Tame the Wilderness
For all my grand declarations about being done with New Orleans, when the day came to leave, I was misty-eyed.
In one gloved hand, I held a ticket to Colorado, folded three times and wilting in the heat.
At my feet: three valises, each the size of a small person.
My family stood in a semicircle, awkward and expectant.
I felt more like I was departing for war rather than the West.
First, Louisa, my sister—moonfaced and round with pregnancy. She clutched her belly then pressed my hand to it.
“I’ll write you as soon as the baby comes,” she said. I looked up to blink away wetness. Her husband stood beside her, simple and good-natured. I wished them both well.
Next came my brother—smiling, softhearted, and entirely unprepared for the weight of marriage to that Damned Beno?t Family.
His arm was looped through that of his wife: Janey Beno?t.
Too sweet to be openly cruel to, though God knows I had tried.
But if there was one principle I believed in: If you cannot do something wholeheartedly, don’t do it at all.
I had failed to hate her properly. So I stopped.
Though I did not cry, my vision took on a slight shimmer when I saw Toussaint. He hugged me the way a gentleman might brush crumbs off a tablecloth—swift, impersonal. His cheek never touched mine. No breath, no scent. Just the quiet, final words between us: “Bon temps.”
Good times.
As if we were passing acquaintances who once shared a table at a picnic.
As if our entire lives hadn’t unfolded together, layer by layer.
I was trying to stifle an untoward sob. When Eliza walked up with that strange, ungodly magnetism, like a natural lodestone, I swallowed nervously.
You could feel people shifting in her direction—shoulders angling, eyes following, necks craning.
I might as well have been part of the luggage.
Even the train hushed its groaning. The whole world wanted to hear what she would say.
When her cheek pressed against mine—velvet and warm—my spine stiffened.
And my mind, the traitor, flashed to a memory I did not want: Toussaint’s hand, his knuckles grazing Eliza’s cheek with casual reverence. Had she closed her eyes when he did?
No. Stop.
There was no room for that. The past was dead. I was not. I was heading toward the future, toward the territories. Toward Ealy Washington and land and respect and a wardrobe worthy of reinvention.
Eliza pulled back. When she spoke, her voice had that maddening, bell-clear resonance.
“You’ll do wonderfully in the wilds of Colorado, I’m sure.”
And before I could even process the meaning, Louisa, always the echo, patted my shoulder and added, “Yes, it takes a special kind of person to tame the wilderness.”
Eliza extended one hand, gesturing graciously to the little circle of family behind me.
“It’s a shame she couldn’t start right here.”
The crowd erupted.
My idiot brother guffawed like someone had lit a firecracker in his boot, and even Louisa snorted into her lace gloves. It was a charming little moment, for them. A laugh line in someone else’s play.
But I felt it. A tight pinch, like a mosquito bite.
You were unsuccessful here.
Eliza is the wilderness you cannot tame.
She hadn’t said those words, but I’d heard them all the same.
I swallowed the sting and summoned the smile I’d practiced at Dillard Finishing School under Miss Dorothea Hamilton’s merciless tutelage.
“A shame,” I managed quietly. But no one heard me.
I had just placed one patent-leather boot on the train’s cast-iron step when I collided—quite literally—with a wall of wool and cologne.
The man was tall. Broad-shouldered. Skin the color of burnished mahogany, with a jaw that looked carved. His porter’s uniform was crisp and suspiciously well fitted, as though tailored not just for functionality but for… effect.
I opened my mouth to protest, but before a single word could escape, he plucked the folded ticket from my glove with one smooth motion.
“You won’t need all of that where you’re going, Miss Bliguet.”
He pronounced my name Blee-GET, and I corrected. “Blee-GAY rhymes with beignet.” I followed his form through the train. “And what do you mean I won’t need all of that?” I asked.
I wasn’t sure if he meant my family or my ticket or the uncharitable thought I was having about Eliza, but either way, it felt a little on time.
I was losing him in the crowd. “Excuse me—!” I managed. I’m sure my face was burning. “Sir—”
But the man was already striding down the platform, disappearing into the crowd like fog. The train let out another hiss, the door clanged shut behind me, and I found myself in the narrow corridor of the colored Pullman car—fuming, flustered, and entirely unsure where my luggage had gone.
Only then did it strike me: He knew my name.
I clutched the brim of my hat like it might keep my entire life from blowing away.
When I looked down at the ticket in my gloved hand—creased now, handled too many times—I realized something was terribly wrong. My ticket. This wasn’t mine. My comfortable seat, paid for in full, had been switched.
To the colored car.
Colored!
I wasn’t under any illusions. I knew exactly who I was. But I had paid for second class. A seat with real upholstery, a porter, a window that closed properly. In New Orleans, people made allowances, looked the other way.
But I was being herded toward the back of the train, behind the day laborers and traveling musicians. Past the respectable noise of second class and straight into a boxcar with rusted hinges and the ghost of livestock. Wooden benches. No service.
Lordy, there was a hen in a crate under one of the benches!
I had left New Orleans to escape unpredictability.
So naturally, it followed me onto the train.