Chapter Fourteen Oklahoma Territory—December 22, 1893
Chapter Fourteen
four weeks later
Ibunched the withering wool of my shawl below my jawline, the wind surly as all wrath.
Winter spiraled deeper and deeper until springtime felt like a misremembered past. I led Cricket through the broad doorway of my barn into the carriage room.
Patches of glow patterned with the dark across the packed-dirt floor.
I felt in my bones the transition from bleak, howling winter to the quiet shadows of my barn.
At his stall, I hung Cricket’s bridle and saddle blanket, then tugged off kidskin leather gloves, warming my palms against my red flannel petticoat.
I exhaled tepid air on my hands and rubbed Cricket’s flanks, his gaunt barrel expanding with heavy breaths.
He nickered—and I jolted. I’d become used to hush.
There was peace in the steady expectancy of quiet.
Grayed daylight streamed through the wooden planks into Smallhopes’s empty stall.
It was strange to not hear her stomping.
I flexed and unflexed my frozen fingers, then grabbed Cricket’s hairbrush off a nail.
I missed Smallhopes—but I’d needed this barn.
I’d traded her to the proprietor of Enid’s general store for some furniture, a stove, and the materials to build my barn.
I’d wavered. The wife had offered her five sons to build my barn, a flock of chickens, twenty dollars’ credit for food over the winter, and packets of sunflower and wildflower seed.
I’d been eyeing those frivolous seeds. “Add that sketch pad and charcoal set,” I said. “And that’s a trade.”
And so they’d built my barn. With leftover wood, I’d hammered together tables and built a bed frame into the wall of my shack.
By tugging a length of canvas across the grass, I’d dragged my stove inside.
I’d scattered the seed, rigged a chicken coop, and scowled at the fresh paper.
I didn’t have time to paint: This age of my life was wind, soil, work.
On another venture down ol’ Chisholm Trail to Wakita, I’d traded one of the cowboys’ shotguns for a milk cow, Mrs. Dawdle.
My palms wet on the Winchester, thumb brushing the checkered walnut stock, anxiety knotted in my gut.
There was risk that someone would recognize the long gun—but I was hungry.
“Alright,” I spoke into the smoky shadows of my barn, my voice gritty in the silence. I brushed my knuckles along the bridge of Cricket’s nose. “You’ll be safe here, old buddy. Good night.”
Outside, the wind spittled, and coyotes clamored from off faraway.
Golden light spread along the horizon as another lonesome night rushed forward.
My land was tawny brown and rounded in dusk, pocketed with shadows and mystery.
I pulled up my shawl and leaned into the gale, pressing through the current like wading through muddy Kansas ponds.
The stitches on my gloves had frayed, the leather wispy, my hands brittle in the cold.
Something shifted along the ground, and I searched for a rattler.
I’d smashed another snake the day before last. But there was no rattle, instead a squeak and whistle threaded along the wind, as if a draught spun through a keyhole of an elm.
I scoured the shadows smudged between the hickories.
All evening I’d felt as if someone narrated fireside legends to me.
Fragments of wide tales, glimpses of other lives lived.
A disquiet, that inexplicable feeling of not being alone.
My rifle was propped beside my bed, so I pointed my broom toward the sounds—in the gloom of dusk, that would do the trick if someone was out there. But there was no one.
Just a rattling, muffled and hoarse. As if voices called across a great distance.
An impression appeared before me across the landscape.
The vision was like an ambrotype photograph developing on a plate of glass, a transient image of ghostly, dimensional shadows and granular lines.
Glass dipped into a puddle of silver nitrate, a form slowly emerging, a world taking shape.
I glimpsed a woman astride a buckskin mustang, clothed in brown Levi’s waist overalls, galloping along a distorted expanse as if silver liquid spilled across the illusion.
Gold snapped across the phantasm, the gilt braid round the woman’s cowboy hat, the stars on her spurs, details coming into focus, then fading away into mist. The apparition wasn’t fully developed, as if it existed in that space between when the glass was set in the chemicals and when an image came to be.
I blinked, but the daydream didn’t vanish. Warmth kneaded my boot soles, as if my land breathed hot fire, as if the earth was awakening. Distinct notes emerged from the chatter, sound collapsing into something resembling words. Memories intertwine, and then perhaps, a new history of women arriving.
I didn’t understand what was happening. I must be filling up the quiet and the broken and the hidden places of myself with old tales.
I must, for what other explanation was there?
I’d heard of diseases of the mind, of women who heard voices or saw prophecies.
Of women locked in asylums. But I didn’t feel like I was unraveling.
I held my shawl tight against my throat.
“Is something there?” I yelled, air rushing into my mouth.
On a sudden, the mirage dissolved, saturated colors and graphite shadows disappearing last. It was quiet, and I was alone.
In my gut, I knew I’d just imagined legendary Willie Matthews, costumed as a boy, driving cattle up Chisholm Trail.
She was one woman, a moment in time, who had re-created history.
And the other woman, the one with the long black braids scrambling through briars, perhaps another forgotten legend from long ago.
I couldn’t explain what sorts of magic existed out on the cold, dark plains. I turned from the stories and disappeared back into the gloom.
Before the crackle of the woodfire, with the moan of an oncoming storm, I dragged a quilt atop my knees.
I raised my fingers before me, considered my reddened, knobby knuckles.
Just cold, not frostbitten. I flung my head back and sighed, tales wandering inside my mind.
Sakes alive, course I wasn’t infected with hysteria.
My ma always told of discernment, of her Holy Spirit, of how forces beyond our realm would speak—if you’d just quiet, just listen.
Whatever was knotted in the wind didn’t feel like my ma’s religion but like something not yet named.
I recognized that the world was more expansive than my belief.
In my rock fireplace, the flames writhed and stretched.
Minutes evolved, time an everlasting swell.
I read several chapters of Vanity Fair, then grabbed my pencil and the Guthrie Daily Leader crossword.
I marked the squares, my handwriting precise and angled, as wax bubbled down my tallow candle.
The wind rattled—paper scraps shivered on the walls.
To fill holes between boards, I’d shoved in newsprint and ripped up a sky-blue skirt, mismatched materials jigsawing up my walls.
Hand-braided rugs lay on my wood-planked floors, and crates with curtains slung across became cabinets.
My shack was cozy, quiet. And mine. I’d expected foreboding and terror, during lonesome nights on the prairie.
But even after the horrors I’d experienced, I felt at ease.
The shadowed, muted parts of myself felt at home in the wide dark.
For Yuletide, I’d plopped a sage bush in a brass drum, looped on popcorn and dried berries.
In a few days, I’d light beeswax candles in tin holders and open the lone package resting on the tree—something the size of my fist brought over by the Browns.
I pressed the newspaper flat. Five across, eight letters, King of the Wild Frontier.
Crockett, the legendary frontiersman my brother Willie had imitated for a season with his antique coonskin cap—until our relentless teasing had pushed him into lavish cattlemen fashion.
Fringed chaps and bright-chroma bandannas.
I unwound my plait and trailed my fingers through my hair, swept up in memories of terrifying Magnolia with tales from Davy Crockett’s Almanacks: Katy Goodgrit wrestling wolves, Sally Ann Thunder Ann Whirlwind’s double streaks of blue lightning, or the giant haunting Old Sally Cato’s woods.
That had been years after Magnolia had come to live with us, but before the haunted look left her eyes.
One dawn, light slanting through the barn’s eaves, I’d handed her the milk pail to haul inside. “If you spill,” I’d said, “Billy Bally Bully will stomp down outta the hills and eat you in one bite, lickety-split.”
She swallowed, whites showing round her brown eyes. “But Old Sally Cato killed him.”
“Right.” I dried my hands on my apron. “But he’s got buddies.
That crashing during thunderstorms are giants as wide as twelve barns strolling on down to Kansas from the Missouri foothills.
” I crouched. “If ever you hear squeakity whirr whirr whirr on the wind, that’s the sound of Old Sally Cato spinning thread on her porch. ”
Magnolia’s knuckles pinked, tightening on the iron handle.
I told her how Old Sally Cato’s boys had roused Billy Bally Bully from his sleep and then raced on home, the monster on their heels, his mouth as broad as a valley, teeth as sharp as pitchforks.
Magnolia blinked slow, and I continued, leaning against a post. “But, quick as lightning straight up sideaways, Old Sally Cato fought the monster, then sat back down at her spinning wheel. Squeakity whirr whirr whirr.”
A few nights later, during the midnight hours, with a norther whistling between loose boards, I’d felt Magnolia slip from beneath our quilt.
She knelt on the floor, the wood planks faintly creaking, and peeked under the bed, her golden curls gathered under her puffy sleep bonnet, the blue hue of night shading her with otherworldly shadow.
“Magnolia,” I said, “sweetheart, come back to bed.”
Magnolia shrieked and lurched, bumping against the bed frame, her pale lashes translucent in the moon rays.
The big owl stirred in the eaves and flew away, his wings flapping into the night.
I gathered her in my arms and pulled her into bed.
“It’s me, it’s me, I’m so sorry,” I repeated.
“Squeakity whirr whirr whirr is just wind songs.”
As far back as I could remember, I had stirred up disorder and chaos. With one mindless tale, her body had tensed again, her worries returned.
“It’s me.” I rubbed her back. “It’s always you and me.”
As moonlight crept through the cracks between wallpaper and fabric, my candle guttering, firelight a’glow on the mounds of wax, I folded my hair into a long braid.
On the newsprint, below Crockett, I added the last words to my crossword, a haunting, then folded the newspaper in fourths and sat awhile in the loud silence.
Flame glowed through my Ball jar of potpourri, brightening the melon and fuchsia and rouge tones of last spring, the wildflowers I’d gathered and boiled.
Rose vervain and fleabane, hedge parsley and sky-blue aster.
Now the petals were just abandoned memory, isolated in their glass cage.
I tugged my robe tight over my nightgown.
I felt hazy, detached from reality, my thoughts spiraling round and round, aimlessly circling how the wind screeched out in my open plain.
A cattle drive spread across my land, a downpour foaming over the herd, Willie Matthews wrangling steers on her mustang, yellow oilcloth slicker bright in the gloom.
Flame stretched from my fireplace, and my candlewick scrawled long shadows across my walls.
I pressed my thumb into the warm wax, felt something.
Then I stood and tossed the newspaper, with all those words, into the fire.