The Veteran (38 page)

“Walk? Where?”

“Out to the prairie. So we can talk.”

She protested that the children needed her attention, but one of her older colleagues gave her a broad wink and whispered that she should take time for her new admirer if she wished. She wished.

They walked away from the fort and found a jumble of rocks in the shade of a tree. He seemed tongue-tied.

“Where do you come from, Ben?” she asked, aware of his shyness, quite liking it.

He nodded towards the distant peaks.

“You were raised over there, in the mountains?”

He nodded again.

“So what school did you go to?”

“No school.”

She tried to assimilate this. To spend a whole boyhood hunting and trapping, never to go to school ... It was too strange.

“It must be very quiet in the mountains. No traffic, no radios, no TV.”

He did not know what she was talking about but presumed she referred to things that made noise, other than the rustle of the trees and the call of the birds.

“It’s the sound of freedom,” he said. “Tell me, Miss. Linda, have you heard of the Northern Cheyenne?”

She was surprised but relieved at the change of subject.

“Of course. In fact my great-grandmother on my mother’s side was a Cheyenne lady.”

He swung his head towards her, the eagle feather danced in the hot breeze, the dark blue eyes fixed her, pleading.

“Tell me about her. Please.”

Linda Pickett recalled that her grandmother had once shown her an old photograph of a wizened crone who had been her own mother. Even with the passing years the large eyes, fine nose and high cheekbones indicated the old woman in the faded monochrome snapshot had once been very beautiful. She told what she knew, what her now-dead grandmother had told her as a little girl.

The Cheyenne woman had once been married to a brave and there had been a baby boy. But about 1880 an epidemic of cholera on the reservation had taken the brave and the boy away. Two years later a frontier preacher had taken the young widow as his wife, braving the disapproval of his fellow whites. He had been of Swedish extraction, big and blond. There were three daughters, the youngest Miss. Pickett’s own grandmother, born in 1890. She in turn had married a Caucasian and produced a son and two daughters, the younger girl born in 1925. In her late teens it was that second daughter, Mary, who had come to Billings seeking work, and had found it as a clerk in the newly established Farmers’ Bank. Working at the next booth was an earnest and industrious teller called Michael Pickett. They married in 1945. Her father had not gone to the war due to short-sightedness. There were four elder brothers, all big blond lads, and then Linda in 1959. She was just eighteen.

“I don’t know why, but I was born with a streak of jet black hair down my head, and dark eyes, nothing like my mom and pa. So there you are. Now you.”

He ignored the invitation.

“Do you have marks on your right leg?”

“My birthmark? How on earth do you know?”

“Please let me see it.”

“Why? It’s private.”

“Please.”

She paused awhile, then tucked up her cotton skirt to reveal a slim golden thigh. They were still there. Two puckered dimples, the entry and exit holes of the trooper’s bullet beside Rosebud Creek. Irritated, she pulled her skirt back down.

“Anything else?” she asked sarcastically.

“Just one. Do you know what
Emos-est-se-haa’e
means in the Cheyenne language?”

“Heavens no.”

“It means Wind That Talks Softly. Whispering Wind. May I call you Whispering Wind?”

“I don’t know. I suppose so. If it pleases you. But why?”

“Because it was once your name. Because I have dreamed about you. Because I have waited for you. Because I love you.”

She flushed deep pink and rose to her feet.

“This is madness. You know nothing about me, nor I of you. Anyway, I am engaged to be married.”

She stalked off to rejoin her group and would talk to him no more.

But she came back to the fort. She wrestled with her conscience, told herself a thousand times she was being crazy, a fool, out of her mind. But in that mind she saw the steady blue eyes holding hers and convinced herself that she should tell this lovelorn young man that there was no point in their ever meeting again. At least, that was what she told herself she would do.

On a Sunday, a week before school resumed, she caught a tour bus from the centre of the town and alighted at the parking lot. He seemed to know she was coming. He was waiting on the parade ground, as he had every day, with Rosebud saddled up.

He helped her up behind him and rode out to the prairie. Rosebud knew her way to the creek. By the glittering water they dismounted, and he told her how his parents had died when he was a boy and a mountain man had adopted him as his own and raised him. He explained that instead of the school of books and maps he had learned the spoor of every animal of the wild, the cry of every bird, the shape and character of every tree.

She explained that her own life was quite different, orthodox and conventional, planned out. That her fiance was a young man of good and immensely wealthy family who could give her everything a woman could need or want, as her mother had explained. So there was no point ...

Then he kissed her. She tried to push him away, but when their lips met the strength went out of her arms and they slipped helplessly round the back of his neck.

His mouth did not smell of alcohol or stale cigars, as did that of her fiance. He did not grope her body. She smelt the odour of him: buckskin, woodsmoke, pine trees. In a tumult she broke away and began to walk back to the fort. He followed but did not touch her again. Rosebud ceased cropping and walked behind.

“Stay with me. Whispering Wind.”

“I cannot.”

“We are destined for each other. It was so spoken, a long time ago.”

“I cannot answer. I have to think. This is crazy. I am engaged.”

“Tell him he will have to wait.”

“Impossible.”

There was a prairie schooner leaving the gates, heading for the out-of-sight parking lot. She diverted her course, boarded it and went inside. Ben Craig mounted Rosebud and walked after the wagon.

At the parking lot the passengers disembarked from the wagon and boarded the bus.

“Whispering Wind,” he called, “will you come back?”

“I cannot, I am going to marry someone else.”

Several matrons looked with displeasure at the young horseman with the wild appearance who was clearly importuning a nice young girl. The doors closed and the driver started the engine.

Rosebud gave a frightened whinny and reared high on her back legs. The bus began to move, picking up speed on the rough road that would lead back to the blacktop highway.

Craig touched Rosebud in the flanks and rode after it, canter developing to gallop as the bus accelerated. The mare was terrified of the monster beside her. It snorted and roared at her. The force of the wind increased. Inside the coach the passengers heard a shout.

“Whispering Wind, come with me to my mountains and be my wife.”

The driver glanced in his rear-view mirror, saw the flaring nostrils and wildly rolling eyes of the horse, and pressed the gas. The bus bucked and jolted on the rough road. Several matrons screamed as they clutched their plump offspring.

Linda Pickett rose from her window seat and tugged at the sliding pane. The bus was slowly outpacing the galloping horse. Rosebud was stricken with panic but trusted to the firm knees that pressed her ribs and the grip on her rein. A dark head came out of a window. Down the slipstream came her reply.

“Yes, Ben Craig, I will.”

The horseman reined in and was lost to view in the dust.

She wrote her letter carefully, not wishing to provoke an outbreak of his temper, which she had felt before, but just to make her meaning regretfully clear. When she had finished her fourth draft, she signed it and posted it. Nothing was heard for a week. The meeting, when it came, was short and brutal.

Michael Pickett was a pillar of his community, president and chief officer of the Farmers’ Bank of Billings. Starting as a humble teller just before Pearl Harbor, he had risen through the ranks to the post of assistant manager. His hard work, orthodoxy and conscientiousness had caught the eye of the founder and owner of the bank, a lifelong bachelor with no kin.

On retirement this gentleman had offered to sell his bank to Michael Pickett. He wanted someone to continue his tradition. Loan finance was raised and the buyout went through. In time most of the purchasing loans were repaid. But in the late Sixties there had been problems: overextension, foreclosures, bad debts. Pickett had been forced to go public and raise survival capital by offering stock on the market. The crisis had been ridden through and liquidity returned.

A week after the arrival of his daughter’s letter Mr. Pickett was not invited but summoned to a meeting with the fiance’s father at his home, the impressive Bar-T Ranch on the banks of the Yellowstone river south-west of Billings. They had met before, at the time of the betrothal, but in the Cattlemen’s Club dining room.

The banker was shown into a huge office with polished timber floors and expensive panelling, adorned with trophies, J framed certificates and the heads of prize bulls. The man behind the expansive desk did not rise or greet. He gestured to I a single vacant chair facing him. When his guest was seated, he stared at the banker without a word. Mr. Pickett was discomfited. He thought he knew what it was about.

The rancher and tycoon took his time. He unwrapped a large Cohiba, lit up and when it was drawing well pushed a single sheet of paper across his desk. Pickett read it; it was his daughter’s letter.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “She told me. I knew she had written. I had not seen the letter.” The rancher leaned forward, admonitory finger raised, angry eyes set in a face like a side of beef beneath the Stetson he always wore, even in his office.

“No way,” he said. “No way, you get it? No way any girl treats my boy like this.”

The banker shrugged.

“I’m as disappointed as you,” he said. “But young people ... sometimes they change their mind. They are both young, maybe a bit overhasty?”

“Talk to her. Suggest she has made a bad mistake.”

“I have talked to her. So has her mother. She wishes to call off her engagement.”

The rancher leaned back and glanced about the room, thinking how far he had come since his early days as a simple wrangler.

“Not when it comes to my boy,” he said.

Retrieving the letter, he pushed a sheaf of papers across the desk.

“You had better read these.”

William ‘Big Bill’ Braddock had indeed come a long way. His grandfather had come west from Bismarck, North Dakota, where he had been born, albeit out of wedlock, to a cavalry soldier who had died fighting on the plains. The grandfather had taken a job in a store and kept it all his life, neither rising nor being dismissed. His son had followed in his humble footsteps, but the grandson had taken a job on a cattle ranch.

The boy was big, hard, a natural bully and given to settling disputes with his fists, almost inevitably to his own advantage. But he was also smart. After the war he had spotted the early beginnings of a company opportunity: the refrigerated truck, capable of delivering prime Montana beef hundreds of miles from where it had been raised.

He struck out on his own, starting with trucks, moving into slaughtering and butchering, until he controlled the whole business from the ranch gate to the barbecue. He created his own name brand, Big Bill’s Beef, free-range, juicy, field-fresh and in your local supermarket. When he moved back into ranching, the missing link in the beef chain, it was as the boss.

The Bar-T, bought ten years earlier, was a rebuilt showpiece and the most impressive mansion along the Yellowstone. His wife, a subdued wisp of a woman almost invisible to the naked eye, had produced him one son, but hardly a chip off the old block. Kevin was in his mid-twenties, much indulged, spoiled and terrified of his father. But Big Bill doted on his scion; nothing was too good for his only son.

Michael Pickett finished the papers pale and shaken.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“Well, Pickett, it’s pretty plain. I have spent a week buying up every marker you owe in this state. That means I now hold the majority stock. I own the bank. And a packet it has cost me. All because of your daughter. Pretty, I’ll say that, but stupid. I don’t know or care who this other guy she’s met is, but you tell her to drop him. She writes back to my son and admits she made a mistake. Their engagement resumes.”

“But if I can’t persuade her?”

“Then you tell her she will be responsible for your complete destruction. I’ll take your bank, I’ll take your house, I’ll take everything you’ve got. Tell her you won’t be able to get a cup of coffee on credit in this county. You hear?”

As he drove down to the highway Michael Pickett was a broken man. He knew Braddock was not joking. He had done this before to men who had crossed him. Pickett had also been warned that the nuptials would have to be advanced to mid-October, a month away.

The family conference was unpleasant. Mrs. Pickett was accusatory and wheedling by turns. What did Linda think she was up to? Had she any idea what she had done? Marriage to Kevin Braddock would bring her, at a stroke, all the things others worked a lifetime to achieve: a fine house, spacious grounds to raise the kids, the best schools, a position in society.

How could she throw it all away for a silly infatuation with an out-of-work actor pretending to be a frontier scout for the duration of a summer work assignment?

Two of her brothers who lived and worked locally had been called to attend. One suggested he go out to Fort Heritage and have a man-to-man talk with the interloper. Both young men suspected a vengeful Braddock could ensure that they too lost their jobs. The brother who spoke was on the state government payroll, and Braddock had powerful friends in Helena.

Her distraught father polished his thick-lensed eyeglasses and looked miserable. It was eventually his misery that convinced Linda Pickett. She nodded, rose and went to her room. This time she wrote two letters.