At night, Caroline and Corin often lay awake as the wind howled around the house, too loud to ignore. Beneath the blankets one such night, he drew lazy patterns on her shoulder that both soothed and aroused her. The smell of him was so dear to her, strong and rank and animal after a day’s work under heavy clothes. She clung to him like a drowning person clinging to a float, keeping her eyes tightly shut, feeling as though the house, at any moment, might give in to the onslaught and be torn away with them inside it. The house was a fiction, she thought; a flimsy carapace between them and the empty fury outside; and it might vanish in a heartbeat. As long as Corin was there, she told herself. As long as he was there with her she didn’t care. He seemed to sense her fears and he spoke to calm them, the way she had heard him speak to nervous horses. His voice was low and she fought to hear it above the din-words rolling in a steady rhythm, like water trickling, half awake and half asleep.
“I guess we should spare a thought for White Cloud and Annie, although I know the Ponca are born to this life and they are stronger than we are, still I would not want to have nothing but hides between me and the wind on a night like this. Hutch has told me of the Great Die-Up, in the winter of eighty-seven, which was before I had come out west, and we two, you and I, were still in New York City, unbeknownst to one another. Every bad winter we have, every time I mention the cold he just shakes his head and says it’s nothing, not compared to the Great Die-Up. Whole herds of cattle froze where they stood. Riders died out on the ranges and they weren’t found until the spring, when the snow melted back and left them sitting high and dry, with their knees drawn up to their chests in the last pose they ever struck, just trying to keep warm. The beeves were all skinny and weak because the summer before that winter had been a droughty one and there was precious little grass or feed to be had. And they just died in their droves. And the cows lost their calves before they were due to birth them, because there was hardly enough to fill one mouth, let alone two; and Hutch himself lost three toes-two on his right foot and one on his left. He’d been out riding in a blizzard so thick he strained to see his horse’s ears, trying to keep the cattle moving so they didn’t just huddle up and freeze into one great heap of dead meat, and when he climbed off his horse at the end of the day he couldn’t feel his legs, let alone his feet. He told me he didn’t get his boots off until three days later, and by that time his feet were big and black and the blood had just frozen right there in his veins. And it’s true, too; I’ve seen the gaps where those toes of his should be. There were snowstorms the likes of which had never been seen, nor have been since; from Mexico to Canada and everywhere in between, and I remember-don’t you remember having no beef one year, when you were little? Perhaps you were too young, but I remember there being no beef in New York. Cook tried everything she could to get some each week but there was none to be had. Not with nigh on every poor beast on the ranges lying under a snowdrift. So this storm, this wind-well, like Hutch says, it’s nothing, my darling. This is the prairie being sweet to us, Caroline. And we’re warm, aren’t we? And we’re safe, too. How could we not be when we have each other?” He spoke like this, on and on through the ragged night, as hailstones hit the roof like lead shot; and Caroline drowsed on the edge of sleep, drinking in the steady words and feeling a cold ache in her feet for Hutch’s lost toes, a cold ache in her heart for cowboys hugging their knees to their chests, out in the sweet prairie wind.
By the spring of 1904 there seemed to be infants everywhere. Several of the mares had gangling foals running at their heels, the yard hens bobbed on a sea of fluffy chicks, William’s howls could at times be heard in every far corner of the ranch, and a small wire-haired terrier belonging to Rook, the Negro cook, gave birth to a litter of blunt-nosed puppies following a chance encounter with a Woodward mongrel of uncertain provenance. The weather was turning warm again, the days longer. No more ice in the cistern, no more hailstorms and blue north winds. The young wheat and sorghum was pale green, and there was a brave scattering of blossom on Caroline’s spindly cherry trees. But, try as she might, Caroline could not be rid of the weight of her dashed expectations, or her fear of the open land that her husband loved so much.
They sat outside on the porch one fair Sunday afternoon, after a travelling preacher had called by to read a service for all the ranch’s inhabitants, and, because of the contentment she read in Corin’s face, rocking gently in his chair, Caroline felt a hundred miles from him.
“What are you reading?” he asked her eventually, startling her because she had thought him asleep beneath his copy of The Woodward Bulletin. She smiled and raised the book so he could see the cover. “What, The Virginian again? Don’t you get tired of reading it?”
“A little. But it’s one of my favorites, and until you take me to town to buy some others…” she shrugged.
“All right, all right. We’ll go next week, how about that? Once Bluebell’s foaled. You could always go by yourself, if you didn’t want to wait for me? No harm would come to you-”
“You don’t know that! I prefer to wait for you,” Caroline cut him off. Just the thought of striking out for Woodward alone was enough to turn her stomach.
“All right, then.” Corin retreated back beneath his paper. “Read some of that one to me then. Let’s find out what’s so special about it.” Caroline looked at the page she had been reading. Nothing was that special about it, she thought. Nothing but that the heroine, a civilized lady of the East, had made such a life for herself, had found such happiness in the wilderness; had been able to see beauty that Caroline could not, and to understand her man as Caroline could not. Caroline scoured the pages as if the secret to this was hidden there somewhere, as if she might be taught how to settle in the West, how to love it, how to thrive. But the passage she had been reading described Molly Wood deciding to leave-the dark spell before that girl’s sunshine happy ending, and Caroline hesitated before reading it out, sitting tall as she had been taught and holding the book high in front of her so her voice would not be hampered by a crooked neck.
“This was the momentous result of that visit which the Virginian had paid her. He had told her that he was coming for his hour soon. From that hour she had decided to escape. She was running away from her own heart. She did not dare to trust herself face to face again with her potent, indomitable lover…”
“My, what drama,” Corin murmured sleepily when Caroline finished, and she closed the book, running her hands over the cover which had become dog-eared and creased with rereading.
“Corin?” Caroline asked hesitantly, a while later when the sun was getting fat in the western sky. “Are you awake?”
“Mmm…” came the drowsy reply.
“I come into my money soon, Corin. I know I told you before, but I… I didn’t tell you how much money it is. It’s… a lot of money. We could go anywhere you wanted… you won’t have to work so hard any more…”
“Go somewhere? Why would we go anywhere?” he asked.
Caroline bit her lip. “It’s just… so isolated here-so far from town! We could… we could buy a house in Woodward, perhaps. I could spend some of the week there… Or we could move everything closer, move the whole ranch closer! I could… join the Coterie Club, perhaps…”
“What are you saying, Caroline? Of course I can’t move the ranch closer to town! Cattle need open grasslands, and the land nearer town is all given over to homesteaders now.”