Chapter Eight
Within the stretched, gauzy light of my tent, the profile of a Native woman tilted skyward. Waist-length hair tucked behind her ears, her fingers brushing a copper pot I’d looped over a nail.
I slumped back in my saddle and lowered my Peacemaker, relief easing the tension knotted across my shoulders.
Not a bandit but another woman. She wore a burgundy and ochre floral blouse with a navy skirt and ornately beaded moccasins, the cut of her shoes distinct from the Kiowa people I knew from home.
The Kiowa lived a handful of miles westward from my parents.
Through the years, I’d come to know the Kiowa tribe and learned they were curious about how we lived, just as we were curious about them.
The woman nickered low in her throat and caressed Cricket’s nose. I vaulted from Whistlejacket and walked over. “Good morning,” I said through the gap in my tent.
“I came to say hello,” she said. “I thought you might be lonesome. It seems quiet out here on the prairie.”
Though I knew it was common for Natives to wander onto homesteads, her curiosity seemed netted with compassion. “It is quiet,” I said, “but I have the wind, the birds, the creaking trees.”
She bit her lip and studied my face, surely assessing whether I was a threat. She must have attended one of the mission boarding schools, with her English diction and Western clothing. I relaxed my shoulders, adopting a welcoming posture. “My name is Minnie.”
She considered the crates I’d stacked in a corner. “I’m curious about how you make your home.”
I gestured toward my supplies. “You’re welcome to look at anything.”
She bent and riffled through the potatoes tossed in a wooden box, her brow furrowing at the cuts I’d made.
Last night I’d flipped through Pa’s Old Farmer’s Almanac and supposed that was how to cut potatoes.
I pushed up the flap of my tent and joined her below the canopy, the light dimming further.
“I’m not practiced with planting,” I said.
Her gaze sparked over my mud-splattered riding skirt and gun belt. Rain crackled against the tent. She said, “I don’t enjoy household chores neither.”
We grinned at each other, and I could tell this was a woman I’d once have chosen as a friend. There was a vitality to her that seemed plain fun. But, of course, with everything last spring, I shouldn’t allow others close to me.
She shared that she was Osage but visiting her sister, who’d married into the Kanza tribe, just east over the rise several miles.
She gestured to the tree line, where I now noted a few women in the shadows, wringing their knuckles.
One had the same thick eyelashes and softly rounded shoulders. That was surely her sister.
The woman stood, hands pressed against her thighs, the black rays of a tattoo peeking from her sleeve. She brushed the foxglove sprigs I’d hung from a rope slung across my tent. “You’re a healer?”
“No.” I knelt and opened a polished wooden box with tonics and salves. I held it out to her. “Just everyday remedies, things my ma makes.”
A breeze squeaked through the doorway, thinning the humid air beneath the canopy.
After a moment she came closer and crouched, brushing the collection of amber and turquoise bottles, the strips of gauze and crushed herbs.
Ma mixed elixirs and visited neighbors afflicted with one fever or another.
I’d stuffed a box with her supplies, expecting there would be plenty of blood and illness in the wildlands.
I hadn’t been wrong. On my scrapes from the last week, I’d smeared crystalized honey and one of Ma’s homemade salves.
The pot was almost depleted, and I didn’t know how to make more.
The woman sifted through my bottles, the glass tinkling a melodic chime, and held a vial of Peruna, the amber oil slanting toward the cork stopper. She placed it back with the others, her thumb brushing the thread across the neck of the bottle.
“Would you like it?” I handed her the bottle of Peruna, wanting to share a simple gift. “It’s an elixir. For women.”
She scrunched her nose, her finger bumping over the ornate lettering. “It’s supposed to invigorate your body,” I explained, “soothe any particularly feminine ailments.”
She nodded and slipped the bottle into her bag, curiosity reflected on her face.
She closed the medicine box and stood, exiting out into the drizzling rain.
I followed and thanked her for visiting.
She said she was headed homeward to her family in the Osage Hills on the morrow, but that she would come round when she visited her sister in another month.
“My name is Niabi,” she said and walked away.
I placed one seed potato into the clay, then another, moving down the trench.
Wiping my palms on my apron, I studied the furrows.
They seemed deep, just as the almanac suggested.
Magnolia and Ma had planted the vegetables, as I had such an awful time with mundane tasks.
Instead, Pa had taught me how to be silent in the woods, how to soothe a spooked filly, how to lead a team into town.
But now every responsibility on the homestead was my own.
I slapped away a horsefly, kept planting.
Last spring, with the horseflies buzzing and the redbud trees bleeding fuchsia along the valley, Magnolia and I had foraged for morels in the wildwoods.
I’d dug at the base of a decaying elm, my palms caked in mud and wrists scratched up by briars.
I pressed back my hair, furious that Magnolia wouldn’t stake claim with me.
“I just don’t understand the issue,” I said.
Magnolia linked her hands before her apron, a floral linsey with rosebud embroidery, her basket hanging off the crook of her arm. “I’m marrying and staying home.” Her posture was still, as if she’d dissolve away into that wet, overturned-earth scent of early spring. “It’s the life I choose.”
I scoffed, yanked a mushroom from the undergrowth. “You’ve never been brave enough.”
She flinched, as if I’d slapped her. I lifted my chin, resolute.
“No.” She crossed her arms, her blond plait brushing the lace cuff of her overblouse. “I’ve never been you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? We’ve always—”
“Minnie, stop.” She lowered beside me in the bramble, her knee bumping my hip. “I don’t want to argue with you.”
I unwound my cape and looped the wool over a low branch, the bough arching above a cluster of snowdrops.
Though one of the first flowers of springtime, snowdrops felt like an omen.
Their delicate white bells bent earthward as if they wept.
Magnolia was making a mistake, and I didn’t know what to do.
I took her upturned hand, and she folded forward, resting her forehead against my collarbone.
I wrapped my arms around her, and she muttered against my blouse, “I don’t want to go.
I want to stay here, where it’s comfortable. ”
As a child, she’d grasped my palm and followed me through faroff pastures, holding on while I discovered new worlds. But homesteading in outlaw country was beyond measure. I supposed I should forgive her fear, having lost both her parents so young, but goodness—why couldn’t she ever take a risk?
She found a new safe harbor instead. “And that future husband of yours?” I asked.
She sat back, wrought her hands, her joints shiny and almost translucent where bone pressed against skin. “Well, this week he’s talking of building a home on down by the millpond.” She let loose an effervescent smile. “I like his ideas.”
I blew at my hair. “It’s fear-flooded and sluggish.”
She grasped her knees, studied me with those dark-brown eyes that never quite stopped thinking. “Just because you want some grand adventure and I don’t, doesn’t make my dreams any less.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“Well,” she said, tucking a lock back into her braid, “you just said it was fear-flooded.”
“Fine. I do think it’s living in fear. A foolish grasp at control.” I unearthed another morel and tossed the mushroom into my basket. I sighed and thumped my back against the elm trunk. “I don’t understand you anymore.”
Magnolia brushed a thumb along her white boots, the leather clean, without even a smudge. She dug out a morel, her posture austere, as if she was containing her own shape. “You don’t have to understand my choices to support me.”
Her lips were pursed, that elegant curve of her brow, the rose hue smudged under her pale skin, her small, deft fingernails brushing the soil from a mushroom: I couldn’t hold on to the rapidly shifting pieces of her anymore.
We were changing: Magnolia, soon a wife; me, chasing after rush and exhilaration.
I was losing her—my tether to who we’d been dissolving.
I didn’t know how to let go. But it seemed I had to let her make her own mistakes.
On my homestead, the horsefly zipped across my forehead, and I swatted him away.
Though Magnolia and her husband now tilled their own farm, on a stretch of smooth brome down beside the old millpond, leaving her had felt like a death.
Our lives forever apart, our relationship broken—irreparable as if she had died.
I shoveled more rows until moisture poured beneath my shirtwaist and my hands ached.
Sweat soaked between my toes, so I untied my boots and sank my bare feet into the mud.
The burn had enriched my homestead, causing all the nutrients to seep into the clay.
The soil was sandy and rich, wetted by rain and warmed by sunglow.
With the hush of isolation, my hands in the dirt, I heard a groan.
I sat back on my heels and scraped my wayward strands back into a plait.
As I looped the length around my head like a coronet braid and shoved in hairpins, I scrutinized the prairie.
It was almost as if someone were retelling a story I’d once known.
I didn’t suppose I was losing my grasp on sanity, just that in my solitude, I could hear the space between silence.
I gulped from my canteen and noticed movement near the windbreak.
A flock of bobwhite quail freckled about the understory.
After grabbing my Winchester and boots, I stalked across the meadow toward the birds, the soft whir of their calls quaking between the rye grass.
A twig cracked—the pointed ears of a gray fox twitched, and the quail scattered.
I pinged off a shot, missed. Sighing, I looped my rifle’s strap across my body and turned away from the hunt, slipping instead into the forest.
The cool shade of the wildwood washed over me.
I roamed deer trails, popping violet hackberries into my mouth and unearthing roots.
After filling a pocket with chinkapin acorns, I stumbled upon a sapling with velvety, coral-colored persimmons.
I plucked one off the branch and ate, the bitter tannins puckering the sides of my mouth.
Once the first frost passed, I’d gather the ripened fruit to dry in the sun.
Dried persimmons were a luxurious treat, almost like gingerbread.
The brush thinned before me, an expansive prairie opening beyond.
I crept closer, adjusting the angle of my Winchester across my back to avoid a low branch, and scanned the claim just beyond the wood.
I heard a thwack and reverberation before I saw him.
The Lawman hammered a long beam, framing his shack.
His sleeves were rolled up, unfiltered sunlight casting harsh shadows in the shirt’s creases.
The muscles of his forearms flexed as he adjusted the angle of a sill, the naked wood linked between two corner posts.
He glanced toward the thicket. Ran a wrist across his brow, wiping away sweat.
How in hellfire had he heard me? I hunkered down, bit my lip.
His camp was methodically organized, tarps angled from stakes, several rows of vegetables already planted—and he’d dug a hollow for rainwater.
Blazes, that was a mighty clever notion.
I itched to sneak onto his homestead, study how he’d constructed the shallow clay basin.
By all accounts the Lawman was troublesome, but even I’d admit that was a good idea.
I pushed off the slope and continued homeward.
There was much to be done, winter whisking in soon.
An ancient oak had fallen across the pathway, the log rotted and smushed in places. I stepped over and continued on.
Slipping my hand into my pocket, I rubbed the key talisman I carried with me every day.
One dawn, aways away in the deep of our childhood, Magnolia and I had ravaged across meadows and woodlands, gathering early spring blackberries and looking for some mischief or another.
A flicker of dappled forest light had shone on the brass hue of the key, its tines sprouting from the earth.
I’d pulled the skeleton key from the soil.
It was small, perhaps to unlock a cabinet or gate.
I’d been young enough that it felt like finding treasure.
I’d wiped off the dirt with my apron and slipped the key into my pocket.
The next day, Magnolia had strung a silver chain through the oval bow and held the talisman out to me in her palm.
I’d worn the key round my neck for years after, a hope for extraordinary futures.
That had been long ago.