Only the Sky: A Western Romance

Only the Sky:

A Western Romance

By Margaret McDiarmid Gooch

Copyright 2011 Margaret M. Gooch

Smashwords Edition

This book is also available in print from online retailers, including CreateSpace.

The work is fictional. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except for the circumstantial resemblances precisely specified in the Afterword, any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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Cover photo by Florence McDiarmid Gooch

Cover design, copyright by Christine Reynolds,

Reynolds Design & Management,

Waltham, Massachusetts

Edited by Heidi M. Thomas

To my mother and father:

Florence McDiarmid Gooch

Luther Cowen Gooch, Jr.

And now comes to mind the light falling golden in the clearing . . .

of that now lost moment in time. . . .

Table of Contents

Frame, Part 1

Western Romance, Part 1

Frame, Part 2

Frame, Part 3

Western Romance, Part 2

Frame, Part 4

Afterword

Frame, Part 1

It is given to me to write, thought Andrea, this story. The box of papers had arrived the day previous, sent by a distant elderly relation. You’re the one writer I know of in the family, Ellen, that cousin, had written. And I think you’ll see—tell—as it should be, believe I can entrust you— What matter that she, Andrea, had only poetry to her credit—had by now, still in her twenties, seen just a few poems published.

This tale would engross her.

She could envision it as a screenplay—would try that means of drafting it out.

Much time would need to go to the purpose, weekends mostly. Would Gene understand?

No. For him, only action counted. Fine that she wrote poems now and then. Fine that she taught fifth-graders, conveyed the right values to them. But in the eyes of her husband, she'd be doing as much for the cause, or so it could seem, if she answered a phone in his office.

Don’t people realize our world’s being poisoned? (a friend’s attempts at authorship raising this question). And why waste time on a fruitless personal ambition when so much is needed? The least act of practical consequence would accomplish more."

Environmental Action, title words of the organization employing Gene as its district field representative, for him, said it all.

Well, there were times enough, on weekends especially, when Gene stayed busy with his reports. She’d say nothing to him for a while—see how it went.

How glad she was to have kept up with Ellen over the years—ever since those two wonderful summers she’d spent as a girl on the ranch Ellen’s nephew still ran. Ellen too, in former years, a schoolteacher—that bond between them, along with the bond first formed by Ellen and Andrea’s grandfather as favorite cousins. The correspondence between those cousins had been the starting means of keeping eastern and western family branches in touch.

And now, it seemed, the long days of retaining family ownership of the ranch were nearing their close.

But what of its beginning, the turmoil of early days? You’ll tell, I’m sure, wrote Ellen, referring to what the papers disclosed, how well—despite everything—it all came out eventually.

Well maybe, thought Andrea. The risks were great of entrusting one’s story to another.

But she thought of her summers west—and horses—and how she’d learned to ride, the wide sky over her—

And how she’d felt entranced, even then, with what Ellen had told her of people and events of the past, the stories she’d heard episodes and gathered hints of,

And how a delight in poetry had flooded her those summers in lines of verse that came to her, inviting other lines, confirming the sway of the impulse to poetry over her,

And she’d written,

"And she, Hallie knew in her heart

How the flight of the wide-looped lariat straight to its mark

Made the air flash quicksilver

And columbine-strewn aspen groves lay shadowed under depths of sky

How the startled deer took the heart’s leap with it—"

And written of names that matched

"The high thin song in the air of the distantly shining Silverfringe Range and the

Wrack-drift accompanied riot of flowers on Zephyrus Pass

Wide-sailed cumulus meadows, those fields rife with iris and juiced loco weed

And what in the thunder laughs:

Thoroden, Dayspring, Illyria, Handshake, Bent Fork, Arriva, Telluride, Fata Morgana."

A BLACK SCREEN

Gunfire.

Sound alone, then with flashes.

One flash that opens to sight—

EXT. BROKEN, SNOW-DUSTED MOUNTAINOUS TERRAIN

Loosely bunched men reluctant to leave straggly cover fire toward a rocky outcropping. Harsh wind drives powdery snow across the crouched figures. A single fugitive, targeted above, holds them in check.

Focus shifts upward, draws nearer. TOM STRIKING HAWK, slim, raggedly dressed, hair worn long with a headband about it, is Indian or mixed-blood, and young, a boy not more than sixteen. Facing ahead with only a quick glance around, he aims with intent steadiness, sending each rifle shot close to its mark.

The command of view his position affords is incomplete. The wooded slope to his back, where a lathered horse is tethered, offers less vantage. There one in pursuit has managed a near closing: REX BONFIELD, a man of some natural dignity, dark-haired and bearded, solidly built, about forty-five.

Rex’s motion is detected; Tom whirls but Rex fires first and the boy, shot in the leg, is down. The fugitive struggles up, back exposed to a second bullet as if with no more mind to his nearby antagonist and with the evident intention of hurling himself over the shielding rocks to the rifle fire below. In haste to prevent him, Rex scrambles the last steps upward; a stride, a lunge, and his hand comes down on Tom’s shoulder to find the boy’s revolver, swiftly turned, pointed right at his face. A full, shocked gaze. Tom hurls the gun down, its discharge on impact harmless. And in the boy’s eyes, all the dark recognition of effort vanquished in capture. A sullen jerk as Rex’s rope goes around him, as his hands are tied. Then Tom closes down in look and all but forced movement. For Rex, as well, swift overcast; he appears at the edge of exhaustion. In pronounced hesitation he intently studies the boy.

The men below see Rex’s wave that gives signal to approach. Drawing breath, they lower their guns and move forward. Worn and begrimed from long pursuit, most can yet muster looks edged with grim jubilation—in particular ZACK STORROD, young, robustly handsome—and a circle of his comrades who comprise a special sub-alliance within the larger group. Hands clasped to shoulders, nods expressive of retributive assent. In contrast, one of the party hangs back: KEN McKENNA, dark-haired, intense, about nineteen. His eyes betray the same stricken sense that claimed captor and captive when arrest was upon them like a shared descent of fate. He might himself be the one seized in capture, sentenced to events sure to follow.

THE SCENE FADES TO BLACK

And with shattering:

EXT. HIGH PLAINS

Another beginning. A train crosses a landscape of challenging immensity; the beyond shines there like water in a cup. What dream might not shimmer forever beyond capture in that swept expanse?

INT. PASSENGER TRAIN

A dark-haired young woman gazes out intently as if to question the emptiness, as if onrush of motion could wave scene and viewer to something, some conclusion, after all. And when a gentleman bends beside HALLIE BONFIELD with a kindly, passing observation, her look reflects an intensity of thought interrupted: blue fire.

She makes brusque acknowledgement and turns again to her reverie. Flashing with changing sunlight and shade, the window glass makes a blur of her view.

EXT. RANCH CORRAL AND SURROUNDINGS (FLASHBACK)

To vision refocused inward, a mountain-edged skyline emerges. Against that backdrop, a small line draws forward—wavering, segmenting—to the wonder of a six-year-old who observes it. The child, Hallie, has paused in swinging play with a rope looped over an upright of a corral that Rex Bonfield, here in his mid-thirties, is repairing. Fitting a cross-piece to the side opposite, he is unaware of the approaching riders: Indians. For a while his daughter stares in silence; then with a murmuring expulsion of breath or soft, hesitant question, she draws his attention; he turns and sees. In a flash, Rex mounts his horse tethered nearby; he pauses, takes a look at her, then swings her up ahead of him. They spur briskly forward as a brown-haired, hazel-eyed young woman, JUDITH BONFIELD, darts from the door of a small ranch house behind them too late to voice objection. Trimly alert, hands on her hips, she stands looking anxiously after them.

EXT. OPEN RANGE (FLASHBACK)

The course of father and daughter, starting as a run, slows as they approach the riders who now wait for them.

HALLIE (V.O.)

The band, where were they from? Land and sky, earth, air, and distance—people who might live anywhere!

They wait in stillness, the Indian tribesmen, silent as the wide, mountain-rimmed landscape behind them. Impassive, their faces; impassive they remain as hands are raised in greeting, as calm words of greeting are exchanged.

HALLIE (V.O.)

Their hair glinted with the sky; their faces seemed warm like earth in the sun. They wore feathers pointing skyward, white-tipped in sunlight.

Horses’ tails switch, no smiles—but suddenly, quick shouts of laughter. And Rex raises Hallie to stand in front of him, urges his horse forward toward the leader of the band—the one in front, at center, their chief—who, his eyes obsidian, lays his hand on her head in bestowal, brings it down, open-fingered, to jab her chin forcibly upward. His feather flashes against a radiance of cloud in her upraised view.

The tribesmen, on a course now swerving, ride on; father and daughter return. The child’s face is aglow with a soaring sense won of release to the extraordinary.

HALLIE (V.O.)

When we got back, Mother was waiting, furious. But Pa laughed—said the Indians were Utes, as he’d thought—no harm, he knew them. He’d told them he had no son living yet, but his daughter was brave and could meet with warriors.

INT./EXT. PASSENGER TRAIN

Hallie’s face registers, through flashing sunlight and shade, a thin line of brush along a dry river bed.

HALLIE (V.O.)

Later, when I first heard of baptism, I thought,

"But I have already been baptized."

EXT. FOOTHILL AND MOUNTAINOUS TERRAIN

The train continues its journey in a line of perceptible ascent toward the thunder of mass and height. A thread against the foothills, again half lost, but still, through motion, focusing the motionless. The mountains close and darken, canyons fall away—below, the glittering flash of water. A variety of grandeur builds, unrolls—what words do we need for it? We have seen, can imagine it; we know it. And yet, the eye and heart wait to attain and soar free of it all where, at the last opening rise, the peaks meet the clouds, are the realm of the glory of