“I am well, thank you, Dr. Holliday, but I’ve brought someone who may require your professional services,” Belle told him, putting her arm around Wilfred’s little shoulders.
“And who is this?” the dentist asked. “I thought I had met all your brothers …”
Belle drew the boy forward. “Dr. Holliday, may I present Wilfred Eberhardt? Wilfred, this is Dr. Holliday. He will help you with that tooth. Did you understand, honey? Er hilft mit diesem Zahn.”
“What seems to be the trouble, Mr. Eberhardt?”
Wilfred stared at his feet, so Belle answered for him. “He has a baby tooth that won’t come out—the new one’s growing in behind it.”
“Does he speak any English at all?”
“He might understand more than he lets on,” Belle said, “the way I do with German—I picked it up, just listening, from the farm families. Wilfred’s people spoke nothing but German. He might not have heard much English until last week.”
“And what happened last week?”
Belle told the dentist what she knew. The immigrant family, the worn-out mother, the bereaved father. The bad weather, the growing debt. The loneliness. The suicide. The little boy leading his even littler sisters to the neighbors …
“God a’mighty,” Dr. Holliday said softly. “Is there no one in this vast land who is not in mournin’?”
“I blame my father,” Belle said, suddenly angry and glad to have someone with whom to share her indignation, a luxury she had not enjoyed since Johnnie Sanders died. “Daddy actually blocked legislation that would have provided relief to those farmers when the hoppers ate their crops. And during the drought? He did it again. He said if folks back East find out how bad it is in Kansas, they’ll stop coming here to homestead and property values will drop. Can you believe it? He thinks he’s making up for it by letting Mother and me give charity to families that go bust, but they wouldn’t need charity in the first place if they hadn’t been lured out here with a pack of lies about what a paradise Kansas is!”
Dr. Holliday’s face was grave. “That is a disturbin’ accusation, Miss Isabelle.”
“It’s God’s honest truth, Dr. Holliday! I’m not lying—”
“Most certainly not. I meant that I was disturbed by the accusation, not that I doubted your word—”
“Daddy always says he’s a self-made man. Well, let me tell you something,” Belle declared. “He thinks very highly of his creator! Why, he—” She stopped and stared. “Are you laughing at me, Dr. Holliday?”
“Not at all, Miss Isabelle. I beg pardon for givin’ you that impression. It was an amusin’ turn of phrase, is all. Now, if you would be so kind as to act as our interpreter, ask young Mr. Eberhardt, please, if I may have a look at the tooth that is troublin’ him. Tell him that I’d like to use this little mirror to look inside his mouth.”
Belle did her best, which must have been good enough. Wilfred climbed into the seat.
Dr. Holliday showed the boy the mirror and let Wilfred use it to peek around in the dentist’s own mouth. Belle had seen all this before when she’d brought her sisters and brothers in, but she settled herself behind the desk in the corner of the office to watch the dentist work, while thinking, just hypothetically, of course, Isabelle Holliday. Mrs. John Holliday. Belle Holliday …
In the past two years, she had often studied the paired daguerreotypes on the mantelpiece at home: pictures taken to commemorate her parents’ wedding day. No doubt about it, Alice Armstrong was a lovely child at thirteen. In Belle’s opinion, her mother might have caught herself a better husband if she’d waited a year or two before settling on a man, but Alice was probably practical even as an infant. Picky, after all, requires at least one alternative to reject. A Missouri farm wasn’t likely to provide even that much choice in the way of suitors. Bob Wright’s proposal was the only one Alice was likely to get.
Gazing at her father’s photograph, Belle had tried but simply could not imagine a beautiful little girl like Alice looking at the nineteen-year-old Bob Wright and thinking, My hero! Not with Bob’s bland boyish face and his dreadful little chin, which looked so much worse now that he was wearing that big, full mustache! Belle could hardly stand to be in the same room with him these days, given the amount of sheer physical effort required not to cringe.
Still, there must have been something attractive about her father, once upon a time. Certainly, he had always been a man to make the most of an opportunity—if you could believe his own boasts, that is. Belle had caught him in so many lies, she no longer gave him the benefit of the doubt and checked every claim.
Yes, her mother had confirmed, before he turned twenty, Bob Wright was leading trains of forty freight wagons, delivering supplies to mining camps and railway crews and army depots on the far frontier. And before Alice turned twenty, Bob had indeed made his little bride the mother of three surviving children.
In the ordinary way of things, there might have been even more children by then, Belle supposed with a shudder, except that Bob was often gone for long stretches, tending to business interests scattered across Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, and New Mexico.
Her father routinely offered that as praiseworthy evidence of gumption, but it also meant letting his wife fend for herself and their kids in a dirt-floored soddy with nobody but wolves and savages for neighbors. Belle’s own earliest memory was of huddling with her brothers under a feather bed while their mother loaded guns for the hired hand during an Indian raid. And then there was the time they all nearly drowned, fleeing downriver by canoe during an attack …
What kind of man hears about something like that when he gets home, and then leaves again a couple of weeks later? That’s what Belle wanted to know.
To her misfortune, Alice Wright always seemed to do just fine on her own, which absolved her husband of the need to stick around. He’d come home now and then, get her pregnant, light out again. And there she’d be with all those little children and a new one on the way, and no word from her husband for months at time, and no way to know if she was a widow or simply abandoned.
Like most entrepreneurs, Bob Wright was hostile to federal power and interference, but he saw no harm at all in the postwar scramble for government contracts. And don’t think Belle hadn’t spotted that hypocrisy. Land grants, mineral rights and rights-of-way, mail monopolies, Indian agencies—that was where the real money was. After the war, her father was in there with the best of them, snout in the federal trough.
From what Belle was able to patch together, her mother had hoped things would get better when the family moved to Fort Dodge after Bob got the sutler contract, but Belle was old enough to remember how gloomy and angry and cold her mother turned when they got there. Living inside the fort during the Indian wars meant there was more danger of attracting an attack by hostiles, but also more help in surviving it. So that was a mixed blessing. And having neighbors might have made a nice change, except it turned out the only other civilians at the fort were buffalo hunters passing through and the Irish girls who called themselves laundresses.
As a child, Belle found the girls’ curly hair and bright dresses pretty, and their breezy manner amusing and gay. She enjoyed their songs and laughter, and liked that she was their pet, but quickly learned that her mother absolutely despised them and that it was wise to keep her own fascination well hidden.