Reason To Believe (43 page)

Clara touched his cheek with the back of her hand as though she were testing for fever. "Anna, would you bring Dad some orange juice? I think there was some over there."

"And coffee," he said between sips of soup.

"You need the juice. You look..." She studied his eyes. "What happened out there, Ben?"

"I'm not sure. Probably no big deal. I need to do some thinkin' about it and..." And talk it over with the one man who could help him sort it all out. "You saw my father?"

"We had a good talk," she told him, but clearly she wasn't sure how much more she ought to say. "He asked me to tell you that he..."

"He what?"

"He said to tell you that he wants to be with the people at Wounded Knee. I'm sure he means the riders, when we get there." Nothing more, although the apprehension in her eyes and her careful tone handed him all her misgivings on a guileless plate. "Crazy as it sounds, I think he wants us to go and get him or something."

He tore the thick square of fry bread in half. "You don't think he wants to be with the people who are waiting there for us? Who have been there for the last hundred years?"

She glanced away. "I
'm
sure he means he wants to be with us, after we arrive."

"How bad off is he?"

"He doesn't think..." She sighed heavily. "He feels that if he went into the hospital in Sioux Falls, he wouldn't come out."

"Alive," he added pointedly. "And he wants to go to Wounded Knee."

"That's what he asked me to tell—" she smiled gently, laying her hand on his coat sleeve "—his son. He's counting on you."

"To take him to a damn cemetery when I should be—" He tore a savage bite off the fry bread and chewed deliberately.
"His son
ought to go up there tonight and haul that old man's scrawny ass to a decent hospital, and the hell with all this—"

"I'll go with you if that's what you think you ought to do."

He stared at the broken bread. "I could make him go. I could just say, hell, he's out of his mind half the time anyway, he can't decide for himself." His gaze met hers, looking for his wife's sensible judgment, her reassurance. "I'm the damn pipe keeper now, right? I'm the so-called holy man. He's just..."

"He's your father." Her grip tightened on his arm. "Ben, you're shivering."

"I don't know what I'm doin' freezin' my ass off out here in this godforsaken..."

"Yes, you do," she said as Anna delivered the orange juice to her mother, as though Ben were, like his father, a patient. "Drink this. We need to get you into some warm water and soak the chill out of you."

"He's gonna die soon, Clara." She gave him that this-is-between-us grimace, but he ignored it. Anna's and Billie's chatter was drifting down the line of chairs as they served coffee to some of the other adults, and Ben needed to know what his wife had seen. "Isn't he?"

"After this is all over, maybe we can talk him into going into the hospital."

"He's always been real stubborn about going to the doctor, but he's always taken pretty good care of himself. Never drank or... Course, he uses the pipe, but no cigarettes. He hardly ever got sick." Saying it and believing it were two different things, but now the cold comprehension of his father's mortality shook him. "He just got old."

"And you've got a bad case of the chills," she said. "Stop talking and finish your food so I can get you into some nice warm water."

"You tryin' to mother me, woman?" He smiled and pushed his chair away from the table. "I really do like the sound of that last part."

Clara led the way out the side door, across a little alleyway, and through a waist-high wooden yard gate. Snowflakes danced in the circle of light cast by the lamp above the front porch. She took a key from her pocket and unlocked the door.

"Mrs. Whipple is a teacher at the school here," she explained as she flipped up the wall switch in the front room. "She's over at the community center, helping in the kitchen, but she offered anyone who needed it the use of her bathroom." She shrugged her jacket off, took his coat, and laid them both across the sofa, next to a pile of clothes she'd put there in advance. "I took her right up on it, brought our clothes over and got Anna taken care of. But I was waiting for you. Anna kept saying she wasn't worried at all, and I was sure you knew what you were doing, but I wanted to wait."

"Were you worried about me anyway?" He sat down to pull off his boots. "Annie said you were, but you know Annie. She jumps to conclusions." His smile invited her to try, just
try
to convince him otherwise.

"I was, a little." Her smile confessed to more than a little. She shrugged prettily. "Old habit, I guess. Shall I draw your bath, sir?"

"Takin' up a new hobby? You can draw me right in the bath if you want." Grinning, he followed her down the hall. "Full frontal nudity, exclusively for you, Clara-bow."

She'd already started running the water, and he wasn't sure she'd heard him until she looked up and he saw that coy twinkle in her eye. He smiled and watched her watch him unbutton his shirt. He peeled the second layer from the bottom up, unconsciously airing up his chest as he did so, but when he pulled the turtleneck over his head, she was adjusting the faucet with one hand and catching a handful of water with the other, missing his display. "There, that feels about right. I'm going in after you this time. We dug out a change of clothes for you, too. You need—"

Stripped down to his jeans, he was leaning back against the sink, balancing ankle over knee as he peeled off a sock. His toes were flame red.

With a murmur of sympathy Clara slid from the side of the tub to her knees and enclosed his toes between her warm, wet hands. She lifted her chin. "Are they frostbitten?"

He was surprised, moved by her tender gesture, shaken partly by her expression of concern, mostly by his unbidden fancy that an angel had suddenly floated down and landed at his feet. "No," he croaked. His throat had gone dry, and he had to swallow before he could say, "I think the red's actually a good sign."

"Then your hands and face must be in good shape, too."

He nodded as he reached for her shoulders and drew her to her feet, setting his own on the floor, pulling her into his arms for the kiss he'd craved since the moment he'd come in out of the cold. The deep, delicious kiss that would truly chase the chill away. His tongue darted into her mouth, searching for warmth and welcome. She greeted him with featherlight touches, tongue to tongue, her body melting against his. She needed to hold him in her arms and know for certain that he was safe and whole. And she was as eager for the kiss as he was.

The power and the joy of it unsettled them both. They drew back from it slowly, lips still parted, savoring the titillation and wordlessly seeking assurances, each from the other's eyes.

"I think I stopped shivering," he said.

"I think I'm starting to." Tenderly she touched his cheek. "You saved that boy's life, Ben."

"Kid gets lost, you go find him. Couldn't leave him out there. Ordinarily I'd say it was just a lucky find." His hands opened, then closed again on her shoulders as a veil of utter amazement settled over him. "But I have to say, it feels like more than luck."

"It was
you,"
she insisted. "Your quick thinking, your cool head, and your willingness. Not everyone would take that risk. You've always had so much confidence in a crisis. More than I ever did. I'm just sort of a plodder."

"A plodder?"

"Day-to-day kind of dependable." As if to prove her point, she turned back to her task, tested the temperature, then added more hot water. "I never do anything remarkable. Neither remarkably bad nor remarkably good. I just plod along."

"It never looked like plodding to me. I mean, you know where you're goin', you take your time, you get there, get it done, get it done right." He unzipped his pants. "Which I personally think is pretty remarkable."

"No, you don't. It's dull and predictable, and you are neither of those things."

"Neither was Billy the Kid, but what did he ever accomplish?"

"I repeat, you saved a boy's life today." She smiled as he dropped his jeans atop the pile he was building on the toilet lid. "And you really do look great in silk underwear."

"Yeah, well, underneath, it's just the same ol' predictable—" he grinned as he gave the elastic waistband a quick shove "—ultimate weapon!"

"That's my cue," she said, sidling out the door. "Although you still..."

"What's that?" he shouted as he shut the water off.

Much later Clara emerged from her turn in the tub. An all-over bath had to be the finest of all luxuries, she'd decided. That and being under the same roof with the man whose presence in the world still in so many ways felt like her personal blessing.

Ben was standing at the window, a hulking shadow watching the night, his shoulder braced against the frame. Reflected light from the snow detailed the room in gradations of light and dark. "Snow's lettin' up," he said, his eyes fixed on some distant point beyond the glass. "Looks like most of the riders are stayin' in town. Tomorrow's a rest day."

"Anna and Billie are staying at the center."

He turned to her. "What about you?"

"I'll stay with the girls." She stepped closer. "You?"

"I kinda like sleepin' in the ol' man's buffalo skins."

"Is it warm?"

He hooked his right arm around her and drew her to his side. "When we build a fire inside, it's pretty warm. It has kind of a timeless feeling about it, you know? It helps me..." He rubbed his chin over her clean, damp, flower-scented hair. "At night I lay awake sometimes and try to make sense of things. When I make my bed in a tipi, it adds a little different shape to the sense of things."

"You know that tipi we have in the museum?" She slipped her arm around his waist. "I've gone in there and just sat a few times. The floor is covered with buffalo hides, and there's a willow backrest, a little fire ring, and that Indian mannequin. It's kind of cozy."

"But no earth, no sky, no fire burning."

"I imagine those. In a way it helps me make sense of my work, too. Preserving things under glass. Trying to keep them in perfect condition, exactly the way they once were."

"They don't stay the same if real people live with them and use them instead of mannequins." He smiled, imagining her checking to see that nobody was watching, then ducking inside the well-preserved tipi to keep company with a statue. "It's good to know that there's somebody like you watching over a few samples of our old stuff. Someone who cares about who we really were."

"And
are."

Some of us, he thought.

Or seem to be, she thought.

He looked down at her, carefully smoothed her hair back from the side of her face and studied her, his smile turning melancholy. Light and shadow delineated his handsome, angular face, but his eyes were so dark, so hard to read. He'd won her heart long ago. Surely he did not doubt that, even though she'd said time and time again that she couldn't love him anymore. She'd also let him see that she couldn't
not
love him.

So there it was. The age-old enigma. The opposites who couldn't quit attracting.

"Are we finished here?" he asked. "I wanna check on Toby, say good night to Annie. And to you." He lowered his head, his lips seeking hers. At the last moment she turned hers away. "What's wrong? You kissed me in the bathroom."

"I know, but..."

The lights had been turned off at the center for the night, but there were still some murmurings in the sleeping bags and pallets scattered about the floor. The girls had gone to sleep, but Clara lay awake, still thinking of her husband. And suddenly he was there. She knew him by his shadowed shape, backlit and lingering in the doorway. And she knew he would come no closer than that. The rest was up to her. So she slipped from her bed and went to him.

He smiled, pulling her into the entry as soon as she came within reach. "You wanna spend the night in a real tipi?"

"Not with four men," she whispered.

"How about just one man? Everyone else has made other arrangements for tonight."

"At whose suggestion?"

"Guys just know these things. Between guys, they just know when it's time to make themselves scarce." He stepped closer, filling her senses with the proximity of a man just come in from the cold. "When somebody wants some time alone with his wife, who's never slept in a tipi before. I've got a nice fire goin'. The bed's all made the old way." His smile loomed scant inches from hers. "I'm wearin' fancy silk underwear."

"No breechclout?"

"I can get one. Whatever your heart desires."

Her heart desired him, even though her head knew better. They drove TJ's pickup to the campsite near the frozen creek, little more than a mile from the heart of the tiny community, but it felt as though they had traveled infinitely farther. The tipi rising from a snowy landscape seemed to touch night's low gray ceiling in another world, another time. Its walls glowed from the small fire inside, inviting them to come, warm themselves, spend the night together. Clara banished her doubts back to the world she'd left behind, much the same way she had done when she'd followed her young, bold cowboy so many years ago.