Chapter 13
Okee
Ibusy myself keeping the cabin livable, clearing snow and ice while taking stock of our dwindling wood and hay. The mare needs feed, but every ration we spend makes escape harder. Once or twice, I catch Lula watching from the window. I tell myself it is only curiosity.
Outdoor tasks complete, I return inside with my arms full of split kindling, snow creaking under my boots as I stamp it off on the threshold.
The door thuds shut behind me. Lula is at the hearth with a small pot set just off the boil, pine needles floating on the surface.
The steam rises sharp enough to bite, clearing my head with the scent of green things.
It is just the two of us.
Again.
She lifts the lid, steam rising to her chin, then looks up at me as if she has been expecting me. I set the wood by the fire and watch her strain the tea through a cloth into a tin cup, keeping the needles back, careful with everything.
Freshly washed garments hang from the rafters like ghosts.
“You washed our clothes?”
She shrugs, but her mouth tightens, as if she does not want my thanks to land too heavily. “Seemed the least I could do.”
“Thank you,” I say, and crouch by the fire, rubbing my hands together until feeling returns in slow, needling increments.
“You’ve been at it all day,” she says, keeping her voice light.
I feed a split log into the stove and watch it catch. “My father would say winter rewards routine.”
Lula sets the tea near the hearth to keep warm, then takes the cloth she strained it through and rinses it in a basin, wringing it hard with both hands.
When she reaches for a garment on the line—Boone’s shirt, still damp at the seams—she hesitates, then shifts it farther from the smoke so it will not take the smell.
“You mention him a great deal,” she says, watching the flame. “For a man you claim to disagree with on everything.”
I rise, wiping my hands on my trousers. “I’m his only son. Whether I wanted the burden or not.”
She nods slowly, then takes a cautious sip from her cup. Her face pinches at the bitterness. She coughs once, soft, then recovers her composure.
“Pine tea?” I ask.
“In wintertime, you need something green in you or your blood goes wrong,” she says.
“You mean scurvy,” I say.
“Yes!” she says, then, as if embarrassed by her enthusiasm, glances down into the cup and clears her throat.
“Precisely. First a man tires and blames the weather. Then his gums soften. Old wounds open.” Lula tips the cup toward me.
“Would you like some?” Her mouth quirks as if she cannot decide whether to apologize for it. “It tastes awful.”
The steam carries that bright, resin bite. Her fingers brush mine when I take the cup, and the small contact travels farther than it ought.
I take a sip, letting a mouthful roll over my tongue.
Bitter. Sharp.
Like chewing a forest.
She watches my face with quiet satisfaction when I do not spit it out. “I used to make it for my Eli in the winters when there was little else green and fresh to be had.”
Her eyes drop to her hands, red at the knuckles from washing, cold, and work.
“A wife does what she can,” she says. “Keeps a man upright.”
I hand the cup back. The fire pops and settles.
“Now I haven’t anyone to care for but myself,” she says, and there is no self-pity in it.
Only the plainness of a fact. She reaches for the cloth by the basin and wrings it once more, as if the motion is habit.
“But at least as an apothecary there are always others. Someone’s child wheezing.
Someone’s hands split open. If I cannot keep my own household, I can still be of use. ”
She turns the cup slowly in her palms, clearing her throat gently. “Is there anyone special in your life?”
I blink. “Beg your pardon?”
“A courtship perhaps?”
Boone flashes through my mind—the way he looks at me when we are alone, unguarded and adoring.
But that is not something I can give voice to.
“There is,” I say. “Someone. Though it is complicated.”
Her mouth curves faintly. “How so?”
“We have never…quite so formally…announced it, I suppose.”
“Hmm. A pity.”
A soft laugh escapes me. “It is.”
Then, not looking at me, she asks, “Would this someone object to you sharing close quarters with a woman?”
I reach for my shirt where it hangs in the rafters. Why is she interrogating me like a prisoner of war?
“Have you taken a post with the newspaper?”
With a little click of her tongue, she sets down her cup. “I should cohabitate with strangers? My apologies for seeking to know you better.”
I ease back in my seat, crossing a leg over my thigh. Perhaps she’s right.
What do I know of this woman besides she’s a widowed herbalist, an irrefutable beauty, a resourceful, brave little spitfire? I wipe my palms over my thighs.
“Since your husband passed,” I start, the shape of the question still awkward on my tongue, “have you another who might object to your current arrangement?”
She studies me as though weighing my measure.
“A few. Nothing of consequence. The last…” Her mouth tightens. “A disappointment. In every respect.”
I laugh without thinking. She shoots me a look.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“It was laughable,” she admits. “Though I suppose that sounds cruel, given how it ended.”
“How did it end?”
“He was among the men on the expedition.”
“Oh…fuck.”
It slips out before I can stop it.
She grimaces, then tells me it had been meant for one night only.
By morning, the man was already planning their future together.
She dismisses it with a shrug, offers a prayer for his soul, and closes her suitcase as if sealing the matter inside.
Her hand rests there a moment before she turns back to me.
“I hope you do not think me unfeeling for speaking so plainly of him now.”
War requires an iron gut. If you let yourself feel all the grief at once, you will never rise again.
“No,” I tell her. “Men say worse in the thick of it. Not from malice. From necessity.”
She releases a breath. “I have never cared for the notion that grief must behave politely.”
“The day after a fight,” I say, “word would pass that a fellow lost his left arm and leg and he’s all right now.”
She gasps, then laughs despite herself. “That is dreadful.”
“If you do not laugh, you will weep.”
She studies me. “Has anyone ever suggested that choice to Boone?”
I smile, though there is ache in it. “He does both well, doesn’t he?”
She seems to realize what she has implied only after the words leave her.
“My apologies for the jest.” She smooths her skirt. “He wears his heart plainly. That is all I meant.”
“That is Boone.”
A beat passes before she asks, “And is there someone of consequence in his life?”
I cough, the bitter pine still clinging to my tongue.
The kettle ticks softly near the coals.
An embarrassed laugh escapes her. “Please, do not mistake me, sir. I am not fishing for matrimony. Only seeking to understand you both.”
“No, of course not. Boone is…”
The word catches. To call him singular feels like betrayal.
“I do not believe he has had a woman in his life in some time.”
There.
The truth, dressed carefully enough to pass.
“Ah,” she says.
She turns the tin cup in her hands, watching the steam thin.
“Back home,” she says, “people took my widowhood like a temporary ailment. They spoke as if remarriage would heal me. Like a dead husband was just an old boot you could replace with a little effort.” She huffs a quiet, humorless laugh.
“But what I wanted was not a new husband. What I wanted was my own name on my own door.”
I find myself smiling. “Your own apothecary,” I remember. “You mentioned it once before, beside the campfire.”
“Yes,” she says, her expression softening, surprised that I had listened, perhaps.
“I loved my husband. Eli was good to me. But I do not miss being managed. I am fully capable of managing myself.”
“Managed,” I repeat.
She nods. “It is not merely that a husband expects service. It is the world’s assumption that he is entitled to it. That my time, my body, my ambition must take the shape he defined.”
The fire pops. Outside, the wind leans hard against the cabin, and the word husband turns over in my mind.
I know what the church says a husband is. I know what the nuns taught us, what the preachers read from their books. A man at the head. A wife beneath his roof, beneath his name, beneath his will. All dressed up in candles and scripture until it sounds less like possession.
I think of Sister Margaret in her habit. The robes, the prayers, the solemn hush of it. Ceremony has its own power. I know that much. Some promises are too large for ordinary words.
But Boone and I had no church. No priest. No blessing anyone would name holy. Only the lake, the dark trees, his hand in mine, and the two of us promising what we already knew.
No robes. No rings. No law.
Still, I have never belonged to anything more truly.
“In scripture,” I say slowly, “marriage is spoken of as union. Not ownership.”
She lifts her eyes. “And yet in practice it often resembles acquisition.”
I cannot argue. I have watched it too—men speaking of wives the way they speak of acres and cattle. Even the gentlest men can do it without noticing.
That is the danger of custom. More habit than conviction.
“Do you believe marriage is necessary,” she asks, “for a life to be respectable?”
Respectable. A word used to judge a man’s choices.
“I stopped concerning myself with what folks find respectable a long time ago.”
A pleased look passes over her face.
“And you?” she says, almost reluctantly. “What do you concern yourself with, Mr. Collins?”
I could tell her the safe answer: survival. Enough provisions to get to spring.
But she is looking at me with such interest.
“I…” I start, and stop.
She waits without pressing.
At last, I say, “I only hope to be useful.”
Her face softens, but she does not patronize it. “You most certainly are,” she says simply. “We’d be lost without you.”
It should not undo me, a sentence that mild. But it does.
Somewhere beyond the walls, a branch cracks under snow. We both go still, listening.
Then another sound—boots breaking crust. A familiar step, coming up the porch. The latch lifts. Cold knifes in with him, carrying the scent of open country. Boone fills the doorway, snow crusted white along his shoulders and hat brim.
He brings no meat. That is the first bad news.
The second is the cough. It tears out of him before he can swallow it down.
“Christ alive,” he says, wiping his mouth with the back of his glove. “Smells like someone stuck a pine up a lumberjack’s backside in here.”
“Pine tea,” Lula offers sweetly. “May I pour you a cup? It’s good for the—”
“Hell no. Liable to start growin’ branches.”
His cough comes again, deeper this time.
Lula’s expression changes.
Not fear.
Assessment.
“Boone,” I say, his gruffness toward her rubbing me more raw than usual. “She is offering her expertise in maintaining winter health.”
At that, he takes off his hat, hangs up his coat, and pauses. “You had some?”
“I did.”
“Taste terrible?”
“It would not be the worst thing you’ve imbibed.”
He stares at the pot a long moment. “Yeah, all right.”
He meanders over, falling into a chair and rubbing his face with both hands. His cropped hair is flattened where the hat had pressed.
“No game moving. Wind out there near blew my face clean off. Horse is eatin’ hay like God quit makin’ it. We lose that horse, we’re a special kind of fucked.”
Lula pours him a cup, gentler than he deserves after all his noise. “This should help some.”
“Sure this ain’t gonna turn me to lumber?”
“I’m reasonably sure.”