Two in the Field Read online

I nodded and moved forward, unable to speak, gripped by emotions almost frighteningly powerful.

  He stopped short of my outstretched arms. “Where’d you go?” His face looked troubled. “Why didn’t you come back? We thought …”

  I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. “I came as soon as I could,” I told him gently. And then, finally, “Where’s your mother?”

  He pointed to one of the sod houses. “She won’t care to see you, Sam.”

  I felt as if the ground had opened beneath me, and I was suspended in that infinitesimal instant before plunging. My face must have showed it. Tim spread his hands to indicate he was powerless. Then his eyes shifted to a point behind me.

  I knew Cait was there.

  My breath stopped in my chest as I turned and saw her in the doorway. Jet hair. Jade eyes. She was older, yes, but maybe even more beautiful than in my memory. She stood very straight, regarding me with no visible emotion as I set about rememorizing her eyes and lips and the freckles dusting her nose.

  “Leave this place, Samuel,” she said finally.

  It sounded almost biblical, her words low-pitched, their import and intensity devastating. Even then a part of my brain refused their meaning and focused instead on the timbre of her voice, excited beyond measure to hear it again.

  “Cait, I …”

  My voice trailed away as a man stepped into the doorway beside her. Young and russet-haired, dressed in coveralls, looking very much at home, he stood there looking at me. Our little tableau held for a long moment. Then Cait turned inside with a graceful movement that wrenched at my heart.

  Don’t do this, I tried to say.

  TWELVE

  Seamus Devlin sat in a makeshift office in a far corner of “Grand Central,” a cavernous structure that served as a sort of community center.

  “Come in!” he barked. A kerosene lamp cast a yellow circle on a makeshift desk fashioned from crates and littered with handwritten forms. “Welcome to the Emerald Colony!”

  I made an effort to wrench my brain out of its dismal loop of replaying Cait’s words. Devlin obviously regarded me as a prospective settler or investor. I tried to track what he was saying—something about claims already taken up to eight miles all around O’Neill City.

  “I don’t really—”

  “But there’s fine plots available on the Elkhorn’s south fork,” he rushed on. “Or maybe in Atkinson, to the west, our other Irish-in-exile settlement.”

  Long-jawed and saturnine, Devlin looked more like an undertaker than a salesman. His grins and winks seemed incongruous, and almost from the first instant I didn’t trust him.

  “Looks like I might not be here too long,” I said. Rain had started to fall just before I came in. Now mud was seeping from one wall. A blast of thunder shook everything. I had no real bedroll, and most of what I owned was still wet from earlier showers. All in all, I’d probably never been in a lower state of mind. “Got a stable where I could bed down with my horse tonight?”

  Devlin pursed his lips. “We’ll do better than that.” He pawed through a pile of forms. “There’s a vacancy in Number 22. You mind sharing?”

  I agreed to seventy-five cents for the night’s lodging, plus stable and feed for Mr. P. I was being robbed, but I didn’t care. He could have said it cost ten bucks and I’d’ve handed it over.

  Mr. P. needed attention. I needed focus. In the stable both were provided by a grizzled old-timer named Mullaney, who called himself a “freighter;” that is, he made his living transporting goods from railway points to settlements like O’Neill. Under his direction I brushed and watered and fed and blanketed Mr. P. I thought I was finished, but Mullaney handed me a stiffer brush for Mr. P’s hooves. “Got to keep ’em dry and clean,” he said, “otherwise rot sets in.”

  What the hell am I doing here? I wondered, and entertained the sullen reflection that no car I’d ever owned required this level of maintenance

  By the time I finished, I was exhausted. The rain had stopped and a full moon lit the prairie. In the distance I heard the Elkhorn’s watery rush as I slogged through the mud toward Number 22. At least I thought it was the one Mullaney had pointed to. No number was evident. No windows either. The air inside reeked of tobacco, liquor, straw, animals, coal oil and sweat. “Christ,” I muttered, “what’s been living here?”

  “Practically everything,” a deep voice said from the far end of the place.

  I dropped my valise and peered around, trying to make out something, preferably an empty bed. I couldn’t even see my hand before my face. A match scratched and a flame appeared where the voice had sounded. The flame moved to a candle and after the wick flared its illumination exposed a dark hand holding a pistol trained on me.

  “Fine.” The perfect capper to this day, I thought. “Just shoot me.”

  A sacklike pallet lay on the dirt floor beside my feet; it was filled with something that rustled as I fell down on it. I pulled off my muddy boots and sank my head in my hands.

  “What do you want?” The voice was a deep rumble and sounded like it belonged to a black man.

  “I paid Devlin to be here,” I said.

  A silence followed.

  “You gotta spew, do it outside, hear?”

  I raised my head. He was staring at me, and he was very black indeed. Crop-haired and square-jawed. Sideburns but no other facial hair.

  “That’s not the problem—yet,” I said. “You got anything to drink?”

  After a moment he climbed to his feet and brought me a green bottle. The long nightshirt he wore looked even more comical than usual, given that the brawny arms protruding from it were thick as hawsers.

  “Christ,” I sputtered. “This is water.”

  “I’m Temperance,” he said calmly.

  Wonderful. Of all the damn cowboys in the Old West to room with, I draw a teetotaler.

  He wiped the bottle’s mouth and capped it after I handed it back. “Most here wouldn’t drink after me,” he said in that rumbly voice.

  “Something wrong with you?”

  He gave me a flat stare.

  I stuck out my hand. “Sam Fowler.”

  He hesitated, then shook. “Lincoln J. Washington.”

  His hand felt like corded steel.

  “What’s the J?” I said. “Jefferson?”

  “Joe,” he said. “I was just ‘Joe’ in slavery. I gave myself those others.” He was watching me closely. “It ain’t like there’s a birth record, you understand?” It came out like a challenge. Daring me to find fault.

  I sighed. It seemed unreal that ten years ago slavery was legal. Still, I didn’t need a black militant in my face just then. “Well, I didn’t take you for Irish.”

  Surprise registered on the square face. He started to frown, then the humor of it struck him and a grin broke through. The tension between us eased. “Call me Linc,” he said.

  I nodded and looked around for a place to sleep.

  “It don’t bother you bein’ in here?” Linc asked.

  “Is something better available?”

  He snorted and asked how much I’d paid. When I told him, he laughed. “Devlin robbed you blind and sent you here as an insult—in with the nigger, see? This soddy held livestock last winter and now it’s a store-all. There’s others empty, a sight cleaner.”

  His anger seemed tinged with fatalism, as if life was better for some than for others, and that’s all there was to it. I didn’t know how to respond. Finally I said, “Well, I don’t smell anything now. Guess I got used to it. Why are there vacancies? Devlin gave me the impression that things are booming.”

  “Only the goldbug trade—and now that’s petering out. I only been here a couple days, but I’ve heard the complaints. Where’s the promised buildings? Where’s the railroad line that’s supposed to come through?” He shrugged. “Some folks have already gone, too. Gold fever snatched some; the rough life and loneliness got to others. They had no trainin’ for it. Back East it sounded good, with John speechif
yin’ so pretty.”

  “General O’Neill?”

  “He’s a general only if you believe the Fenians are an army,” Linc said wryly. “For politeness I’ll call him ‘general,’ but John was a captain when we mustered out of the Union Army. I was his first sergeant.”

  He explained that after serving in Custer’s cavalry, O’Neill had volunteered to lead one of the new black Union units. “Second Regiment West Tennessee Infantry of African Descent,” Linc said proudly. “Fought our first engagement at Wolf River Bridge in December ’64. Stood fast in the middle of howling lunatic Rebs wantin’ to kill us more’n any Yanks they’d ever known of. John promoted me after that battle.”

  “And you came out here to join him?”

  “Not directly.” An odd note sounded in his voice. “First I tried goin’ home.”

  Silence.

  “I might ask what you’re doing here,” he said, shifting the subject, “and why you slumped in so sorry-like.”

  I told him a little. Then I realized it was a rare comfort to have somebody to share with, and went on, filling in the story of my searching for Cait except for the time-travel part. That I covered by saying I’d been out of the country for six years. To which he simply nodded and commented that ever since the war’s end a lot of men had seen far places.

  “You suppose Cait’s married to him?” I said, after describing the scene at her doorway. A pause followed, and I realized from Linc’s expression that he wasn’t sure who Cait was.

  “Did she have a ring on her finger?” he said.

  The Claddaugh heart … had she been wearing it?

  “I didn’t look at her hands.”

  He made a sympathetic noise, as if I weren’t an idiot but just someone foolishly in love, and said, “What you got in mind to do?”

  “Get drunk, I guess, then get laid.”

  He nodded neutrally.

  “Where’s the nearest place for it?”

  “Up at Yankton, I reckon, across the line in Dakota territory.”

  “Then that’s where I’m headed.”

  He was silent.

  “You ever have this kind of problem?” I said.

  “Apart from John O’Neill,” he answered slowly, “you’re the first white to ask somethin’ like that.”

  “Well, what’s the answer?”

  “I don’t have anything like that … not no more.”

  “Why not?”

  “Don’t ask ’less you want to know.”

  “I do.”

  Keeping his eyes downcast, he spoke slowly, his words barely audible. “When I went home after the war, the Ku Klux lured me out on a fool’s errand and burned my house down.” Sorrow edged his voice. “My wife and kids were in it.”

  “Jesus, I’m sorry, Linc.” My predicament seemed almost inconsequential. “I wish I had some whiskey right now.”

  “Right now, me too,” he said. “But I dosed myself with it too much. Liquor helped me through the pain—but it was a long time before I wanted to try livin’ again. If I go back to it now, it’ll kill me.”

  An owl’s hoot sounded outside, a startling eruption in the stillness.

  “I’ve come for the land,” Linc said, tone hardening. “For something to be mine, you understand? I figure home-steading out here, where I have the tie with John, is my prime chance.”

  I looked around at our dingy space; it didn’t appear to be much of a prospect.

  “No time to clean up yet,” he said defensively. “I been working long hours. ’Sides, I didn’t want to cause trouble right off. But John’s due back any day now, and then I expect an accounting on why Devlin gave me this soddy. And why it is I can’t lay claim to a plot of land closer than twenty miles from here—and then only in sand hills not fit to plant. Hell, some of the Injuns’ ground is better—and everybody knows they got the dregs.”

  He snuffed the candle and said he needed to sleep.

  I lay in my clothes atop the pallet and stared up into the blackness. I thought I smelled the prairie outside, a warm, earthy, loamy incubation. Linc’s breathing deepened. A single cricket chirped somewhere, then stilled. I lay in a sod hut in Nebraska, listening to deep silence, thinking of my daughters and everything else I’d left behind in my other life.

  “Late start today.” Linc squatted beside a small fire of buffalo chips, which proved to burn fast and clean, about like rotten wood. The smell of coffee had roused me, and I’d stumbled outside to discover that the sun had been up for maybe half an hour. He handed me a tin cup and watched as I sipped. “Too weak?”

  “Weak?” I echoed. “Hell, it would strip paint.”

  He looked satisfied. “Here, have some beans left from yesterday.”

  They were greasy and had a strange undertaste. “Where’d you learn to cook?” I asked.

  “U.S. Army,” he replied.

  Devlin had assigned him the job of hauling timber from Eagle Creek, eighteen miles away. A few scattered stands of burr oaks stood along the Elkhorn, but it meant banishment for any settler who tried to cut one down. Logs had to come either from Eagle Creek or the Niobrara River, even farther distant. Milled lumber, pre-ordered from Omaha, 125 miles away, was out of the question.

  Daylight gave me a better look at Linc, whose face and physiognomy, it seemed to me, could have made him a forebear of Jackie Robinson. Torso thick and powerful; thighs bulging his denim pants; cords of muscle standing out in his forearms and hands.

  “What I told you last night about my family,” he said, “I don’t want it going farther.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “I could say the same.”

  He studied me for a moment. “There’s somethin’ about you that’s different.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You ain’t the slightest whit scared of me.”

  “Should I be?”

  He made a sweeping motion toward the settlement. “Some of ’em are actin’ damn nervy over me being here,” he said. “Devlin’s one.”

  “Maybe he’s got something to worry about.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “Well, good luck.”

  “Same to you.”

  I was about to mount Mr. P. when I spotted Tim in front of the store, prying open barrels and crates.

  “Ma told me last night you’d be leaving,” he said sadly when I went over to say goodbye. “We got into a fight over it. You’re going now?”

  Again I was struck by his resemblance to Colm. Cait must see it every day of her life.

  “ ’Fraid so,” I said.

  As he stared at the ground I fought back an impulse to say how much I wanted to stay with him, be his pal. Be his dad.

  “Have you seen Andy?” He glanced defiantly toward his house, and I realized that Cait must have ordered him not to talk to me.

  “I saw him play not long ago.” I embellished Andy’s game in Hartford until it was practically a one-man victory. “He’s married now. You’ve got a new cousin, a baby boy.”

  He acknowledged this news with a quick smile, but his thoughts were focused on the past. “Those were the best times,” he said, toeing the ground. “When it was me ’n you ’n Andy.”

  “It was good, for sure.” I felt as if a boulder was sitting on my chest.

  “I wanted you to be my dad,” he said softly.

  Feeling even worse, I wrapped an arm around his shoulder.

  “It’s Ma’s fault,” he said bitterly. “She could at least talk to you, but she won’t—even though I reckon she ain’t sparkin’ Tip like he wants.”

  “Tip?”

  “Tip McKee,” he said. “You saw him with her yesterday. Tip builds things and fixes up the house. Ma calls him her second Irish boy. She fancies the way he sings and jokes.

  “They’re not married?”

  “Naw.” Tim looked disgusted. “But his soddy is next to us and he comes over all the time. Everybody knows he fancies her.”

  A glimmer of hope.

  “Could we have a catch, Sam?”
/>   “You got a ball?”

  While he ran into the store to get it, I tethered Mr. P. to a hitching ring. We tossed his well-scuffed baseball back and forth, and soon he began showing me his arm strength. My hands were out of shape but I made no complaint as he slammed ball after ball into them, throwing quickly and accurately.

  “You’ve got a strong arm, Tim.” An echo of what I’d heard from my grandfather when I was a boy.

  “Someday I’ll play for the Reds,” he confided.

  “Timothy!”

  We turned like guilty schoolboys to see Cait stepping from her soddy onto the dirt street.

  “I don’t want Sam to go,” Tim said as she drew near.

  “Get back to your work,” she told him. “Please.” Her eyes looked tired and I wondered if she’d lain awake last night like I had.

  “If Sam’s leaving, I want to with him,” he said resolutely. “Will you take me, Sam?”

  Cait glanced my way for the first time, her cheeks reddening with embarrassment.

  “You know I can’t,” I told him.

  “I hate it here!” His voice broke as he said it. Then, face contorted with anger and humiliation, he ran off behind the store.

  “See what you’ve done?” Cait said accusingly. “I asked you to leave, but instead you caused this.”

  She hadn’t asked but ordered, and I didn’t see how I was the cause of Tim’s discontent. But arguing wouldn’t help. “I’m going now,” I said, “if that’s really what you want.”

  She hesitated, at least I thought so. But her answer, when it came, left no space for doubt: “For a certainty I do.”

  “Okay,” I said wearily. “Before I leave, can I give you a message from Andy?”

  She listened expressionlessly as I described her brother’s trip to Ireland and what he’d learned of their family and how he’d come to share her feelings.

  “Fine,” she said softly, shrugging slightly as if to imply, too little, too late, but when she spoke again the brogue in her voice gave her away—it became distinct when her emotions were high. “If it’s sharing Andy intends, you might instruct him to send along some of the great amount of money he makes playing his game.”

  “He’s married now, Cait. He has an infant son.”