One suffocatingly hot day, when Caroline thought she would run mad if she had no relief from it, she went into the bedroom, shut the door, stripped off her blouse and corset and threw them to the floor. She sat still and felt the relative cool of the air in the room touch her sticky, stifling skin and, slowly, the light-headedness that had dogged her all that morning began to diminish. It was so humid, the air so thick, the sky so blindingly, glaringly bright that Caroline seemed to feel her blood thickening, simmering in her veins. When she dressed again, she left the corset off. Nobody seemed to notice, and indeed there was little to notice. The heat and her own cooking had reduced her appetite and the work had taken its toll. Beneath the rigors of her underclothes, Caroline had grown very thin.
Later that week it rained. It rained as though the sky were blackly furious with the ground and aimed to injure it. It rained in torrents, not in drops but in solid rods of water that lanced down from the glowering clouds and stirred the topsoil into a soup that ran away toward Toad Creek. That modest creek became an angry cascade. The horses stood stoically, nose to tail, with water streaming from their manes. Out on the pasture, the cows lay down and narrowed their eyes. Corin was in Woodward with Hutch, having driven seven hundred head of cattle to the stock pens, and Caroline lay on the bed in the early evening and prayed as hard as she could that the North Canadian would not flood, would not stay long in spate, would not prevent Corin’s return. She left the shutters open, listening to the rain hammer the roof above her, waiting, arms outflung, for the air creeping in through the window to feel cooler-for the water to wash the heat away.
There was a tentative knock at the door, and Magpie appeared.
“What’s wrong?” Caroline asked abruptly, sitting up with a start.
“Nothing wrong, Mrs. Massey. I have brought you something. Something to make you relieved,” the girl said. Caroline sighed, smoothing back her sweaty hair.
“Nothing can make me relieved,” she murmured.
“Come and try,” Magpie pressed. “It’s not good to lie down too much. You don’t grow used to things that way,” she insisted, and Caroline dragged herself to her feet, following the Ponca girl to the kitchen. “Watermelon. The first one of the summer! Try some.” Magpie passed Caroline a wide slice of the fruit: a bloody-colored crescent moon that stickied her fingers.
“Thank you, Magpie, but I’m really not very hungry…”
“Try some,” Magpie repeated, more firmly. Caroline glanced at her, met her bright black eyes and saw only goodwill there. She took the fruit and nibbled at it. “It’s good, yes?”
“Yes,” Caroline admitted, taking bigger bites. The melon was neither sweet nor sharp. It tasted mild and earthy, softly easing the parched, torn feeling at the back of her throat.
“And drink this.” Magpie passed her a cup of water. “Rainwater. Straight from the sky.”
“Well, there’s no shortage of that today!” Caroline joked.
“This is water from the land, this is water from the sky,” Magpie explained, pointing to the fruit and the cup. “To eat and drink these things, it makes you… it makes you balance with the land and the sky. Do you see? That way, you don’t feel so much like you are punished. You will feel like you are a part of this land and sky.”
“That would be good. Not to feel punished,” Caroline smiled slightly.
“Eat more, drink more!” Magpie encouraged her, smiling too. They sat together at the kitchen table, with the rain hissing down outside and their chins slick with melon juice; and soon Caroline felt a blessed cool begin to spread outward from inside her, sluicing the fevered burn from her skin.
There was a dun-colored mare called Clara, who had short, slender legs, a compact body, ribs like a barrel, neck a little scrawny. She was in her twilight years and had foaled a half-dozen times for Corin; foals that had grown into fine saddle horses, with just one exception-a colt who was never right between the ears, and could not be broken, and who snapped the bones of several fine bronco busters before his heart finally gave out with the strain of his own fury.
“Clara hung her head all sorrowful the day it happened, even though that colt was over the other side of Woodward by then,” Hutch told Caroline, as she stroked the mare’s bony face tentatively. The pungent reek of horse and the leather of the tack was strong in the morning sunshine. Caroline squinted up at the foreman from the shade of her bonnet. Hutch’s eyes were bright slivers between the furrows of his brows and the crow’s feet scoring his temples. These marks on his face were deep, though he was only a little older than Corin.
“You think she knew her baby had died? How sad!” Caroline said.
“I reckon she knew. Inferno, we called that colt. He was the color of fire, and when you walked up to him he fixed you a look in the eye that made grown men tremble.”
“How horrible! How could an animal as gentle as Clara have such an evil offspring?”
“Many a murderer was born to a decent, God-fearing woman, and I guess the same applies for horses as for humans,” Hutch shrugged. “Now, Clara here wouldn’t hurt a fly. You could get up on her back, yell at the top of your voice and give her a mighty wallop with a stick and she wouldn’t even hold that against you.”
“Well! I don’t think I’m going to do any of those things!” Caroline laughed.
“Well, sure you are-the getting up on her back part, that is,” Hutch smiled.
“Oh, no! I thought I was just learning how to put the saddle on today?” Caroline said, a note of alarm in her voice.
“That’s right, and that’s taken all of five minutes. And what’s the point of a horse with a saddle on it if nobody gets up and sits in it?”
“Hutch, I… I don’t know that I can…” she faltered.
“Only one way to find out,” he said, but gently, and he took her elbow to draw her closer to the horse’s side. “Come on now, Mrs. Massey. There’s no way the wife of a rancher can go around not knowing how to ride. And it’s nothing to be scared of. It’s as easy as sitting in a chair.”
“Chairs don’t run around! Or kick!” Caroline argued.
“No, but they don’t get you from point A to point B in half the time a wagon does, neither,” Hutch chuckled. His smile was crooked and warm, and when he held out his hand to her she found it impossible not to take it.
“I’m really not sure about this,” she said, nerves making her voice small.
“In about ten minutes’ time, you’re going to be wondering what all the fuss was about,” Hutch assured her.
Hutch cupped his hand around her shin and boosted her into the side saddle, where she perched, her face pale, expecting at any moment to be cast back into the sand. He showed her how to hook her right leg around the pommel to keep herself secure, and to take her weight in the left stirrup for balance.
“All right now. Comfy?” he asked.
“Not really,” she said, but she found the beginnings of a smile for him.
“Now, give her a little nudge with that heel, loose those reins and say, ‘Get up, Clara!’ ”
“Get up, Clara! Please,” Caroline said, with as much conviction as she could manage, and then gave a little shriek as the mare moved obediently forward.