Chapter Seventeen
The shack’s walls shuddered from the rollicking piano and fiddles, the harmonicas and hollering.
I leaned against the wallpaper next to Olive, gripping a decanter of applejack brandy.
The one-room home was cheerful and scrubbed clean, kerosene lanterns and tallow candles lit, furniture dragged outside and rugs rolled up.
“And gawd,” Olive was saying, “the rattler just went up into the eaves of our soddy. Sakes alive, the critter’s just living up there.”
I snorted. “I would’ve shot the ceiling out.”
She leaned against Asa and sipped her brandy, the golden candlelight gleaming on the voluminous sapphire gigot sleeves of her gown. “You know, probably should’ve done such a thing,” she said, “collapsed our mud ceiling down upon us.”
“It sure was a sight,” Asa added. “Olive screeching, snapping uselessly at the air with her apron, the children racing outta doors into the rain.” He chuckled. “They came in after a spell, joined me back at the table to finish our turnips and venison.”
A rapid-paced quadrille began, and Thad, their teenage son, grabbed Sophia’s hand and led her bounding across the room, their elbows linked, bare toes pounding the wood-planked floor.
“Can’t believe we’re living such stories,” I said. “Not sure how anyone will survive until spring.”
“Oh, we will,” Olive said and clinked her glass against mine.
That seemed the vibrant truth of Olive. She tenaciously sought a safe and hopeful future for her family.
Tonight homesteaders gathered from throughout the territory, as far as horse and buggy could pass word of a dance.
Willie gripped the shoulder of a farmer in a grain-sack shirt: my brother’s cheeks red, leaning in too close, his voice just below a yell as he emphatically told some story or another.
Ezra stood beside Willie, wiping a splotch from his mug, bushy eyebrows a dingy shadow color in the dark.
Across the room, US Deputy Marshal Frank Canton slunk from one cluster of pioneers to the next, his hands grasping shoulders, long-stemmed pipe dangling from his mouth, golden star a glint in lamplight.
His gait was languid but his eyes shrewd.
My stomach felt scraped hollow, terrified of what it meant to have a lawman establishing control in our territory.
Folks were curious about those missing cowboys, but hopefully the marshal had grander worries than two lost bandits.
Under the glow of a kerosene lamp, the Lawman leaned against a doorway, a tin of whiskey dangling from his hand.
Stot had brooded there most of the evening, arms crossed, withdrawn and nefarious.
Next to the farmers clothed in shades of dust, Stot was shockingly full of contrast: black hat, black vest, pressed white biled shirt, shined boots.
Gun belt oiled and low across his hips. Though we lived our life in the dirt, in layers of earth the colors of murky and rust, his shirt was always clean, stiff with white paper collars and cuffs, spurs gleaming, black wool trousers faded but clean, as if working his land was a sacred act.
“The most reckless buchario in these hills,” Olive read from a piece of newsprint shoved into a crack between the shack’s boards, a page from a chapbook.
An inked drawing of Calamity Jane wiggled from the crevice, her waterfall curls windblown beneath her cowboy hat, elegant throat contrasted beside her dark jacket, hands clasping her mare’s reins.
I knew the next words in the story, had read it so many times before: She can drink whiskey, shoot, play cards, or swear, if it comes to it, but ’twixt you and me, I reckon that’s a gal who’s got honor left with her grit.
“Has Poppy read Calamity Jane’s stories yet?” I asked. “Those tales will get her stuck in a tree, avoiding her duties.”
Olive rubbed the ridge of her collarbone. “Suppose that’s what I want—for any sort of learning before school next fall.”
Poppy sprawled in the corner, playing jacks. Beside Sophia, a girl in taffy-pink ruffles and oversize bows vocalized opera scales. They spoke of putting together a play about Annie Oakley, the legendary sharpshooter who, myth told, had thwarted train robberies and slain beasts.
Willie hollered. “Minnie—you’ll perform Buffalo Bill?”
I had a strong voice for leading a backyard spectacle, my male characters a crowd favorite back in Kansas.
Sophia rushed over and grasped my hands, begging me to play Buffalo Bill.
Once I would’ve been the center of the carryings-on, but I didn’t want to perform tonight—I felt epochs removed from the carefree girl I’d left in Kansas.
I shook my head and leaned against the wall between Olive and my brothers, haunted by the past. Even though Sophia was a handful of years younger than me, I felt comfortable beside her ma, the middle-aged homemaker.
Willie furrowed his brow at me, then moved his attention elsewhere.
It was past midnight, the crowd frenzied as the party dragged on.
A while before, we’d ate a second supper: The scent of warmth, of butter and popcorn, still lingered.
Children slept—or whispered tales to one another—on coats in the barn.
A bonfire raged outside, and the dance spilled from the crowded room into the starlight beyond.
Willie wiped his forehead, his skin mottled with the flush of liquor.
I leaned closer. “You’re coming day after next to dig my well, right?”
“Come again?” Willie drummed his hand on his thigh, watched the crowd.
“You promised after Christmas to help with some repairs and my well.” I crossed my arms. Willie had been born lazy and never got over it. “Feel as if you’d be mighty distraught if I keep hauling dirt myself and that sandy soil caves in atop me, burying me alive.”
“Oh, right.” Behind him, ghostly hand-laced curtains framed a window. “We’ll come round in a couple days, promise.”
The marshal ambled toward my brothers, fingers thinning the curve of his mustache.
Olive told me of her design for a new quilt, and I chewed my fingernail, straining to hear the marshal.
As he’d heard tale of our family’s skill with siring thoroughbreds, he asked after Ezra’s opinion on breeding horses.
For once, I was thankful Ezra took credit for my expertise instead of drawing me into the conversation.
The marshal exchanged farming chatter for a span—I didn’t overhear any questioning about the missing outlaws.
But I didn’t trust the marshal’s friendly demeanor.
He seemingly cataloged each pioneer who populated his corner of outlaw territory.
Marshal Canton looked beyond my brothers to the Browns, flicking open his pocket watch and snapping it closed.
I told Olive I wanted to wander outside, then slipped into darkness, away from the marshal and his questions.
I stalked through the switchgrass, scraggly winter-dead thistles snagging my skirt.
I sat in the meadow, an elm bough framing the expanse.
The night echoed of the dance. Wispy, silver-tinged clouds raced across the sky, tiny starblazes winking through the gauze.
I hugged my knees, the velvet sleeves of my overbodice bunching.
The thistles crackled as someone approached.
A cowboy hat and broad shoulders silhouetted as a static shadow before the movement of the sky. Stot.
“Forget your cloak, duchess?”
I lifted my hand, waggled my wrist. “You’ll share yours. You’re a gentleman, after all.”
He shrugged from his coat and dropped it unceremoniously on me, then sat beside me in the bluestem.
I slipped my arms inside the long black slicker, its red flannel lining warm and cozy, smelling of smoke and wide meadows and linseed oil.
We watched the sky, the calm of night shockingly still after the gathering.
One Eye’s shaggy fur and pointed ears peeked between the nettle, as he stalked a circle round us, guarding our perimeter.
“You smoke?” Stot removed a cigarette from a leather case embossed with interlocking circles, the knotwork medieval or perhaps Irish.
I held out my hand. “Course I do.”
He reclined in the buffalo grass beside me, and I lay, too, lifting the cigarette to my mouth.
I felt safe with him, and he seemed to view me as another comrade this long winter.
Just two lost souls, taking a breath and watching the starlight.
I dragged in the flavors of tar, my exhale fogging clouds in the cold air.
I couldn’t become friends with that kind preacher by the name of Poor a mile northward nor that banker who chatted with me last week at the county store.
No, I’d become friends with the notorious outlaw.
Stot rustled his shoulders about in the groundcover.
“You cold, outlaw?”
“You stole my slicker.”
“So you’re cold?”
“Of course I’m blasted cold, Minnie.”
“Amelia.” I bit my lip. “So the vicious Lawman is cold.”
“You want me to act all tough or something?” His eyes were closed, his star-shadowed face softened by something resembling a smile. “You know I don’t need to. I’m terrifying no matter.”
“You don’t seem so wicked.” I unpinned my hat and laid it on the grass. “You’re insufferable, but I’m not afraid.”
“No,” he said. “I suppose you wouldn’t be.”
I decided to take that as a compliment, an observation of my tenacity and grit.
Above, oak leaves crackled, and from off yonder—the whine of a banjo, the grumble of wind, the squeal of voices.
Warmth from Stot’s shoulder brushed mine, as if I felt the borders of his body.
One Eye stepped his thick paws between our legs.
He turned and turned, then flopped, his body soft along my thighs.
Stot petted One Eye, and I laid my hand across my mouth, warming my naked knuckles with my exhale.
Stot yanked off his woolen gloves and handed them to me. I tugged them over my chapped fingers.
“I mined some coal last week from that shallow seam up north.” Stot slid his hands under his thighs. “Reckon I could cart over a bucket for you tomorrow, if you’d like.”
I thanked him—I hadn’t had coal all winter. “I’ve some spare parsnips, if you’d want to get them in the ground before the first snow.”
“I offered the coal to you. We don’t have to keep a balanced scale.”
Yet that was the way of life, especially on the frontier. Friendships were based on exchange, on what you could give and receive. “I’d feel more comfortable,” I said, “if I repaid what was owed.”
“That’ll suit, if you prefer. But I’m not counting score.”
I tucked his coat up round my throat and nodded.
But I was keeping score. Approaching friendships any other way felt foolish.
Stot’s gaze roamed my face, seemingly untangling the contradictory pieces of me.
His demeanor balanced between awareness of our perimeter and an uncanny ease, that liquid way he moved his body.
His hat tipped forward, the crown’s classic cattleman crease grabbing firelight and shadow, his profile indistinct in the starlight, thick brows anchoring his face.
Perhaps he honestly saw me, as he knew some of my darkness.
There was no need for acting, no need to become strong or weak or whatever anyone else expected. I was just Minnie.