Softly Falling Read online

  As the children drew their own pack rats on paper, she looked at the beautiful buffalo hide winter count that Pierre had loaned to her classroom of True Greatness. “D’ye think, sir, that I can convince your boss to permit you to tell my children about winter counts?”

  “It’ll take no convincing,” the Indian said in his straightforward way. “I’ve noticed that he’s happy to help you.”

  “He’s interested in education,” Lily said, even as her face felt warm.

  “That too,” he replied with a smile.

  Heavens, Lily, stop talking, she scolded herself. She walked Pierre to the classroom door. She held out her hand and he shook it. His handshake was light and delicate, telling her that Indian men did not usually touch anyone’s hands like that.

  “Thank you,” she said. “You’re a good teacher, Pierre Fontaine.”

  “Not as good as you.”

  “Oh, I . . .”

  “Just look at them,” he said simply and released her hand. “See you later, Teacher.”

  Lily watched him head back down the hill, noticing at the same time that Freak the scary cat was watching him too. When Pierre grew smaller and smaller, Freak came closer, his eyes still on the retreating figure. For the smallest moment—she quickly dismissed the notion—Lily wondered if Freak had decided to be her protector.

  She threw up her hands and went back into the classroom, walking around to watch her children. Oh, they were hers. How did that happen? Nick wasn’t much of an artist, but Luella’s effort looked remarkably like the Little Man of the Prairie that Pierre had drawn. Lily couldn’t help a little shiver, hoping that the pack rat would confine his education to after hours, when the school was empty.

  When the children finished, she asked, “Should we pin them up here or take them home?”

  “Here, I think,” Nick said, reminding her that he had the makings of a leader already. He cocked his head a little to one side, looking like his mama. “If we tell you the words, could you write a little something to go along with the pictures?”

  “I can,” she said. “Perhaps we could just pull our desks together closer to mine, and we’ll all decide what to say.” She looked at Luella. “Luella is a little farther along with writing. Should we let her write our final version for the wall?”

  The Sansevers all nodded. Lily looked at Luella, surprised to see the tears in her eyes. “Is that satisfactory with you, Luella?” she asked, unsure of herself.

  Luella nodded, then took a deep breath and stood beside her desk. She looked directly at the blackboard first, then at Chantal. “I owe you an apology, Chantal,” she said, her voice tight with emotion. “You didn’t steal my eraser. I am sorry.”

  A child of impulse, Chantal reached out and touched Luella’s hand, and her eyes filled with tears too. “That’s all right.” She dabbed at her eyes. “Would you like to sit on the front row with us?”

  Luella nodded. Nick stood up, bowed to her, and pulled her heavy desk closer to the rest of them, while Lily surveyed the effect. “I like this, but let’s go a little farther,” she said. “Let’s move our desks into a u-shape and I’ll move my desk closer.”

  Without a word, her children did as she said. When they were all seated again, shy Amelie raised her hand.

  “Yes, my dear?” Lily asked. Maybe she shouldn’t say “my dear,” but she was not really a teacher, so what did it matter? No one seemed to mind.

  “I think we will learn better this way,” Amelie said.

  “I believe you are right,” Lily said, swallowing the boulder in her throat. “Now, let us decide what we want to say about our Little Man.”

  The afternoon’s lesson plan went out the window as a better one took over. By the time the school day ended, Luella’s neatly printed statement about the pack rat was tacked to the wall opposite Pierre’s winter count and surrounded by five pictures, Lily’s included.

  There was only time to make one last assignment. “Mr. Fontaine said that pack rats don’t hibernate. Let’s think about what little bits of food he might like. We could bring him something every day or so for him to hide.”

  The children decided that raisins and seeds might be best. Nick suggested coffee beans, but his classmates firmly vetoed this victual. “Mama has lentils and there are oats,” Amelie said. “Coffee beans would keep him awake, Nick.”

  The others giggled, and Nick had to smile too.

  “Maybe he’s English like Miss Carteret and likes loose tea,” Chantal teased, her eyes on Lily.

  Nick threw back his head and laughed. Chantal and Amelie looked at each other. Lily wondered what had just happened, but she had no trouble teasing back. She put her hands on Luella’s shoulders. “What do you think, Luella? Loose tea or coffee beans?”

  “Tea,” Luella said decisively. She leaned back ever so slightly against Lily and sighed, as though a great load had been lifted from her young shoulders. Or if not lifted, at least rearranged to become more manageable.

  What other burdens do you carry, Luella? Lily asked herself, wondering how solitary the child’s life really was, once the school day was over. She would have to ask Fothering. Whatever he said, Lily knew there were ways, good ways, to give the lonely child the attention she craved. Maybe teaching with True Greatness was going to require at least as much understanding of her children as the alphabet and numbers. Only a week ago, such a thought would have terrified Lily. Now she welcomed it.

  CHAPTER 21

  What a day,” Lily said softly as she said good afternoon to her students and watched them march away, Nick leading the little parade with Luella right behind. Satisfied as never before, she turned around and surveyed the classroom, making sure all objects that would snare the Little Man’s interest were safely tucked in her desk drawers. Knowing he must have had a difficult two days, she took two hairpins from her chignon and left them on her desk as a peace offering.

  She closed the door quietly behind her and looked to the tree line. Freak stood there, his tail twitching. He took a step forward, thought better of it, and retreated.

  “Never mind, I say,” she told him. “We have all year. Just leave the pack rat alone, do you hear?”

  He narrowed his eyes as if to say, “You’re talking to a cat, imbecile.”

  Lily took her time. The September sun felt good on her face, but there was no denying the chill underlying the sun’s warmth, like the suddenly colder current in a shallow stream. She sauntered past the cookshack, where the door stood open.

  When Madeleine saw her, Lily waved. The widow blew her a kiss, but that wasn’t enough. As Lily watched, Madeleine wiped her hands on her apron and ran out the door, her arms held open wide. She grabbed Lily in an unexpected embrace, rocking her from side to side, speaking in French.

  “My French isn’t so good,” Lily said as she hugged the woman back.

  Madeleine just held her in her arms. “Chantal and Amelie told me.”

  “About Luella’s apology?”

  “Oui, but my dear, even better: Nicholas laughed.” Madeleine’s face grew serious. “He has not laughed since . . . you know.”

  Lily took a deep breath. “Then this was a good day for all of us.”

  Over her protests, Madeleine gave Lily an extra helping of mashed potatoes that night at supper, which she divided with her father. As she chatted with him, it was her turn for her mind to wander. She glanced at Pierre Fontaine, sitting next to Jack. He sat cross-legged on the bench, which suggested to her that the Indian wasn’t totally resigned to his cowboy world. She wanted to ask Jack where he had come from.

  On the way west, she had looked with interest on a handful of Indians riding in the same railcar, accompanied by white men in dark suits and a man who looked neither one nor the other, in a suit but wearing moccasins. Her curiosity overcame her shyness—after all, wasn’t she neither one nor the other?—so she said thank you when he held a café door open for her at one of the stops for meals. She held back a bit and found herself at the lunch counte
r at the same time he was.

  “Excuse me, sir, but where are these Indians going?” she had managed to whisper as the harried server practically flung cheese sandwiches with some sort of mystery meat at them and held out her hand for a dime. Never mind that Lily had whispered for tea and toast.

  He had looked at her with interest of his own when he heard her unfamiliar accent, and with his lips, indicated a bench outside the crowded café. Shy and wondering if she had just violated some fearsome taboo of travel, she sat with him as he looked at his sandwich with vague displeasure. He took a bite and rolled his eyes. “At least it is food,” he had said, which made her smile. “Or something like,” he added, which made her chuckle.

  “They are Lakota,” he told her as she ate, “back from a visit to the great white father’s house.”

  When he could tell she did not understand, he tried again. “Washington and big fat man name of Cleaverland.”

  “My goodness, the president of the United States,” she had said, having gleaned some information from an old newspaper someone had left behind on a train seat. “Did they have a good visit?”

  He shrugged. “Someone stole their souls and took pictures, and Cleaverland and his men talked a lot, but nothing will change.”

  That thought wasn’t going to digest any better than the sandwich. “They are going home now?”

  He had smiled faintly at that question. “Never home. Back to a little piece of land they don’t much like.”

  “And you? Where do you go?”

  “Same place. I am the man who tells the white men and the Lakota what the other is saying.”

  “You are the interpreter?”

  He had nodded and gave her a shrewd look, one that she knew took in her olive skin and West African features, mingled with French and what have you. “You are like me—you have a foot in two worlds.”

  The train whistle had sounded then and the conductor started swinging his lantern and shouting, “Booard! Booard!” Lily left her half-eaten sandwich on the bench, even though she was certain not even a stray dog would be that hungry.

  Without missing a step, the interpreter scooped up her left-behind food and tucked it in his overcoat. “You never know when you might be hungry for nearly anything,” he said with no embarrassment. He had returned to his section of the train compartment and she to hers. He had looked at her a few more times before the entourage got off at Ogalala, and tipped his hat when they left. She thought about him a long while and wished there was some way to have made more of his acquaintance. A foot in both worlds.

  Jack put on a clean shirt that night for his visit to the Carteret’s shack. He had shaved two days ago, but it never hurt to revisit that sun-wrinkled face he knew so well and do some more efficient resurfacing.

  Same old face, right down to that still-impressive scar. Jack rubbed his chin, pleased that at least the thing didn’t hurt. He debated a moustache and discarded it again. Better to do nothing. After all, she had seen his face for a few weeks now.

  And he had seen hers. She reminded him of the pretty half-daughters of the nearest plantation owner, their mother a woman of color who worked in the plantation kitchen. Everyone knew about it, even the planter’s wife, but there they were, a fact of Southern life.

  His own kind—the sharecropping, white trash kind—were none too particular about a little color in their own background, except his father, who wouldn’t countenance such things. He had warned Jack a time or two, but died a few years before Jack reached that age when he might have gone looking for a wife, had not a war intervened. The matter became moot then, as he struggled to fight and stay alive in a war he didn’t care much about, except that it took him from the desperation of that poor farm in Georgia. He hadn’t regretted leaving it or the South.

  He had no doubt that Lily Carteret was several genteel cuts above him, no matter the shade of her complexion. Her father was a gentleman, even though he was a remittance man and an alcoholic. The back of the photo of Lily’s mother that had been in his possession for several months had the stamp of a studio in Bridgetown, Barbados. Mrs. Carteret had been an islander, where mixes and matches through a century or two had produced the world’s most lovely women, in Jack’s estimation. Ah, well. Lily didn’t mind him, and they could surely be friends.

  He flattered himself that Lily had been watching for him, because the door opened before he even raised his hand to knock. Her excitement was palpable, but she took his hat politely and motioned to the packing crate settee as elegantly as if he sat in an English parlor. But her eyes! How lively they were, how wide and beautifully brown.

  “I gather the day went well,” he said, once he sat down. “The Little Man of the Prairie didn’t frighten anyone?”

  “Oh, heavens, we’re just hoping that the whole kerfuffle didn’t frighten him away.”

  He said hello to her father, who was sitting in the rocking chair with a back issue of the Cheyenne Tribune open. Clarence Carteret nodded his own greeting and returned to the paper he had probably read half a dozen times already, if the creases were any indication. At least he was sober and awake.

  Lily sat beside Jack, turned a little and facing him, her enthusiasm so charming. “Jack, we created a whole lesson around the pack rat, and everyone is committed to supplying him with food.” She sighed. “I hope he’ll be back.”

  “Time will tell,” he said, and it sounded so perfectly insipid that he wanted to roll his eyes.

  “What was even better, Luella apologized to Chantal for accusing her of theft. That takes courage.” She looked at him, those lovely eyes troubled. “I stopped to talk to Fothering, and he told me that she is mostly ignored at the Buxton house.”

  Clarence was now asleep in his chair, but she moved a little closer, as if she feared that legions were lined up outside with an ear to the thin wall. “Perhaps this is rude of me, but what on earth is wrong with Mrs. Buxton that she cares not to mother her only child?”

  He had no enlightenment for her, but he knew from experience it wasn’t a normal family. As he wondered how much to tell her, he couldn’t overlook Lily’s inquiring eyes. He felt his face grow warm, which only reminded him that his was no poker face, even if he had won her father’s ranch on the turn of a card.

  “What are you not saying?” she asked.

  “I . . . I think she just likes to be sick,” he managed.

  Lily’s own expression told him that she wasn’t satisfied with his lame answer. He could say more, that Mrs. Buxton just seemed to be bored and suffered her own lack of attention from Mr. Buxton. Beyond that, he knew he would never tell Lily about the time he answered a summons to her bedroom, ostensibly for a shopping list in town, and found her ready for a diversion he wasn’t inclined to provide. In fact, he couldn’t leave the room fast enough. When Jack mentioned the matter that night to Preacher, his hand had said something about Potiphar’s wife.

  “She’s bored,” Jack said in his official foreman tone of voice that discouraged further discussion.

  To his relief, Lily nodded. “ ’Tis a pity she can’t see that Luella just wants some love and attention.” She became all businesslike. “Now, sir, let us forge ahead to two syllable words.”

  They did, moving to the table. He carefully copied the random collection of letters at the top of his slate and made words. When he finished, she looked over his slate. As he had hoped, she paused at the word yall, then tapped the slate with her fingernail.

  “That is not a word, Jack.”

  “Sure it is,” he told her, not trying to hide his smile. “I say it all the time. ‘Yall hurry up shoveling out that, uh . . . that, uh. . .”

  “Manure?” she offered helpfully, her eyes lively. “Yall is still not a word.”

  “Y’all. I am from Georgia and that’s what we say. You’ve heard me.”

  She folded her hands and eyed him. “Very well! I will concede that yall is a word, but let us add an apostrophe here. Now I will allow it, even though it’s only one sy
llable, and you are beyond that. Y’all.”

  They looked at each other and burst into laughter, which made Clarence Carteret start from his doze and looked at them, owl-like.

  “I’m sorry, Papa,” Lily said. “He’s being funny.”

  Clarence put down his paper and narrowed his eyes. “Behave yourself, Mr. Sinclair,” he said, and then his lips twitched.

  The three of them laughed, after which Clarence stood up, kissed Lily on the top of her head, and said, “Good night, y’all,” as he went to his bedroom.

  Lily looked so pleased that Jack could not resist. “Sir, no, I’m afraid that when you are addressing two or more people, it is most properly ‘all y’all.’ ”

  Clarence just shook his head and laughed as he closed his door. Jack glanced back at Lily, who seemed to be struggling. “What happened?” he asked softly, not wanting to disturb her further.

  “He made a joke,” she said simply and dabbed at her eyes.

  “Bravo, Lily,” he said. “You’re good for him.”

  “Am I?” She sounded so hopeful and suddenly as young as Chantal.

  He nodded and pointed to Ivanhoe because he really wanted to cuddle her on his lap, and that would never do in a million years. “You are. Now, chapter twenty, is it?”

  She read the chapter, pausing now and then to point at small words. “Your turn,” she would say, and he read too. It was a small thing, but he felt his whole body expand with the pleasure of reading.

  He didn’t want the chapter to end. Ivanhoe seemed a bit wordy to him, but Sir Walter could have added another page or two of something, anything, just so he could listen to Lily read. Jack couldn’t help but wonder if Nick Sansever had fallen in love with her yet. Good thing he, Jack Sinclair, was just a friend.

  Nick. That reminded him. After she closed the book and returned it to the shelf, he stood and wondered just how brave he was. She handed him his hat.

  “I have to tell you something, Lily,” he said. “Madeleine was in tears when she told me how delighted she was that Nick had laughed in your class today. Chantal told her.” He managed a self-conscience laugh of his own. “Why do women cry when they are happy?”