Page 93 of The Veteran

‘I don’t know,’ said the girl, ‘I’ll think about it.’

An hour later she and her party were gone.

It took a week, but she came. One of her colleagues at the school was called away to the bedside of a relative. There was a vacancy in the escort group and she volunteered. The day was hot. She wore a simple cotton print frock.

Craig had asked Charlie to check the visitor roster for him, looking for a booking from the school.

‘You have your eye on someone, Ben?’ she asked archly. She was not disappointed, recognizing that a relationship with a sensible girl could enormously help his rehabilitation to the real world. She was pleased by the speed with which he was learning to read and write. She had procured two simple books for him to read, word by word. After the fall she thought she could find lodgings for him in town, a job as store clerk or table waiter, while she worked on her thesis about his recovery.

He was waiting when the wagons unloaded their cargoes of children and teachers.

‘Will you come walk with me, Miss Linda?’

‘Walk? Where?’

‘Out to the prairie. So we can talk.’

She protested that the children needed her attention, but one of her older colleagues gave her a broad wink and whispered that she should take time for her new admirer if she wished. She wished.

They walked away from the fort and found a jumble of rocks in the shade of a tree. He seemed tongue-tied.

‘Where do you come from, Ben?’ she asked, aware of his shyness, quite liking it. He nodded towards the distant peaks.

‘You were raised over there, in the mountains?’ He nodded again.

‘So what school did you go to?’

‘No school.’

She tried to assimilate this. To spend a whole boyhood hunting and trapping, never to go to school . . . It was too strange.

‘It must be very quiet in the mountains. No traffic, no radios, no TV.’

He did not know what she was talking about but presumed she referred to things that made noise, other than the rustle of the trees and the call of the birds.

‘It’s the sound of freedom,’ he said. ‘Tell me, Miss Linda, have you heard of the Northern Cheyenne?’

She was surprised but relieved at the change of subject.

‘Of course. In fact my great-grandmother on my mother’s side was a Cheyenne lady.’

He swung his head towards her, the eagle feather danced in the hot breeze, the dark blue eyes fixed her, pleading.

‘Tell me about her. Please.’

Linda Pickett recalled that her grandmother had once shown her an old photograph of a wizened crone who had been her own mother. Even with the passing years the large eyes, fine nose and high cheekbones indicated the old woman in the faded monochrome snapshot had once been very beautiful. She told what she knew, what her now-dead grandmother had told her as a little girl.

The Cheyenne woman had once been married to a brave and there had been a baby boy. But about 1880 an epidemic of cholera on the reservation had taken the brave and the boy away. Two years later a frontier preacher had taken the young widow as his wife, braving the disapproval of his fellow whites. He had been of Swedish extraction, big and blond. There were three daughters, the youngest Miss Pickett’s own grandmother, born in 1890.

She in turn had married a Caucasian and produced a son and two daughters, the younger girl born in 1925. In her late teens it was that second daughter, Mary, who had come to Billings seeking work, and had found it as a clerk in the newly established Farmers’ Bank.

Working at the next booth was an earnest and industrious teller called Michael Pickett. They married in 1945. Her father had not gone to the war due to short-sightedness. There were four elder brothers, all big blond lads, and then Linda in 1959. She was just eighteen.

‘I don’t know why, but I was born with a streak of jet black hair down my head, and dark eyes, nothing like my mom and pa. So there you are. Now you.’

He ignored the invitation.

‘Do you have marks on your right leg?’

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