BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 41

1920

DANIEL

Past forty years old now, I'm not so much a catch as I once was unless a woman compares me with the failed farmers, failed miners, confirmed drunks and other riffraff that remains single. My position, fairly safe financially, makes me more attractive than I am. What women remain unmarried, however, are young enough to weigh me in as overly aged when compared to imagined partners. Others have been sitting on the shelf, maybe spoiled by disuse—perhaps, they might even have started as spoiled and unusable. Then there are those widowed and with children, who make me skittish to even be near them. I know my weaknesses well enough to know that, in the right frame of mind in the right circumstances, I might do something foolish.

But sometimes it's just impossible to avoid unwanted contact. The Springfield-Taber Road, which passes by a lot of homesteads, and my lateral routes that pass even more shacks, provide ample opportunity for discourse and more, should all parties desire. This land of half a million acres, tending toward stillness as it does, takes just a minuscule spot of movement to catch a settler's attention, so my horse appearing in the distance, even miles away, becomes an occasion to break up not just a day but sometimes a week of imposed silence—that quality of the area being desirable to a few, unbearable to most.

If you add to that inherent draw of an appearing difference, a suck not unlike the eddy in a canal, mankind's seemingly universal wish for more—more of anything, just more—and a belief in providence that connects things that shouldn't be connected, and I become something of a prize I really am not.

Mrs. Tillotson, for instance, whose husband, just twenty-five years old, passed away from the Spanish Flu—as Nora and countless others did—and left three children under six years of age. With the aid of her Italian neighbor, Pasquale DiRenzo, her acreage has some scratched-in wheat but the spears already show browning from either lack of moisture or a late frost. There was really no way to avoid her if she wanted to meet me, this being the only road save some random traipse through the desert further out by the lavas.

Likely, Mrs. Johnson's husband, who must be in his seventies now, over to the west would make her wife number four or five (no one knew how many, exactly) in order to extend his empire, and given her diminishing choices she might just take that opportunity. Just not yet.

The children stand gathered at the trailside, my presence a vision to them, so used they must be to one dreary day after another. And their mother, some two hundred feet back, has timed her walk so she meets me as I pass. I have empathy but I am no savior. Like her, I am tired, just a different sort of it. This is no place for a woman, I know that, whether widowed or married, and those who stick it out possess some sort of stubbornness or gravity that refuses them leave. That character trait is not one I wish to tangle with.

"Ma'am," I say, tipping my hat like a gentleman.

"Mr. Blossom!" she says, the effort to sound pleasant an obvious strain. There's not much energy left to prop it up, is my guess. "What brings you to the desert? Or should I say 'God's Country'?"

I chuckle, as the remark intends to make me do, resist the ironic rejoinders it presents me. "A last look at the Project," I say. She knows what I mean.

"It's hot," she says. "You must be parched. Come in for a minute, there's pie made just this morning. Coffee if you'd like to wash it down."

Water pie or rhubarb, it can only be, it being a little late for last year's fruit, even dried, to be useful for a pastry endeavor. The children look healthy enough, but near-starved—and not so much for food as for attention, difference, a male's presence, perhaps—and it is their need, not hers, I cave to. "I can't resist that, Mrs. Tillotson."

"Charlotte, please. Call me Charlotte."

"Daniel," I say, hoping my reluctance shows without being insulting. I dismount and take my horse along with us.

Well-behaved, the children follow us like chickens interested in possible sustenance, not underfoot but close, each competing with the others to be nearest me.

Once inside, I see the table already set for five. I'm taken aback, just a bit, to be so predictable. But I realize she may have just been forcing the issue by tweaking fate—or God, I don't know her spiritual disposition—by doing what she could to put machinations in motion to create the next moment, the one she wishes for, to occur.

"Sit," she says to me. "Children," she says to the young ones in a voice stern but loving, one obviously long-listened to and successfully used. They respond without being told, sit at the table without fuss, keep silent.

"Any news of the Project?" she asks, setting us slices of, yes, rhubarb pie. With cream. I sniff lightly, trying to detect if it's gone off. Drinking settlers' milk is sometimes a form of Russian Roulette.

I am not a politician, but those in the office often accuse me of being one. I am the company point man, the one who touches the most individuals overall—though each ditch rider has his entourage, too, and they, believe me, are not politicians. I have to watch my words, so much so that what I say is often nothing at all. My words go one way and mean another, one rider remarked to ensuing laughter. I admit, I use a magical sleight-of-language intended to misdirect, for the last thing I, or the company, needs is gossip to roll up into something akin to a desert fire, racing ahead of itself like a burning rabbit setting more land ablaze.

And so, politician-like, I make a half circle with my head, something to signal my own perplexity. "You probably know as much as me. It's up to the Bureau."

Disappointed by the lack of an immediate savior, yet she makes an effort to remain sunny. There are lower tiers of hope, the biggest prize is not always necessary, smaller ones can suffice. "A couple weeks then?"

I make sounds of pleasure, maybe just a tad beyond what the pie deserves, but it is truly better than I expected. In part, no doubt, due to my hunger and a long spell of eating my own cooking. Seisser's culinary efforts, while adequate, were no improvement on the fare I was accustomed to. And my own fixing this morning amounted to jerky. "I believe they're meeting at the end of June. First of July, somewhere around there."

She has sat down opposite me. The children, though listening to us, work their pie in such a manner that I know it's been sometime since they tasted something sweet. Another bite and they'll have finished, wanting to lick their plates but in the presence of a guest refraining from doing so.

"Is it a matter of the reservoir or the canal?" she asks. Her brow furrows, like all the dry farmers' do when considering those options.

"Both," I say. "Fine pie. A real pleasure." I fork a bite in, my heart somewhere between enjoying the taste and wishing to escape this enclosure in time and space.

"And the tunnel?" she asks.

I feel I need to offer her something and the tunnel seems a safe enough subject, it being an engineer's wishful thought to drill an eight mile shaft from Montana's Yellowstone Lake across the Great Divide into the Snake River watershed. "I think we can discount that, but you never know."

She eases somewhat, one bullet dodged. "Your project stand a chance?" She puts her finger to her lips, shakes her head as if dissuading a fly. "Our project, I should say."

I pause, a forkful of rhubarb poised, the children's eyes focussed on the rising fare. I should give them my portion, but I can't fashion the sequence of actions that would make such an offer seem less than an insult to their mother. "I think better than the other one. The Dubois Project. Ours is more within reason, considering the cost of the other. Not to mention the difficulty. It's why we chose the route we did." I pause, then add a little commentary. "And asking for less always looks better aside someone asking for more."

She nods and smiles. "So, so true."

I ask about her Italian neighbors, she laughs a bit, tells about the language barrier between her and DiRenzo's wife. She signals with her hands the awkwardness between them as they try to breach the barriers of loneliness, one husband dead and the other working on the railroad every day. He walks four miles in the morning to Taber and four miles back each night. Francesca has two children, a wild pair slightly older than her own and knowing more English than their parents.

When I finish, I push the plate away and say thanks, another hand reaching in my pocket. I know a trick, don't perform it well but well enough to fool young children, and as I get up to leave I reach behind the oldest boy's ear. Touching the other ear to get his attention, I pull a quarter out from behind the first to astonish him. "You better start washing better behind your ears," I say. I hand it to him. I do the same with the girl, and the youngest boy who doesn't understand what's happening, other than something is showing up that wasn't there before.

I would leave her money but she would interpret it as charity. Too proud, she would deny the need and refuse it. As it is, she can't take from her kids what's been given, a graver misdeed. There's enough between them to buy some flour or sugar, get them by for a few days down the road. It's not what she wants, but I know she doesn't really want what she thinks she does. And that I can't offer it if she does.

"I best be on the trail," I say. "I should be at headquarters in two hours and I'll be late as it is."

The children might be as crestfallen as their mother were it not for the coins they still fondle. If there were increments of deprivation a man might chronicle, this scene would mark a clear spot on the spectrum, a place where either sinking or rising might next occur. Not prone to prayer, nonetheless I throw out a mental suggestion to whatever powers there might be to set things aright for the woman.

"Ciao," says the girl, waving, apparently having been around Italians enough to exchange a word of a different language. "Ciao," I say back, and she beams. Not to be outdone, the older boy says it, too, and then the younger one speaks it, though in a less well-formed variation. I return the favor, which makes them say it again, somewhat in unison. Charlotte and I offer smiles to each other, charmed. But hers is of a weak character that, once I'm gone, I suspect will deteriorate into a lament that has gone on for some time and will continue to reign.

On the way to Springfield I am reminded of Emmaline Johannson's words, something along "if we all could throw our troubles in a pile and retrieve some in exchange, why, we'd all just go in and grab our own back."

© 2025 Ralph Thurston