BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 34

1906

JOHANNSON

First thing in the morning, Emmaline Johannson rides Opal, their farm horse, for over an hour to get to the Big Fill. She leaves at first sunlight, earlier if the moon is out enough to see the trail on the canal bank. Opal knows the way, could do it in the dark, but Emmaline likes to know where she's going to fall if indeed she falls.

On the way she organizes the cooking in her mind. The beef that was hanging in the icehouse the day before, if it is sufficiently thawed now, gets cut first, today it'll be roasts and tomorrow stew from the lesser cuts, maybe ribs if she changes her mind. The local women, those living at Grandview or Otis, nothing but girls really, will have fired up the cookstoves and done a modicum of prep work for her already. Cut carrots, sliced onions, kneaded the dough from the night prior, brought out apples if any are left, prepared the rhubarb for pies. By the time she and Opal arrive the stoves will be hot, the bread dough's second rise nearly done, some of the beef trimmed, the potatoes peeled.

She has fed John, left the kids with the neighbor girl, who's barely older than they are, in charge. John has headed the other way, to do explosive work on the canal through the rock cut above their place some two miles. The other men on the job never tire of kidding about hiring a man who has already lost a leg in a misfire, but he repeats his practiced retort: he has less to lose than other men, his missing leg proof of his experience.

Through the winter, she and John a dug a well, Emmaline lowering him on a rope so he could set the charge to deepen the hole, then reeling him back up. John jokes about that process, how he made sure she was in a good mood so she wouldn't leave him hanging while the fuse was burning. She hardly musters a grin, the true consequences in her mind obviously nearer to her thoughts than they were to his. There are times when she wished she'd indeed left him hanging. Truly.

When the morning sun rises enough it casts its light on the Big Butte to the northwest, making it seem nearer than it is. Like she could ride there in a couple hours when it's over a half day's ride were she to take it. In the winter, with the snow deep and the sky blue, it appears to swell to triple its summer size, the trick of light on snow and a more vivid background changing the way things look. On those days she can pick out, but not name—though she's been told—three different mountain ranges further west and north, and if she turns around to the northeast the Tetons show, clear over from Wyoming. John intends to go hunting that way come fall, get a deer or an elk, though when he tells the neighbors this they laugh, considering his amputation a drawback to mountain climbing. He claims otherwise, stating that unlike the awkward stance necessary for men having both legs to take, he can shimmy up a hill just by adjusting his crutch on the uphill side, a far less strenuous act, he says, than normal walking.

There's stirrings at the camp as Emmaline ties Opal to a post outside the stable. Later, when she gets a minute, she'll take the horse over to water, then stake her to feed. Now, though, it's time to work, the men emerging from their tents, some already with coffee the girls readied earlier, some—the finicky on one hand, preferring to make their own, the complainers on the other hand, thinking they can make better—with small fires out front of their tents boiling their own.

Inside the kitchen tent and at the slab of wood they call a table, she works her knife along a rack of ribs—she decided she doesn't feel like making roasts today—and makes a stack of meat strips for today's stew to go with bread and potatoes—enough to feed a hundred men. The work, grueling as it is, will pay this year's mortgage, and John's wages from dynamiting should take care of the maintenance fee on the water coming from the canal. The baby comes in November, if she figures correctly, when the farm work is done and the canal work mostly shut down so there'll be no need for a cook—though John can still set charges through the winter where needed. Given the prevalence of rock, it will be needed.

Hannah Herr works aside her, up from Otis with her five year old boy Henry and her husband, who works the spray team. He sprinkles down the fill's dirt—it being just powder this time of year—so it packs better rather than just flowing. It's a little like baking, you need to get the particles just so in order to make them hold, not too much water in the flour and not too little.

Sometimes they have eggs in the morning but the local hens obviously aren't laying, so its bread and bacon for breakfast and the men know better than to bellyache or their dinner may be smaller in quantity and lesser in quality. The younger girls dish food up in the dining tent, their lack of skills no impediment for handing out bread though there's a shy one that will have to alter her attitude or find something else to work at. Delicacy is not a virtue here.

Nora Jones has come in, she doesn't always. Daniel Blossom, too, and Emmaline can tell that either they have an understanding or soon will, there's just that look. They don't sit by each other but their glances meet more than they should were it otherwise, and when she's been nearby when they spoke to each other she noticed their voices turning more melodic. Granted, it's only been two or three times but still, she knows when a shift takes place.

She smiles, remembering such a time.

© 2025 Ralph Thurston