Chapter 7
Okee
On foot in the snow, we crawl along at less than a mile an hour.
My toes go dead in my boots. At a thicket, we break evergreen boughs and pack them inside our boots to hold off the cold.
I keep looking over my shoulder. A branch cracks.
The wind howls through the timber. My heart climbs into my throat and stays there.
By midday the sun softens the top crust, and we duck under a red cedar.
I break off some dry-looking low branches. “These’ll burn.”
Boone digs out a shallow pit with his boot heel while I build a base. The woman sits hunched nearby, suitcase clutched tight, her breath white in the air.
“See that?” Boone points to the earth. “Rabbit tracks. Fresh.” He pulls the rifle off his shoulder. “I’ll see if I can scare us up something’. Keep her warm, hear?”
I don’t reply. I rest back on my heels, my leg muscles aching, and strike steel to flint until a spark catches in the moss.
At last, smoke curls up, thin as thread.
I bend and breathe on it until the ember takes.
Even that pulls at my lungs. If I—a man sturdy enough for cavalry and a life spent drifting across the West—have met my limit, this woman must be worn near to nothing.
It’s trouble enough to see to my own safety. Now this. Now her.
Boone has a way of minding concerns that are not his own. I can tell he’s already adopted this woman, desperate for her to warm to him to assuage his guilt.
The way he wept. Though he would never admit how angry he must be with himself, neither had he ever admitted aloud the guilt of sending a friend into battle at dawn with a black eye from a drunken night of cards.
A friend, Charlie, a boy all of seventeen who died with bullets in his gut and Boone’s apology forever left unsaid.
I had sensed the guilt in him for weeks back then.
My heart swells and I can feel nothing but pity for him even now. That beautiful, tenderhearted creature.
But we did not mastermind this crime. We made efforts at great personal expense to prevent this tragedy. We failed, yes. But that certainly does not make us culpable in my mind. Or responsible for this woman. But it’s of no use to reason with him. Boone always allows his heart to do the thinking.
The woman doesn’t move. She hasn’t spoken since we stopped. She just sits there with that case, hugging her knees with a sour expression.
Boone’s footsteps fade into the trees, rifle tucked tight. I listen to the wind threading through the branches, the fire popping quiet.
Seeing her like this, in the daylight, and letting myself study her—why would a woman with a face like that be camped along the Verdigris?
Her eyes are feline. Clear and clever. Hair blonde as ivory. Rosy lips carved into a delicate shape.
“Cold?” I ask her.
She blinks slowly, looking off somewhere as if my voice was a vague, distant sound. A few moments pass before she responds with a subtle rock of her head.
My blood is still pumping hard, the movement and the fire both making me warmer than I need.
I shrug off my coat and lay it over her knees.
She flinches a little, like she’s surprised by the gesture.
Then, a hollow rumble groans from her belly.
She smooths the fabric of her dress at her middle, lifting her chin as if to overcome her hunger with dignity.
“He’ll return with supper,” I say, leaning closer to the fire. “He’s a fine hunter.”
She doesn’t respond.
I lean back, staring at the flames, trying not to think about Hollister’s men who might already be tracking us.
“Lula Clay,” she says, soft.
“Pardon?”
“My name. Lula Clay.”
I nod, an unexpected pleasure washing over me at the small gesture of trust. There’s a sweetness to it—Lula. Southern.
We can forgive that, I suppose. Though, like the Southern belles I’ve observed, she carries the refined gentility of a woman accustomed to crowds parting for her. The kind of woman that could get a man killed for looking at her wrong, all the while pretending not to know the power she wields.
It fits her somehow. The rosebud and the thorns.
“Ms. Clay,” I say, dipping my head slightly in polite acknowledgement. “I regret the circumstances of our introduction.”
She swipes back a wayward weft of flaxen hair, voice weary. “You’re quite well-spoken.”
I raise an eyebrow.
There it is. The compliment with teeth.
“Yes,” I say. I let it hang for a second. “Educated men often are.”
She claps dirt gently off her hands. “I’ve met men with schooling who do not speak near as well.”
“I attended university back east.”
“Truly?”
“Mm,” I hum in affirmation, keeping my hands busy wiping down my pistol. “Before the war.”
She doesn’t say anything at first. Just watches my hands move, then looks into the fire.
“I studied with a doctor back in my town,” she says. “Helped him with ledgers, medicines. But I never did more than plain school. For girls. It wasn’t formal. I’m mostly self-taught.”
I nod.
“I meant no disrespect,” she says, fumbling a little. “I was told plenty about Indian Territory, and none of it was kind. But I never met…” she says, trailing off uncomfortably.
I half smile, a rare involuntary reflex, but it’s humorless.
“Where is home?” I ask.
“Greenbrier County. West Virginia.”
My eyes shift toward the trees, to the place where Boone disappeared minutes ago.
He is from West Virginia and talks about it often. Though he’s drifted on his own long enough, it is a rare sort of man he hasn’t already met.
I was still a boy, too young to understand the differences between men, when my father spoke of Indian Removal and called it necessary.
We sat at our Anglo table, my mother in Anglo clothes, eating an Anglo meal, while he spoke of human lives like poker chips.
The memory of it still sickens me, and I cannot keep the bitterness from my voice.
“I’d guess you never met an Indian because most were driven west before you were born.”
She shifts at that.
“My father’s people came from London,” I continue. “He met my mother here.”
“And your mother?”
“They call us Muscogee. Creeks. But we are Mvskoke.”
She grants me a small smile at that, polite, and dips her chin as though I’ve just offered an interesting fact over supper.
The fire settles low between us, snapping now and then. Wind moves through the cedar above, shaking loose a dusting of snow. She keeps my coat over her lap, one gloved hand resting on the suitcase, the other turned toward the heat.
I tell myself it is enough. She is temporary company, nothing more. Boone will come back with meat or he will not. We will keep moving west or we will be caught. Whatever business put her on the Verdigris is none of mine.
My knees ache too much, my shoulders far too heavy to give a damn.
But curiosity is a hard thing to starve once fed.
I glance at her. “This expedition,” I say. “Why were you on it?”
Her eyes lift to mine. For the first time, there is something like teasing in them. “Why?” she asks. “Because I am a woman, you mean?”
I blink at her, the corner of my mouth twitching as I hold back a smile. “Yes. Precisely because you’re a woman. This is a dangerous place.”
“And yet here I am.”
“Here you are.”
She studies me a moment, as if deciding whether to take offense or pleasure in it. “I was engaged as an assistant,” she says at last. “Copying notes. Organizing specimens. Keeping records no one else cared to keep properly.”
“For scientists,” I add.
“You sound surprised.”
“Only curious.”
She draws my coat a little closer around her knees. “Curious that a woman might be useful for something besides sewing up stockings and pouring coffee?”
“Curious what kind of woman joins an expedition into dangerous country.”
She looks pleased with herself a moment, dragging out the silence if only just to wield some power over my curiosity. “I plan to open an apothecary. For medicines.”
“So you’re a herbalist then?”
“Yes,” she says, a smile cracking, as if impressed I knew the proper word. “And midwife.”
“That’s something,” I say. “Bringing life into the world. Men like Boone and me, we’ve seen more of death. War.”
Her eyes flick to mine, a spark of interest catching fire.
“Birth is not all grace,” she says. “It’s blood. Panic. Screaming.”
“So is war.”
That quiets us both for a moment. There’s steel in her. Grace beneath the grit. Fire crackles. Wind rustles the branches overhead.
She shifts her skirts, sitting closer as sparks pop in the campfire between us. “You were in the army?” she asks.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“My husband too.”
I stop breathing for a beat. I hadn’t estimated she would be married.
She never mentioned a husband, and being out on an expedition like this with a man waiting at home seems like an unusual thing.
But then she says, “He died at Chickamauga,” and the battlefield falls into place, the bodies pile in muddy trenches, and the stench of death returns sharp and bitter on my tongue.
I force the memory down until it turns to ash in my belly, then manage a restrained, “Sorry for your loss, ma’am. ”
“Thank you. But please, call me Lula.”
“Thank you. And you may call me Okee.”
It’s not long before Boone returns, chest puffed and a limp rabbit in his grip. “It’s suppertime, folks,” he announces. He holds up a rabbit by the hind legs, snow dusted across his coat. “Clean shot,” he says, nodding toward the neat red mark above its eye.
“Nice work, partner,” I say. “I’d like to introduce you to Lula Clay.”
His expression slackens and he turns to her, seeming at a loss. “Ms. Clay.”
“Boone,” she says, not warm, not cold. Just a toe in a kinder direction.
He dips his head like a schoolboy caught unprepared.
“Ma’am,” he says after a beat, voice careful. Snow melts down the barrel of his rifle and patters into the fire pit.
“Please,” she says. “Just Lula.”
He opens his mouth like he’s got something else to say, but nothing comes out. Instead he crouches near the pit and starts skinning the rabbit. The silence stretches long and taut.