Chapter Thirty-Three
The following afternoon I brushed Ezra’s mare Frailty, my fingers dipping in the hollows between her worn patches of chestnut hair.
As I caressed Frailty’s bulging stomach and sinewy muscles, her ears flattened.
She needed a wash. “It’s just the wind, sugar,” I told her, then carried a bucket out to the well.
Outside, a norther whipped furious and brutal across Ezra’s homestead.
I tied the rope around the handle and turned the windlass.
There were sounds on the wind, breezes whistling through loose boards.
I kept overhearing remnants of a faraway conversation, kept wondering about these stories rising from the silence.
I hauled out the pail, the damp metal brittle. My fingers were red, my nails jagged.
The ancient voice narrated something longlost. As I untied the flaxen rope, fragments of a woman’s tale broke apart from the crack of the wind.
I pressed back through gusts, toward the barn.
I was still cross with Ezra, but when he’d asked me to examine his pregnant mare, I couldn’t say no.
I hoped he’d continue the generosity I’d noticed at the Browns’ barn bee.
I thought through my past, wondered whether I should rewrite the version of Ezra I’d fashioned, if perhaps there was something about him I just hadn’t recognized yet.
I held my slicker tight at the throat and waded back to the barn.
There was so much sky on my brothers’ land.
Smooth brome stretched to the edge of the earth, the sun already muted along the lower pastures.
The dreary winter sky barely brushed with pigment, just a weak smudge of topaz and rose.
I longed to grasp charcoal and show color with gray, to find something hidden between shadow and murky beige.
Last week Stot had arrived with a gorgeous walnut-stained oak easel he’d carved.
I’d finished my moody-blue and oatmeal-brown landscape, the one with Sally Ann Thunder Ann Whirlwind as an ephemeral vapor.
Before dark fell, I’d gallop on home and perhaps sketch a new terrain.
Inside Ezra’s barn, I dipped the sponge in the water bucket, hoping to provide comfort for Frailty, soothing her with a hushed monologue, gossiping about the handsome feller who lived just north aways.
Perhaps Stot would stop over this evening, talk with me by the fire.
Maybe he’d have a solution for the bodies.
Something must be done: I just hadn’t rustled up a strategy yet.
These past weeks Stot and I had shared of our pasts, a little here and there—tales of our families, pranks of our youth.
Unsurprisingly, he’d been an ungoverned little boy, not understanding arbitrary rules.
He carried himself with unbreakable honor, but then he’d catch my eye as he sliced carrots beneath the kerosene lantern or as he fixed a molding board along my ceiling, and I’d glimpse such unbidden roguishness in him.
He was just so much of one thing and then entirely another, and I couldn’t quite untangle who he was.
He’d been helpful round my homestead, though.
Framing my windows in pine, straightening a wobbly drawer.
My hands stilled, overcome with memories of Stot’s last visit, a couple of evenings past. He’d lounged on my sofa, his green eyes watching me.
I ran the back of my hand across my forehead, smearing soapy water.
Sometimes he was too unbearably magnetic.
His stature, that scent of nutmeg and sunlight—he took up all the space inside my thoughts.
I squeezed the sponge over Frailty’s flank, washing her brown and white patches.
Though Stot had become a friend, I’d never uncovered why he’d been shot or what had happened with the outlaws.
Although mystery seemed a part of him, I felt as if I knew him in truth more than I’d known Magnolia or Lark.
But of course that was nonsense. I’d known them the width of my life.
The stable door slapped open, fracturing the slush of dripping water. At the doorway, Ezra straightened a brush on its peg. I dropped the sponge in the bucket with a plop and stepped around Ezra to grab my gun belt.
“You’ll tidy this mess?” Ezra asked.
I turned slowly. “Were you to pay me for evaluating her?”
“You’re not a veterinarian.”
I buckled my belt across my hips. Along the sides of the barn, the wind moaned, uneasy. “And yet you asked me to come round.”
“So she’s fine?”
I sighed, grabbed a rag off a peg. “Frailty’s fine.” I dried my hands. “Wind’s probably bothering her.”
Ezra nodded, his coarse hair slicked back with pomade. “Not the foal?”
“Foal’s fine. You know the signs to look for?”
An ugly frown tugged at his lips. “You’ll come by every day.”
I slipped on my cape, pressed the top button through the keyhole. “I can’t ride over every day. I have my own claim.” I explained again what to do, to give her space and watch for odd behavior. “Frailty’s your mare. You can keep her safe.”
He struck the wood slats of the barn, and the stall shivered. Surly energy buzzed from his shoulders. I led Cricket into the carriage room. Gloom drifted in wide puddles from the deep hollows of the barn, while glow seeped from cracks between boards.
“That outlaw of yours?” He ran his fingers over his mustache, the tone of his voice grating. “Stay away from him this week.”
I yanked on my gloves and slid open the barn door. “He’s not my outlaw.”
Ezra straightened his bowler hat, the brim casting an ugly gloom on the rim of his cheekbones. “No?”
“Why would he be?”
“He’s by, an awful lot.”
“We’re neighbors.” I led Cricket beyond the doorway. “And it’s not like you’re going to help me improve my homestead.”
Ezra grasped my wrist, yanked me back into the shadows. He leaned close, his spit spraying my face. “Do not say I don’t provide for my own.”
I lifted my brows. “Why, of course not.”
His fingers bruised my wrist through the leather, the button on my glove incising my skin. I shook my hand free and walked outside. It was odd, him cautioning me away from Stot. “Why avoid him? Something stirring?”
“You don’t need to know,” Ezra said as he followed.
“Thought you protected your own.”
His nostrils flared cavernous and oblong. “Ain’t no matter: Nothing a lady can do about it anyhow. Them hooligan band just out west.” He knocked his head toward the salt plains, the hideaway of the Wild Bunch. “They’re taking care of him.”
My blood iced, terror quick and visceral. I tugged at the high collar of my dress, my heartbeat a clear thump against my throat. “Why do you suppose such a thing?”
Ezra kicked at some gum balls strewn about the grass.
“Other day, at the saloon, I’m drinking blackstrap, minding my own business.
The Lawman’s glowering from a shady corner, listening to talk about the murders like some emperor.
Folks supposing the Browns must’ve slayed those outlaws.
The Lawman clanks down his decanter, saunters over, demands the Browns be removed from speculation, that everyone get their heads out of the sand and suppose what’s more sensible—that the Browns, amiable, middle-aged homesteaders, had killed two vicious outlaws?
Or that perhaps it would’ve taken a faster draw to take them down.
He glared at the crowd, hands gripped tight to his pistols, essentially confessing that he’d slaughtered the outlaws.
He hulked there, glowering, until everyone closed back up their gaping mouths and aggressively nodded in agreement.
” Ezra grimaced, the barrel of his chest pressing at the seams of his tweed waistcoat.
My hands gripped the wooden slats of the fence.
That foolhardy man. Sakes alive, I couldn’t let him take my fall.
I asked Ezra why he supposed the outlaws were coming for Stot, and he told that after the Lawman left the saloon, Bitter Creek had asked after his hideout.
“I never approved of that criminal taking land from honest folk.” Ezra pulled on a wiry eyebrow.
“But either way, sure enough, one of your neighbors killed them.”
“The Lawman didn’t murder those outlaws, and the Browns would never hurt anyone. Ezra, tell me you don’t support vigilante hogwash.”
“There’s only so much land.”
“You weak-bellied bigot.”
He struck me across the face. The landscape blurred a stripe of textures.
I held my jaw. The horizon wobbled, my boots unstable. Cricket stamped, uneasy, and I touched his wheat-brown withers, returning to myself.
“Come on now, women can’t tend land on their own.” Ezra smoothed the ends of his chambray under his waistband. “It’s the dead of winter, our farms are struggling. It’s high time you admit forfeit and move here. That’s your role.”
I clenched the lapel of my cloak; threadbare dusk light overlaid his pale skin. “I belong on my own land.”
“Enough.” He grabbed a tin can of chew off the fence and threw it across the yard, his knuckles red with sweat. The can clattered in the high grass. “I’m cross and done with your antics.”
I gripped Cricket’s saddle horn, my forearms shaking, and mounted. “I won’t be back.”
Ezra grasped my ankle and tugged me off. My shoulder bashed the ground, my arm knocking out of socket. I rolled onto my side, cheek pressed into the dirt, gasping for air. Cricket stamped, and Ezra yanked his reins. “Quiet, you ninny.”
I drew my hunting knife from my boot sheath. “Don’t tug at my horse.”
He wiped his hands together. “You will forfeit your homestead to my control and come tend my home.”
I pushed up to a seated position, left arm drooping across my belly, a creeper vine grasping my bootheel. “No.”
“No?” His voice unnerving and low.
“I will not leave my home,” I said. “Your farm is your problem. Figure it out yourself.”
Ezra strode back, yanked me up by the collar, his rectangular face before mine, eyebrows askew. My blade slipped between my fingers, falling into the creeper. He spit in my face. “Disgusting, useless woman.”
He dropped me and kicked, the wood of his boot sole shredding skin along my forearm.
I coughed, mouth flooded with blood and dust, and found the knife in the bramble.
He kicked again, clobbering my stomach, and I flung the blade, the eerie zip slicing the sound of eventide.
The knife struck true, where his shoulder met his collarbone.
He stumbled backward, ivory chambray disappearing into shadow.
I yanked out my Colt and stood. My body swayed.
“You won’t shoot me.” Ezra held his shoulder.
My gun trained on Ezra, I leaned against Cricket’s mane and murmured steady, my command for the handless swing mount. “You know I don’t miss.” Blood pooled in my mouth, and my words came out slurred. “My blade would’ve been between your eyes if I wanted.”
The color drained from his face.
Cricket lowered his head, kneeing down so I could mount.
I swung my leg over and eased into the saddle, pistol trained on Ezra.
“Try any of this again, and I’ll kill you.
” The expanse of his homestead blurred, my grasp on reality hazy.
Blood dripped from between Ezra’s fingers and splattered the earth.
“Unless the Lawman slaughters you first,” I said, “when he hears you betrayed him.”
“You have to be loyal to betray.”
“He won’t care.” I anchored my boots in my stirrups. “I’d be scared, Ezra.”
Cricket galloped away, the prairie vibrating as we tore across the earth.
Night fell, opaque and thick. I shouldn’t have been surprised, once again, by the vileness of humanity.
This past year I’d observed depravity and baselessness.
I expected folks to be unwholesome cowards who’d fail me.
But then I’d let some hope in. Somewhere, deep inside myself, I’d a notion that perhaps I’d been wrong.
That day we built the Browns’ barn, I’d begun to wonder whether Ezra would change.
To hope, that had been my weakness. For of course there was no space for hope on the frontier.
I tied a rope about my waist to keep in my saddle if I fainted.
I tucked my limp arm against my stomach, sank my blood-slicked hand into Cricket’s black mane, and laid my head upon him, held on.
He’d bring me to safety, if such a place existed.
But I needed someone, no matter how deep and dark their secrets went.
I couldn’t survive this alone. Before me, the horizon trembled, and the wind groaned, an agony etched in the curve of air.
It was as if Cricket fell out from below me and I floated, as if I spiraled into the endless beyond, split in two, a Minnie who hoped and a Minnie who was honest. A woman arising, a woman half smoldering.
There was a whoosh, a crack of air, an uncanny awareness of the mutability of the here and now.
A phantasm materialized over the landscape of a sky clogged with smoke, of strange, faraway scents, and of a gravelly rumbling I’d never heard before.
I glimpsed the homesteading woman again—she walked through amber bluestem grass, wind snapping a sky-blue floral dress about her hips, dark hair loosely piled atop her head in voluminous Gibson waves, white oak basket looped over her forearm.
The vision mimicked a quick, impressionist sketch—unsharpened charcoal, shifting baselines, the clouds a haphazard smudge, the woman a contour of lines.
The mirage slipped away as a mist; the woman vanished.
Time wobbly out on the prairie. I lost hold of the thread, of my own story.
I am many fragments, someone whispered. The endless horizon before me turned gauzy and indistinct, the atmosphere scenting of orange pekoe tea, Cricket a rhythm of galloping, and then I remembered no more.