Chapter Eighteen
Abay mare lowered her head, swaying as she grazed.
The clatter of footfalls broke the faint sound of her munching.
I flopped onto my tummy, peered through the buffalo grass.
Thad and Poppy rushed over, Poppy talking rapidly and gasping with laughter as she asked me for advice on a prank.
Thad shoved his hands below his armpits, studied Stot.
I told them about stealing my neighbor’s clothes last Yuletide.
Poppy clapped, and then they raced off to chase mischief.
A year ago, I’d led the high jinks myself.
Now I wanted to sit and watch shadows. How had I been so effervescent, so young, just seasons before?
“Thaddaeus, wait,” Stot called.
Thad halted, and Poppy slammed into him. They walked back, Thad looking over his shoulder.
“Heard your pa say—” Stot said. “I can help you with roping and sharpshooting.”
“What now?” Poppy said, flabbergasted.
Stot brushed off his trousers, made to stand. “Forget it. It was a poor notion.”
Thad shook his head, eyes wide. “I’d be honored, Mr. Lawman. Honored.”
Stot’s face moved into something like an untried grin, a flash of teeth more feral than welcoming.
“Sure enough,” Thad said. “Just come round whenever. Ma will bake pie.”
Thad backed away, Poppy pulling him by the elbow. The moment stretched. Olive seemed wary of Stot, but when all sum was weighed, pioneers welcomed anyone into their home, renegade or not.
“What was that?”
“Heard of his notion to join a cattle drive,” Stot said. “Know you offered to help him with riding, thought I could share some of my skills as well.”
“You ranched before?” I asked. “Along with that mysterious doctoring.”
A crinkle at his eyes. “Perhaps.”
I rolled my tongue around in my mouth, the taste of watermelon lingering. “What else?”
“Surveyor. Railroads. Farmed,” he said. “Everything, Minnie.”
“And now cowboy trainer for farm boys,” I said. “You’re doing an awful job, keeping up that reputation of yours.”
“I know your secrets, but you don’t know what I’ve done.” The undertone of his voice was gravelly and haunting.
A preternatural chill crept up my nape. If he spoke of his past in that tone, then it must be full of atrocities. I held his gaze. “You murder a woman and her baby, as folks say?”
He didn’t seem to move, the night sky darkening beyond. “I’m wanted for the crime.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Answer don’t matter—either way, I’m all-nation unsafe.” He pocketed his matches and cigarette case. “I shouldn’t be round you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” I pinched his sleeve above his paper cuff. Distantly, the banjo twisted an elegiac melody, the string picks tiptoeing down my spine. “Don’t go.”
His shoulders tense, body tipped forward to stand. “It wasn’t considerate of me to make a habit of publicly socializing with you.”
“So just alone on our homesteads.” I released his sleeve. “That seems proper.”
“Minnie.” He sighed, his tone somewhere between exasperated and resigned. “I didn’t recognize that in befriending you, I entwined you with my reputation.”
I tracked the bumpy texture of my linen blouse with my thumb. “I’m not worried.”
I lay back down, nestled into the bluestem, and after a moment he joined me.
It felt fragile and raw, those moments under the stars, the vulnerability of another becoming known to me.
The tobacco sweetened the crisp scent of winter, and I closed my eyes, felt the flickering darkness upon my eyelids.
“So how’d you file anyway,” I asked, “if you’re an outlaw in truth?”
“Filed under my twin brother’s name.”
“Well, that’s a convenient alias. So the Lawman has a brother.”
“And six sisters.”
“You close?”
Stot rubbed his fist, knuckles brittle with the dry winter air. “Yes.”
One Eye shivered with some night terror, and I ran my palm along his back. “So why isn’t he homesteading alongside you?”
“He’s dead.”
“Oh, damn.” I reached out for him, let my hand drop. “I sure am sorry, Stot.”
He took off his hat by the crown and held it to his chest. “Much obliged.”
“And your sisters, where are they?”
“Home. I distanced myself after everything, to safeguard them.”
I propped onto my elbows, bit my lip. That was something I understood.
Laughter haunted the edge of the prairie, and a horse stomped dust with a muted thud.
The Dipper tipped across the sky, the handle now almost horizontal, so it was well into the deep of night.
Stot reached toward me and slipped his hand into the pocket of his cloak.
I froze, his fingers brushing my stomach through the fabric of his slicker, my body buzzing, his gaze on my face, brow furrowed.
He pulled out his flask and drank, the scent of whiskey tangy.
“I’m planning to call round on the Osage in a few days.” He handed me the flask. “You coming along?”
The liquid coursed down my throat, abrasive and primal, tasting of wood spices and old books and all things worn. “We ain’t taking a blasted buggy.”
“Course not.”
Our eyes met, held. Smolder from the distant bonfire haloed behind him, the rough shapes of his face black and gold and garnet in the tossed firelight.
His hair, hat smudged and messy above his orderly clothes.
His gaze roamed the length of my arm, the strip of my lace cuff, edging from the cavern of his slicker.
He cleared his throat, pulled at his necktie.
“Let’s walk.” He patted his vest pocket and pinched the divots of his hat, lifting it out of the shadows.
The prairie was vast and empty as we wandered through the switchgrasses and sideoats, space stretching forever away to the sky.
The delicate winter clouds had fled, leaving glittering starlight.
As we roamed, I heard the distant melody of a fiddle, the whoop and rumble of laughter, Stot’s low whistle for One Eye.
Several women hummed the rhythm of one of Ma’s favorite hymns.
Tell me the old, old story, of unseen things above.
Those few spare notes tugged me back in time, and I could almost smell those long ago summer weeks at the revival in Topeka: grass and sweat and musty Bible paper.
Sunglow fizzling across my skin, the constant hum of hymns crooned round camp, the bluebirds nesting above our tent.
Lark, Magnolia, and I roamed the edges of the grounds, slipping into the woods, down to the creek bottoms. We were no longer children, not quite teenagers.
Sometimes we’d join Willie before a campfire, where he laughed with other boys and passed instruments round the circle.
Ezra patrolled camp with a flock of older boys, chins lifted high, Bibles clutched in the crook of their elbows, a glint of righteousness in their eyes.
One evening my pa stood before a bonfire, hands on his hips, suspenders an X across his back. “There’s nothing like this, Minnie,” he said. “Nothing like the glory of our Lord.”
Pa didn’t often share musings, so I stepped beside him to listen, lifting my floral skirt above the mud. “You suppose so?”
“Course I do.” He flicked a glance at me, bushy jet-black eyebrows flecked with gray.
Once a month, my family joined the other Methodists from miles round at our one-room schoolhouse—we sang hymns and listened to stories, but the zeal swarming this revival was altogether different.
Across the grass, Ma and a few women sang as they scrubbed pots, Ma’s dim brown hair twisted in a loose braid instead of her habitual bun.
She had enlivened at the revival, befriending others involved in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.
Between songs they planned a protest outside the saloons of our county.
Pa shifted his weight, studied me.
“I believe God’s good.” I scratched my wrist below my lace cuff. “I just reason folks will return to whomever they’d been before, when the tents pack up and they head on home to the everyday.”
He rubbed his beard, his palms clean. At home his hands were always smudged with oil or dirt. Tell me the story slowly, the women sang, that I may take it in.
A cascade of laughter burst from the path: Magnolia beckoned me from a cluster of youths. She gripped Lark’s arm, his body angled away as he hollered some nonsense or other across the crowd. The whites showed round Magnolia’s brown eyes; she was always a bit lost without me.
“Settle your horses,” I called to her and turned back to Pa. “You caution that men are fickle, that I should steer clear of the lot of them.”
“Well now, I reckon that’s truth too.” A forlorn smile edged his mouth. “But you do realize man makes religion. What’s being worshipped is something altogether elsewhile. Course men are wicked, darling—but that’s precisely the point.”
Tell me the old, old story. Ma’s arm went round and round, scrubbing the pot, her wrist buried in the soapy water.
If you would really be, in any time of trouble, a comforter to me.
I nodded and walked away, my pa at the boundary of the revival, hands slipped into his pockets, in awe of the God of all things.
I wonder what might have been if I’d stayed talking with my pa or had joined my ma cleaning, instead of joining the others in a game of chase.
In the stretched lantern light of the Yuletide celebration, the haunting tenor of the hymn lingered.
As Stot and I roamed the prairie, youths chased each other round the hayricks in a game of scratch and gravel.
The moon arose deep in the night, and then there was plenty of light to explore.
We stood by the bonfire and warmed before drifting back out into the darkness.
For a time Stot instructed Thad on dagger throwing, blades spiraling through shadow into a stump, Sophia, Poppy, and I huddled beneath saddle blankets.
It was a night of watching one brutal, exhausting year slip into past and vanish away.
“Merry Christmas, Minnie,” Stot said, as the bonfire roared toward the heavens.
I gripped my woolen mittens, the wind pressing me toward flames. “Happy Christmas.”
At the end of the long dark, with smoke creeping up from the timberline to fog the inky-black expanse, the edges of the horizon turned purple and gray, like splotches of boysenberry jam smeared across the sky. Dawn had come, weightless and fragile.
I smelt daybreak as I walked the wood grove with Stot, the warmth of sausages and oatmeal. And across the meadow, the women sang, Tell me the old, old story. I stepped forward, ready to begin a new year.