Chapter Thirty-Seven
Crystals crackled and swayed in the breeze.
Trees bowed, iced limbs arching earthward, creating ethereal corridors.
The dawn sky clear and blue as if cleansed, the forest tranquil in the aftermath of storm.
The cosmos before me a glittering marvel, as if I’d left my home and wandered the borderland of a new world.
I could hear everything as my boots crunched through snow.
Icicles encased the branches and dripped from crisp leaves.
I tugged off my woolen gloves, touched a frozen oak leaf.
The rime seared, melting against the warmth of my fingertip, a smear of liquid drizzling down to my wrist. With beauty always came destruction.
The ice storm had crushed trees, heaped limbs across the ground, as if an overgrown god had thrown a fit in the woods.
Stot crouched beside the fire, packing our breakfast of oats.
Afterward, when I’d rolled away and curled onto my side, he’d reached out to hold me.
He’d cursed when I told him no, but he let me go.
Through the night was the sound of his breathing and branches crashing against the earth.
This morning we’d packed our gear and fed our horses in silence.
A rattle of finches, with their red napes and speckled bodies, swooped across the buffalo trail, flitting between branches, erratic in their exuberance.
I couldn’t believe I’d done such a thing.
Sakes alive, he was marrying another woman.
I’d lost control, again. Let myself be ruled by passion, impulsively done whatever I’d wanted, without a thought for his intended or for how sleeping with him would shatter the community we’d built.
I rubbed my palms over my face, the wool scratching my raw skin.
Gleaming in the snowmelt before the campfire, a mirage of my land took shape, the meadow glistening shades of gold.
The ground rippled, and with a zap my fertile grasses transformed to heaps of sand.
The terrain shifted through mutating images, the feathered oat stalks and red paintbrush flowers shrinking, a gale thrashing the meadows, dirt replacing what had once been.
The earth aged; the landscape transformed.
There was a sense that I observed some horrifying future, my land a barren wasteland of dust.
I saw the homesteader then, in the midst of the prophetic terrain.
The woman who seemed an echo of my mother.
She waded through the billowing, red-speckled haze, her feet sinking below the layers of sandy loam, a peculiar metal shape roaring behind her, a wrap clenched at her neck, the yarn worn and dissolving away.
The solitude, the sorrow, the exhaustion a mimic of my own days.
I didn’t know who she was, this woman I kept seeing.
Perhaps she was my ancestor, somewhere in another age.
Her land black ash, mine white ice. All of our stories, interwoven and repeating.
It was the same story; it was something I’d never heard before.
I turned and walked through the woodland to the creek’s edge. The water softly buzzed, and into the void the ancient voice spoke, You’re in the right story.
A clump of snow fell from a branch and smashed into the stream.
Other voices chatted, sharing the uncertainty and shame that spooled about me.
Boots sounded behind—Stot moved down the slope.
He placed his blanket cloak around me, his palms a weight on my shoulders, his breath puffs of steam across my neck.
I turned, wrapped the blanket tighter. “I got it.”
Snow crunched as he shifted. He took off his hat, ran his fingers through his hair. His face raw angles, his nose and cheeks pinked in the cold. He didn’t say anything. Shirt tucked into dark trousers, ironed vest buttoned, not even a hemline cuffed up. He was stability in chaos.
I stepped around him and headed back fireside.
“Wait,” he asked.
I halted, held myself steady.
He rubbed the band of his hat. “You’re upset. I thought—” He studied my face. “Last night we seemed to want the same thing.”
Course I’d wanted to be intimate with him—didn’t mean I was proud of my choice. The finches kept chattering. “It’s that feller from before?” he asked. “Your sister’s husband. Lark.”
Lark had nothing to do with right now—I hadn’t thought about him in an age. Flurries drifted down, white dusting Stot’s black hair.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“You think I actually know?” I lifted my skirts and rushed uphill.
I didn’t know myself, my emotions foreign to me.
And even if I’d known what I wanted, I’d just ruin my desires with want, with need, with my utter lack of control.
I brushed my hands across my cheeks, swiping away freezing tears.
Before the fire, I kicked at the snow, covering the flames as Stot hovered at the edge of the clearing. I tossed the cloak at him and mounted.
“Home,” I spoke to Cricket.
As we slammed across the frozen white earth, black trees flickering past, all the days of my life stuttered by, stretching far back into memory.
There was a sense that I’d stepped into a tale in the middle, the storyteller already speaking an age, me just catching up as they spoke.
All the chaos and trauma and mistakes had brought me here, into the great quiet of the prairie, to this land that whispered and echoed with all the sorrow of timelessness.