Chapter Nine
Igathered potato tubers in my apron and stepped beyond my waxed canvas tarp into the sunlight.
The sweet, earthy scent of an October day sketched out all the empty spaces.
My skirt caught on a sandbur, the bluebonnet cloth wrapped around the spiky seed head—I tugged.
The burrs knotted up in the weave and wouldn’t release.
Right there, where the fabric bunched, a maroon smudge puddled over the indigo flowers.
No matter how hard I scrubbed, I couldn’t cleanse the bloodstain.
The cowboys kept on haunting.
I gripped tight my apron, the cloth heavy with potatoes, and unwound the golden, barbed seedpod from a blue floret. From the east, a shrill sound scuttered beneath the wind, a rumble like many voices. Foreboding swelled within me.
But it was only a woman and two girls walking across the prairie.
I dabbed a cloth on my collarbone, my fingertips raw from the prickly sandburs, and strode toward them.
I checked my wristwatch—today’s daylight was half used up.
Sunbeams soaked the woman’s face, her skin a luminous deep brown and her black hair swept up into a bonnet.
One hand wrought her skirt, a linsey-woolsey hued sepia with dust and dotted with clovers, and her other hand fidgeted with the red-checked edge of cloth in a basket.
I noted both fierceness and hesitancy—she seemed giddy to come calling but also worried about how she’d be received.
“Afternoon,” she called.
I nodded, wiped a hand across my forehead.
“I’m Mrs. Olive Brown. Everyone just calls me Olive.” She pointed over her shoulder. “We’ve claimed the quarter section just east over the hill.”
“Ah.” I returned her smile. It felt brittle, not having smiled in a season. “Welcome. Amelia. Miss Hoopes.”
“A pleasure.” She handed me something warm wrapped in cloth. “My county-prizewinning pie.”
Carrot-red clay caked her feet, her heels cracked light brown with use.
She’d walked barefoot all the way here, for companionship.
With a pie scenting of vanilla and buttermilk—a kindness, a generous gift.
She introduced her daughters, Sophia and Poppy, then started in about the sewing circle and literary society.
She told of the sharpshooting contest and taffy pull organized for this Saturday and the ball game the following week.
“Oh, we’ll have such fun. You must come round on Sundays for supper.
” Olive untied her bonnet’s white ribbons, her fingers long and deft as they loosened the knot.
“What gatherings are you most excited about?”
“I’ll attend barn raisings. Help when obliged,” I said. “But I’ve no interest in socializing.”
Olive’s hands faltered as she reknotted her bow.
“Ma—” Her daughter Poppy tugged at her scratchy, wincey-wool collar. From the energy charging about her like a lightning storm, she looked just out of pinafores, perhaps nine or ten, not yet comfortable in tailored blouses. “She has four horses.”
“Four, huh?” Olive straightened her daughter’s braid. “Make sure you stand back a pace. Wouldn’t want to spook ’em.”
“Don’t you worry about that,” I said to Poppy. “Go on, say hello. They’re friendly.”
Olive nodded and Poppy dashed over to my horses.
Olive shared she’d staked claim with her daughters; her husband, Asa; and a teenage son, Thaddaeus.
Asa and Thad were back on their quarter section digging their dugout into the slope of a hill.
There was much to do—I didn’t have time for chitchat.
I peeked at my trenches. Sophia pressed her knees in the dirt, several rows down, planting my potatoes—she’d practically finished for me.
“Good Lord,” I said. “She mustn’t do my work.”
“Sure enough, your tilling’s lovely,” Olive rubbed her hand over her mouth, “but there’s nothing wrong with being neighborly.”
I transferred my weight to my spade. Was she teasing me? “You saying something about my planting, Olive?”
Her eyebrow popped up. She was radiant, her honey eyes crackling. Amused, I drummed my fingers on the wooden handle, then strode over to Sophia and thanked her. “You don’t need to plant for me.”
Sophia glanced up, her lilac bonnet perched atop black ringlets. “Oh, I just adore planting potatoes,” she said. Sophia was perhaps sixteen, her ethereal demeanor startling with its similarity to Magnolia’s. “Gardening is so full of hope, don’t you suppose?”
I wiped at my nose. “It’s practically transcendent.”
Olive snorted. She thanked her daughter for being thoughtful, then walked with me to the patch of shade cast by my tent. Olive considered my camp, black fabric snapping in the wind. “It’s just you?”
“Come hell or high water.” I leaned my spade against a wooden crate and offered Olive a basket of pawpaws I’d foraged.
“I admire that,” Olive said, grabbing a fruit. “The gumption to build such a life, on your own.”
Poppy squealed—Whistlejacket’s velvety nose nibbled her hand. I nodded toward Poppy. “I remember days like that.”
“That one, she’s a hot pan of live fire.” She watched Poppy with affection, wiping dirt from the pawpaw, the yellow rind blotched with brown. “All nature, she’s bursting right outta her skin, and sometimes I cannot find my patience.”
“I caused my ma an appalling amount of suffering, scurrying about as I did.”
“Well, I suppose.” Olive studied me. “You must have breakneck grit to venture alone.”
I saluted with my pawpaw, took a bite. It tasted overwhelmingly sweet.
“Gawd, but she needs the structure of schooling.” Olive tapped her thumb on the pawpaw, gently bruising the velvety skin.
Beyond, Sophia carried another load of potatoes in her apron.
Olive shared that there was no school until the following autumn, that it’d take time to bring a teacher down, but that they’d make do, as they always did.
“You’ve primers for her?”
“No. No books,” Olive said. Poppy stroked Cricket’s mane, kept up a stream of chatter. “I hear there’ll be a book wagon, sometime.”
I’d packed only essential supplies, but I wouldn’t have dreamed of traveling without stories.
I’d placed favorite chapbooks and literary monthlies into my trunk, along with Dickens and Thackeray, Wilkie Collins and Sir Walter Scott.
What else would there be to do during the long, dark winter evenings?
A thought crowded my mind, of the Ivanhoe hardback shoved deep into a crate.
The emerald-green cover with the smoky black vines, the book a haunting reminder of bloodshed.
“I’ve no primers,” I said. “But I’ve some dime novels that might be helpful.”
“In truth?” Olive brushed her fingers round her ear, looked through an opening in my tent with longing.
I dug some chapbooks from a chest and handed them to Olive. She held the books with reverence, aligning the askew covers. “We couldn’t.”
“Take ’em,” I said. “Borrow more anytime you like. Just send the girls on over.”
“You’re a schoolteacher?”
“Was.” I’d schooled our county’s one-room for a season—I’d found satisfaction discussing science and literature and devising unexpected disciplines for the children, but I’d missed that feeling of contentment within my muscles after a long day of farming.
Olive clasped my hands. I itched to pull away but didn’t want to be unnecessarily rude. “Folks round here need a teacher,” she said. “You shan’t have to fuss with planning socials—just teach.”
I stepped back, untangled my hands from hers. “I don’t want to become involved. It’s just me, alone with my horses.”
Olive pressed flat the lace rounding her collar. “I’m not sure life is for living, alone.” She paused. “But I suppose there are many ways to live.”
“There are,” I said. “And this is mine.”
Olive nodded, but her eyes had a glint. If I read Olive right, this conversation wasn’t over. She picked up her basket, looped it on her forearm. “How are you faring, in truth? This is a grum hard life. We’re gonna need community some, to survive the winter.”
“I’m fine.” Besides the prairie fire and the assault, the murders and the apparitions. I coughed something like a laugh. “Course I’m not okay. It’s a dratted nightmare out here.”
“It’s wretched.” She smirked, almost wickedly. “But we’ll endure.”
“We will.”
I squinted at the sun moving too swift across the sky, noted the rhythm of Sophia humming, the trill of a wood thrush.
“I’ve not seen many others about on bordering homesteads,” Olive said. “No women.”
With the thicket bordering the creek to my south and west, the forest northward, and the rises to the east, I’d spotted no other homesteaders except for a few glimpses of the Lawman thrashing across his land on his mustang.
Shark, he’d called him. A ridiculous name.
And that wolf beast that followed him about—One Eye, even though he had two.
Olive rubbed her basket, fingers bumping over the weave of white oak, the ligaments of her wrist tense. “You hear about those missing men?” she asked.
“What?” My spine tugged taut, my body suddenly breathless. Round the other side of my tent, something skidded across the terrain, perhaps a tumbleweed.
“At a gathering in Enid a couple days past, some folks planning social societies and deciding where to build the church, a Wild Bunch outlaw made the rounds, asking questions.” Olive straightened the band of her apron.
“Apparently two cowhands have been missing since the rush. They bragged about getting plots right here, nearby the curve in Crooked Creek. And some farmer saw them over yonder our way, a few hours into the race, looking into flames.”
Sweat pebbled on my chilled skin. I wiped the moisture with a rag.
I’d thought it’d be months until enough order established for folks to pay attention to the countryside—and by then the cowboys I’d sent to their maker would’ve been lost in the disorder of the rush.
But those cowboys just kept looming. Gossip needed to be buried, so no one looked my way.
“Suppose they wandered on.” My voice came out too thin.
“Perhaps.” Olive leaned forward, relishing the gossip. “But did you know that vicious outlaw, the one they call the Lawman, staked claim just north?”
“I met him.”
I wasn’t sure what to make of that meddlesome gunslinger. Sometimes I’d wake at night, thinking of him—wondering whether he’d keep my secrets. I sure as starfire hoped he didn’t turn me in.
“Oh?” Olive looked eager and horrified at the same time.
I shuddered dramatically in response.
“That bad?”
“Oh, he’s awful. Arrogant,” I said. “But I think he’ll keep to himself. I’m not scared of him one bit.”
“Maybe you should be?” She kneaded her shoulders, scrunching the fabric’s green flora. “Heard he slaughtered four of them Dalton bandits in some battle or another.”
“Glad someone did.”
Olive laughed and refolded the cloth in her basket. “Well now, don’t be a stranger. I know how the days stretch long and quiet. You come find us when you’re ready for more pie.”
As Olive and her daughters walked home, the blaze of sunlight dampened, day falling into later afternoon.
Time continued on and on, days on the frontier an endless trail winding forever into the distance.
Those cowboys kept rising from the grave.
Olive seemed to relish gossip—I hoped her eager chatter wouldn’t remake my secrets into something sensational.
I’d seen it, many times before, how a story could gather and build into a cyclone.
Along my hem, I picked at the blotch of blood.
Why wouldn’t it dissolve? I tried to reshape my thoughts into something calm, to shake out worry and find quiet in my mind.
But horrors kept spiraling. I scratched at the dry skin on my collarbone, thought through the incident, considered whether any evidence might’ve been left behind.
I released my skirt, the white fabric swelling like a low cloud—and walked on into the autumn-gold sunshine.