She turned the stallion back toward the dim path that led to the line shack and thought of Hayward. He was seeing Pearl Stryker now. She was too old and experienced for him. He was also seeing the new schoolteacher from Ohio. And a girl from Rosebud Reservation. And several others. In a dream J.B. told her he would love many women, unable to resist them, but he’d marry and live a long life, have a son and send him to military school in Missouri, position him to inherit the Bennett fortunes, and though she would not live to see it, a long line of children followed. There was a red smear on the white tile wall of the future. People couldn’t help the pain that rode them like overbroke ponies and tired them too soon for the length of a life.
Lost in her thoughts, she didn’t notice the weather change until the cold breeze made her shiver and she realized the hazy sunlight had thinned and the air turned gray-blue. She put her heels to the stallion to hurry him. Overhead heavy gray-white clouds eased back and forth, casting dark shapes across the valley. To the north a wall of gray-white, a mile away and several miles wide, rolled toward them, sent by the sudden gusty wind that lifted the stallion’s mane and scattered it, breaking the sky to pieces. He stopped and danced sideways, swinging his haunches into the wind, and called long and loud into the empty hills, ears pricked, waiting for a reply that didn’t come. She looked at the empty horizon and saw she was the only vertical thing for miles. The wind, filled with bits of sand, stung the skin and threatened to fill their eyes. They’d never make it home; she’d have to try for the line shack though it meant riding straight into the storm. She turned the stallion and slapped him with the reins.
The sun disappeared and the wind became a roaring whirlwind and she couldn’t tell direction anymore. After a while, she understood that it was snow and ice that pelted her bare skin, not sand. Her chest hurt as she held her breath against the cold that encased her in her soaked clothes, and trembling waves rose up her legs into her arms and teeth that she clenched to keep from chattering. Don’t stop, she urged the stallion, keep moving. They were in one of those early blizzards that came sweeping across the hills without notice, stranding cattle and killing people. She looked into the white walls of whirling snow and called for help, but the wind whipped her words away with a loud roar. Her eyes were heavy with ice, and she decided it was better to close them than have them freeze open. She pulled her hair from the bun and tried to wrap it around her neck, but the wind caught it, filled it with snow and ice and flung it back like a club beating against her shoulders and head. She buried her hands in the stallion’s snow-filled mane, fought to keep her fingers tight on the reins. She should knot them around her hands, she thought, she should knot the reins so they didn’t slide over his head, she should knot them, and put the end in her mouth, or under her thigh, she should stop, remove the saddle, wrap herself in the blanket and ride bareback so his body would keep her warm, but how to remount, he was too tall, so she lay on his neck for protection. The stallion lifted his head to push her back, and she was forced to open her eyes. When he whinnied, the sound started deep in his belly and shook his body, again no answer. Dulcinea became aware of parts she rarely thought about, the tops of her thighs that burned and then grew numb, her knees that felt as if she knelt on a frozen lake, her elbows so sharp with cold they rubbed raw where the frozen cloth of her shirt touched.
In her delirium, she saw a picture of J.B. and herself and their old dog Jesse James, named after a distant relative in Missouri, caught in a blur of motion in front of their half-finished house. They were so young and handsome and the snow turned the world white around them. She saw J.B. reflected in the window of their completed house, fingerprints from his hand on the glass as he called to her. She startled awake. “I’m here! Help!” The wind snatched her words.
She saw him gather his old buffalo hide coat, hat and scarf, and horsehide mittens lined in rabbit fur, and pull out the bag he kept at the ready for winter mishaps when stranded cattle and folks on the road needed rescuing. She was trapped between alternating wind shears and storms, and felt snow crisscrossing in front of her face. “Keep moving,” she heard J.B. say. “Don’t stop.”
Then she was sure he was there beside her, reaching for the ice-encased rein, pulling the stumbling horse along, rubbing the horse’s shoulder and speaking low words of praise, telling the stallion he was brave and strong, calling him his night horse, blowing his own breath into his nostrils dripping with ice, stroking his nose and heating the ice until his face dripped and his large eyes gained brightness and he fought fiercely onward, lifting his legs high above the gathering drifts, marching to the music of his words. She felt him rest his hand on her small boot. The leather warmed and a sigh escaped her lips. He moved his hand up her ankle, calf, knee, and thigh, and his extraordinary heat relieved the numbness of her muscles, the bitter cold that had begun to settle in her bones. His heat pushed beneath her skin, deep into her flesh. She imagined he could feel her blood as he swam up onto the horse’s back, settled behind her, wrapped his coat and arms around her, and held her in the saddle. All he wanted was her forgiveness, she realized. The horse stumbled to a stop, nose pressed against the door of the old line shack. When the door unlatched, the animal stepped inside to the warmth of a small fire and a candle flickered in the sudden gust of blown snow.
Dulcinea slid down, pushed the door closed, and stumbled to the fire to warm her hands as snow dropped off the horse and puddled on the hard-packed dirt floor. When she was warm, she stood, shook the last of the melting snow off her clothes, and glanced at the walls of the shack, surprisingly tight, the cracks filled with animal hair, grassy mud, and paper. A candle guttered on the table among several pieces of scattered paper and a dirty plate and cup, as if someone had just left the room. Who was living here? Her heart leapt. Cullen! She calmed herself. Of course not, but someone.
Curious, she lifted a page from the table and saw it was a deed for Drum’s ranch, with a shaky signature at the bottom that bore little resemblance to his firm block letters. She quickly scanned the other pages, which included the deed to J.B.’s and what appeared to be someone practicing Hayward’s and her signatures. Even though they were poor efforts, their intent was clear. She sank into one of the two straight-backed chairs. Who could this be? Whoever it was, it meant she and her son would have to disappear. A deeper chill came over her, and she began to shiver uncontrollably.
The stallion lifted his head and gave a deep guttural whinny as the door opened.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Graver fought against the image of Dulcinea frozen beneath a ten-foot snowdrift that wouldn’t melt for another two weeks when one of those warm trade winds rode through the hills, melted everything in a day, and delivered the dead as casually as flowers in spring: cattle caught in fence corners, crowding each other, trapped by their own panic and blindness in the storm, people caught unawares when the winds shifted and the sun fled behind a wall of snow and ice. Sometimes a horse and rider were found together like lovers, belly to belly in a last frantic arrival at the end. Once, a whole family in their buckboard on the way home when it struck, somehow too blind and exhausted to move once the horses mired in a six-foot drift, and the family froze to death where they sat, as polite and still as worshippers on the splintered boards, reins still gripped in the father’s hands, his mouth open as if calling his last benediction upon the sleeping heads of his little ones.