Two in the Field (21 page)

I arrived in early evening and began to question the therapeutic value of drunken debauchery there soon after entering a saloon. The bar whiskey was overpriced and tasted like it could be used in taxidermy. The resident whores (“soiled doves” as the newspapers liked to call them) were fat and poxed. I paid a king’s ransom to carry out a bottle of Old Crow.

Yankton’s version of a luxury hotel would have used up most of my remaining cash, so I took a second-story room in a flophouse next to a dance hall. It offered the usual furnishings: bed-frame and concave mattress, rickety chair, chest of drawers, all-purpose pail, spittoon, and a cutting board for tobacco. On one wall hung an ornamental design of braided hair, probably human. The usual buzzing pests circled inside, but all surfaces were remarkably clean, as if recently scrubbed. Wondering what accounted for the uncommon cleanliness, I propped my feet on the window ledge, leaned back in the chair, sipped my Old Crow, and did my best to tune out the mournful blend of accordion and piano wafting up from the dance hall.

Staring out over the wooden rooftops, I tried to think things through. I’d come back for Cait. She didn’t want me. From
here I could go in any direction. But where? And for what purpose? My daughters’ faces played in my mind and I kept thinking about the good times—only the good ones—we’d had together. Christ, I’d abandoned what little bit of family I had. And gotten what? Nothing. My life, I decided, had become as pathetic as a country song. Maybe if I tried to return to my old existence as hard as I’d tried to get here, I could escape back to the future.

And then what?

I drained way too much of that bottle.

Late that night, as consciousness blurred woozily into sleep, I had a dream. I think it was dream. A waking dream. Maybe a visitation. Next morning, even when my head was a quagmire shot through with pain, I remembered it: Colm had talked to me. He’d seemed to stand or float at the end of the bed, and he looked as he had in the photographic images I’d seen: handsome, dark-haired, Union uniform with brass buttons. Looking not all that much older than Tim, really, and so alike they could have been brothers. He told me that I had to go back to Cait. She needed me. And not only Cait. The boy needed me. I couldn’t leave them.

But what about the other man?

He paid no attention to that and said I’d been brought back to be with Cait, that it was my destiny, and repeated that I must not leave her.

In the dream it made sense.

When I was able to think a bit more lucidly, it still made sense. Whether it had been Colm O’Neill or my own subconscious talking to me, I reached the same conclusion: I had to go back and try to win Cait. Nothing else mattered as much, and I’d come too far to give up.

I fell back into coma-like sleep and awoke to my door opening
noisily and something metal clanging on the floor. I sat up in a shaft of sunlight and for a moment was blinded. As if fashioned from the rays, a woman materialized. She was tall, maybe five-ten, and extremely buxom; her skin was milky, her hair so pale it seemed spun from silver. I stared at her. A vision in vanilla. Her sky-blue eyes met mine with no embarrassment and her accented voice was matter-of-fact as she said, “Excuse, sir.”

I shook my head gingerly to clear the cobwebs and instantly regretted it. “Who are you?”

“I come back.” Hoisting the mop and pail that had caused the clatter, she backed through the door, the motion swaying her breasts. “Sorry to bother.”

“Hold on.” It was hard to grasp that a Viking poster girl cleaned rooms in this dump. “You work here?”

“Work hard, you bet,” she said, almost defiantly.

“Tell you what.” With slow movements I reached down and pulled a dime from my pants on the floor. “Could you take a break and bring me a pot of coffee?”

Frowning in concentration, she repeated “pot of coffee” and went out. By the time she returned I’d gotten myself upright and into my clothes. My head felt about like her pail had sounded. She set the coffee pot and cup on the dresser, along with seven and a half cents change.

“Keep it,” I said. “You have no idea how much I need this.”

She eyed me. “I’m no whore,” she said levelly, pronouncing it “hooer.”

“I wasn’t propositioning you.”

“Every day Yankton men offer money for poke-poke.”

Poke-poke? Well, it figured. Young horny guys made up most of the population here, and she was sexier than the whores by a huge margin.

“Well, you didn’t hear me offering,” I said, meanwhile thinking
that doing so might not be a bad idea. “Just keep it for your trouble.”

The coins vanished into her skirts and she left. I hadn’t finished the first cup before she was back with a saucer of dried stuff, dark and grainy. “Eat,” she commanded.

The smell nearly made me puke. “What
is
this?”

“Silli.”

“What’s silly?”

She screwed up her forehead and translated: “Herring.”

Ugh. She refused to leave till I tried some, so I nibbled at the end of one piece. The smell was fierce, the taste ultra-fishy. Seeing me gag, she launched into a vigorous speech I couldn’t understand, her pronunciation and inflection sort of Russian-like, but not quite; more like listening to a tape slowed and played backward. She ended by admonishing me to eat every bit, and finally departed. The instant she was gone I tossed it out the window. By the time I was ready to leave, she was nowhere in sight. On an impulse I left her another dime. Kindness, even involving herring, should not go unrewarded.

Cranium throbbing, legs unsteady, I headed outside.

My intention was to start back at once for O’Neill. Instead, I spent several hours grooming Mr. P., and by then it seemed too late to set out. The truth was that I was stalling. I was afraid of going back. That night, tipped back with my feet on the same window ledge, this time without whiskey, I tried in vain to think of some creative new way to approach Cait.

In the morning I heard a tap on the door and found not only a pot of coffee outside, but a plate of fresh-baked pastries. I called out just as her blonde head was vanishing into another room, and she turned back.

“Come and share,” I said.

She looked doubtful, but I insisted. Refusing the chair, staying
prudently by the doorway, she sipped coffee with me and nibbled at slices of finger-like pastry she called
pinnar
, and a round coffee cake,
pulla
.

“What language is that?”

“Suomi,”
she said gravely. “Finnish.”

“Oh.”

“That is because I am a Finn,” she said with charming simplicity, as if I mightn’t have figured it out.

“What’s your name?”

“Kaija Tihönen.”

Like “kayak” without the final
k
, then “tee-HOY-nen.” A strong-sounding name that fit this robust woman. I guessed that she was in her early twenties, although her sober demeanor made her seem older.

We finished the pastries.

“Why are you in Yankton?” I asked.

“My husband Ürho—here you call him ‘Earl’—went for the gold.”

“He’s in the Black Hills?”

“He’s gone,” she said, a tremor in her voice. “The soldiers found my Ürho with arrows stuck in him.”

I learned that they had come from Helsinki two years ago. Ürho had gotten a job in a Boston shipyard. Then friends talked him into going with them to find gold. Against her wishes, he’d sold their possessions in order to do it.

“The others didn’t want me to come,” she said. “But I wouldn’t stay behind. When they said I couldn’t go to the Hills, Ürho left me here with money for a month.”

“Did any of them come back?”

She shook her head.

“I’m sorry, Kaija.”

“My money was gone by the time the soldiers found them,”
she said. “And by then I knew I would have a baby.” She put her hands under her breasts and hefted them, as if explaining their size. “Cholera took baby right after he was born.”

“When was this?”

“Last week, a little more.” Her fingers were trembling. “I have a baptism paper. His name was Ürho, too.”

It was impossible for me to fathom the depths of her grief. I remembered Cait describing her tangled emotions on learning she was pregnant after Colm’s death. But her boy had lived.

“What are you going to do?”

“Go back to Helsinki when I get enough money. Mr. Kaari, the Finn who owns this hotel, gives me meals and a sleeping place—but now he’s looking at me
that
way.”

As if she’d said too much, she abruptly stooped for the pastry plate, nodded goodbye and closed the door behind her. I was left thinking that along with Cait and Kaija and Noola Sullivan, the U.S. in 1875 must contain vast numbers of women whose young lovers and husbands had met violent deaths. Maybe the very commonality of it explained why women in this time shared their suffering with an openness I wasn’t used to.

Or maybe I was just some kind of magnet for widows.

I left Kaija a few dollars from my dwindling cache.

That afternoon, Mr. P. and I had just forded the Niobrara when I felt the same sickness coming on that had flattened me in Omaha. Soon I was beset by hot flashes, chills, stomach cramps and virulent diarrhea. I managed to water Mr. P. and tether him to a tree before I collapsed beneath a bluff near the river and curled up wondering if I was going to die right there. Mr. P. nickered, wanting food. I was too weak to do anything about it; he’d have to make it on what grass and brambles he could reach.

I spent the night puking and shitting. If anything, my condition
was worse than before. I decided that I was indeed going to die there. Thinking about it provided the only solace I could find—that the pain would not go on indefinitely. Toward dawn I managed to crawl over and cut Mr. P. loose. I wished him luck. He looked at me regretfully, then clopped off into the night. I’d hoped he would stay by me, see me to the end. Show a little loyalty. But no.

I must have slept. Next thing I knew, dawn was into its rosy stage. I wondered if I’d hallucinated setting Mr. P. free, because he was back again, though tethered in a different place. Then I sensed a presence behind me. Trying to remember where my pistol was, I started to sit up.

Something landed on top of me.

I was jolted forward, my face pushed into the turf. Whatever was on me didn’t feel all that heavy—not a bear, surely—but it exerted enough force to keep my head pinned to the ground. I tried to wrench loose, to twist around, but I was too weak and dehydrated to put up much of a struggle.

The weight of the thing shifted. The downward pressure on my head eased enough to let me turn. Whatever was pressing there shifted to my neck, and then I realized that it was a hand. With an effort I rolled on to my back. Straddling me, holding my throat with one hand while brandishing a crusted blade in his other, was a lumpy-faced Indian. He had terrible breath and was saying something, repeating two guttural words—
gib
and
mahnee
. Finally I realized they were English:
“Give … money.”

I tried to calculate my chances. Could I buck him off and scramble to get my revolver—it must be in my bag—before he did me in? He didn’t look especially big or formidable. But even the effort of thinking about so much activity made me nauseous again.

“Okay,” I mumbled. “Sure, money.”

He grinned maliciously and bounded off me, knife at the ready. As I pulled my billfold from my pocket, he snatched it and jumped back out of reach. He needn’t have worried. Feeling my gorge rising again, I lifted up on one elbow, turned my head and vomited.

“Yuhmin yan,”
he said in approving tones, looking on with what seemed almost clinical interest. When I sank down, depleted, he walked around in a circle and came back and pointed to where I’d heaved, then indicated he’d seen the various places I’d shat and puked. He seemed amused. With hand signs he conveyed the message that he would not harm me. Which made sense, since by then he could have slit my throat a dozen times.

“Whatever,” I muttered.

With his knife he ripped my shirtfront away, a swift movement that scared hell out of me. Then, demonstrating a surprisingly gentle touch, he probed my abdomen and scrutinized my skin. Probably checking for typhoid or scarlet fever. I’d done the same and not found any of the dread red spots. While he studied me, I studied him. No noble savage, that was for sure. No movie Geronimo or Sitting Bull, as played by some muscled USC halfback. This guy was little and stunted, with wiry hair that looked like he’d chopped it off in places with his knife. His shoulders were narrow and he had a paunch; his jaw was heavy, his eyes flinty and suspicious, one drooping beneath a ridge of scar tissue.