Return To Ithaca - Softcover

Randy Lee Eickhoff holds several graduate degrees, including a Ph.D. in Classics. He lives in El Paso, Texas where he works on translations in several languages, poetry, plays, and novels of which two have been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His translation of Ireland's national epic is now a text in not only schools in the United States, but countries overseas as well. His nonfiction work on the Tigua Indians, Exiled, won the Southwest History Award. He has been inducted into the Paso Del Norte Writers Hall of Fame, the local chapter of the Texas Institute of Arts and Letters. He spends his time in El Paso, Ireland, and Italy, lecturing on Dante and The Ulster Cycle.

Chapter One
 
 
She raised her summer-sky blue eyes to look out the window above the zinc sink over the sun-burnt grama grass waving in tufts of honey, gold and white, over the prairie before the shale hills marking the beginning of the Dakota Badlands. Here and there, clumps of dark-green soapweed dotted the pale blonde prairie. She lifted the cup of coffee, sipping, looking down the long, gentle slope to where tall cottonwoods stood on the banks of the creek and shook their golden leaves with the slightest breeze. Giant bur-reed and narrow-leaved cattails, the downy spikes once used by Indian women to line diapers for their babies, clumped at one point where the creek washed back from the bank.
A small Indian village once stood there, but the United States cavalry had ridden through the village a hundred years ago, killing everyone--man, woman, and child. After a rain, she would walk the banks, looking for whatever might have been uncovered: arrowheads, pot shards, a rusted cartridge, a stone axehead. Once, she found a fetish carved from sandstone, but she did not know what it signified. Sometimes when the rain came hard and washed rivulets down the banks, bleached white bones would appear, the bones of those Indians. She would carefully gather them and carry them to the lightning-struck cottonwood that grew on the hill above the stock tank where she buried them deep with a spade in a line down away from the tree. Sometimes, she would go up to that tree and sit beneath it on the grass and close her eyes and imagine ancient voices whispering to her on the wind coming through the branches. But no rains had come for a long time, now, and she knew if she walked the banks, she would find only dry shale that would crumble in her fingers if she picked it up.
She sighed and smoothed her black hair with its iron-gray streaks back from her high forehead covered with a faint network of wrinkles. Her head began to throb and she gently rubbed her temples, hoping she could ease the throbbing away before it worked its way into a blinding headache. Overhead, she heard her father-in-law's boots kicking along the hard wooden floor before he walked into the kitchen and sighed again, turning away from the window.
"Mornin', Kate," Tom Morgan said, yawning as he entered, tucking the tail of his blue denim workshirt into faded jeans fitted low and loose over his narrow hips. A worn brass buckle held an ancient brown belt around his waist. He lifted a chipped cup, its faded DAYS OF '76 legend barely readable, from a hook beneath the cupboards and filled it with coffee from the pot on the stove. He cautiously sipped, then grimaced as the coffee scalded his tongue.
"Hot," he complained.
"Twenty years," she said.
"Huh?" he asked, trying another cautious sip.
She sighed. "For nearly twenty years, now, you been doing that."
"Doing what?" he asked, frowning.
"Burning yourself with the coffee. A dog only sticks his nose into a fire once, but you been doing it every day for nearly twenty years."
"Maybe," he grunted, miffed. He blew on his coffee before taking another cautious sip. He looked fondly at the fine lines etched in his daughter-in-law's face, noting the square shoulders and deep breasts. She wore a plain blue denim workshirt, the tails tucked into faded jeans pulled down over scuffed brown boots. Her hands were large and square, the nails cut short. Her nose was bold and her gray-streaked black hair had been pulled back and rolled into a tight bun at the base of her neck.
A handsome woman, he thought. Not beautiful, maybe, like those in town, but store-bought beauty ain't worth a damn anyway. Not one of those hanging around Myrtle's Beauty Shop could even saddle a horse let alone ride it out to check the stock. Or throw a calf and hold it for branding, for that matter. Yes, Henry could have done worse.
She stirred and pulled herself away from the window, and turned to face him. He smiled into her startling blue eyes. Her full lips tilted in a brief smile, then she moved to the cupboard and set out a box of cornflakes and two bowls. He moved to the refrigerator and took a pitcher of orange juice and milk from it, hipping the door shut, and brought them to the table.
They heard the clang of the triangle down at the cookhouse as Cookie called their foreman, Seth Williams, and two hands, Sam and Joe, to breakfast. Kate poured the cornflakes into the bowl and reached for the bowl of sugar from the ledge above the table. Old Tom glanced at the white plastic clock on the wall above the refrigerator and clicked on the radio on the ledge. Paul Harvey was just finishing the "Rest of the Story" and the farm and ranch news would be next. He hooked a chair with the toe of his boot and pulled it out from the table as Kate brought the pot of coffee from the stove and placed it on a trivet on the table and sat opposite him.
"Think I'll ride over to the west pasture and check on the cattle there," he said. He picked up his mug of coffee and blew across it before cautiously sipping. "I ain't too sold on mixing the breeds. I spent a lot of time building up a pure-bred reputation. Don't know why that ain't good enough for you."
She shrugged. "Wasn't my idea. You forgot that Bill had decided to break the herd apart when you turned the ranch over to him. His idea, his herd."
"Yeah, but that don't make it right," Tom grumbled.
"You going to take Dog?"
He grunted. "No. He left last night for White River. Be gone two, maybe three days. A Sun Dance is scheduled down there."
She smiled fondly at him, noticing for the hundredth-some time the gnarled fingers and rope-scarred hands, the heavy lines grooved into his tanned face as if by a bailing hook. His bushy eyebrows stood out like barbed wire over his hooded, sun-bleached gray eyes the color of a blue norther. His white hair was neatly combed straight back and she could smell the faint rose scent of the lotion he used to keep it plastered in place. His shirt had been buttoned full against the sagging flesh of his throat. The tin of Union Leader tobacco bulged one of the button-down pockets of his denim workshirt.
She sighed silently and allowed her mind to drift back to when his son, Bill, had brought her home from Pierre after a long train ride from the state university in Vermillion. She had been excited, then, and apprehensive at meeting Bill's father who had been too busy with spring roundup and branding at the time to come to their wedding in Yankton. Not, she reflected, that there had been much of a wedding. A justice of the peace had presided with just one other couple present as witnesses. But she could sense that Bill had been disappointed when his father had not made the effort to come to the wedding.
I suppose it was your fault. Or, at least partly your fault getting pregnant. Starting from scratch like that is hard on a young couple. Damn hard. But you have to give him credit; he's never mentioned his disappointment to you. And when Timmy was born, well, that seemed to make things all right. I wonder if it would have been different if you hadn't miscarried the first child.
And then, unbidden, her mind slipped to Bill's brother, Henry, and she felt her face grow warm, remembering his square jaw, his blue eyes and how they seemed to bore to the back of her brain and read her thoughts there and how excited she had felt and she saw that excitement mirrored in his eyes--
Stop it! This is not the way to begin the day! Those times are past and should remain in the past. You have Timmy. I wonder if Bill would have stayed home if Timmy had been a girl? No, he wanted to go where his brother had gone. Two brothers have never been that close. And then, there was the romanticism of the war. But what about Henry? Why didn't he come home?
He spoke, but it took a second for the words to break through her thoughts. She blinked and looked at him. "What?"
"You gonna dream like that you might stay in bed a little longer," he said grumpily.
"Then who would make the coffee for you to burn your lips on?" she asked.
"I can make coffee. I had been doing it for years ever since--" He let his voice trail off and Kate nodded, patiently waiting for him to continue. Nearly thirty years had passed since his wife had died from cancer, and he still could not mention her name without a catch in his throat.
"Anyway, as I was saying," he grumbled, "I gotta check the west stock. And there's a section of fence and a couple of posts could stand replacement up there."
"Better take along Timmy to help you. Wire's a two-man job," she said. Then, remembering her daydream, she added acidly. "Of course, if you hadn't glorified the war, we would have both Henry and Bill here and things would be a lot smoother."
His faced reddened as he puffed out his cheeks and exhaled loudly. "I didn't--"
"Of course, you did," she interrupted angrily. It was an old argument between them, yet she still couldn't put it to rest. "I remember how many times you told them the Morgans had always done their duty for their country. Your father went to World War One while your grandfather stayed at home and took care of the place. Of course," she added, feeling the spite building up within her, "his father didn't have a place to tend while he went off with Sherman on the great Georgia raid, right? And you, well, somehow you always managed to make Anzio sound like a great glory while your father stayed at home. And of course, you were willing to do the same when Vietnam came around for Henry and Bill." She blinked back angry tears that sparkled in her eyes. He looked away. "The ranch wasn't good enough for them by the time you had finished with it. There was a magic monotony, then, between the prairie and the sky and they couldn't bear the criticism that they heard in your voice behind your stories of war. The daily task of chores could not compete with the romanticism of war that you spun with your stories."
"I didn't tell them to go," he said defensively.
"Of course you did, you old fool," she said, suddenly weary with the argument. "Your stories did that." She glanced t...