What was the meaning of that preposterous advertisement? Was it composed to mock her? But standing there in the midst of the downpour, hat clutched to his chest, hair plastered slickly to his skull, Wesley Case looks humble rather than sneering, the last woebegone seal left by its herd on a barren shore. Everyone else with a lick of sense has got off Front Street and under cover, but he still loiters about on the boardwalk, courting pneumonia.
A strong gust of wind swirls down the street, moulding his sodden trousers to his legs, streaking the rain sidelong, and rocking him on his feet. Ada wishes it would blow hard enough to tumble him over the horizon and out of view. The sight of him disturbs her frightfully because it elicits a pang of sympathy, and that she doesn’t want to feel. She had never dreamed he would persist in making such a ridiculous spectacleof himself. And Case shows no signs of losing heart, of renouncing this absurd role he has chosen to play. Somehow, he must be
stopped
.
Case spots Ada Tarr plunging across the road, skirts hiked up in two white-knuckled fists to keep them clear of the puddles. What he’s asking for he’s about to get. Ada stops just short of the boardwalk and squints up at him, rain dashing on her face. The boardwalk provides him with an unfair advantage of height, so he steps down into the mud to bring them face to face.
“What is all this?” she says. “Explain yourself.”
“I wished a hearing so I issued you an invitation, which I see you have accepted.”
“It was not an invitation, but blackmail. Call it what it is. How dare you subject me to public humiliation. George Eliot, pound cake, pianos – those can only refer to me.”
“They do. But I doubt very much the public is aware of your enthusiasm for the first two. I allow the mention of a piano may have given someone a second thought – but that is questionable. All in all, I believe you remain anonymous.”
“I am not a plaything in your silly game.” Ada’s face is streaming rain. “What do you mean by this nonsense? What is behind it?”
“I thought it obvious.”
“It is not obvious. I want you to explain yourself.”
“Our last meeting was not successful. I acted very proudly. I have dispensed with pride. As you see.”
“That tells me nothing.”
“Very well. Do you remember New Year’s Eve? You lectured me on the subject of Peregrine Hathaway’s ardour. You approved of it. You thought his baying at Celeste’s door spoke well of him. Well, here I am baying at your door in my own way,
sotto voce
perhaps, but I am an older man than he is. I cannot quite bring myself to howl as loudly as you might like. This is all I’m capable of.”
Ada suddenly begins to shiver. “We are scarcely acquainted. What grounds do you have for making such a mad declaration? Do you imagine a few conversations sufficient to know me?”
“If you require more conversation, I will talk until kingdom come. I will keep talking just as long as you require. I intend to prove my sincerity to your satisfaction. Now, however, I must get you home. You’re soaked and shaking. I’ll hire a surrey at the livery. Return to the school and wait for me there.”
And before she can protest, or demur, Case is striding away on his long legs, head bent and shoulders stooped under the slashing rain.
They scarcely speak during the drive back to Ada’s house. Case’s attention is fully occupied on keeping the surrey on the greasy track, which it threatens to slither off at every bend in the road. And the rain racketing on the leather top of the carriage creates such pandemonium anything less than a shout could not be heard. The wild, ragged noise is playing on Ada’s nerves. When a ferocious burst of wind makes the surrey’s top crack like a breaking board, she barely manages to stifle a cry. A quick, furtive glance tells her Case hasn’t noticed; he is blind to everything but the rumps of the horses.
At her door, Case springs down from the buggy and helps her out.
“You said you wish to talk,” Ada says, keeping her eyes lowered to the spots of mud on her skirt as if they are her chief concern. “I think now is as good a time as any. You best come in.” Case follows her up the porch and into the hall. Her wet face gleams in the faint light of the curtained house. “I’m soaked to the skin,” she says. “I must change my clothes.”
“Yes. By all means.”
Ada climbs the stairs, goes into the bedroom, and shrugs out of her wet garments. She dries her hair with a towel from the washstand, begins to dab her body dry with it. The rain pecks at the window, and her nerves.
She begins to scrub her body with the towel, rubs it punishingly with the rough cloth until her skin burns. Suddenly, from below stairs, she hears a mild tinkling. Case’s fingers wandering over the keys of the spinet. Hugging her breasts tight, she paces back and forth until a glimpse of herself in the pier glass brings her up short. She stares at the stranger in the mirror, the naked body covered in red welts. Ada opens a drawer, takes out a fresh chemise and undergarments, puts them on. She stands listening. The spinet has gone quiet. She waits for him to go, for the front door to slam shut, but all she hears is the rain tapping maniacally on the window. Time passes, and then underneath the ticking of the rain, she hears Wesley Case’s feet on the stairs. After three or four cautious steps, he pauses, takes three or four more, and pauses again. Listening to his footfall, she feels as if a shadow of herself is accompanying him to this room where she stands scandalously exposed in her chemise and drawers. The bedroom door stands open; she means to close it, ought to close it, but only lowers her head. She hears him stop at the doorway, wait a moment to be challenged or rebuked, then he enters.
EIGHTEEN
AT FOUR O’CLOCK IN
the morning, lying abed, when the first intimations of light were turning the windowpane slate blue, Case proposed to Ada. It was not only the obligation of a gentleman in such a situation, it was also his heart’s desire. But Ada demurred. “No,” she said, “I will do nothing in a rush. I did it once. It was not a happy decision.”
“You harbour doubts about me.”
Alert to the hurt in his voice, she laid her hand on his rib cage and said, “Doubts about myself. All I ask is for a little time to resolve them.”
Which compelled him to say that time was of the essence. Sooner or later, they would be found out, and the town scandalized. And she replied that they inhabited a small island here, far from prying eyes. And he said, had she forgotten that their small island had another inhabitant, Joe McMullen?
“Well,” she said, “that is true. But Mr. McMullen is your friend.”
“A very talkative friend.”
Ada gave him a nudge with her knee. “As Miss Eliot says, ‘Falsehood is easy, truth is difficult.’ I advise you to take the difficult path. Confide in him. I am sure he wishes no harm to come to either of us. At any rate, we live in such close proximity, a lie cannot be sustained.”
So Case had walked back to the ranch at dawn, received his scolding from Joe for the worry he had caused him, and after that tirade was finished he had confessed to him how matters stood, told him how he had offered Ada his hand, and how she had refused. Until she came to her senses, her reputation must be safeguarded at all costs. And Joe had nodded gravely and said, “Well, I ain’t going to squawk. Sometimes ladies need protecting even from themselves.”
In the weeks that followed, Ada and the ranch occupied all Case’s thoughts. Trying to parse his new life with her was mystifying, but at least the ranch was nothing but straight ahead and go. Over the winter Case had ordered the latest agricultural manuals from Chicago, and now he was eager to put the ideas they advocated into practice. He talked to Joe about “progress in livestock breeding,” and “scientific innovation and advance.” McMullen didn’t second these queer notions, believing that all this was nothing more than another way for smart operators to hoodwink you into buying downright useless novelties. When Case spoke of importing a purebred Hereford bull from the East to improve the bloodline of his herd, Joe told him meat was only meat. When it’s on the plate nobody asks who sired it.
Of all Case’s pet notions, Joe opposed most strenuously his plan to fence the property with barbed wire. He had no use for what he called the Devil’s rope, which he said was good for nothing but tearing up horses that blundered into it. What’s more, blocking people from crossing your land was damn unfriendly and unneighbourly. Case argued that a good fence would save them the hours they spent hunting strays and allow them to rotate cattle from pasture to pasture. It was
efficient
. Joe said that efficient was Lucifer’s word; he wanted no part of it.
So Case went to work digging postholes on his own. In a sulk, Joe watched him from the doorstep for a morning and then, cursing and grumbling, came to lend a hand. Case made up for McMullen’s grudging help with an excess of sweaty zeal. He felt life opening up before him, felt all things were possible. Around him the first, tender grass shoots were showing, and he could scarcely believe that a short month ago he and Joe were stumbling out of bed to play midwife to a heifer struggling to give birth, reaching into a cow to turn a calf, or tying a loop around a pair of protruding ankles to drag slippery, steaming life into the dark and cold. He could see the results of those efforts all around him as he worked, calves bunting their mothers’ udders and fumbling for a teat. And after they had drunk their fill, they stood straddle-legged, dazed with contentment, until some mysterious spark sent them off bucking and snorting, their mothers trotting about in a panic if they lost sight of them, long yarns of slobber dangling from their jaws while they bawled plaintively for their young to return to their sides. It all stirred his spirits, sweetened his anticipation of the end of the day, which came punctually at five o’clock ȁ McMullen scoffed that they were keeping banker’s hours – when Case returned to the ranch house, washed, shaved, brushed his teeth with salt, and set off for Ada’s.
Classes ended at four o’clock, but Ada seldom left the school until five, often later. She was conscientious about preparing lessons and spent a good deal of time copying out material for the next day on the blackboard since her pupils’ parents and the school board saw no need to spend hard-earned money on textbooks. If children could learn things out of a book, they reasoned, what need was there of a teacher? There were assignments to correct, tidying and sweeping up to do before she could put on her bonnet and leave the still and silent schoolhouse.
Case had said he didn’t like her walking about unaccompanied.
“And what’s the solution?” she had said with a laugh. “If I were to be seen hanging on your arm every day, what would that do to the schoolmarm’s reputation?”
And he had almost said,
If you would agree to marry me, your reputation would be secure
. But that was a touchy subject she dismissed or avoided whenever he raised it, so what he said was, “I don’t like the idea of drunks taking liberties with you.”
And she had nearly answered,
What? Take liberties with a woman carrying a pocket pistol?
But that would have required an explanation of something she couldn’t explain herself. Gobbler Johnson was no more. Word had reached Fort Benton months ago that he was the victim of mishap and had been found frozen to death in an isolated spot near Helena. Yet she still carried the derringer in her reticule because setting it aside would be like breaking a comforting spell. So all she had said to Case was, “Schoolmarms are immune to liberties, don’t you know?”
Most days, impatient to see her, he would arrive at her house before she did, take a seat in the parlour, flip through the pages of a book, drum his fingers on the arm of the sofa, jump up and part the curtains every five minutes in hope of catching a glimpse of her. At long last, there she would be, making her way briskly up the trail with a light, elastic step. He would go to the door, hover awkwardly there until she swept into the house and went up on tiptoe to brush her lips to his. Case would smell the sun and wind in her hair, feel the heat of her lightly perspiring body, see the flush of colour glowing on her cheekbones.
Immediately they would begin to talk. She would relate the miracle of the little chap who had suddenly mastered the multiplication tables, tell of the big boys whose attention she had captured with a spirited description of Caesar’s Gallic campaigns. She told him that she had learned from her failure to teach the Harding girls; now she cut the cloth to the coat, not the other way around. She strove to teach her pupils what they could grasp and what would hold their interest. Her new approach was succeeding, and Case could see how her successes thrilled and energized her. “And do you know what happened today?” she would exclaim, leaning forward, eyes shining, her hand falling on Case’s knee to capture his complete attention. “One of the little Slocum girl’s older sisters told her there would be no school this summer. She hadn’t realized. And the tiny mite came to me, wrapped her arms around my legs, and wept in my skirts, all because she would not see Mrs. Tarr
until Septem”
And Case, in his turn, narrated his day just as fervently, perhaps even a touch frantically, because he had a suspicion that Ada’s refusal to marry him was because she believed he could not be constant to anything, and that perhaps included her. He would proudly enumerate how many posts he and Joe had sunk that day, how many yards of barbed wire they had strung. He explained in great detail how, by selling twenty steers to the Army for beef, the money got from them was going to be used to buy more heifers and increase his breeding stock. He told her he was well on his way to building a considerable herd,
responsibly and frugally
. All this was to convince her of his hardheaded acumen and ambition. One evening he went further to prove his worthiness, self-importantly divulged that he was engaged in confidential business here in Fort Benton, that he was acting as adviser and agent to one Major Walsh of the North-West Mounted Police. She had greeted this news a little dryly, a little deflatingly, saying only that she had never expected to entertain a member of the diplomatic corps in her very own parlour. But when she had seen how his face fell at that remark, she had given his hand a gentle squeeze and said that if he were going to keep company with her he would have to learn when she was teasing and when she was not.