Chapter Forty-Two
The midnight hours were swollen with shadowy dreams and screeching sounds.
I slept fitfully, hot and then too cold, blankets tangled round my ankles, Winchester clutched to my chest—a habit since confessing at the saloon.
I woke with a headache grating across my brow and a hunger for coffee: hot and black.
I shoved out my door—and stumbled back, knocking my shins against a steel pail.
Against my porch’s wooden pillar an old bowie knife cleaved into a stack of papers.
Terror shot across my shoulders and quaked up my neck.
I yanked my pistol from my holster—scanned the timberline.
After a moment, I exhaled. I was alone.
But the size of it: Someone had been on my porch during the dark of night, and I’d heard nothing.
I ripped the knife from the wood and unfolded the newsprint.
Between all the words was a graphite sketch of a woman with features an exaggeration of my own, with elegant black eyebrows and menswear like Cattle Annie, the portrait labeled The Famed Minnie L. Hoopes of Grant County.
Notice—Bloodshed solved. Word has reached here that the two slain cowboys of the Wild Bunch were sent to their maker in self-defense by Minnie L.
Hoopes of Grant County. Col. Archibald Williams overheard the tale at Duke’s Saloon in Wakita last night.
“The lady held the entire saloon enthralled,” Col.
Williams recounts. “Them cowboys were god-awful bandits, preying on the chastity of our women. None in that room had a dry eye, everyone commending Miss Hoopes for her courage.”
I didn’t recall such an event, fearing that I’d be shot in the back.
But folks apparently believed me, had reshaped my harrowing tale into something sensational.
The story spreading across the territory wasn’t quite truth, but it seemed my friends and I were safe from vigilante law.
I slipped the newsprint into my pocket. A skein of geese lofted into the sky, their throaty sqwacks sharp in the hush.
Who’d leave such a thing below my shake-shingles, with a knife whacked into my post?
I picked at a scab on my wrist, gaze unfocusing on the middle distance.
On the oak slats underfoot, a scrap of rag paper curled in the breeze.
The paper lifted, as if to blow away—but I caught it, gripped the note between both hands, black ink on buff-colored paper.
We won’t stop watching you, Miss Hoopes.
And lay off being so high and mighty. It’s irritating.
Terror sank into my bones. My wrists ached, clutching the letter. The message was clear: The outlaws retained power. The Wild Bunch could drop me anytime they wanted: in the dark of night, during the daylight hours, whenever I lowered my guard.
I wasn’t safe.
But it seemed they wouldn’t hurt me—yet. Perhaps they’d let past vendettas dim. The bowie knife’s curved tip shone with faded morning light. I ran my thumb along the edge, wondered whose blade had been slammed into my porch. The polished maple handle was incised with “GN.”
Rumors went that Bitter Creek’s given name was George. I couldn’t be sure—but when had I ever been sure of anything besides my own unbidden mayhem? I hauled up my skirts, dashed inside, and penned my own message.
I pressed my lavender stationery against the pillar, thwacked Bitter’s bowie knife into the delicate embossed border.
Many thanks for the blade, George. But I don’t fancy antiques.
Next time, why don’t you and Rose come on in for a fireside chat?
Don’t you worry—I only Slaughter those who threaten me or mine. —Minnie “Mayhem” Hoopes
I frowned at the note, the embossed roses and ornamental filigree snapping in the wind’s gusts.
Wondered whether my audacity would get me shot quicker than gun smoke.
The play on his alias “Slaughter Kid” felt particularly clever.
I gnawed my lip, unsure what to do. My instinct was that Bitter Creek would chuckle and move right on along.
That he’d respect a bit of pushback. I sure as starfire hoped my gut was right.
All day, I furtively minded the horizon, rifle slung across my back. The day before, Stot and I had ridden into town and signed a statement with the marshal. Maybe now I could just leave yesterday’s worries and focus on my homestead.
I shaped dirt around the root ball of my new orange tree.
The clay shone amber in the sunglow, the ground softened by snowmelt.
Today the earth seemed ready for spring, for the smells and colors and sounds of awaking.
I sat back on my heels. The narrow trunk lifted to a burst of small evergreen leaves.
I’d dreamed of an orchard, with summer blossoms and fruit blooming throughout the year.
And with this orange sapling, I’d begun.
I wiped my muddy hands on my apron and withdrew my flask, gulped some sweet tea.
A puff of cottonwood floated on by. I needed to combine the boiling lye soap with some crushed lavender.
Near the windbreak, under the stark midday sunlight, a stiff man loped forward on a thoroughbred.
Alarm heated my spine. But I soon recognized that it wasn’t an outlaw intent on revenge—it was Ezra.
I cocked my revolver but didn’t yet withdraw my gun. I couldn’t decide whether it was too much to greet my brother with a barrel lined up between his eyes.
Ezra halted before me, his stallion’s hooves leaving a patchwork of indentions in the wet ground.
He swung down, his gray-flecked brows combed upward.
He handed me my hunting knife, carved-ivory hilt out.
The blade rested in my palm, a visceral reminder of the length that now separated us.
I flipped my knife and slid it into my boot.
“You cannot know how this has troubled me,” Ezra said. He studied the soil, his expression pathetic and wavering, as if he placed upon himself some weak facade, as if he wanted me to pity him.
I nodded and walked past him toward the barn, my back bristling.
“Minnie, I—”
“No.” I glanced over my shoulder. The afternoon sky was blank. “I won’t listen to your rationalizations. Get off my land.”
“Look, I’m sorry, hear.” Fat tears smeared his face. He stepped closer, grasped my wrist.
I tightened my other hand on my pistol. “Let go.”
His shiny pink fist, washed without a smudge, gripped my shirtwaist. I tugged my arm free and stepped back.
There was a reverberation: A black mustang dashed across my land, its hooves sodden thunks against the rigid earth.
Stot drew his pistol—hopefully he wouldn’t send my brother to kingdom come.
Ezra’s hand clenched his vest placket. He seemed frightened but also confused, somehow not understanding the gravity of his abhorrent treatment of me.
Shark pounded toward us with a clamor. Stot yanked on his reins, cocked his Peacemaker.
“Pause—” I patted at the air as Stot swung from the saddle. He strode forward, gun trained on Ezra, clouds of red dust pluming behind him.
Ezra swallowed and tread backward.
“You’re just going to kill him?” I asked Stot.
A vein raised on Stot’s neck. “Maybe.”
Time moved slow, in the unfiltered sunshine, with a cowboy, but after a tight moment, Stot uncocked his gun and pointed the barrel earthward. He stomped forward, spurs clattering on loose rocks, and punched Ezra across the chin.
Ezra flew backward and smashed against the damp earth.
“Stop.” I grabbed Stot’s jaw, turned his gaze to mine.
His fingers flexed, unflexed above his six-shooter.
Rage rippling beneath his control. I thought of what he’d shared, that long ago night under the stars, of how the search for truth, for righteousness in a brutal world, was vaporous and confusing.
How easy it was to become lost. I saw Stot. Loyalty and honor, rage and revenge.
I spoke low. “This is not who you have to be.”
A wasp buzzed past, and faroff my pot of lye soap bubbled.
Stot rubbed his face. Hesitated a moment, as he chose what sort of man he wanted to be.
I glimpsed the honor fundamental to him—and yet agony was stitched alongside goodness.
He grappled with the dark parts of himself, those shadowed and hidden corridors.
My palm looped his arm, and I felt the heat of his body, the fury taut and rumbling.
I hoped to help him walk toward the lighter parts of himself.
“I’m okay,” he said, voice hoarse. I let go.
He stalked to where Ezra sprawled in the mud, practically trembling with fear. Stot crouched, slowly, eerily. “You touch her again, and I will annihilate you,” he said, voice resonant.
Ezra swallowed, his cheeks muddled and red, soil splattered up his jeans and starched chambray.
I wiped my hands on my apron and walked away toward the barn.
There was much work to be done, and I didn’t have any more space for melodrama.
I heard a scuttle and heavy breathing, my brother leaving.
He didn’t say anything, and I didn’t watch him go.
After I’d poured the lye mixture, I moved across the meadow to Stot. He paced, shoulders tense, magnetic in his fury. But he stilled at my approach. I placed a hand on his hip, laid my cheek on his back.
His muscles were strained beneath flannel. Light glowed beyond the cottonwoods, the scent of sweetgrass from off yonder. Stot pinched his hat by its cattleman crease, straightened its angle against the falling sun. “I wanted to shoot him between the eyes.”
“I know.”
He turned, slipped his hands around my waist, his movements tender. He inhaled, his mouth right above my ear. I slid backward down the slope, pulling away, and he gripped me closer.
“Don’t do that.” He spoke into my hair. “Just be with me a moment. Don’t analyze or worry.” He laid his head on mine. “Let me hold you.”
There was agony in the knowing, in being vulnerable enough to show someone your traumas, to allow them to see you. I felt the urge to disintegrate, or explode: An ache pressed and pressed against the walls of my chest. It was painful, surrendering.
But I let him hold me, his cheek on top of my coronet braid. And with time, air returned to my body. I allowed myself to feel safe, to calm. He was a stable rock amid fire and storm and the foreverness of weather. His lips pressed to my braid. “We’re good together.”
I nodded and pulled back. His throat gleamed golden with sweat, his bandolier bunching his shirt tight across his chest. I recognized that I was evolving, that I wasn’t yet settled—and I wanted to be careful with his heart. I brushed my lips against his, then went to feed my animals supper.
While I tossed grain for the chickens and hauled a pail of well water inside, Stot fixed a popped board on the side of my home.
A bluebird swooped by. A memory edged over my thoughts, time folding and layering.
Dawn light, my ma’s delicate wrists, the bluebird-colored lace of her cuff, her black embossed hymnal.
Make sure you tell the Lord about your adventures every day, she’d said and placed her hymnal in my palms. I didn’t know how to begin such a thing.
I pushed open my shack door and walked to my bookshelf, oak floorboards creaking.
I tipped out my ma’s small leather hymnal, felt the weight of the book in my palm, then slipped the hymnal into my apron pocket, as she’d done every day of my childhood.
Life on the frontier was clogged with hazards and escapades and tedium.
I wasn’t sure which moments were the sort you told to the God above, but I supposed I could just start talking.
I walked westward along the edge of my prairie, catching the last hour of sunlight, and Stot fell in step with me.
It was primaveral, earliest spring, the cusp between one season and the next, when anything could happen.
This space between seasons was my favorite time of year—there was such possibility after the long pause of winter.
Colors pressed up from my ground, raw and gorgeous, a smear of lime along the groundcover, fuchsia edging the woodland.
I imagined other wildflowers blooming: saltmarsh asters and milkweed, purple coneflowers and prairie roses.
Stot strolled with me across the fields awhile, the scent of mauve vervain and dewy green leaves pressing through the damp.
When the sun slipped down among the treetops, I wiped my hands on my apron and turned back home.
Beneath the porch awning, my oil painting dried on the easel, almost finished.
The red of my barn shadowed with maroon, the atmosphere beyond a springtime sky, smudges of luminosity textured across the board.
Around the woman, a ghostly blue haze shimmered, as if she wasn’t quite a part of the landscape.
I liked it that way, as if stories were forever unfinished.
About the wood nettle, I continued searching for those first textures of spring, for the snowy white feathering of dogwoods and for wild plum blossoms, for yellow sumac and magenta redbuds.
Stot offered some oats to Shark, and I yanked up wild chives, the green stalks rising from the dead grass.
A zip tinged up the stem, as if the ground zapped me.
“I hear you,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere. ”
And I wasn’t. This was my land. This was my home. So be it wind or rain or wildfire or heartbreak, I’d be here. The voices rose in treble, speaking across time and distance. A feathering of ruby stems bent in the wind, and I waited. From deep underground, I heard the ancient voice of the earth.
Let’s restart.