Chapter Three
As Cricket galloped, a red froth blurred the space between his ankles and the earth.
The sunburnt expanse of bluestem grasses stretched and stretched until prairie faded away.
I saw not a soul, yet I felt the press of bodies, rushers scrambling throughout the land.
Cricket vaulted over a dry creek bottom, then leapt over a knee-high line of flame.
We were close to the claim I’d scouted—half a mile, perhaps.
It was hushed, alone in the wide unknown.
My life before chattered with voices. In the stillness, remembrances of moments bursting with noise settled over me.
Growing up, it’d been the three of us dashing across the prairie: Magnolia and me and our neighbor Lark, a boy born the month after me.
Lark, always with some new shenanigan; Magnolia with her eager goodness; and, off yonder, the muted tones of my parents and brothers.
That first autumn day, after Magnolia’s birth parents had passed on from the grippe, I’d sat on the bough of an elm and waited for my orphaned cousin.
My scraped, six-year-old knees pulled against my chest. Lark leaned against the trunk below, his boots crossed at the ankles, the mahogany leather worn and unlacing from the soles.
He pushed off the tree and rocked forward, then back onto his wooden heels, tiny puffs of dust clouding, his energy never containable.
Our buggy rolled up the path. Black lace shadowed Ma’s face, mourning for her sister and brother-in-law.
Pa halted the wagon, and Ma lifted Magnolia, her toddler face blanched, petal-pink dress dingy and torn along the hem.
I’d expected a baby, eyelids swollen and red, but the line of Magnolia’s profile was elegant, her demeanor almost serene.
“Her hair’s so shiny.” I picked at a scab on my elbow, scowled at Magnolia’s glossy, blond ringlets.
Lark bumped back against the bole and pulled apart the length of an oat stalk. Ma lowered Magnolia to the grass and clasped her tiny hand, leading her uphill. Ma palmed the sway of her own back, realigning her posture.
“Why isn’t she crying?” I asked.
Lark tossed the stems away and grinned up at me, his smile quick and lopsided. “I’ve some burr acorns we can shove beneath her quilt.”
I scooted to the edge of the branch, readying to hop down, when Magnolia tripped and collapsed into nettle.
She pushed herself up, eyes wide, face white—but she didn’t cry.
The sugarberry canopy above her swayed, scattering shadows and light across the grass, and a bucketful of yellow leaves cascaded down.
My heart tumbled in my chest, and I just knew: I’d forever care for Magnolia with everything that was within me.
“No.”
“Alright,” Lark said, “suppose we could—”
“Look at her.” Ma scooped Magnolia up and slipped inside our home, Magnolia’s tiny pink fingers clutching Ma’s sleeve. “She’s so delicate.”
Lark rocked back onto his heels. “Yeah, she’s a baby.”
I swung from the branch. “We protect her. No matter what.”
Lark shoved at his tawny hair. “Sure enough.”
“Promise. None of our usual nonsense and horsefeathers.” I swept bark fragments off my hands with a loud clap. “She’s ours now.”
I’d held out my palm for our secret handshake. He took my hand, and ever after it’d been Lark and Magnolia and me exploring our little realm, dreaming of what could be beyond. But then they’d both chosen to stay back in Kansas. Now it was only me, headed into the frontier.
A copper pot rattled against my long gun, Cricket’s shoulders rippling with sweat and movement.
I pressed my calves against his flank as we darted into a thicket of blackjack oaks.
Brambles clawed my hair, and sunbeams got tangled up in the canopy.
Below, a luster rippled in the taupe water of the stream.
I was so thirsty, but first I must stake claim.
Cricket’s hooves crunched over a layer of walnuts, and deep in the forest was the blur of scarlet hawthorn apples, the silver bark of a hackberry, the gnarled twist of a mock orange.
This land could sustain me during winter.
Most nesters would starve, freeze, or just plain wither under the tumult of the prairie wind.
Without time to plant crops before winter, my horses and I needed access to food and water if we’d survive until spring.
Beyond the woodland, the earth swayed in slopes and rises.
Eastward, the prairie lifted to a hillock perfect for a few cows.
I glimpsed no one—this prairie could become my home.
Most claims were a stretch of sandstone red dirt.
The meadow here was cider and fawn, ivory and the deep emerald of evergreen.
There were scrubby wild grape bushes and holly berries, and under the glow of Oklahoma sunshine, all imaginable shades of gold.
I withdrew my claim flag: the linen coarse in my palms, ends thrashing in the wind.
A surveyor’s cornerstone marker sat between a ragged thistle and some wild oats.
I charged forward, flag thrust high. At the stone, I vaulted off Cricket, pulled my stake from its rope fastenings, and jammed the pole into the ground.
It didn’t budge a fingernail into the hard, dry earth.
I yanked off my iron skillet and pounded and pounded and pounded until the rod finally sank into the soil.
My hands shook as I tied my flag to the stake. The russet lettering rippled in the wind, a proclamation stamped into the fabric:
This claim is taken by
Minnie Hoopes
My heart thumped, my breath expanded. The weight of time along my forearms, the tug of legacy at my back.
I spun. Strands of hair scattered across my cheekbones and stuck to my eyebrows.
I pushed them away. I could build my house snuggled against that embankment.
It’d be warm, the blackjacks barring the torrent of wind.
And there, in that patch of sunglow, my horses’ barn.
A southern orchard, perhaps a glossy orange sapling sprouting toward the sky.
From horizon to horizon, an expanse of my own.
I’d done it. I’d braved this brutal race and claimed my future.
Beside my flag, I dug into the soil with my shovel, the ricochet against dry earth reverberating up my arms. All the women of my heritage, none had owned land.
I thought of my ma, in the dawn light a month earlier, as I’d tightened my last saddlebag onto Cricket.
She’d placed her pocket-size Methodist hymnal in my palms, the embossed leather worn, her hands cupping mine.
Ma, you sure? She carried that hymnal in her apron every day, humming low in her throat as she worked, sometimes cracking open the spine, lips pursed as she flipped the pages to her song, her timbre a crisp prayer resounding through the sagebrush.
Take a breath every now and then, she’d said and drawn me into a hug.
Write home when you can. And make sure you tell the Lord about your adventures every day.
She’d squeezed me round the shoulders, then let go, her black boots stepping back a pace, beyond the shadow of my silhouette.
After digging a couple of feet into the earth, I untied a few boards from my saddle and tossed them cross the hole, fashioning a makeshift cellar, some evidence I’d improved upon this quarter section.
Battles over land ownership could be overlong and brutal.
I jogged to Cricket and brought my nose to his soft, soot-black muzzle.
“We did it, old buddy.” I mounted, and with one last glance at my flag snapping in the wind, we galloped to check the other three corners of the claim, to make sure no one else had beat me.
But I knew this was my land. I’d gotten here first. A gleam of afternoon gold brushed over the field as we checked the markers—none had been claimed.
Down in the creek bottoms, I drank and filled my canteens. I lay in the water, submerging beneath the surface, cleansing, reviving, and then we rode back through the gilded land, and I swear, the power of the earth pulsed below Cricket’s hooves.
The ground shuddered and groaned as if awakening. Perhaps a norther blustered through the meadowflowers. Maybe a stampede approached from afar. Or perhaps my land had come alive to welcome me.
I swung down and walked through fiery red grass, drenched skirts dragging behind. I pushed aside the braided layers of stiff, pale groundcover until I found the dirt. Pressing into the soil, my finger pads felt the warmth of the earth. “Hello,” I whispered.
It was quiet. The rush of the wind, the faint song of a meadowlark, some guttural gunfire faroff, but no brothers, fathers, neighbors.
I’d heard of the isolation, of the deep loneliness of homesteading life.
But I hungered boundlessly for space. To be rid of remembrances and begin anew.
I pushed up, wiped my palms on my skirts.
Time to hurry onward to the land office. This was still a race, after all. I jogged back to Cricket and grasped my saddle pommel—then hesitated. An all-overish quiver of disquiet shot up the back of my neck.
Something had changed.
I lowered my boots back to the dirt. Unease spread across the expanse, like ink in water. I swiped a palm across my forehead, unsure.
And then I smelt it. Warm and deep, the scent of winter’s end.
Fire was coming.