Chapter Thirteen
The night passed full of color and sound.
The Osage moved between bonfires, their clothes catching the flame’s light.
Several children chased each other silently, slinking in and out of shadow, sneaking round their white lodges, the domes a’glow in the dark.
After hours fireside, Wa-ah-zho joined a game beside us, bone dice clattering as they slammed the wooden bowl onto blankets.
Niabi roved the celebration with her hound, leaning forward as she chatted with a friend, squeezing another woman’s arm, laughing without restraint.
I was softly drunk on corn whiskey and relishing the weight of night’s shadows.
Beside me, the Lawman leaned back into darkness, One Eye asleep at his boots. After the Osage had welcomed us, they’d sent someone to gather Cricket and Shark. The Lawman had clucked his tongue—and One Eye had bolted from the thicket, apparently shadowing us all night.
The Lawman stretched out his legs, heels sunk in the dirt, hat tipped over his face, body lengthened into something like a slouch, an impersonation of a carefree cowboy.
Below the front dip of his broadbrim hat, his gaze darted around the crowd, sharp and analytical.
He didn’t entirely trust them. Well, a renegade probably trusted no one.
I sipped the whiskey, liquid burning the back of my throat. The Lawman leaned his shoulder close to mine. “You’re naive.”
I straightened the scratchy cuffs of my wincey blouse. “What are you scared of, Lawman?”
“Containment.”
I snapped my gaze to his, my fingers moving to the buttons at my neck. “Just ride on home, if you’re all affright.”
His gaze roamed to my palm, the butter-yellow linen crusted brown with blood. “I won’t leave you.”
“I’m hardly dying here.”
“I’ll stay.”
He leaned back again, his posture deliberate.
Peeking from the woolen blanket over his body, a line of metal glinted, bullets organized down his bandolier.
It was peculiar that he wouldn’t leave me.
If he didn’t trust anyone, why would he form an alliance with me, a woman he knew had committed double murder?
Niabi bustled back, her arms full of bundles and pots, her shaggy hound trailing. “Let’s mix a salve for your hand.”
I joined her fireside.
The Lawman lifted his copper cup and sipped whiskey, watchful. Niabi poured something the shade of bruised rain clouds from a woven bag into a shallow bowl.
“Lavender?” I asked, the bonfire warm along the bridge of my nose.
Niabi nodded and held some grains out to me.
They smelt like renewal. Niabi shared she was a healer, taught the ancient ways by her mother and grandmother.
She did not hold her own memories of her ancestral land but had grown up among these hills, learning the remedies and gifts the earth offered here.
She handed me the bowl and pestle, motioning for me to grind the lavender.
I rotated the pestle across the grains, and Niabi laid her palm atop mine, a black spider tattooed on the back of her hand.
She adjusted the angle of the pestle and modeled the right amount of pressure.
My skin was dry, and I felt the texture of her palm across my knuckles.
She showed me how to mix the ground lavender with some grease.
“You’ve all those books in your shack. Are skilled with horses and weapons.” She stirred the salve with her forefinger. “What else can you do?”
No one had ever asked about my skills. She knew my strengths of bravery and boldness.
That I could hunt, build, survive. And horses, I’d always understood horses.
When I thought back, horses saturated my earliest memories, the moments blurry and imprecise: a coppery claybank flank; lifting a carrot toward an Appaloosa; Pa guiding my bootheel into a stirrup; hair snapping behind me as I rounded wayward cattle on my pony.
After I’d heard the legend of Willie Matthews—a woman from nearby in Kansas who’d dressed as a man and drove longhorns up Old Chisholm Trail to Dodge City—I’d yearned to shuck my skirts, chop off my hair, and throw trouser legs over a mustang.
But Niabi would expect a pioneer to establish a farmstead, train horses, withstand a harsh life.
What other abilities of mine might be uncommon on the frontier?
I tapped the pestle on the wooden bowl. “I can paint.”
“Paint?” She tucked a slick strand of hair behind her ear, firelight striking on her sunset-hued beaded earrings. “Similar to how we make art with hand weaving—you paint?”
I scratched my ankle above my boot. “I could, once.”
“You don’t walk backward.” She flicked her hand, swiping away my ambivalence.
Niabi bustled away, returning with charcoal paint and an earthenware pot.
She explained the spider shape on her hand.
Like Ho e ka, a name for Earth, the spider represented a snare that trapped all life.
Niabi asked me to draw the patterns round the pot, and I explained some of my painting techniques.
Later, she joined her husband on a stump, leaning her head against his shoulder.
His energy was staid, while hers vibrated.
She was vivacious in a way I’d once been, before these seasons of regret.
I lost hold of those pieces of myself somewhere along the way.
I painted for a time, the celebration muted beyond me, the Lawman ever present in the shadows, and then the night sky began to loosen, as it did close to sunrise, letting in the softer undertones of dawn.
Wa-ah-zho spoke something to Niabi and tucked her blanket cloak across her lap, the navy ink of his tattoos climbing from his collar.
He leaned across our circle toward me. “Will you come back? We’ll share more stories. ”
“You can paint. Show me how to train my horse.” Niabi held out her hand to me, her stack of bracelets jangling. “And I’ll show you where to find herbs in the hills.”
I clasped her hand between mine. “I’d be honored.”
Wa-ah-zho nodded, then stood and drifted off into the edge of daybreak. Someway, unwanted, I’d made allies tonight.
The Lawman linked his hands behind his head and leaned back. “Who knew you could be civil?” His voice rasped in the dark. “It’s almost as if you’re used to being belle of the ball.”
There was a time when I’d been the county darling.
But I couldn’t revive that part of myself, as I must hold tight to control.
The last time Olive came calling, she’d brought buttermilk pie.
Poppy had raced into my shack to swap out her dime novel, narrating an unbroken stream about her last borrowed pamphlet, the bell of her calico dress stirring up dirt.
Sofia had settled on my porch to shuck partridge peas, and Olive had taken to sweeping, overfull of gossip.
They’d stayed from midday to almost candlelighting, Olive desperate for companionship, the isolation of the frontier almost unbearable for her.
While I’d misplaced space inside myself for friendship.
They were too brittle, too messy. When I sifted through memories, it was hard to reconcile all the betrayals.
Most of the time, it felt like some dream.
Something that had happened to someone else.
I unbuttoned my blouse’s cuffs. “Everyone has fun with me.”
Our log rocked as he bent closer. The blanket parted to reveal his pressed black waistcoat and white shirt. “Everyone, huh?”
“Well, anyone not born of the devil himself.”
Graphite-black scruff shaded his jaw, black hair curling behind his ears. In the distance, the amber and marmalade blur of the bonfire glowed. “So, what, you’re jealous?” I asked. “You want my friendship?”
“I don’t have friendships.”
“Me either.” Not anymore. My wind-whipped hands slipped below the blanket to press against my rib cage. “But sure, once I was the county’s favored darling.”
“I cannot envision you as a darling.”
I crossed my legs atop our stump, turned toward him. “Oh, I broke every rule placed before me. But I can dance to sunup, carry on longer than anyone else.”
“Hmm.”
“Don’t tell, though,” I said conspiratorially. “I’m starting afresh, crafting a new alias.”
Light glinted on the chain of his pocket watch, and a willow trembled in the breeze. “I won’t tell.”
It was as if he meant more, as if he spoke of the confidences he kept for me. The air felt thick and soggy with all that was unsaid between us. “You won’t tell of the cowboys?”
“No,” he said. “It’s your secret.”
My inhale clogged my throat. “Thank you.”
I’d felt on pause, wondering what sort of man he was.
But perhaps he wouldn’t hold my debt against me.
I’d scrutinized how folks spoke of the Lawman, and the tales were atrocious: him roving No Man’s Land with rival outlaw bands, maliciously pitting criminals against each other.
But it was becoming hard to envision him as a bloodthirsty gunslinger.
I couldn’t untangle the story from the man before me.
Of course he was unyielding and menacing, but there was an honor to him.
A righteousness and appreciation of order.
Those weren’t qualities one expected of a renegade.
The breeze whipped past, fluttering the baby hairs on my nape. He watched me, firelight striking across his jaw, highlighting the strong angles, the rough stubble, his austere demeanor. I felt uneasy, as if I couldn’t hide myself from him. I adjusted a hatpin in my bun.
“It’s Stot,” the Lawman said.
“Stot?”
“Umstott.”
His name. “Oh.” I rubbed my thumb over a deteriorating section of the wood stump. “You still have to call me Miss Hoopes.”
He doffed his hat, then settled back into his relaxed pose, as if he slept.
The evocative rhythm of voices and drums and stomps thrummed along my spine.
The song ended, and a hush spread like scent through the crowd.
Though I didn’t want to rely on others, I’d enjoyed these hours with the Osage.
I felt a part of myself sit up from the grave and remember.
I tilted my face skyward. The night had weakened from black to an oily gunmetal, like water poured across a canvas.
The fire warmed me, but beyond, a norther rumbled and roared.
Winter was almost here. I hoped I’d prepared enough to survive until spring.
A faint warmth pulsed along my boots, beckoning me toward home.
Around camp, day rustled from night, the Osage rising from their timbers, blankets looped around bodies, the warm scent of black coffee seeping through the air. Niabi settled beside me on the log, the four stripes on her cloak arresting in the oncoming light. “Greet the new day with me?”
I followed Niabi to the edge of their camp, where grass became forest. Beyond, where sky met earth, a brightness loomed. Dawn was rising.
The Osage chanted. I was honored Niabi had invited me to observe their rite.
I wrapped my blanket tight across my shoulders and waited.
And then a sunray slashed over the horizon.
As they sang, they crouched and lifted a piece of earth, swiping the soil across their foreheads in sacrament.
Before fleeing Kansas, I’d rarely ever thought about this concept of land.
The prairies of our farm had just been ours, something taken for granted.
But after feeling cared for by my meadows and my creek, after hearing the Osage stories of honoring the land, after all I’d lived this past season, I felt such deep gratitude for the earth.
I bent and scooped up a fragment of soil.
I studied the red dirt smudged on my fingertips. It was cold and silty. I rubbed the soil between my fingers and looked homeward.