Chapter Fifteen
Itrimmed my lampwicks with my dagger, fresh kerosene ready for sundown.
Wiping my blackened palms on my apron, I grabbed the sagebrush broom off its nail.
Swept the floor and chimney, whisking the pile of ash from my home, thoughts tangled up with long-forgotten stories.
With household chores almost complete, I could gallop through fields, training my horses.
I groaned—I’d forgotten to clean the dratted butter separator again.
I hated the slow, precise disassembling of parts, the gentle scrubbing, the absolute tedium.
If I ever dragged out my oil paints, I’d grasp gray and brown pigment, toss some dirt across canvas, capture the monotonous emptiness that was winter on my farm.
As I removed the crank handle and disks from the separator, the swish of skirts through grass broke my solitude.
I squinted through unbroken sunrays. Olive strode toward me with a basket rounded by a cheery gingham cloth. “Joyous tidings,” she called.
I dropped the separator and wrung my hands on my apron. “Olive, happy Yule.”
She smirked. “You’ve ash all about your face.”
I dragged my rag across my skin, scraping off dirt and weariness.
“It’s in your hair,” she added.
“Of course it is. Shall you like to come back after I’ve had my wash?” I flung my hand westward. “In the frigid creek.”
Her gaze swept the clutter of projects strewn across my porch. “Mmm.”
“Everything’s fine.”
“I never said it wasn’t.” She transferred her weight, the plum velvet ribbon rimming her hem wavering, then settling. “Heard tomorrow was Christmas Eve.”
“Huh. Heard that too.”
“Coming to the dance?”
I sat beneath my wooden shake-shingles. “Not likely.”
Olive grabbed my pail of walnuts and sat beside me, puffing her starchy skirts over her propped knees.
One warm autumn day, I’d tossed the pail of lime-green walnut balls across a hard patch of earth, and without restraint I’d set to stomping the nuts from the soft outer hull.
Though homesteading was lonesome and monotonous, some moments were full of lavish, private abandon.
Olive unfolded her knife. “Hear there’s to be watermelon and gingersnaps.”
“Someone has molasses?”
She pressed her blade into the seam of the walnut. “That’s the story.”
After we’d shucked the pail of walnuts, and Olive blessedly cleaned my butter separator, leaving the pieces to dry on a cloth, we reclined against the bleached oak planks of my shack, the long wild rye tossing in the wind.
A red dust cloud toppled across the meadow, obscuring the tree line.
Olive opened the folds of gingham to reveal popcorn balls, her demeanor tranquil but her eyes solemn.
“What’s troubling you?” I asked.
She snapped her gaze to mine. “What do you mean?”
“You’re upset about something.”
She wiped beneath her eyes, sweat highlighting her cheekbones. “You hear talk of those missing cowboys?”
Warmth shot up my spine. No one had spoken of the cowboys in months—I’d hoped interest in the story had finally dwindled, that I was free of those awful men.
If provoked, if this story started swarming, the Lawman would surely offer me up to slaughter.
Why had I assumed a renegade could be trustworthy? There was no loyalty between us.
I forced my hands to unclench. “What’s in the wind?”
Olive fiddled with the ribbon ties of her ivy-patterned bonnet. “Seen you out riding with the Lawman. You’re friendly with him?”
Course we weren’t friends, but Stot was useful on a hunt. And he’d re-sided my shack. “He’s helpful round my homestead,” I said.
“Just plain reckless to run about with him.”
I coughed a brittle laugh. Reckless was all I was, all I had left.
Olive scraped at mud caked on the arch of her foot. Was she insinuating that he was responsible for the missing cowboys? I liked her like this—not just the pristine, competent homesteader but someone with edge and dust. A woman full of her own opinions—even if she was wrong.
“I do appreciate your concern,” I said, “but I left Kansas because I tired of folks bossing me about.”
Olive scratched down her neck. “Right.”
I could tell she was annoyed—but I’d fought for my independence. I didn’t want others judging me. “And he’s not all bad,” I said.
“So you believe people are shades of gray?” She straightened the swoop of her ruffled collar.
I tended to sift humanity into two categories: full of shadows or full of light. As either a risk to me—or me, a risk to them. In my pocket, I gripped the curved bow of my key. “Actually, I see saints or sinners.”
“We’re not all one or the other, though, right?”
“No. I forget that.”
She grabbed a popcorn ball, handed one to me. I tasted the luxurious sweetness of the treat, my land fading in the distance, my thoughts muddled up with worry.
“I’ve seen your ease with horses.” Olive rubbed her thumb along an eyebrow. “Thad’s talking tales of joining a cattle drive come summer.”
“He can ride?” I asked. “Knows horses?”
“Fair enough.” She knocked her head back and forth. “As children, Asa and I were enslaved on the same plantation. He labored in the stables. But after we escaped—we haven’t had much notion to spend time round horses.”
“You fled during the war?”
“Yes.” She grasped the edges of her rounded collar, knuckles tight. “Now I’m looking to the future.”
When I mourned, folks’ condolences or questions made the suffering worse, so I just sat with her a moment, waited. Hanging from the rafters, bags of geese feathers, curing for pillows, warmed in the sunshine. She didn’t say any more.
“Send Thad on over,” I said. “I’ll teach him some ranching skills, so he’s not a tenderfoot.”
She thanked me, and we crunched the popcorn balls in silence. After a time I brushed my hands along my apron and asked, “You were saying something, about the missing cowboys?”
She tucked a piece of hair back into her French braid, turned toward me. “Here’s the thing: No one’s seen hide of them since September. Their wives back in the Dakotas are pressing for answers, screeching about foul play.”
I wrought my knuckles, unease anchored in my stomach. “Why does anyone even care?” I scratched at a dry patch on my wrist. I couldn’t figure why folks didn’t just let this story die. It was the Wild West: People disappeared. “Men roam, leave their wives all the time.”
“Story goes,” Olive said, “that they weren’t just cattlehands but Wild Bunch outlaws.”
“Well,” I paused, “damn.”
“Bitter Creek, that gangly, unnerving Wild Bunch outlaw, he’s haunting social gatherings, questioning homesteaders—all a’fire about the mystery.” Olive studied the sunshine striking from a low cloud. “I don’t fancy folks impassioned about one cause or another.”
I broke apart my popcorn ball, hands sweaty, the crumbles sticky in my palm.
Out in the frontier it was vigilante rule—everyone creating their own order.
It didn’t matter what the law said, it mattered what folks decided about you.
Sometimes a claim of self-defense would save you, other times you’d be hung before nightfall.
“You think the county’s moving toward vigilante law. ”
“They just haven’t chosen their target yet,” Olive said.
Sakes alive, we didn’t need more trouble.
It was enough, just surviving winter. Perhaps Olive was right, that folks sought someone to blame, but I couldn’t turn myself in, as men never believed a woman’s story.
But—no one had found the bodies. My corner of the frontier should be safe from a witch hunt.
My translucent bags of geese feathers fluttered in the breeze, sunlight a’glow through the linen, the feathery silhouettes gray shadows. I realized her earlier implications about Stot: I’d killed the cowboys, yet he was under fire. Once again my choices heaped havoc onto someone else.
“And it reasons,” I said, “that the Wild Bunch could target their enemy, the Lawman, and me being neighborly with him—”
“Just take care of yourself, Amelia. Be watchful.”
“You as well.” I gnawed my lip. “And you can call me Minnie.”
She snorted. “You truly don’t let folks in, do you?” She took my hand and squeezed. “Think about the dance, won’t you?”
She stood, brushing her hands along her faded raspberry-pink calico dress, and crossed my pasture, her empty basket hanging off the crook of her arm. My posture was taut, sweat slipping down my back.
Olive turned, spoke from across the field. “You do know: There are folks who can handle your dark spaces.”
She walked up the hillock again and, soon enough, disappeared into haze. The scraggly branches along my horizon blurred, and distantly cows groaned. The sun tripped across the sky, day quickening toward the coming darkness of night. I strode downhill. I had work to do.
At candlelighting, I propped a wooden panel against the raised bark of a blackjack oak, a few tubes of oil paint clutched in my palm.
I’d salvaged the board from a broken crate, the surface already primed with gesso.
I was determined to paint with color again.
Across the sky, the lush sunset soaked upward while the laundry lingered on the line and a pile of logs hulked beside my axe.
I stepped forward, held a flat sable-haired brush vertical—then I painted the expanse in rushed, impressionist strokes, drenching the board in thick smears of vermilion and cobalt and amber.
After the sky darkened several shades, I dropped my brush into the wheatgrass, hefted my axe, and went to split firewood.
A while later, with the sun fallen beyond the curve of the earth, in that ghostly luminescence of twilight, I walked on past. I spotted something within my painting.
There seemed a shape moving among the grasses, a flick of a withered shawl, the elegant curve of a collarbone—an impression of a woman not wholly there.
Apprehension squirmed round my shoulders.
I’d read a story last year in New England Magazine of a woman who’d lost hold of her reason, haunted by a figure crawling about her hideous yellow wallpaper.
I couldn’t remember what had become of her.
There was risk if someone glimpsed my sanity fracturing.
Even though old folktales just wandered my resting mind, if I seemed the slightest bit unmoored, I could end up trapped and caged, imprisoned in an asylum.
I turned the board around and walked on, oil paint smearing like warmed wax across my thumb and along the swoop of my palm, the air pungent with the sharp scents of mineral and woodland.