someday, the child would, too. Even if Blue never came back, there might in time be a way for him to know about the child—to know that at last something more than just the fussing had come of all their times together.

  As if the news that a baby would be arriving in six months or so was not enough excitement for one day, Potato Creek Johnny came rushing in with another startling piece of news. Calamity and Bartle had been spotted a few miles north of town; they were said to be taking their time, but would make town by nightfall or sooner unless some accident befell them.

  “Calamity and Bartle?” Dora asked. “What’d they do with Jim?”

  “The news is Jim is dead!” Johnny said.

  “Dead of what? Did he get smallpox?” Dora asked.

  “Well, I’ve heard different stories,” Johnny admitted. “I think a stagecoach fell on him. Another story is that it was suicide.”

  Dora didn’t like getting such news—she fretted most of the afternoon, looking out the window a hundred times or more. But the horizons to the north remained empty, and when someone finally showed up it was Ogden, stomping up the stairs to hug his wife. Ogden’s hugs were perils in themselves; he had little sense of his own strength. More than once Dora feared her ribs might give way, but in her jangled state she was glad to see Ogden—there was so much of him that after a few minutes beside him on the bed, body heat alone relaxed her and calmed her down. The only nuisance was Fred, who was jealous of Ogden. Fred had already pecked the buttons off all Ogden’s shirts—if Ogden forgot him for a moment, to kiss his wife or something, Fred would reach in and crack another button.

  Ogden was an impulsive hugger and kisser; it often prompted Dora to impulsive actions too, or, at the very least, impulsive talk. After returning some of his impulsive kisses it was on the tip of Dora’s tongue to tell him about the baby, but before she could do so she looked out the window once more and spotted a familiar black horse, with a familiar black dog. Limping beside the horse was Bartle Bone, looking very much the tired, foot-weary mountain man.

  “It’s Calamity!” Dora said. “Calamity and Bartle!”

  Calamity had been keeping a lookout for Dora as she rode through Belle Fourche. Dora often ran to meet her when she’d been away awhile.

  “Here she comes,” Bartle said. He had spotted Dora and Doosie the minute they stepped outdoors.

  “My God, who’s that?” he added. A boy so large he had to turn edgewise to get out the door had appeared behind them. He was the largest man Bartle had seen since his last visit with Touches the Sky, the Miniconjou chief. Touches the Sky was taller than the young man on the porch, but not by much, and he was far from being as large in bulk.

  Calamity, too, was startled by the size of the youth. Dora looked tiny beside him. Calamity had been fighting back tears all day at the thought of seeing her friend—now she could stop fighting them back: there was Dora!

  “Get down, get down, you’re here!” Dora said.

  “We ain’t all back. Jim’s dead, we buried him in Dubuque,” Bartle said. He felt it best to deliver sad news promptly.

  On the long ride up the Missouri and the walk south he had suffered more than he had expected to suffer from the absence of his old compañero of the trails. They slid past the banks where he had so often camped with Jim; then, walking south over the gray plains, he was constantly afflicted by memories of Jim Ragg—at times he almost felt he was traveling with a ghost, so strongly did Jim Ragg still haunt the Missouri country.

  Calamity had got tired of hearing about it; she had liked Jim too, but enough was enough, and Bartle was as voluble as ever—just ten times as lugubrious. They took to drinking at opposite ends of the boat; once they left the boat, Calamity soon had to insist on a separate camp: she didn’t want to spend any more evenings listening to Bartle cough up memories. She concentrated on getting home to Dora. Dora had told her she could have her own room.

  The big boy looked shy. He stood well back from the hugging, which went on a considerable time. But he kept his eye on Dora.

  “What did happen to old Jim?” Potato Creek Johnny asked, when everyone was hugged out. He was shocked at the appearance of Calamity and Bartle; they looked gaunted by travel, or drink, or both. He himself had walked out of Miles City with them only a few months before; he didn’t feel any the worse for having lived a few months, but both Calamity and Bartle looked as if they had aged several years—and neither of them had looked any too young to begin with.

  Ogden, too, was a little taken aback by the appearance of the odd-looking woman and the rough old mountain man. He had heard Dora and Doosie talk about them and knew they were old friends of both. He had pictured them in his mind as fine, attractive people—old-timers, adventurers. But these two old people just looked like wrecks; they looked dirty, wobbly, and sad. He wondered if some terrible massacre had occurred of which they were the only survivors.

  “What did happen to old Jim?” Johnny repeated. Both Bartle and Calamity had ignored his first inquiry.

  Suddenly Bartle slammed him in the face with his fist, sending him reeling backward, though more from surprise than hurt.

  “Damn you, I’ll strangle you if you call him old again,” Bartle said, fiercely angry for a moment.

  Johnny quickly apologized. “It just slipped out. I’m sorry,” he said. “But what did happen to him? We heard a stagecoach fell on him.”

  Neither Bartle nor Calamity really wanted to reveal the unflattering facts, but Calamity finally decided she might as well get it over with.

  “A loco in Chicago stabbed him with a pocketknife,” she said.

  “A pocketknife?” Johnny said in disbelief.

  “A pocketknife can kill you if it hits just the right spot,” Bartle said, embarrassed for Jim.

  Dora, realizing Ogden had been left out; led Calamity over to him.

  “Martha, this is Ogden,” she said. “He’s my husband.”

  To Calamity the news was as unexpected as a slap, or more so. Ogden looked like a decent boy, but it was still a slap of surprise. After a moment she offered her hand but found she had to struggle to say anything.

  “Howdy, I guess for once I’m tongue-tied,” she said. “Chalk it up to the long trip.”

  6

  A MONTH OR SO LATER, OGDEN NOTICED THAT HIS WIFE’S shape seemed to be changing. The change surprised him, but he didn’t feel he should be asking questions. He knew very little about women—just what he could deduce from being with Dora; in all likelihood their shapes were supposed to change from time to time.

  Dora, still mulling over her dilemma, decided to wait until Ogden asked before discussing the baby. But he was so slow to ask that it provoked her. Ogden’s deference was beginning to irritate her almost as much as Blue’s cheekiness had; with men, if it wasn’t one thing it was another. One morning in a fit of irritation she blurted it out.
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  “Can’t you tell I look different?” she exclaimed. “Don’t it interest you?”

  “Your face looks the same,” Ogden said in his own defense.

  “It don’t, my eyes are puffy,” Dora said. “The reason I look this way is because I’m going to have a baby.”

  Ogden received the news calmly; for a time he didn’t connect it with anything he might have done. For some reason Dora got even more provoked with him and flounced off downstairs. She had been provoked with him several times lately; each time he was startled, but seldom said anything. It made him sad that he didn’t know how to behave. Usually he would conclude that each new failure meant he would have to go back to the lonely life, but before he could get himself moving, Dora would show up, in an improved mood, acting as if nothing had happened.

  Only later in the day, thinking a little more carefully about what he knew or had heard about the genesis of babies, did it come to him that this baby could be the result of something he had done.

  “Will I be the Pa of the baby?” he asked tentatively that night in bed.

  Though in general Dora seemed to be looking forward to the baby, she evidently had not been looking forward to his asking such a question just at that moment.

  Sometimes, even when they were in bed together, Dora seemed to live distantly from him. Ogden had no grasp of why that should be—he never wanted to live distantly from Dora, in his mind or anywhere else. One moment they would be holding hands; Dora would be right with him; then, because of some word, she seemed to move herself away, even if physically she didn’t stir or flounce out as she did when provoked. On the whole Ogden preferred it when she flounced out. He would be left alone to wonder what he had done wrong; but when Dora went away without actually leaving, he felt even worse.

  This time, a long silence grew between them; Ogden wished fervently that he had had the good sense to keep his mouth shut and just wait to be instructed about the baby.

  Dora didn’t look angry, though—she just sat on the bed and looked out the window. It was a cold winter night, but Dora liked the window open. He heard the creak of a wagon down the street. Ogden realized she might not even be thinking about him, or about the baby, either. She might be thinking about old times. Since Calamity had returned, the two of them often sat together for hours; it was old times they mostly seemed to talk about. Ogden relaxed a little, and yet he couldn’t completely banish worry. Dora kept looking out the window into the deep night. Her face seemed fearful; it seemed sad too—and Ogden couldn’t stand for his wife to be sad or afraid. It made him feel he wasn’t doing his part as a husband. It had been complicated enough even before he knew Dora meant to have a baby, but now that she did mean to have one—and he knew she did mean to; he could put his hand on her swelling belly and feel, now and then, a slight movement; Dora called it a kick but Ogden felt as if a very small fish, a mere minnow, had brushed against his hand—it seemed things were even more complicated. He wondered why people bothered to make babies, if babies only complicated their lives so. He meant to try to talk Dora out of making any more, since it made her more easily provoked, or else fearful and sad.

  Dora had been prepared for Ogden’s questions; she could see his curiosity rising daily. She had discussed it with Calamity. Calamity had no actual experience of babies, but that didn’t mean she was free of opinion. Her opinion was that Blue was too unreliable to involve in fatherhood; Calamity liked Ogden, though the way she expressed her liking might have seemed disparaging to some.

  “He’s a whopping piece of dough,” Calamity said. “But he ain’t set yet. You can roll him into any kind of biscuit you want—only do it quick. You can never tell when a boy like that will set.”

  Dora didn’t regard it as particularly good advice, but she was grateful to Calamity anyway. Whether she knew what she was talking about or not, she was someone to share confidences with. When Calamity had first returned, her whole face had been bloodshot from drink; she rambled and got vomiting-sick almost every day. But with steady food and no chores and a clean room to stay in, she had improved somewhat, and was beginning to recover some of her ginger. The two of them, with Ogden, went on picnics, and all had fun. Once on a zero day she and Calamity had even tried on ice skates—the new fad in Belle Fourche—but this venture frightened Ogden nearly out of his wits. Neither woman had any caution—they skittered right to the middle of the river, where the ice was crackly. Of course, Ogden being so large himself, it would have been a chancy rescue, had either of them fallen through.

  But they hadn’t fallen through, and she hadn’t decided what to tell Ogden about the baby, either. Doosie, her other oracle of wisdom, was of the opinion that it didn’t matter much. Babies came, and then you dealt with them; on the whole, men weren’t much help, whether they had happened to father the baby or not.

  “Babies got to take what they find,” Doosie said. “They can’t be worrying about this Pa and that Pa. Let ’em have two Pas, if you can find two. It ain’t gonna hurt nothing.”

  “Oh, blow your nose!” Dora said. “Everybody tells me something different. I should have stayed single. It’s how I’ve lived my life.”

  Then she burst into tears.

  Sitting on the bed with Ogden, she felt no impulse to tears. She just felt stuck in a crack, the crack between past and present. When she looked out the window she might become sad in reverie, remembering all the best parts of the past; she might become fearful that someday the window would close, and with it her passage to that part of her life. But there was no denying that on the other side of the crack a very large boy was waiting in her bed. Ogden was there; she had firmly and immediately made him her own; she might as well answer the question.

  “Ogden, you’ll be its Pa,” Dora said.

  7

  BARTLE BONE HAD BEEN A CHEERFUL MAN ALL HIS LIFE; HE had never really been able to understand Jim Ragg’s melancholy. What was there to be so low about? With the rising of the sun in the cool morning, a fresh day presented itself: to Bartle a fresh day was a gift that might produce any manner of wonders. He and Jim could encounter a great animal—an old silvertip, for example. They might run into ten or fifteen young Sioux out looking for sport, in which case there could be a fight to the death, or a race for their lives. They might be challenged by a blizzard or a flood. They might stumble into some town and discover a pretty woman with a tooth for pleasure; they might spot some gold in the bottom of a creek.

  Even if no adventure presented itself, they always had their minds. They could just sit around and talk about matters practical or impractical; or at least they could sit around and he could talk: Jim had rarely delivered himself of the kind of speculative remarks that Bartle favored. Calamity occasionally liked to speculate, but Jim Ragg just liked to travel. On the whole, even when they had come out on the short end of a fight, Bartle had seldom found cause to take the dark view of life. Even at its worst it was something interesting to wake up to.

  The melancholy that he had felt since Jim’s death was thus an unfamiliar and a distressing thing. Every day he felt sure he’d wake up and recover his old lift. But after a month and a half in Belle Fourche doing nothing, he knew he might as well face the fact that his old lift was just gone. He would walk outside, relieve himself in the snow, and not be able to think of another thing to do. Belle Fourche was a dull town; there was not a person in it who excited his curiosity. But as Calamity often pointed out, he wasn’t chained to Belle Fourche. The whole west lay around him under its great ring of sky. He could go anywhere, if he could just summon some of his old interest in going. But a lack of interest in going—or in staying, either—was at the heart of his problem. In the meantime, as Calamity plainly let him know, he had become poor company.

  “Jim’s the one who died,” she pointed out one morning. She had persuaded him to load his gun and go hunting with her. A miner who had got drunk in Dora’s saloon the night before claimed to have seen three moose between Deadwood and Belle Fourche. No one gave th
e claim much credit except Doosie—she always got excited at the prospect of a different animal to cook.

  “Go kill me one!” Doosie commanded. “And don’t forget to take the sweetbreads.”

  It was a bitter day, the skies like slate. Bartle had even lost his old indifference to cold; they had marched five miles before he even stopped shivering. Cold didn’t bother Calamity—she had a bottle in her pocket, but was not nipping much.

  They hunted all day, making a wide semicircle, first west, then south, then east of Belle Fourche. They saw no moose—they also saw no elk, no antelope, no deer. By nightfall they reckoned themselves to be ten miles southeast of town and too tired to make it back. Calamity was so tired she even considered throwing away her rifle.

  After an hour spent attempting to arrange a decent camp, they were even more tired, as well as hungry and discouraged. The camp was a shambles, the arrangements windy, the wood supply low. Jim Ragg had always made the camps, arranged the fires, seen to the wood, and secured windbreaks when possible; he was meticulous about his camps. True, on their walk down from the Missouri, he, Bartle, and Calamity had made several inadequate camps but then it had been fall, and not so cold.

  “We’ll be lucky not to freeze tonight,” Calamity said. “This fire won’t last till morning. It’s been a year since I slept out in weather this bad.”

  “Hug your dog,” Bartle suggested. Cody had supplied them with a skinny grouse for supper.

  They didn’t freeze, though Bartle had a crust of ice on his beard when morning came. Calamity had to flounder around for an hour to gather enough firewood to thaw them out. Even the sun was the color of ice; the wind had picked up, meaning worse might come. They had not meant to camp and had brought no coffee.

  Once Bartle would have considered such circumstances of no consequence at all; now he found them painful, unrelieved by any element of excitement. He and Calamity struggled upwind for four hours before finally reaching town. Doosie greeted them critically; she had expected them to bring meat, and instead they had arrived shivering and starving.