Prairie Nocturne Read online

  Donald’s round cheeks still were the color of cottage cheese.

  “Donald. They had guns, we had guns. The race is to the swift, man.”

  “I know it is. Still, this isn’t like when they chaired us through the Castle grounds while we waved the shire targetry trophy around, is it.”

  “Edinburgh or here,” Ninian was giving no ground, “marksmanship in a good cause is no sin. Let’s get cracking. We’ll use the other horse with ours to drag that one into the beaver dams there, then do away with it.” He studied down at the bodies, his beard moving with the grimace beneath. “As to our adversaries, I’m afraid their graves are going to have to be coyotes’ bellies.” Luckily there was plenty of country, back in here, and the pair could be disposed of in one timber-thick gulch or another. As a known man of the Bible, Ninian had spoken at more funerals than he could count, but this occasion necessarily lacked holy words. Before starting on making the dead vanish to the extent that they would, Ninian put a hand on the shoulder of his companion. “Never a word, Donald. You understand that? To anyone. We never can.”

  “Jen knows my every breath.”

  “Jen will need to forbear, this once. As will Flora.” A grim light of idea came into Ninian’s eyes. “Williamson, though. Let’s give him something further to think about. We’ll leave a hat on that wood gate of his. A bit of homesteader glue”—a piece of barbed wire—“will hold it until they find it.”

  Donald scooped up both hats and, one in each hand, asked punctiliously: “Which, for the occasion?”

  “It doesn’t much matter. I suppose the one with the play-pretty on it stands out a bit better.” Donald handed him Mose’s hat with the crossed-swords escutcheon of the Tenth Cavalry pinned front and center.

  For a moment Ninian held the well-worn hat as if it deserved better, then hung it on the barrel tip of his lifted rifle. “Just so there won’t be any doubt about how this came out.” Pointing the gun off across the prairie, he blasted a hole through the hat with one last shot.

  FINALE

  · 1925 ·

  “THERE’S NO OTHER way it could have been,” Wes concluded, after his necessarily bare-bones version. “A shot-up hat doesn’t barbwire itself to a gate. Especially the gate squarely between our holdings and Scotch Heaven.” His voice had gone unusually soft. The telling of it had taken long enough that he’d had to rest his weight against the trestle table. There beside him, as if on fashion-of-the-season display, the battleworn hat reposed atop the hatbox. “Whit and I—we were the ones who found it.”

  Dry-mouthed, with the hard corners of the story still bruising in her as she thought it through, Susan could see the rest of it as if it were taking place now as puppet-play on that table. Royal cubs with the run of the ranch, he and Whit bringing the hat to their father in excited curiosity. The old manipulator, out-manipulated, his guns outgunned, pulling back to a waiting game. Angeline Rathbun and Monty, casualties of Mose’s disappearance, reduced to charitable charges. And coming home to Scotch Heaven, that day, with a blood-writ added to their landclaims there, her father in his Jehovan determination and reliable Donald beside him, their silences deeper than ever and their spines stronger than Warren Williamson’s.

  When she could manage, she asked harshly:

  “This couldn’t wait? Past tomorrow night?”

  For an instant, Wes’s facial muscles backed away from the ferocity of her tone, but his flinch just as quickly fell before the resolute expression he had worked up to, coming here. “I thought it might be harder on you to find out then.”

  “Harder?”

  Her voice ripped him. “Oh, let’s travel round more such Christian ground,” she tore onward. “A kick in the heart is better a day early than a day late, is that your thinking? Wes, damn you, if you’ve pulled this stunt with Monty too. Tell me! No, look at me and tell me! If you’ve thrown him, with everything riding on tomorrow night—”

  “I haven’t said word one to him. We never have.” The Williamson We, embedded in Wes since the christening moment when it was made part of his name. Susan struggled with the ramifications from that answer, him and his. Do the Double W’s of life, principalities of the prairie and other swaths of the earth, entitle themselves to their own rules? Take unto themselves the privilege to use the Mose Rathbuns like poker chips, then when their bluff is called, convert the washhouse to sanctuary for the widow and orphan? Ever so charitably never saying word one, of course, letting silence hide the past, and does that wash them clean? Does kindly deceit count as a charity? In this blooded instance, was she in a position to say it didn’t?

  Amid all that was raging in her she had to marvel at Wes, she couldn’t even make his eyes drop. She shook her head as if bringing herself out of a spell. “So it’s up to me, is it. You spring this on me. And now I’m supposed to what—swear off Monty as if I were taking the temperance vow? Or hand this along to him: ‘By the way, my father one time did away with a rustler who happened to be your father—more tea, my dear?’ ”

  “Susan,” he pleaded, “you and I haven’t been able to line out any kind of life together, don’t I know that. But if you try it with Monty, just by the nature of things you’ll be up against worse trouble.”

  “I wonder, Wes. I wonder.”

  Her words were like pepper in the air. “All this. You backing Monty once he saw how to make something of himself. Then coming to me—‘I have the pupil of a lifetime for you,’ ” she mimicked with sad accuracy. “All that expense and involvement. What did you think you were doing, rinsing out your conscience or the Williamson family conscience, such as that might be? Or buying yourself forgiveness for being a Williamson, were you? Granting yourself an indulgence, was that it? My understanding is that went out several dozen popes ago.” If that drew blood on him somewhere, he did not let it show. “Monty has had his own reasons to wonder what you’re up to, did that occur to you? Even if you didn’t outright think of him as bait for the Klan”—Wes’s lips parted, but no sound issued—“weren’t you glad to rub him in on them, boost him to show them how little they are? And luck or design, have it work out that you had your whack at them, in the end?” With a catch in her throat she relentlessly went on down the list. “Or was it all to coax me around. Did you want Scotch Heaven, what’s left of it, that badly?” Her last charge was the calmest and therefore the worst. “Or do you even know what you were playing at, anymore?”

  “Are you through?”

  Her glare said no, but she compressed the rest into an accusing silence for him to try to fight out of.

  Wes made the effort. “Tomorrow night Monty steps onto the stage at Carnegie Hall. He is the pupil of your life, Susan, you can’t get around that, unless you manage to take Chaliapin under your wing. Maybe I didn’t know precisely what I was setting into motion, but where was the push for any of it if it hadn’t come from me? Monty didn’t look you up on his own, did he, and you didn’t come scouting the woods for his voice that I know of.” Susan said nothing to that, an acknowledgment of sorts. For this next, Wes kept himself anchored with a white-knuckled grip on the table while he forced out the words: “Given that, I can ask as much as anyone—who’s been up to what? I didn’t do this to start a Lonelyhearts Club for Monty, you can bet on that.”

  “Well, there now,” she said point-blank back at him. “Just that quick you’re more sure of your motive than you’ve shown so far.”

  “This isn’t getting us anywhere,” he gave in to battle fatigue. “What do you say we wait until the Observance is out of the way and talk this over sanely.”

  “Which means you better leave now, while the wind is with you,” her burr of anger sounding for all the world like her father’s. She stalked back toward her desk and the still-opened diary, flinging a hand of contempt at the cavalry hat as she passed it. “And you may as well leave that.”

  NOT bad,” J.J. sized up the nicely appointed accommodations the next afternoon, a discreet suite at the rear of Carnegie Hall usually reserved f
or performers whose travel arrangements nudged uncomfortably close to performance time, “the Carnies giving us out-of-towners’ treatment.” The three from Harlem shared out a grin that said Pretty much what we are and helped themselves to the atmosphere of luxury. Cecil adjusted the royal-blue drapes to his liking as Monty poked his head into a bedroom twice the size of the washhouse quarters where he had spent his ranch life. Couldn’t have whistled for this. Susan at that moment was in the working part of the hall, he knew, on the early side to help oversee arrangements for the Observance. We’re both here, at the tip of the top. Take that, odds, that particular observation warming him as if he and she had confounded all the laws of all the games of chance. With just enough of a smile, he took off his hat and skimmed it in onto the extravagant bed.

  “They’re going to want us spang on time for the runthrough, what with all the bigwigs,” J.J. was getting back to business. “Montgomery, you going to catch some rest first, I hope?”

  “Figured I’d sack out a while like usual, sure.”

  “Cece, you?”

  “Not me, I have to see to my piano.” He already was on his way out to company that better befitted Carnegie Hall, his expression said.

  After the slam of the door J.J. chuckled. “He’ll settle down, always does. I see here”—he flapped a hand on the rehearsal schedule—“there’s quite a set of speeches before your turn. If you want, Cece and I can hold the fort until they’re about done practicing those, then I can come fetch you.”

  Monty gave a short sharp shake of his head. “I want to be there for the whole works.” She’s there. Now he said in easy fashion but meaning it: “While Cecil’s playing with his piana, I hope you’re going to polish up your medals and slap them on.”

  Trying not to look embarrassed and pleased, J.J. tucked away the schedule in the handiest pocket and muttered: “Polish up Phil Sherman, more like. I better go see if there are any kinks in the production, be the first time if there aren’t. I’ll roust you thirty minutes before the rehearsal.” Monty nodded to that, and turned to follow his hat to the regal welcome of the bed.

  “Montgomery?” J.J. sounded as if a kink had occurred to him. But something in the way that the lanky figure tautened to hear what was coming put a pause in him. Swallowing, J.J. said only: “Sweet dreams, man. You’ve earned them.”

  There on the soft raft of bed, borne by tides he couldn’t have forecast if he had tried when he and she and the Major first embarked on this, Monty let himself drift, half there, half in the latitudes of yearning: Susan and the night’s music, the night’s music and Susan. Not so much a nap as a trance, this time of waiting. Susan he had made up his mind on, and to keep from battering himself endlessly on the nerve ends of that, he mentally worked through the songs, the imaginary flow of piano keys beneath them, even though he knew them as well as his own skin. Maybe better. Always there was going to be a mystery in that, why the fairly puny human range of colors—nobody was cat-puke green, were they? there wasn’t any race that was an aggravating eggplant purple, was there?—didn’t register all the same in the basic human eye.

  “We are not some kind of a stain on other people’s notion of things,” she had said. No, he thought, but we’re not the pattern they show any sign of picking out to like, either. Her own decision, as far as it went: “Let’s see what happens after your tour.” That was the trick, all right, seeing ahead when life kept stretching over the curve of the world.

  Restlessly he rolled onto his side, but a moment later he was on his back again, half-spreadeagled with an arm over his eyes as he tried to imagine tonight. What J.J. had started to say and didn’t, he perfectly well knew, was some sort of encouragement about the audience. Right, J.J., just the usual riffraff that wanders into Carnegie Hall, hmm? Words were no help on the audience question, the stomach juices were what made the statement. All he could do was to gird himself—he’d been doing that since he first set foot into the soft soil of a rodeo arena, hadn’t he. By now he ought to know pretty much all there was to know about girding. He put his hand to where the scars were, his ribcage and then the column of his throat, reflexively tracing those near misses of death in a manner as old as when warriors of The Iliad touched places where their armor had shielded off a blow, as thankful as when a cavalryman stroked a brass buckle that had turned a bullet. Oddly, he found that the grievous harms he carried on himself put him in a calmer mood for tonight. Plenty of company coming tonight, when it came to bearing wounds: the shot-up veterans, like—well, like the Major; the busloads down from Harlem, unpenned for one night from the segregation line at 125th Street. Everybody who would be here tonight was a survivor of something. His voice would need to reflect that.

  * * *

  “Whatever patient clock ticks out there in the night of the universe has brought us again to the eleventh day of the eleventh month, which holds the moment of stillness when the Great War stopped. Into that holy silence of the Armistice we bring, on this night of observance, the greatest vows of which we are capable, some in spoken word, some in glorious song, all from the heartsprings deepest within us.”

  Wes broke off reading and stepped away from the microphone. “And it goes on like that for a further four minutes and thirty seconds,” he notified the stage echelon of command congregated in the wings. He was truculent about the rehearsal, Susan could tell. Of all of them, Wes was a maestro of impromptu, his political years having given him a natural ease at climbing up in front of any gathering and speaking his piece. I can think of one I wish he had choked on.

  The stage manager hastily clicked his stopwatch off, Phil Sherman looking bemused beside him. “Major, we have plenty of rehearsal time, you are free to go through your whole speech.”

  “What for?” the shortly put question answered itself. “You requested five minutes’ worth and that’s what it will be.” Wes all but marched off the stage, the slight hitch in his gait made increasingly plain as he covered the desert-like distance from centerstage.

  Been around the man since he came back with that in ’18 and never noticed it that much. That told Monty something about the proportion of matters here. One more time he studied around at the amplitude of Carnegie Hall; the place was the definition of big, all right. Extra-tall fancy-peaked doorways with what looked like lions’ forelegs carved high up on the frames, huge columns of some Greek kind set into the walls, atmosphere of a mansion about to be toned up for a party—and all that was simply on the stage. Out front, the gilded horseshoe balconies were banked, up and up, like decks of a topheavy steamboat. Not long from now an audience would squash into that expanse like the representation of everything on two legs; even here at rehearsal this place had a couple of rows full, as if the listening level always had to be kept going like a low fire. J.J. had whispered to him that Vandiver had salted the rehearsal with any of Over There’s big givers—“the Major’s crowd”—who wanted to come and gawk, and the Carnegie Hall management was there in force as a mark of respect to such wallet power. In his performance tux as he waited with the others in the wings to step out in front of this chosen bunch, Monty felt very nearly underdressed.

  Susan and he were not standing near each other in the gaggle in the wings, they were mutually showing at least that much common sense. Cued now by the stage manager, she stepped out, heart pounding in spite of her willed poise, strode smoothly to the microphone stand there beneath the proscenium of all American prosceniums, and delivered a ringing recital about the Harlem letters. She made way for Tammany’s man in Harlem, whom no one expected to follow Wes’s example of deferring a speechmaking chance until the house was full. Nor did he.

  In the comedy spot, Butterbeans and Susie strolled on and traded contentious married-couple wisecracks. Then Susan once more, to introduce the Lincoln Theater house announcer, Charles York, for the reading of selections from the Harlem war archive in his basso profundo.

  Vandiver was to follow this with his spiel for Bonds of Peace and as he zeroed in on the microphone,
J.J. slid over by Monty and murmured, “You’re up next.”

  Everything else necessarily came to a halt as Monty sighted-in his voice from various spots on the stage to choose his mark. The first time he sent “When I was young and in my prime, I dabbed my X on the Medicine Line” soaring out into the hall, he glanced upward for a moment, then turned his head enough to wink at J.J.: no swaying chandelier.

  Susan had slipped away into the main-floor seats to hear this. As the bell-clear tone shimmered through the air of the hall each time Monty tested the line, she moved from one spot to another, momentarily pushing all else from her mind for his music. From any velvet-seated sector, he sounded simply glorious.

  It took more tries than usual—this was Carnegie Hall, after all—but when he indicated the place on the stage he was settling for, stagehands wheeled out the grand piano and its spot was duly tape-marked as well. Over by the curtain Cecil went up on tiptoes and serenely down again, part of his ritual before presenting himself. As if reminded of something, Monty turned to the stage manager. “There is one change I need to make in the program.”

  Busy making his lighting notations on a clipboard, the stage manager said aside: “You’re getting a bit ahead of us, Mister Rathbun—we can deal with that as you run through the music.”

  “Can’t either,” Monty genially contradicted him. “It has to do with the music right from the start. I would like for Miss Duff to be my accompanist tonight.”

  J.J.’s head jerked around from conversation with Phil Sherman. Cecil looked sucker-punched. Down in the front rows, the well-dressed givers sat up as if now they were starting to get their considerable money’s worth.