Chapter 1 – Juliette
ONE
JULIETTE
I know, it sounds archaic when I say it out loud. Something that couldn’t happen in this year of our Lord whatever. Not when there was internet and everything. But you’d be surprised about some goings-on in a town like Riverbend.
“Juliette! Now!”
“I’m coming, Daddy!” I called down the stairs. “I just have to-”
“I don’t want to hear what you’re doing,” he shouted up to me. “I want to see it done. You get down here and stop stalling. My decision is final.”
There wasn’t a decision, I wanted to remind him. Decision implied there had been some kind of choice. Options that I had. And there weren’t any.
Today, I was going to be sold. Sorry…married.
It’s not like my father was a human trafficker. Not really.
It came down to a few basic facts.
The first one being, the doctor told him it was cancer and that it had spread from his throat to his lungs. He was so filled with it, there was no point in trying to treat it at this point. They gave him months, not years.
Herb had been a lifelong smoker, who believed all the rot about cigarettes causing cancer was just a lot of nonsense intended to keep the price of cigarettes so high. By his reasoning, if they really were that bad for you, people would stop making them.
Yeah, he got that one wrong.
So his days on this earth were officially numbered for Herb Clarke.
Second fact, Daddy didn’t believe his daughter could manage the farm once he passed.
He was right on that score. Not that I couldn’t have managed the farm, but I wouldn’t have.
As soon as he told me what the doctor said, my plan was to sell it ten seconds after putting him in the ground and never look back. May he rest in peace.
Maybe he knew that. Maybe he knew my hatred for this place was something I held deep down inside.
Finally, Herb believed in the sanctimony of marriage. That a wife was designed by God to serve her husband and bear his children. So if he got a husband for me, he could leave the farm to him and ensure the Clarke farm legacy would go on through our lineage.
I know what you’re thinking. Why not just pick a man out for myself?
Well, as I mentioned, I didn’t see the fine people of Riverbend very often.
Also, Herb refused to let me date.
Hence, his dilemma of knowing he was dying, needing to find me a husband pronto, or else…
Or else I would betray him once he was in the grave.
That’s what he called it when he got drunk after learning of his fatal diagnosis. That I would sell the farm that had been in his family for generations and it would be like the Clarkes’ had never been part of this land.
At the time, I’d protested.
No, no. Don’t say that, Daddy! Of course, I wouldn’t leave here. I love being a sugar beet farmer in Riverbend, Montana.
Truth was, I thought I was a better liar than that.
Instead, he was hauling me off to the Rodeo Remnant Auction, where he planned to basically sell me to the highest bidder.
Winner gets the farm and the house, as long as he agrees to marry me. Thus ensuring the fruit of my loins would carry on the family legacy.
Yeah, that wasn’t going to happen.
However, my dilemma was this. What if some yahoo ponied up and did marry me?
Because four hundred acres, a three bedroom, two bath, twenty-five hundred square foot house, including barn, and equipment, and, I imagined, sex with me on the regular, was a pretty decent deal for a cowboy in these parts.
Sure, I could get a divorce as soon as Herb kicked it, but then I was relying on a local judge to determine what was a fair and equitable distribution for me. Which you would think would be all of it, but that was not a guarantee in these parts where misogyny was bred deep.
It also required my cowboy-buyer to agree to a divorce.
Which, given whatever his investment was going to be, might not be in his best interest.
No, I needed another plan.
“For the last time! Juliette!” Herb bellowed.
I didn’t bother responding. There was no point. I’d learned how to swallow my tongue from as early as I could remember, and that’s what I just kept doing.
I gave myself one last glance in the mirror.
I appeared exactly how he wanted me to look.
Plain, white, cotton dress. No makeup. Long, straight, natural, light brown hair pushed off my face with a floral embroidered headband. Hazel eyes that had already seen too much, and at the same time, not enough.
Virginal. I looked fucking virginal.
I didn’t want to look at that girl in the mirror anymore.
I skipped downstairs and stopped at the bottom step. Herb was opening the front door, showing me his back, and I was struck again by how fast it all seemed to be happening.
The weight seemed to be falling off of him in pounds almost daily. His shoulders were slumped. The threadbare denim shirt I’d been ironing for him for years, he called it his church shirt, was drooping around his shoulders while the steps he took to shuffle out onto the porch were measured.
Careful. Like he was suddenly always afraid of falling.
I swallowed the sudden lump in my throat. It would be easy to say I didn’t love my father. It would be easy to say that because my father didn’t love me. I wasn’t a daughter to him, I was a possession. Something precious for him to own.
It wasn’t intentional, it was simply an internal failing of his. He didn’t love…anything.
Because you couldn’t both love something and own it.
Except, what Herb didn’t realize, was that we had more of a transactional relationship. He made sure I was sheltered and fed. I kept the house and worked alongside him in the fields during planting and harvesting seasons.
He didn’t beat me. Nothing more than a slap against my head or a hard tug on my ponytail when I wasn’t moving as fast as he wanted, or didn’t figure shit out as fast as he needed me to do.
No verbal abuse either, really. He didn’t believe in cussing and calling me stupid or ugly would have been pointless, because I wasn’t either of those things and he knew it.
So there was no affection in our relationship, but there was grudging respect.
Herb worked for the land. A one man owner/operator. There were plenty of folks out there younger than he was who couldn’t manage an operation this size the way he did. Not that he counted my contributions, but still.
The man gave this place everything he had.
I understood why the thought of losing it devastated him. But I didn’t care.
“I’m ready, Daddy. I just wanted to fix my hair one last time.”
That was one thing we did do a lot. We lied to each other. Or at least, I lied to him a lot. I didn’t give a shit how my hair looked, I was just trying to buy some time.
“Hair’s fine,” he grunted.
Together, we made our way to his battered, old Ford pickup. I hopped into the passenger side and did the trick where you had to slam the door shut twice to get it to stick. He started the engine and I knew we had a little less than an hour’s drive into town.
The horse auction was to kick off at noon, promptly.
My auction would soon follow.
Or maybe not.
“What if they don’t let you do it?”
“What are you talking about?” My father lit a cigarette with the car lighter (yeah, he was still smoking because, fuck it, if you’re going to die already, why not go down doing what you love?) but other than that, didn’t spare me a glance.
“You know,” I said. “What if they don’t let you sell me? What if it’s not even legal?”
“Ain’t sellin’ you, girl,” he spat. “Just lettin’ folks in these parts know you’re open to marriage. You’re what, nineteen?”
“Twenty.”
“’Bout time then.”
“But you’re offering up the farm as incentive. Folks around here are going to have thoughts about that.”
“Yeah, it’s called a dowry,” he drawled. “Fathers have been paying money to give their daughters away for centuries.”
I didn’t correct him and say, not in this century. I also didn’t point out that he hadn’t used the word dowry two days ago when he told me what was going to happen today.
“Want you comin’ with me to the auction Friday.”
“Why?”
“Lot of cowboys will be there.”
“So?”
“Time you got married. Need to leave this farm to your husband.”
“Husband? You won’t even let me date.”
“Datin’ isn’t weddin’. Time you got wedded and bedded before I leave this earth.”
“You can’t do this. You can’t just…marry me off to some cowboy.”
“You belong to me, girl. You’ll do as I say. Wear your church dress. That’ll drive up the bids.”
“Bids!”
“It’s how an auction works. They make an offer and I take the best one.”
There were tears after that. I took myself off to my room thinking I would need to run away right then. Herb must have counted on that because he locked me in my bedroom. From when I was a kid, the lock on my bedroom door was always on the outside.
For two days I’d been allowed bathroom and kitchen privileges and that was it. Until I got over my snit about getting married.
I considered telling him my secret…that just because he didn’t allow dating didn’t mean I hadn’t done it.
Would I call Kevin a boyfriend? Not really. But he was keen on me and that was something.
“You know, it ain’t about the money.”
I looked over at his profile, the smoke was blowing out his nostrils.
I know he believed that. Or thought he did.
“When I say I’m taking the best offer, it means I’m taking everything into consideration. Some old geezer offers more money for you…that ain’t what this is about. You need a proper husband. A God fearing one. Someone young enough to run this farm and raise kids with you.”
Did that mean Kevin had a chance?
Did I want him to have one? I didn’t even know if liked him.
I only knew that he liked me and when he rang up my order at the hardware store he always tried to flirt with me a bit.
The last time I was in town, he asked if I wanted coffee at the diner and I said yes.
We didn’t say much while we drank our coffee, but I counted it as a date.
He was cute. My age. His dad was training him to take over the family business, just like mine was training me to be a good wife to the man who would take over the family business. So, we had that in common.
Except, if he did bid on me, won me, in this sick contest my father was planning, then I would have to hate him for all time.
No, I couldn’t look that far ahead. There was a way out of this. I just had to use my brain.
If I pulled the steering wheel to the right, drove us off the side of the road, I’d be able to get out of the truck before Herb could stop me. Make a run for it.
However, we were probably still sixty miles outside Riverbend.
There was no way I was running that distance, or walking it for that matter, in a day.
There was the Long Valley ranch to the west and I knew the Talleys had no love for Herb.
They didn’t think it was right that I wasn’t in school.
Mrs. Talley said as much to my father on more than one occasion when we ran into them in town, to which my father would tell her to mind her own business.
If I told them what he was planning for me, I had no doubt they would take me in. But what did that get me? Could I hide out on their ranch until Herb kicked it?
That would only piss him off. Give him plenty of time to change his will to leave the farm to the Feds. The Bureau of Land Management was always looking to pick up property for government use. Drilling, strip mining, and anything else they could think of.
It was a threat Herb had used before when I’d suggested things like…going off to college.
“You don’t want to work this farm, girl? You want to go off to some fancy school? Then I might just leave the whole damn operation to someone who really wants it.”
Let me be clear, the operation, as Herb liked to call it, wasn’t a small sum. The land, the established crops, the house and outbuildings would easily go for over a million dollars. I knew that because I’d checked on Zillow like a million times for same sized operations.
Walking away from that, when I’d put everything I had since I was a kid, into this place? Didn’t sit well with me.
Starting from nothing wasn’t a plan. I had no money, no real savings that I had access to, except one thousand, two hundred and thirteen dollars I’d managed to stash under the floorboards in my bedroom.
That money had taken me years to accumulate. The change from every grocery shop or supply run that I’d skim by the barest margin so he wouldn’t know what I was doing.
I’d waited, biding my time, until the day came when he stopped demanding the receipt so he could do the math and make sure the numbers added up. The day when he finally trusted that what I returned in change not used was accurate.
That’s when my savings began.
But it wasn’t enough. Not to walk away from this town, this state and find some way to start over.
Maybe my problem was I wasn’t very brave.
I didn’t see myself striking out on my own to a city (I used to dream about Seattle, because in my head it was the most different place on earth from Riverbend) without a high school diploma, college degree, or at least a few months’ rent while I tried to find some job.
That’s always where my imagination ended for me. Working as a waitress at some restaurant. Getting by. Living in some shitty apartment, most likely with a roommate who ate the leftover food I brought home.
I spent a lot of time working out very detailed trajectories for myself, but it always came back to the farm.
My farm. My legacy. My sweat for ten years as both a laborer and housekeeper.
It belonged to me.
But, the only way I was going to be able to hold on to it was to watch my father marry me off to some cowboy.
I’d have to come up with a whole new plan.
Wait for Herb to pass. Figure out how to plan for a divorce that resulted in me getting what I was rightfully owed. All of it.
It was days like these I regretted the fact that I wasn’t a sociopathic murderer.
No, running didn’t get me what I wanted. Fighting Herb was pointless. And I wasn’t capable of violence.
Marriage, and navigating my way through a temporary situation, were the only ways out.
I just didn’t know what I was going to have to do, to get to the other side of it.
But I did know this. The man, whoever he was, was going to be my new mortal enemy.