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Short Stories & Tall Tales
The Ladies from Kitesville
Tom Sheehan
In a cave deep in the mountain range, past some circuitous canyons that seemed a maze of comings and goings without an exit at times, Myrna Williams, a rancher’s daughter of 17, was still under a blanket, hands trussed at her side, her ankles bound. Not hurt yet, not “bothered” either, she did not know who her captor was: had not seen him, not a glimpse; had not heard him, not a sound. She felt some consideration for him, though, after her abduction.
The other “silence” was there, for a spell.
Myrna was a bit odd, her family knew, as did few close friends. Now and then she heard “the voices talking,” from a distance, from a separation of sorts, it was said, but said so on the side, never frontally, never too loud, never in front of strange company. It was too odd to be faced in the open.
From nowhere, on the previous day she guessed, this same blanket now about her had been tossed over her head. Grabbed roughly, handled roughly, she was soon sitting a saddle. The only aroma the blanket gave off was horse smell, but lightly at that. No other identifiable aroma offered any clue, and now no sound had come to her in at least a day and a half. Maybe more. Time moves in different ways, a thought said.
She guessed at the time elapsed, letting her stomach tell by hunger tantrums, her sleepiness adding into the measurement. She believed she was alone; no one near her could be that silent. “Talk” was always available, as it generally was with her. There was no way to know how long she had ridden a strange horse after being taken. The ride was mainly on noisy, rocky surfaces, in a canyon all the way, she affirmed, with some close quarters on several occasions. A few times, without voiced direction, a hand pushed her head down when they were in a tight overhead situation. At a few points the sense of air change suggested they were in a tunnel or cave, at least in a narrow enclosure.
She guessed a lot. She occupied her mind with a hundred things. She always had.
Shortly after realizing they were in a cave, gentle hands directed her off the saddle to a place on a soft surface. Prevalent was the odor of a brush she vaguely recalled, but she was not good at names of growth on the plains, of any crop beyond good grass and its good strains. She knew oat and wheat and barley, and good feed.
Upset that she could not recall the name of brush, she said, “When my father catches you,” the words muttered with a controlled anger, “I wouldn’t want to be in your boots.” Under the musty, smelly blanket her voice, she assumed, came off like dust, crannied, unwanted and unavoidable.
There was no reply. During this placement she wasn’t shoved or pushed or prodded. Footsteps, light as she could imagine being a man’s, faded away. Spurs did not jingle, no metal on rock. No further sound came from any direction. Old animal smells, not washed out by rain, told her she was in a cave. At least, she realized, she was capable of momentary concentration. There would be questions, of course. The answers seemed open to all options.
To the other women of the kite brigade, or The Wyoming Ladies Kite Society as they called themselves, it had happened suddenly: first Mryna was there and then she wasn’t. Out over the wide spread of grass, in one sudden movement, as if a separate wind moved it away on a rush, in a slight draw that cut the prairie, the kite at the far end of the line belonging to her, to Myrna Williams, a rancher’s daughter who was lovable but carried at times her odd behavior, dove downward at a galloping speed. The reservation Shoshoni medicine man might have said, tsapahaikwa aingagwikwizhapundi, “dropped from the hands like lightning.” None of the ladies saw the kite move at first, until Margot Haskell yelled.
The kite had fallen like a signal.
They, the kiters, were a handful of ladies from Kitesville, the nickname given to their small community in Wyoming, all ranchers’ wives except Myrna who was a rancher’s daughter, lined up about 100 yards apart on the wide grass outside of town and set their kites to soaring. In all the western lands of the country growing by leaps and bounds in 1876, nothing went as high and as pretty as five kites, home-made ones for that‘s all there were, not quite on the loose but reaching for heaven, cloven skies, freedom’s wakeful pinch. They were signs of the time, “those long-legged flying things.” The women had been kite flying for much of the summer, devoted to a new sense of freedom, of release, of excitement.
It was, to each flyer, a thankful day, a slightly breezy day caught up in an air of independence and mood breaking, an ultimate sunny day.
To Myrna it was another delicate and lovable escape from “the voices.”
To Margot Haskell the kite flying was a grasp at her youth. She marked all her time from one day in the past, the day when she fell in love with Ed Haskell and saw her first kite, or many of them, flying across the gorge at Niagara Falls in a publicity contest in 1848. The contest was arranged to spark interest in a bridge that ought to be built across the gorge. She fell in love with his voice as he explained what he knew about kites, not very much, but his eyes hardly moved from hers in the crowd. She was 18. The air was full of noise and excitement. Colors of every sort sported in the crowd. His hair was dark and his shoulders broad as barn doors.
Haskell, leaning towards her, had said, “Back home in Rhode Island, on the beach, a few ladies fly their kites on Sunday, as if resting from their arduous labors of the week.” He was deep-voiced, alert, carried a sense of conviction about himself, understood a woman’s situation, and had boring eyes that brought redness to her cheeks. She was in love.
And years later, married to Ed Haskell, having moved west, ranching because her husband said meat from steers or other hoofed stock sustained and then controlled population centers of the world and did so here in America with added promise, she also began to raise her family. The women remembered the day she told friends at a wedding party, “A man in Nebraska, back down the trail, flies kites all the time. I saw him when I was a girl, when I met Ed. It was a lovely sight and takes so little to get so high in harmless excitement.” Her female friends knew what she was saying. Some of them joined her without question.
The list of materials she introduced to them was a meager list; silk remnants if they could afford them, light and somewhat stable or bendable wood, like bamboo or a special sapling work for spar framework, string in a ball as big as one could handle it (and strong enough to handle wind power and drag), odd paint or decorations to make the exercise come to color, and indelible and expectant joy. There had been meetings and discussions, and now and then, except from Ed Haskell, a reproach about wasted time when true work was to be done. But they persevered, as a unit; the Kite Ladies they were called.
Now, out on the wide grass, alerted fully, worried, Margot Haskell yelled again. “Where’s Myrna’s kite?” She yelled it again, the words caught up in a slight breath of wind. She followed up with, “Where’s Myrna? I can’t see her.” The others looked, saw the space no longer occupied by Myrna’s silken, tepee-decorated kite. “I can’t see her.” The bubble in her was finding fright as its favor. Twisting about, she yelled to another one of the flyers, “Clare, get the horses.” She started reeling in her kite string, then feeling overpowered, she let go the line of string, felt it leaving like a handshake.
Their kites had been a grand adventure, how they were first designed, materials sought, questions of flight asked time and again, as if they did not believe what they were hearing, had no sense at all about the mystery of winds aloft. They all knew the terror of mad winds on the floor of the earth, in a dry wadi suddenly in a rainstorm becoming a raging flood bent on annihilation. Now all that work was loose in the heavens. They rushed to mount heir horses, to chase down a fear, to find Myrna a victim of merely a swollen ankle, a victim who had stepped into a gopher hole, who was embarrassed to scream.
She was not to be seen. The four women scoured the wadi, the nearby canyon, saw nothing of their young friend. Margot realized the girl could not have run out of sight that fast; she had to have been taken on horseback. To Clare, she screamed, “Go get the men. Hurry.”
Clare, out of the chute on a speedy roan stallion, flew across the grass. In the distance, coming around an abrupt knob of trees in the grassland, a small herd of cows were headed for fencing. Margot, pulling a rifle from a saddle scabbard, fired a round in the air and waved her hat, flashing it in the air, all saying danger at hand.
Three riders rode in, anxious looking. The women had been kiting every Sunday for a few months. This must be Sunday the men figured. Two Flaherty brothers stood tall, Jim and Devon, and the third wrangler was Cardo Checkovan, a no-nonsense trail boss from a dozen rides.
He said to Margot, “What’s the trouble, Mrs. Haskell?”
“Myrna Williams lost her kite and now we can’t find her. We looked down the draw, checked out the wadi and a good portion of Gatling Canyon and we can’t find her. She was afoot. Her horse is still here.”
Checkovan nodded and said, “That Bilton kid been around, Roy Bilton works the Ganset Double-X? I’ve seen the pair of them out here in the past, riding, making at picnicking. Could be they’re off somewhere.” He did not make any faces or sly grins, still a no-nonsense gent.
“I am positive that did not happen,” Margot said. “They broke up over a month ago. He’s seeing Dulcie Tucker now. “
“Well, we’ll take a good look up in there. See if there’s any trail talking back. I saw Mrs. Tillman heading to town. She going for help?”
“Yes.”
“Well, when they come, you stay here to greet them. Tell them me and the Flaherty boys are up in there ahead of them and keep an eye out for us. If I was you,” he added, nodding his head at the other women, “I’d send them back but wouldn’t want you to be alone. You folks make up your mind… one of us stays with you folks until the boys come from town, or all three of us go up in there. Three better in hunting they say, least the crows say so, counting as they do.”
“You all go up in there. I’ll stay here and send the ladies back, if they’ll go. I’m not sure they will. That will be their decision.”
The three men rode up into the canyon.
At dusk, when they were not back and a dozen riders had come in from town, including Ed Haskell, the women went back with a one-man escort and Haskell, knowing as much as anybody, spread them over the wide grass to make sure they were not missing Myna in a quick hole. Nothing came of that search as evening came on and he said they’d spend the night in the canyon with a fire and start looking in the morning.
During the night Checkovan and the Flaherty brothers rode in to the firelight, tired, thirsty, hungry, but they rubbed their horses down, watered them, and fed them. “Nothing in there that we saw, and we run the whole canyon,” Checkovan told them. “Not a scratch of a sign. No kite. No kite tail. Nothing. If you ask me, it’s a renegade Indian, a sly one.”
“Why? Haskell said.
“The girl’s a fair looker, we all know. Probably turned some buck’s head, one on the loose, away from the women of the tribe. I’m glad her pa’s out on the trail with his herd, and not here. He’d go some kind of mad, knowing her loose like this.”
Haskell, spreading a blanket near his saddle, said, “We can talk all night about the maybes but it won’t help us find Myrna. Best roll in and get some sleep. My wagon’ll be here by morning with chow. Duty Claiborne promises a morning feast.”
From across the fire Checkovan said, “He bringing any of that fried dough stuff with him. I haven’t had any of it since we crossed trails on that long trip to Warner railhead? Man could run me all day with that stuff.”
“Duty’s always prepared,” Haskell replied, and all was nearly silent after that, with a slight breeze, a howl or two from the side of mountain, the snicker of roped horses answering who-knows-what in the night. Sleep coiled across the prairie grass like a huge blanket let out and rolled up, keeping promises, taking good care of time.
The stars, though, stayed wide awake, as did Myrna Williams who, early in the morning she guessed, caught the aroma of fried dough creeping to her as vital as a signal. People were looking for her. What kind of a signal could she use? From where. The aroma was Duty Claiborne’s fried dough before the biscuits came along. The Haskell’s chuck master had celebrated morning for as many years as she could remember.
Inside of a breath of air, she heard a rustle. It was not animal-like. The soft sound came to her, a familiar wisp to it, a ruffle of sound she had known. It came again, this time a soft rustle. It can only be my kite, she thought, the sound as soft and as fine as a sleeping gown on a line of rope, her kite. The comfortable shush of it, the warm and sexy hum of It made her think it must be sitting on an edge, at an opening, the voice of wind touching it.
Nothing made sense to her. Why get carried off to be left here, not hurt, not bothered the way she thought at first. Who? What? Why? Indeed, where was she? How far from home? Her mother and father must be going crazy. Her father would kill again. He’d done it before.
The sound rustled again, the soft sound, the silk of it. Rolling as far as she could to one side, she felt an object, a hard object, long and narrow, against her hip. She rolled so that her hand traced its frame. It was a knife.
Why? Who would leave her like this, but leave the knife for her to make her escape? How would anybody gain from it? She might fall prey to a wild animal, another desperate man, an Indian brave running to freedom from the reservation.
Then she heard the voices that she had heard before, long ago. Long, long ago. The voice that had talked to her at the oddest times. She had forgotten them. Now they were back. Could she tell her father they were back? She shook her head and the voices stopped. The questions stopped.
She had no answers, the mystery deepening. Yet she was relieved. In a matter of minutes she had freed herself, cut the bonds that bound her arms and legs. Touched her kite that sat on a ledge. Feeling for it, she felt a ball of twine.
It made no sense, except the person who had taken her here did not want to hurt her, wanted her to get free … after a while.
In a matter of ten minutes she found the entrance of the cave and looked outside. Directly opposite was a climbing ledge that appeared to have been worn into the cliff face by Indians over the centuries. With kite and ball of string, and the knife in her right hand, Myrna Williams began ascending the ancient stairway. Never here before, she heard stories about the stairs as a child, but did not know in what part of the mountains she had been taken to … and allowed to go free.
For almost an hour she climbed, resting to catch her breath, trying to see what lay beyond, trying to formulate a plan, thinking of a signal to tell where she was.
As she climbed she wondered about the people who had created these stairs, worn them or chiseled them or hacked them into place. They had to be dedicated, and hardy, and earned the muscles that came to them. She also wondered how many had died carving the mountain steps. Up she climbed, filled with the wonder time and time again, the labor, the love of something greater than they were. It all beat at her endlessly, and she feared the voices would come again, but they had gone, it seemed, for the course of her climb.
The aroma of the fried dough came back to her, but it was a memory, she was positive. Nothing came on the wind, or came up the stairs after her. Nobody was around, on the stairs or below in the canyon. Overhead a few wide-winged birds drifted on blankets of air rising from the edges of the cliff. Nobody, she believed was lonelier than she was. They couldn’t be. Life couldn’t be that cruel.
At the top of the peak, the vast view spread out before her, mountains and the distant spread of grass, she saw nothing intimately known to her, no person, no building, and no fence line. She was in the mountains, but did not know where.
The wind whistled softly at the peak, slipping with a sense of music in it around a set of stones that had been carried up the stairs and placed here. Like an altar, she thought. The Indians that did this had direction. What direction would she go? She figured the route of grassland was best, but what way? How to get there. How to get help.
She would never be sure of the source, she assented later to anyone who would listen, but she heard as sure as she had ever heard any words in a conversation, in a direct conversation, the distinct words, “The kite. The kite.”
That morning of the rescue, more than a dozen ranch hands and ranchers’ wives, including Myrna Williams’ distraught parents, saw the kite with the tepee decoration as it lifted on the winds above the mountain range.
Margot Haskell suddenly knew her own celebration, for she had brought the idea of kite flying here in the first place. Her responsibility partially diminished as she recalled an old Shoshoni medicine man who had spoken about “the curse of the voices” and how he had cured one young brave, his sister’s son, by binding him and taking him to the edge of a great gorge, letting him think he was to be thrown down. “We scared the voices from his head,” he said. “They never came back.”
Margot wondered who was in her company when she heard the old Indian tell his story. She struggled to remember. But she knew that she had written down a few words that had carried an understanding to her. She would look at them again;
The ones that said ni-mukua koihkwa pennaipaai, all that there is of a spirit voice goes away.
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