A Pastoral for Edith

Edith Dodson had spent much of her life as a cook for the Dodson Mining Company in Wallace. Her hair was the color of soft auburn that shined bright against the harsh winter snow, and her cotton dresses flowed freely in the summer months. Edith had big blue eyes that kept the company miners returning to the cookhouse when the dinner bell rang. She was the talk of every mining crew in Wallace, yet she remained the girl I dreamed of every night for the rest of my life.

I first came to town at the turn of the century, from Miles City, to earn a living as a drover for Junior McCall’s Cattle Company. Before that, I had driven cattle for my father until his passing. Not long after, my mother joined my father. The night my brothers and I buried our mother, we decided to sell the ranch. We split the money, and each went our own way. I drifted from town to town searching for work doing the only thing I knew how to do, driving cattle. My brothers Jack and Wyatt went off to New York. Mother always wished the twins, being the youngest, would pursue education with the changing of the times. Wade signed up to fight in the war in Cuba with the volunteer cavalry regiment. I wouldn’t hear of his adventures until many years later.

When I first met Mr. McCall it was by sheer luck. It was around August and the rain had been pouring heavily in Wallace for a few days. I was only passing by, hitching rides on my way to Canada without a clue of what I was looking for. I’d spent nearly every dollar I had along the way. I had been halfway through stewed beef and potatoes when I overheard Mr. McCall complaining to a man about his cowboys. Something about a lost horse, and an injured rider with a doctor bill too high for the worth of the cowboy. I scarfed down the remainder of my food and waited until Mr. McCall had walked from his table to the bar for a drink. I stood at the end of the bar, handing in my empty bowl and utensils to the barkeep, ordering a beer, same as Mr. McCall. We made eye contact. He was an older man, short in stature, yet large in heart I’d come to learn. He wore his broad-brimmed hat to the side, and donned a large mustache that covered the top of his lip.

“You new to Wallace, son?” he asked me. He had no accent, just spoke nasally.

“Passing through on my way to Canada, waiting out the rain I suppose,” I said, looking up at him again.

“It gets this way around August, cold and rainy,” he said, taking a drink from his beer after. “The miners in town don’t complain though, they ain’t got to deal with it like the rest of us. Where is it you come from?”

“Just outside of Milestown, or Miles City now I guess. Montana.”

Mr. McCall grabbed his beer and walked around the bar closer to me, “You running from something? Family in Canada?”

“No. I suppose I’m just looking for the next place to call home. The world is changin’, parents passed on. Brothers and I sold the family ranch, and we each went on our separate ways. Riverside started expanding, offered us a big chunk of money for our land, and we took it. My brothers had grown tired of punchin’ anyways so it was for the best.”

“And what about you? You still looking to ride friend?” McCall leaned up from the bar and faced towards me with attentiveness.

“It’s all I know how to do. I overheard you discussing with the other gentleman about a greenhorn been giving you some trouble?” I asked. I looked him in the eye.

He shuffled his feet, and looked back at the bar, “Yeah, none of these kids ride like they did when I was young, too worried about girls and books now I suppose,” he paused, “James McCall,” he stuck his hand out to me. “my father was James McCall, so most around here call me Junior.”

I shook his hand.

“Well son, if you are looking for work to help with your travels, I could use a drover for the next few weeks, while that boy’s with the doctor. And when he’s out, you can get back on your way. We’ve got good horses and a place you can sleep while you are here,” He smiled.

I agreed to his offer, and so began a change in my life. We rode from the bottom of Shoshone County where his operation was, and we drove the cattle to Wallace onto trains for the meat processors near the mining camps in the mountains. Thirty miles one way, about a three day journey. Mr. McCall paid me a dollar seventy-five a day, and I worked fourteen days straight those first two weeks. The snowy mountain peaks surrounded us down in the valley, and we took the trail along the river to Wallace, where the elk and deer population drank from. The green of the foliage changed colors that last week to an amber color, and I’d enjoyed the work so much I’d forgotten that it was all to come to an end soon. I made friends with the wrangler Silas Brown, the man Mr. McCall spoke to in the saloon, and a few miners in Wallace, we’d drink with before heading back to McCall’s ranch. It was a small operation, just me and three other cowboys usually, but we all got along well.

One early evening in late August, my last night with Mr. McCall I’d assumed because the greenhorn Eli had started riding with us again, we arrived early in town before the train. We herded the cattle just south of the corral, and we had a good view of town from where we rested. The main street began to glisten with the early dew drops, and Wallace lit up with folk enjoying the last few months of good weather before the heavy snow. I surveyed the town and its people, looking at the wooden buildings along the main road. Men going to work in the mines, and some leaving for the saloons, all covered in the fine coal soot that seemed to stain their clothes and faces indefinitely. Women and children walked hand and hand to the market corner, leaving with meats and produce. I took a deep breath of the chilled Idaho air, smelling the wet quartz and old timber of the mine in the distance, and a part of me knew I would miss Wallace and the company of Mr. McCall. And then the rumble of the tracks began and the train could be heard in the distance, coming from the mountains, and I was back in that moment, resting next to my horse and the other drovers.

Down the path leaving the town towards the loading platform was when I first saw Edith. Her hair was glistening in the evening orange, and her green cotton dress danced in the wind, revealing her ankle high brown boots. She was young, maybe my age, twenty or so, yet her hands looked hardened from work and her face was gentle and freckled, a soft smile on her lips as she walked. She must have sensed me staring because she flashed a smile in my direction and waved as I stood beside my horse. My heart sank a little from embarrassment. After all, Mother did warn of a woman’s intuition.

“That’d be Mac Dodson’s daughter, Edith.” Eli said, he must have seen me staring, even worse. “Don’t worry about her too much cowboy, I’m sure an oil man's son already has asked for her hand in marriage. She don’t want a cowboy.”

“Who is Mac Dodson?” I asked, trying to change the subject.

“The man that keeps Wallace running. He owns all the mines and the silver that comes out of it. He’s the big house on the east side of town.” said Eli.

I mounted my horse, and we began driving the cattle into their pens, another crew of hands would come and put them in the train carts for transportation later on, and so our job was done. Silas took our strings of horses down to the stable for the night, and the rest of us moseyed down to the tavern, where we’d eat, drink, and whore until tomorrow morning's work. Mr. McCall was waiting for us that evening, specifically me I later learned. There were four of us, and we drank like sailors, and laughed like brothers. Eli, Silas, Mr. McCall and I sat together around a table, and a part of me dreaded the journey across the border. What was even in Canada for me?

“Mr. McCall,” I said, getting his attention. “How is work during the winter?”

“We usually work until November, or first snowfall, whichever is first. Usually by then, the mines will rely on the overstock we provide.” He paused, sipping his beer. “Most of the boys like Silas here, head south for work until there’s no snow and more work. I usually stay to feed the herds and work around the ranch.”

I thought of Edith. I looked down the neck of my beer bottle, and saw children with red hair running the streets of Wallace. I imagined what her father looked like, and what life could be like for me in Wallace. Perhaps I was overzealous at the time, but Edith had left a mark in my skull like no other.

“I want to work with you on the ranch.” I said firmly, the laughter stopped and Silas and Eli looked at me and then to Mr. McCall. “I’ve got the experience. I’ve spent twenty winters on the ranch in Montana and know how to look for storms. I could stay through the winter.”

Mr. McCall looked amongst all of us and a smile bloomed under his mustache. We developed quite a friendship after that moment. Time moved fast from then on. I worked with Junior up until his passing in ‘35, and I miss him every day. The world has changed quite a bit since then. Junior’s son sold the company in ‘38, and I retired peacefully on my own just a few miles south of Wallace, near where the ranch sat. Wallace boomed through the Great War, young men went to fight, but soon many more came in to work in their place. I drove my Ford through the same streets I once drove cattle through now. I heard from my youngest brothers Jack and Wyatt shortly after I began working with Junior, they’d told me about the Fords and the magic of driving the streets of New York, I figured at the time it was just for the big cities. Jack became a professor at one of the Universities and Wyatt pursued government, eventually becoming a senator or some sort. Wade wrote back for the first time in 1939. He’d stayed in Cuba and had eight grandchildren now. He wrote of his time with President Roosevelt and his adventures with the 1st Volunteer Cavalry Regiment. I had so much to say about my time working cattle with Junior, I pursued writing around ‘22, completing my first story in the fall of ‘23. Since then I’d managed to sell a few books through a local press in Wallace, just enough to keep my Ford running I suppose. I’d even written a few western dime novels that did well in the big cities to the East according to brother Jack.

I had lived well, seen the beauty of the world around me, pursued what I loved and made friends along the way. Yet I was old now, the doctors in Wallace said I was wasting away and my lungs were failing. Breathing became harder by the day. This last year I decided to take a chance and look up a woman in town, Edith. I’d come to learn she married a Charles Huxley, son of an oil magnate. Eli was right. I learned she moved to South Dakota for many years with Charles until his death in ‘38 when she returned back to Wallace, a widow on her father’s estate. She managed the estate, and her brothers the mining business, now expanded beyond Wallace but across three states. With my illness, which I had come to terms with, I knew my inevitable passing on was soon, yet I still felt regret for never introducing myself to the pretty little girl who cooked down at the mines. The one with freckles across her brow and soft amber hair. The girl that inspired my first novel and eventually embodied every damsel in distress I wrote. We were surely both old now, and romance was futile. Besides, at my age, romance did not interest me much anymore, as did the comfort of my home. So that afternoon after asking around town, I drove down the main street of Wallace, took a left at the grocer, and a right at the hardware supplier and chophouse all the way down a paved street. Trees lined along the street passed by as I drove towards the manor. I reached the front court and parked my car, walking up the steps carefully, the steps made of what seemed like marble, and the two doors had to have been twelve feet tall. It was a gorgeous house, one like no other I had seen in person. When I knocked, a well dressed young man answered.

“Good afternoon sir,” he said elegantly, “Are you here for a meeting with the head of the estate?”

“No,” I tucked my head down, immediately embarrassed by my actions, like I was twenty again. “I would like to speak with Edith Dods–Huxley. It’s not a business matter, but a personal one.”

“I see. Are you a friend of Ms. Dodson?” he asked, stepping outside, and closing the door.

“Well, no. I suppose we’d never met before. But I was hoping to introduce myself,” I said, accepting failure.

“In that case sir, I cannot help you. Ms. Dodson isn't accepting visitors at this time. Have a good day,” He said with an awkward smirk and turned his back to me, closing the door as he walked back into the house.

I shuffled back to my car. It was foolish of me to think I could just walk up on her property and kindle a friendship of some kind after forty years. But before I could open my car door to leave, the front door to the house opened again. This time an older woman walked out, hunched by the back, and her fingers curled. Arthritis. I had it too for the past few years now.

“James, don’t bother strangers like that again!” She said with her back turned to me, shutting the door. She turned again to me, “You sir, come up here! What can I do you for?” I recognized the woman with ease. Edith. She was old like me now, wrinkled, a little grumpy it seemed, but still nonetheless as beautiful as she was when we were young. Her hair had a little red left in the front, but it was mostly grey, as was mine, but the color in her big eyes were still as blue as the day I first saw her.

I walked up the steps with ease this time, and a breeze of calmness came over me. “Edith, I first saw you when I was twenty, working for Junior McCall. I wanted to introduce myself.” I said.

“I remember you. I see it in your eyes again. The same look I could feel all the way near the train station,” She said softly, with a smile.

“Yes. That was me. I’m old now,” I said.

“You are. But so am I. How is Junior?” She asked, sitting down in a worn white rocking chair.

“He passed a few years back. His son sold the ranch.”

“I’m sorry to hear about that. I can remember listening in on my fathers meetings with Junior. He was very fond of you. Like a son, he’d say.” She paused. I felt my throat tighten with the thought of Junior, he was like a father to me in many ways. “Well why don’t you sit? James is making afternoon coffee, and being old means I don’t have many visitors anymore these days. Tell me your story.”

I sat next to Edith, and the world moved slowly for the first time, and the breath in my lungs was clear once more. And so Edith and I made up for lost time.