Chapter Twenty-Five
Ipulled on Cricket’s reins, slowing to a canter, my heart pounding with the rush of racing over the knolls.
A curl of smoke smeared the blue sky—Olive’s homestead just beyond.
I rubbed Cricket’s pale neck as we trotted over the crest. Below, the land stretched bleak gray and cashmere to the horizon.
The Browns’ sod house pressed into a hill, the mud cut in neat rectangles, flower boxes with colorful pansies settled before the windowsills, twin apple trees and a willow sprouted to the side.
Olive, in a blue gingham gown and white apron, bustled about before the soddy.
Asa, Thad, and Stot chatted beside the rock-hewn well amid a pile of lumber, their sheepdog Old Watch loped the perimeter, and Poppy sang a ditty, somewhere.
I wasn’t practiced in quiet moments with others. I felt at ease in noise, in moments at the edge of control. I scrubbed my face, my kid-leather gloves velvety on my tight skin. To join the Browns and Stot today was settling into this land, acknowledging that I’d found a community.
I galloped downhill, tossing an upburst of red dust into the timid blue sky. As I dismounted, Olive greeted me, drying her hands on her apron. Asa took Cricket’s reins with a welcoming nod, and Olive slid her arm round my shoulder, guiding me toward their outdoor kitchen.
“Tell me you saw that enormous orange moon the other night?” she asked.
I told her that I’d watched the moonrise from my porch, and she settled me beside Sophia to cut fruit.
I hefted a barrel of Arkansas Black apples and dumped them on the wood block.
The deep, wine-red apples were cool, fresh from the cellar.
Olive handed me a folding knife, hilt out, an eyebrow quirked.
“I know how to use a blasted knife.”
“Never said you didn’t,” she said.
“However—” Sophia lowered herself onto a blanket. From a basket, she grabbed a pair of trousers to darn: Sophia had made a fine reputation as a seamstress. “One wonders if you’ve ever used a blade against such natural pursuits as baking a cobbler.”
Olive snorted and snapped a cloth toward Sophia. “Oh, stop.”
“Y’all are something awful to me,” I said.
Mirth edged Olive’s mouth. “You adore us.”
Olive watched me cut the apple, her brows drawn, anxious about my lack of skill. She opened her mouth to speak, and I held up my hand. “You asked for my help. I’ll bake pies however in smoky Sam Hill I want.”
She shared an amused glance with Sophia, then kneaded the dough.
Olive brushed her forehead with the back of her hand, smearing a dusting of flour.
We spoke of what novels we’d read these past weeks, the crisp scent of apples a texture in the air.
Sophia and I talked of Little Women, which I’d recently loaned her.
She thought perhaps she was like faithful Meg and supposed I was like independent and adventurous Jo.
Poppy wandered past, grumbling that Sophia had told her she resembled the youngest, Amy, but that she felt like Jo.
“Sometimes I feel like Amy too,” I told her with a wink. Poppy wrinkled her nose and adjusted her bundle of wood. “But you get to choose who you want to be,” I said.
“See? I’m Jo,” Poppy said to Sophia, then stalked off down the slope.
Olive smiled at me as she scattered flour across the table and tossed down a ball of dough.
I chopped my apple and brushed the pieces into a cornflower blue bowl.
In the shade before a statuesque post oak, Thad split the wood Poppy carried over while Asa and Stot discussed plans for the barn.
Asa adjusted the brim of his bowler hat, and Stot gripped a sheet of ledger paper, their design etched on it.
Olive followed my gaze to the men. “They’re two peas in a pod, huh? ” she said.
My eyebrows flung skyward. No one would ever say those two were alike.
Stot with his powerful strides. His wayward black hair and sharp cheekbones.
Asa, on the other hand, was steady as a brook, predictable as Stot was stormy.
And yet there was an earnestness, a sense of being firmly rooted, as if they’d both lost the world, only to find it again.
A woodpecker dove from the sugar maple and drummed against their home.
Olive shooed him away and clicked her knife through the dough, cutting defined shapes.
It was peculiar, Olive likening Stot to her husband, as she’d cautioned me away from a friendship with Stot. Now she glanced at Stot with affection.
“When’d you start softening toward Stot?” I asked, scraping a pile of cuttings into a bowl.
“Suppose about the time I knew him as Stot.” Olive cocked her head and laid the dough over sugared apples.
Sophia stood, carried her basket of linens inside, and Olive continued: “Once, when Thad spent the better part of two days cutting wood, then hauling the lumber and some quail off to Cross Station for sale, Stot ran into him along the way, and then stood by him as Thad sold the lumber. Nobody dared barter with an outlaw beside him—Thad made eighty cents. A fair amount, I’d think.
” Olive pinched the dough on her pie, sharpening a star shape.
“Stot just started standing by us, I suppose. He’s like that stallion of his—sleek and striking and fierce but altogether different once tamed. ”
“Stot is definitively not tamed.”
“No?” Her mouth twisted into a smirk. “Not yet?”
“Gawd.” My face flushed. “Not ever.”
“Mmm.”
Warmth pressed up my neck. I focused on clicking my blade through the apples. I should be frightened of him but—I just wasn’t. Perhaps the darkness in me took comfort in the darkness in him. I shoved each tale of the Lawman aside, reasoned that there must be some explanation.
Their sheepdog Old Watch knocked the back of my knees, and I bent to pet him.
Across the field, Stot caught my gaze. He adjusted the angle of his broadbrim, and I thought of all the times I’d watched Pa adjust his hat the same way.
Memories of bygone farm gatherings flickered past: plunging into the creek from a high bough, a last warm summer’s day; Lark fumbling a pumpkin, insides splattering the crops, us laughing uproariously; my ma singing, There’s a wideness in God’s mercy, like the wideness of the sea, her aria slipping between the oat grasses; Pa gesturing to fox tracks in groundcover; looping a gun belt cross my hips, Magnolia studying the sketches in a botany tome; too many remembrances to parse, each nuance varied and the same.
I didn’t know when I’d stopped enjoying the moments of my life, when each day felt like a trial.
“I also admire that notion with his brother’s widow.” Olive set her pie in the outdoor oven, then wrought her hands in her apron, wiping off dust and dough.
“What’s that now?”
She gathered bowls and rags, tidying up. “Surely you’ve discussed that?”
“That his twin died?” I washed my hands and grabbed a few apples.
Olive cracked open a log cabin patchwork quilt and settled on the ground with a bowl of pecans for an apple crumble, her brows tugged together. Her palm smoothed a ripple between a grass-green floral square and a navy-checked rectangle.
“Oh, honey.” She sighed, the lines beside her mouth drawn. “He should have told you. His twin left a widow and four daughters. Stot’s moving them down come spring, marrying the widow, caring for the children.”
My hands clenched, fingernails cutting into the flesh of the apples. “No,” I said. A weight sank in my stomach, myself suddenly woozy and adrift. “I didn’t know.”
“I do like the man.” Olive split a nut and brushed some residue from a shell, tension knotted across her shoulders. “But he’s a wanted outlaw and betrothed.”
I joined Olive on the quilt, gripping the ridge of my pleated ivory collar.
I pulled the halves of a nut apart, the heft fragile and airless, like worn leather.
It shouldn’t hurt to hear such a thing. I hadn’t lost anything.
I didn’t even know Stot, truly. He’d seemed untethered like me, and yet—he had a sweetheart back home.
Supposed that was the portrait of the woman, the slip of lace.
I tipped my palm, sifting the crumbles into the bucket.
Olive picked up a wayward fleck of pecan from the quilt. “You respect plain speaking?”
“Please.”
“You don’t seem to operate with boundaries, alike the rest of the world.” Olive crunched nuts over apples and butter. “I don’t know what happened in your past, and it don’t matter, not to me. I’m just saying: I wonder how firmly you’ll keep to your own rules.”
I stood and poured well water from a pitcher into a jar. “What rules?”
She cracked a brittle laugh. “Exactly.” She stood, pie dish balanced on her palm. “Just make sure you slather up those walls of yours between him too.” Her gaze moved to Stot, his sleeves rolled up, tanned forearms slick with sweat. “Lord have mercy, he’s handsome. But not for you.”
I gnawed my lip, nodded. Course he wasn’t for me.
“Any red-blooded woman would need boundaries with him,” Olive added.
I coughed on my gulp of water.
“Ah, now.” She wrinkled her nose and placed the cobbler in the oven. “Don’t waste the water.”
Stot strode over then, his gaze raking across my posture.
“Fancy an apple, Mr. Tharp?” Olive asked, gesturing to the sliced apples on the table. Stot nodded and picked up a piece.
I wrung my sticky hands in my apron. “Tharp?” That was his last name?
Olive sighed. “What are you two jabbering about all the time, and you don’t even know about his betrothed or his full name?” Olive wiped flour off the wood plank. “Ain’t proper to call him Stot, anyhow,” she muttered.
Stot’s eyes jolted to mine and his hand paused, his apple held static in the air.
“Well,” I said, “this ain’t the place for propriety.” I lifted my jar in something like a salute. “It’s the Wild West, darling.”
After we finished the pies, Olive carried utensils inside and I washed my forearms in a bucket.
Stot strode over, palms resting on his gun belt.
I gazed at his hands, nicked skin gripping sable leather.
I didn’t know how to reconcile that he was an engaged man.
He caught my gaze, his bearing almost tentative, and handed me the plans for the barn and a chunk of charcoal.
“Wanted your thoughts on our design,” he said, dipping his canteen in the water barrel.
I placed the sheet on the wood slab. The plan was for a small, practical barn.
I sketched some parallel boards below the dormers, then added swoops, the curve of the Browns’ land, a few flicks of sparse grasses, and lines for that unbreakable wind.
I set the charcoal down, leaned back against the table. “It’ll suit.”
“The boards there, across the dormers, are a fine notion.” He touched the scuffs of grasses with his forefinger, lifted a brow in something like amusement.
The breeze rattled through barren willow limbs and screeched through the tongs of a rake.
A homemade wind chime of copper spoons, leftover metal pipes, and chunks of sapwood hung from the rafters, the copper twisting from a length of twine and clattering against a pipe.
Olive came out the door, her heels scratching the dirt.
Stot spoke low. “About my brother’s widow—”
“We don’t have to talk about that.”
“When you asked, in your cabin—”
“When you were shot?” I flicked my hand, sending his concern away, as my body numbed beneath my rib cage. The wind chime rattled. “You don’t owe me an explanation.”
A vein pulsed on his jaw, the hollows of his cheeks contracted. His gaze flicked between my eyes. “Alright.”
I picked up Olive’s folding knife, snapped it closed, then turned back to the table to brush leftover apple cores into a pile.
After a pause, Stot strode off, down the hill, his spurs silver in the dust. I pressed my fist to my chest, something hollow blooming—as a lonesome murmur cracked across the landscape.
Time continues to turn, around and around I spin.
Within the clamor of sound—wind chime, birdsong, faraway laughter, heartbeat at my temples—the women spoke.
Forgotten memories, lost stories. The coarse, winter-dead grass of the soddy prickled my forearms. I could almost, but not quite, catch fragments of conversation: the Native woman, the cattlehand, the ancient voice, and another woman, perhaps the homesteader, as if I’d slipped into a different story, someone else’s memories.
The timbre of their voices something I almost recognized.
In the bright spray of day, my boots firm against the present timeline, surrounded by Stot and the Browns, I recognized the insanity of listening for voices lost in another era.
The bristles of grass stirred in the breeze, and I cupped my neck, off balance.
Whatever it was that called out to me—I didn’t feel threatened, almost as if the women hollered at me to hold on, just a little longer.
I pressed off the wall, dirt creasing beneath my fingernails, and returned to the present moment.
Down beside the woodpile, Stot hefted his axe, the sun slipping along his collarbone and glistening on the chain of his pocket watch.
He caught my gaze from beneath the brim of his hat, the old-fashioned cattleman crease catching the deep shadows.
My heart felt stretched and raw, distorted beyond its shape to rub against my chest.
Let alone his fiancée from back home, the notorious outlaw wouldn’t be attracted to a mud-smudged homesteader.
I’d seen the fancy ladies who trailed outlaws, Rose of Cimarron with her waterfall curls blowing in the wind, Belle Starr with her elaborate velvet gowns and revolvers strapped about her waist, or spunky Little Britches with her quirky leather chaps.
The women round outlaws were glamorous and arresting—absolutely nothing like me with my faded linsey shirtwaists and practical buns.
I grabbed an apple core and tossed it in the bucket. Sure enough, he was the most handsome man this side of the Mississippi. But goodness, why did any of this matter? I didn’t need to distance myself from him. He had unavailable written all over him like fire on dry prairie.