Chapter Thirty-Two
When dawn broke, Cricket and I galloped toward Olive’s homestead.
I scented magnolia blossoms on the breeze, but it must be an illusion.
An entire season must pass on by before the huge, waxy blooms would open.
There was a luster in the wildwood, like a juniper-green gemstone lost amid the bramble.
I tumbled back in my past, to crawling across the curve of a gnarled magnolia bough, deep within the haven of emerald leaves.
Starlight soaked the sky, the perfume of the blooms seeping about the canopy.
Hours before, I’d snuck from my bed to eavesdrop on Ma and her literary society.
They met once a month and fervently debated women’s rights, wandering the threads of suffrage and prohibition.
We should submit to the opinions of our husbands, some of her friends would state.
Ma’s skin would get mottled and all a’flushed, red splotches along her neck, her eyes blinking faster.
I cherished seeing my hardworking, gospel-singing ma passionate, fighting for something that mattered to her.
At nine, I was old enough to understand that life wasn’t simple.
Ma walked a line between what seemed two conflicting existences: fierce loyalty to her religion and unbounded passion for women’s rights.
That night, I crept round the corner and listened as they discussed Susan B.
Anthony’s recent speech. There shall never be another season of silence, my ma quoted, until women have the same rights men have on this green earth.
“It’s not enough,” Ma said to her friends. From my crouch in the hallway, an image of my ma reflected in the curve of a silver plate, her form distorted and awash with gray. “Something must be done.”
One of her friends clapped with a sharp boom and said, “Well then, let’s just take a hatchet to the bar tops, like Mrs. Carrie Nation threatens.”
Ma laughed, but I wondered—why not? So I stepped on out and asked. Ma stood, straightening her skirts. “Minnie.” She wiped her hands round the curve of her face, glanced at her friends. “You should be sleeping.”
“Why not demolish the bar if you think it should be destroyed?” Midwinter cool prickled my ankles, my cotton nightgown all a’sudden this month too small, the lace frill trailing my calves.
Ma slipped her arm round my shoulder. “I’ll walk you back to bed.”
“I’m not a child anymore.” I pulled from her. “Take Pa’s hatchet and go. I’ll distract Mr. Anders.”
And that was how I came to be crawling ’cross a gnarled magnolia bough above Mr. Anders’s saloon, in the middle of godforsaken night, preparing to distract him something fierce so Ma and her suffrage friends could slash up his saloon.
I sat on the branch, ankles dangling from my white cotton nightgown, hair tied up in curl papers, and slipped my folding knife from my pocket.
Like Ma, I supported women’s rights but didn’t understand why temperance mattered, how those two pieces were intertwined.
I halted, my blade gleaming in the dark, unsure if I should attempt such a daring commotion.
Folks always spoke that I trailed chaos behind me.
But I thought my antics had reason. I’ve a plan, I had told my ma.
Oh honey, I know, she’d said as she loaded a sack onto the buckboard, you always do.
Below the magnolia, Ma hunkered in the shadows with her friends, the wooden handle of Pa’s hatchet gripped in her palms. Her ashen hair was parted severely down the middle, her bun tight at the nape of her neck—but her face wasn’t hard.
It was luminous. I wasn’t sure about her mission, but I sure as starfire supported my ma.
I scooted to the edge of the magnolia bough and dragged in a deep inhale. Then I slashed my dagger across my shin. I smothered a yelp. Across the path, Ma’s eyes widened. “Go,” I whispered and waved her on.
I jumped from the magnolia, slamming into the uneven soil, and started yowling something fierce. I rolled onto my side, tugged up my legs, my palm dripping blood, and just kept on screaming.
Mr. Anders shoved out the batwing saloon doors, his gray hair tufted out like a winged owl, his shotgun trained on the dark.
I howled, and Mr. Anders rushed on over, sighting me in the shadows.
“Ah, hell. Minnie Hoopes?” He cursed. “What have you got into now.”
He gathered his wife, and I kept causing such a racket, blood smeared all over my palms and hemline, no one noticed my ma and her literary society friends slip into the saloon.
Through the window, I saw Ma swing her hatchet, her dandelion-yellow dress fluttering, the arc of her bell sleeve distorted through the smoke-smudged glass.
A flash of lightning in thunderclouds. That moment, witnessing Ma take axe to the bar top, watching her fight with abandon for what she believed, rooted in my memory.
Ma tirelessly worked round our farm in her impeccably stitched homespun gowns.
She resembled all the other mas, with perhaps a pinch more spunk, a bit more joy.
But I watched her closer after that, and I realized: My ma walked through town different.
She didn’t let anyone tell her how a woman was supposed to be.
A woman could be whomever she wanted. And now, here I was, homesteading on land that was to be my own.
My ma and her ma and all the women before her would be so proud that I had carved out a space of my very own.
If I could only keep ahold of it.
Cricket and I dashed below glossy, emerald branches, the leaves’ shapes blurring as we rushed on past. But they were holly leaves, not magnolias.
I searched round the Browns’ farm until I found Olive down by the creek, washing linens.
The gilt of dawn spilt into the gorge, time stretching and pulling, heavy on my chest. I dismounted Cricket and climbed down to the bank, clumps of dirt loosening under my boots.
Olive called hello, her hands sunk in the water, white linens elegiacally floating in the creek. I glanced behind me, wiping my palms down the front of my skirt. She dropped the cloth and dried her hands on her apron. “What is it?”
“The bodies of the missing outlaws were found.” I updated her that the marshal hadn’t outright tossed blame at them. “But my gut is that he’s looking at your family—and Stot.”
Olive stumbled back, sat on the bank, red dirt drenching her lace skirt. “We can’t have that.”
“No.” I dropped beside her. “Suppose we get him to look another way.”
Her hands rested in her lap, her bearing still.
“Hey.” I gripped her shoulder. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have worried you. I don’t think anything must be done yet—there’s no evidence against your family.”
She crossed her arms, a wet rag clenched in her fist, water soaking her sleeve. “How come you just know we ain’t done it.”
“It’s not who you are.”
She dropped the rag into a bucket with a plop, a spray of water misting my hands. “What if they attacked us, and it was self-defense?”
I gripped the lapel of my jacket, my fingernails brittle and too cold. She couldn’t confess to my crime. “I know that ain’t the tale.”
She walked to the water’s edge, bent to grab the linens. Light dappled along the current, the stream tugging ever onward.
“But I’m not finding another solution,” she said.
“You can’t claim self-defense,” I said. “It makes you seem desperate.”
“I am desperate,” Olive said. “If the marshal frames us, and folks rile up about horsefeathers, as they do—I’ll do whatever it takes to protect my family.”
“I’m behind you.” I joined her before the water.
I couldn’t allow them to confess to my crime.
I slipped my hands into the cold water, grasped the slippery, rectangular bar of homemade lye soap.
Last night, before the waning flicker of my oil lantern, I’d considered different scenarios and strategies.
I couldn’t find a wiggle anywhere. So it seemed, if I didn’t discover a solution soon, vigilantes would either come for the Browns or for me. That was law in the Wild West.
I grabbed a sodden length of gauzy linsey, rubbed the bar on the clothes, cleaning free the residue of earth. “Don’t claim self-defense. We’ll find a way.”
And we would. I thought of what Stot had said a few weeks past, about finding the balance in a world without rules, of searching for the less bad among all the awful choices.
The white cloth submerged in the foggy water, beneath the iridescent stretches of soapy clouds.
Wriggling across the creek’s mirrored surface, something almost seemed to take shape.
A sweeping valley, someone else’s barn, other women, a different community.
I recognize the townsite as Bethsheba. Women walked the dirt pathways of Bethsheba’s arms, the wind howled against the wooden boards of her bones, and Bethsheba shivered, her freckles of nails glinting in the morning glow.
Just like the hazy women in my oil landscapes: something there, but not quite.
I’m not sure I’m in the right story anymore.
The words sank into the pit of my stomach: I felt distorted, the pathway through my life indistinct and warped. Other moments in time wavered in the water, nebulous and ghostly. I scrubbed at the sheen of red dust from Olive’s laundry, my hands aching along the sides.