Chapter Nine
Three Forks Creek, Collins Ranch, Montana Territory
Three Hours Earlier
The river was trying to take Zoe’s best apron.
She caught it with both hands an inch above the waterline, hauled it back against the current, and wrung it out on the flat rock with the grim determination of someone who had already lost a handkerchief to the creek thirty minutes earlier and intended to hold the line from here on.
The cold of the water had moved past her wrists and up her forearms to somewhere around her elbows, and her knuckles were the particular shade of pink that suggested they were ten minutes from crossing over into red.
The lye soap had long since done its work on the soft places of her hands.
The afternoon had gone cold, the sun pulling back behind the upper ridgeline and taking its warmth with it while leaving all its light.
She set the apron on the nearest bush to dry and reached back into the wooden tub for the next piece.
“Sadie,” she called over her shoulder, “would you hand me the Reverend?”
“Which one is the Reverend?” After a pause, Sadie asked from somewhere behind her.
“The one that preaches every Sunday from the top of your uncle’s pile,” Zoe replied pleasantly. “The one with the stiff collar and the tendency to lecture. The shirt, Sadie.”
Sadie’s footsteps moved away. A small thump came from the bank where the laundry basket stood. The wet hem of Wade’s shirt came up over the rim, was inspected, was set aside. A stocking followed. A second stocking. A small huff.
The stiff shirt arrived in Zoe’s outstretched hand. She took it and worked it across the washboard with the same methodical strokes she had used since her mother’s kitchen in Albany. The familiar ache began building from her knuckles to her shoulder.
“When will we be finished?” Sadie said behind her.
“Four more pieces in this tub, and then the rinsing, and then the hanging.” Zoe kept her strokes even. “Another hour, perhaps.”
The silence that followed lasted a little too long.
“Another hour,” Sadie repeated, drawing the words out at the end as though the length of them might shorten the hour.
Sadie sat down on the bank. Zoe heard the small thud, but she kept her hands on the washboard and her eyes on the shirt.
Lord, she prayed silently, with the inward composure she had been managing since half past eleven, I know You are present at all laundry days.
I know this because someone had to invent cold creek water and lye soap occurring on the same occasion, and I am choosing to believe You did it on purpose.
I am asking only for the next hour. Just the next hour, Lord.
The shirt came off the board and went into the rinsing tub, and Zoe reached for the next.
The next piece was one of Wade’s work shirts, worn through at the left elbow and mended twice. Zoe ran her thumb briefly over the mend before she set it on the board.
The shirt carried him on it.
Pine soap from her own kettle on the back of the stove.
The faint warm leather of his coat lining.
Beneath those, the smell of his skin at the side of the neck, the same smell she had caught on the wagon back from Bozeman three weeks ago when his shoulder had been an inch from hers and which she had been recognizing at irregular intervals ever since.
She drew the shirt across the slats with the same care she would have given a borrowed book.
“Auntie Zoe?”
Sadie’s voice came from somewhere behind her at the laundry basket, the flat note of a child who had passed the polite stage of complaining and arrived at the honest one.
“Yes, sweet girl?”
“My back hurts.”
Zoe turned to look. Sadie was sitting on the wet grass with her two boots stuck straight out in front of her and the dejected curve of her shoulders bent forward. Her yellow braid had begun to come undone at the tail.
“I am sorry, sweet girl,” Zoe answered gently. “Sit on the rock instead of the grass. The rock is flatter.”
Sadie didn’t move toward the rock.
“My arms hurt, too,” she added, the corner of her mouth pulling down.
“We both have that,” Zoe said gently. “Laundry day asks a good deal of everybody.”
“It doesn’t ask anything of Uncle Wade,” Sadie pointed out, crossing her arms over her wet apron.
“Your uncle has been at Ben Greene’s farm since this morning breaking a wild horse,” Zoe replied evenly, “which I would estimate is a similar level of ask. Different ask. Same level.”
There was a pause in which Sadie considered this.
“Are you tired?” Sadie asked, her chin set against her crossed arms.
“Yes,” Zoe answered, working the shirt across the slats without lifting her eyes.
“How tired?”
“Approximately as tired as I look,” Zoe replied, the dry edge she’d heard from her own mother coming up briefly at the back of her throat.
“You look very tired,” Sadie said, with the frank sympathy of a child who meant it as kindness.
“Thank you, Sadie.”
The afternoon wore on. Zoe worked the last pieces on the washboard and moved to the rinsing, pulling each item through the cold creek current with both hands and wringing them out against the flat rock until her palms ached.
Sadie helped with the smaller pieces, the handkerchiefs and kitchen cloths and her own stockings, spreading them on the bushes with an air of diminishing enthusiasm that tracked the temperature of the afternoon.
A cold wind came down off the foothills and cut along the creek bank, carrying the smell of pine and dry stone, and Sadie pulled her overshirt tighter around herself and said nothing, which was a different kind of warning than all the talking she had been doing for the past two hours.
Zoe knew the quiet of a tired child. She also knew, as well as she knew her own reflection, that the quiet of a tired child was not the same as peace.
She spread her own washed apron on the highest branch of a serviceberry bush and turned back to the tub.
“Last piece,” she said warmly. “George’s, by the look of it.”
Sadie was sitting on the flat rock now with her knees pulled to her chest and her chin on her knees. Her teeth held her lower lip in place. Her pale blue eyes had fixed on the water and not moved in some time.
“Sadie,” Zoe said gently. “What is it, sweet girl?”
“Nothing,” Sadie said to the creek.
“That is not a nothing face.”
“I only have one face,” Sadie replied, with the edge of a child who is very tired and has lost the patience for being cheerful about it. “It is not a nothing face or a something face. It is my face.”
Zoe worked George’s shirt over the washboard without pushing the point. She rinsed the shirt, wrung it out against the flat rock, and turned to spread it on the bush.
“You are not my mother!”
Sadie said it to the creek, not loudly, but in a flat, matter-of-fact voice.
Zoe went still with the wet shirt in her hands. The water moved at her ankles. Her fingers had closed around the shirt at the shoulder seam and the water was running down the inside of her wrists into her sleeves. She stood at the center of the creek bend and let it run.
“No,” she replied, very gently. “I am not.”
“My mother never made me do laundry for this long,” Sadie continued, still to the creek. “My mother made it a game. She made everything a game. She was always funny. Always, always funny.” A pause. “You’re not funny!”
Zoe spread the shirt on the serviceberry bush.
Her hands worked at the wet cotton, but they were the only piece of her that was working.
The rest of her stood at the bank with the sentence Sadie had said still settling in the bottom of her chest. She didn’t yet have an answer for it and she knew that the next thing she said to the child at the rock was going to be a thing the child would carry for the next eighteen years.
She steadied her hand. She drew a careful breath in through her nose. She finished spreading the shirt across the branch. The cold of her wet sleeve sat against the inside of her own wrist, and the cold gave her something to lean on while the rest of her went on searching.
“I am sorry, Sadie,” she said quietly. “I know today has been long and cold and your back hurts. I’m sorry the laundry took so much time.”
“You are boring,” Sadie said, louder now, and the word hit the cold air with more force than she had probably intended because her voice cracked on the end of it.
“You’re boring and you do everything wrong and I don’t want to wash Uncle Wade’s shirts and I don’t want to stand by the cold creek and I want my mama. ”
The last three words came out in a rush, small and honest and raw.
Zoe turned from the bush.
She kept her voice soft and careful, as her own mother had kept it on the mornings when grief came up unexpected. “Come here, sweet girl.”
“No,” Sadie said, and she was crying now, properly, her shoulders shaking with it. “I don’t want to come there. I don’t want you to hold me. You are not my mama and you are never going to be my mama and I don’t want you here and I want Uncle Wade and I want to go home.”
She was on her feet without Zoe quite seeing her rise, and then she was three steps from the rock, and then five, and her voice had climbed out of crying into a strained, high pitch.
“Sadie,” Zoe said firmly, stepping toward her. “Sadie, sweetheart...”
“No,” Sadie screamed. It was not a tantrum scream. It was the scream of a child in real pain, the sound of held-down grief that had been waiting for a cold afternoon to finally crack the surface. “I want my mama. I want my mama back. I want her back right now. I want her back.”
She ran two steps toward the slope and dropped to her knees in the grass. The screaming dissolved into weeping, the kind that moved in waves and did not slow for breath.
Zoe knelt beside her in the cold grass.
The damp soaked through the front of her skirt at once but she didn’t move to set herself elsewhere. The first small shake of Sadie’s shoulders went through Zoe’s hand at her back, and the second shake went through her wrist, and the third shake reached the bottom of Zoe’s chest and pulled hard.