Chapter Twenty
The following week, Whistlejacket and I roamed the creek bed, her rope lead loose in my palm.
Morning light cut through the canopy, rays falling in lines across the wooden planks I’d laid across the stream.
At the bend in the rivulet, I rubbed her silvery blue withers.
“How’s that, sweetie?” I motioned toward the planks, introducing her to bridge crossings.
She drank some water, and then we wandered closer.
I asked whether she wanted to sniff the bridge, and she nosed the wood with her muzzle, her velvetlike black ears tipped backward.
“That’s brave, Whistlejacket,” I said and offered her an apple slice.
The stream hissed on by, sound an unbroken simmer, and impressions of days training horses alongside Pa crackled past. Once, while practicing backing exercises with a mare, I’d tugged her bridle, frustrated.
Do not lose your temper around your mare, Pa said, grabbing the lead.
Minnie, you’ve got a way with horses. He crinkled his face into a smile, mustache wrinkling.
Just gotta learn a little control yourself, is all.
Memories folded together, images looping, but woven throughout them all was Pa alongside me, encouraging me to be a little bit stronger than the day before.
In the thicket, a painted turtle plopped into the water, his dive fragmenting the steady rhythm of the rustling stream. Those days with my pa were long ago.
I encouraged Whistlejacket a while more, until she was comfortable placing her front hooves on the plank.
When we returned home, I chopped firewood.
As I worked, a norther screeched along the timberline and chapped my knuckles.
The sky above seemed veiled, an indistinct pressure in the atmosphere.
I placed an ash log upright on a stump and swung my axe straight on through.
Then I gathered the pieces and piled them on my makeshift cart.
From the north, my brothers and their skewbald Thoroughbreds exited the forest and trotted across my prairie. I lodged my axe in the stump, then wheeled my cart to the barn, meeting my brothers in the carriage room.
“Boy howdy, have you sighted that Sunday hat Mrs. Fieldstone’s taken to wearing, with the sharp black feathers like spikes,” Willie said.
We had an ongoing conversation about ridiculous fashions we’d seen round the county.
I led Willie’s white-and-sorrel horse into a stall, my palm rubbing the hitch in her hips.
Willie followed, clapping his mittens together against the cold.
Ezra unbuckled his saddlebag and drew out a canvas sack, the leather ties almost black in the gloom.
“That laundry?” I interrupted Willie’s rambling about some farmer’s hogs getting stuck in the wallows.
Ezra’s herringbone waistcoat strained across the barrel of his chest. “And some trouser hems to darn.”
“You reckon I wield a needle any better than you?” I said. “You know I can’t sew. And I’m not washing nothing until you help dig my well.”
Ezra kicked the stall door shut and shoved the sack against my chest, his ruddy complexion darkening to cherry.
“Ah now, calm your grumbling spells.” Willie leaned against a post and snacked on an apple, his mustache oiled into an upward curve.
Willie usually stepped back when we fought.
But lately, without Pa to moderate, Ezra and I snarled at each other like starved and beaten hounds.
Thunder shook the oak boards of my barn, and Willie nodded outside.
“A downpour is a’coming within the hour.
We’ll get mighty soaked.” He plucked at his waistcoat, a slick jade brocade more appropriate for a Topeka drawing room than the farm.
“You’re right up yonder from the creek.” Willie offered the apple core to his mare and picked a piece of hay off his trousers. “You truly need a well?”
I breathed in through my nose. Yes, I needed a well.
It was wearying, hauling water all the time.
I’d spent days digging their wells in the sweltering heat of summer’s end.
Had helped hammer up their shacks, repaired one of Willie’s guns when it hang-fired, worked with Ezra’s mare when she’d spooked during storms. I was done.
I held my arms out, dramatically dropped Ezra’s bundle on the barn floor, and strode beyond the broad doorway.
Outside, gunmetal-hued clouds foamed across the sky, a thundershaker rising from the south.
Ezra followed and grasped my arm. I tugged it back. “Don’t handle me like that.”
“You will wash my laundry,” he said. “It’s your role.”
“I never agreed to that. Find yourself a wife.”
His bushy eyebrows were straight lines across his brow. “It’s nonsense, you off on your own.”
I held my wrist where he’d grabbed me, his thumb imprinted on my skin. Ezra and I had fought the length of our childhood, but our arguments had always felt like sibling sparring, something on the edge of play. This didn’t feel like play.
Disquiet clamored below my rib cage. Surely the feeling was misplaced, just unease from talk of the missing outlaws and the voices on my land.
But watching the fury spike across Ezra’s shoulders, the tautness of his spine, remembering all his righteous, anti-suffrage beliefs that threaded deeper and deeper, I wondered. And I felt fear.
“Darn my clothes,” he said.
“Sure enough,” I said. “You can come round and gather them—when you help dig my well.”
“You will do as I say.”
A forgotten moment flickered in and out, of another blistering fight with Ezra.
I’d been maybe five, arguing that it was my turn to chop wood; him, eleven and screaming to just get on inside.
Ma swept out the door, drying her hands on a rag.
Stop hollering at your sister. She reached for him, as if to draw him in for a hug, and he flinched.
Ezra? He tossed the axe across the field, stomped away.
From the switchgrass, I hefted the blade, wrapping my small hands around the wooden handle.
Ma absently dried her hands, a deep wrinkle between her brows.
I couldn’t recall what happened next but after that, when Ezra rounded a corner, I’d learned to walk the other way.
I couldn’t fathom his anger, as our parents had raised us in a happy home.
I didn’t suppose Ezra’s cruelty was rooted in his zealotry, as he’d been tightly wound as far back as I could remember.
Perhaps his fervent beliefs puffed up his need to dominate others, but they weren’t the cause.
Maybe someone had hurt him, somewhere I hadn’t seen. Shown him a more ruthless way to live.
Near the windbreak, a few whitetail deer twitched their ears, sunset light flooding the hardwoods. The deer spooked—and ran away. Ezra smoothed wayward eyebrow strands, the veins on his palms bulging. He vibrated in his fury, waiting for me to relent.
Willie breezed outside, hands slid in his baggy, wide-legged trouser pockets, brows lifted. “It’s fixing to gush a thunderclapper.” He riffled through the coins in his pockets, the jangle bright in the terse silence. “We’ll come round the next clear day, won’t we, Ezra?”
I gripped my holster, didn’t break Ezra’s glare. “I don’t trust you anymore.”
Ezra scoffed. “Not sure you’re qualified to judge anyone’s character.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Hear that Lawman comes by, often enough.”
“That’s none of your business.”
I stepped forward, but Willie looped his arm round my shoulder. “Two days, promise,” Willie said.
“Fine,” I snapped. “But I’m done with you today.” I shrugged off Willie and strode through the high grass. I didn’t look back. The uncomplicated days of our childhood felt long ago.
The following afternoon, the air fresh and crisp from a downpour the night before, I hung up the wash, a line stretching from the eaves of my shack to the quaking aspen uphill aways.
I’d cleaned my brothers’ wash but was determined to ransom their laundry with help round my homestead.
I held a curtain between my fingers and clipped it to the line, sunbeams filtering through the lace pattern, sketching floral silhouettes on my hands.
The week before I’d left for the Strip, this same curtain rumpled in my lap, Ma had leaned against the doorframe, quieter than usual.
I crouched beside my travel chest, folding linens and shirtwaists.
Ma’s demeanor was fragile, unsteady as she navigated this season of change: Magnolia just married, her other three children venturing into the frontier.
“Lord have mercy,” she said. “I’m proud of you—but you sure you want to go?”
I placed the lace curtain deep in my trunk. “Course I want to go.”
She tipped her head back against the dark wood doorframe. “You running?”
“What?” I picked up a sheet, folded it lengthwise. “What would I be running from?”
She lifted her brows, pausing to let that thought hang, and then she held out her hands for the fabric. “Here, let me show you.” She snapped out the sheet, cobalt lines vivid in the sunglow, and showed me again how to fold linens crisp.
“Ma, stop. You know I’ll never be able to fold like you.”
She sat beside me on the floor, sheet scrunched in her lap, blue lines coiled about directionless. “Well, and I’d never be able to shoot a rattler off a fence from fifty paces like you, so I think you’re the one to venture off as a pioneer, not me.”
I swallowed, the space inside myself not large enough to hold her hope.
She cupped my face between her palms. “Go.” She blinked, her eyes wet and veined in red. “But remember, this will always be your home.”
But it wasn’t anymore. I’d lost hold of safe harbor.
On my homestead, the linens wandering in the breeze, the navy lines lifting and stretching, I wondered whether I’d answer her questions the same way now. I had run, but I’d always been going. I just hadn’t thought I’d be fleeing heartbreak.
I missed my ma, missed the farm. But this space between the wildwoods and the creek was my home.
At times my prairie was empty and lonesome, but then I listened.
I clipped up Ezra’s rough-spun shirt, my fingers raw and cold, and heard the edge of the wind, the chatter of finches in faraway trees, and then words.
It begins with the earth. I faltered on the clothespin, the wood snapping shut on my forefinger.
One woman returned again and again, the tenor of her voice cavernous and archaic. She reverberated and she creaked, her timbre variable and throaty. Rippling through feathery wild rye, between the silences, her voice just kept on telling me stories.