Something had shifted. And I couldn’t say then whether I was stepping toward safety or straight into the fire of a scandal.
EVERYTHING BUT A CHILD OF GOD
The West stretched out before me like a messy unframed canvas. Unruly. Brown. Like God had spilled His drink and decided to call it a territory.
Major and I had urged Lessie into the bed last night, and he took the chaise. I had rocked in the bed barely able to breathe with the knowledge that there was a man in this tiny room, boots falling over the velvet chaise, tight belly rising and falling, and eyes always finding mine in the night. This morning, I turned to watch Lessie and Major eating cold shrimp. I didn’t trust seafood this far from the gulf, so I let them have it. Lessie made notes in her little book after she tasted something she liked.
“I’ll tell him it’s you.”Major had the audacity to say this like I’d won some bayou beauty contest. Good sir, I didn’t board this train to be crowned Miss Prairie Dust 1893 by a bounty hunter.
Was I supposed to be flattered? Swept away? I was far from fainting.
I’m not romantic. Notdesperately.
But I did think—just briefly—about the way Toussaint had looked at Eliza. That man trembled at the altar. Like love was the Holy Ghost and he’d just caught it in both hands. No one’s ever trembled for me.
Ididwant it, though. I had twisted myself into knots—so many, so tightly—that I was unrecognizable to myself. The way I’d started tousling my hair and taking those long, useless walks around my French Quarter apartment, waiting to bump into a miracle. I had lostmyselftrying to beher.
And I could never live that way again.
We’d been confined to the VIP cabin for the last twenty-four hours of the journey—me, Major, and Lessie, like debutantes in detention. Our meals were delivered to the door with the suspicious energy of a jailhouse slop line. Some fatherreallydidn’t trust his daughter. The conductor watched Major and Lessie like they were planning an armed rebellion.
But did they care? Absolutely not. They ate like royalty. I watched the world change outside. I thought about Ealy. And then Toussaint. And then, annoyingly, Major. His eyes on my hair. His hand on mine as we swapped sandwiches.
At least the view wasn’t confusing.
It was vast and wild, unruly in a way that both thrilled and unsettled me. The train ride from New Orleans had its moments of stunning clarity: the endless expanse of prairie grass shimmering in the light, the red rock mesas standing defiantly against the horizon, and the jagged peaks of distant mountains. Iwantedto see the grandeur. Itriedto see the grandeur.
But all I saw was chaos. No order, no sense, no society. Just land and sky and nerve.
And honestly, it made my stomach twist.
I tried to find the hidden order in the randomness. The way the grasses bent uniformly with the wind, like wispy dancers. Even the train itself, though grimy and rattling, kept a steady tempo as it cut through the West. I clung to these patterns, like tiny anchors.
By the time the train pulled into the last stop, where a fancy Wells Fargo stagecoach waited to take the remaining passengers farther west, I was already mentally cataloging the next steps. I avoided Major’s gaze, keeping to myself as I busied my hands, readying my supplies for the transition to the coach. The stagecoach gleamed, its rich red panels trimmed in polished gold.
In Denver, an expectant husband stood swaying at the platform, scanning faces for a bride I knew was never coming.
I was just about to step forward, tell him she’d gotten off in St. Louis with her skirts hitched and her lover in tow, when the man staggered toward a stack of packing crates and smashed them with a single blow. Wood splintered. A child nearby started crying.
Then came the shouting. He called her everything but the child of God, each word meaner than the last.
So I stopped. Because maybe that rich girl hadn’t runtowardromance after all.
Maybe she was runningaway fromthis.
I kept my mouth shut and boarded the stagecoach. Like any other woman minding her own business.
NEVER GETTING TO CARSONDALE
The interior of the stagecoach was surprisingly plush, with leather seats that bore the faint scent of saddle oil and windows shielded by delicate lace curtains. I’d prepared for discomfort, but this was decadence on wheels, or at least the frontier version of it. There were six passengers, far fewer than the coach’s maximum capacity, and this made all the difference. Profit had triumphed over propriety; the company, eager to fill seats, had ignored the rigid segregation rules. For Wells Fargo, practicality outweighed prejudice, and white and Negro passengers rode side by side.
Major’s broad back swayed outside the carriage, his spine straight, as if the least desirable seat on the entire stagecoach were some royal throne. When the carriage jolted, he didn’t jolt inelegantly like they did inside. Instead, he merely shifted, letting the sun catch the sharp line of his jaw, looking every bit like the self-appointed King of the West instead of a lowly Negro forced to cling to the stoop for dear life.
Out here, in the yawning vastness of the frontier, everything was so aggressively large and unorganized. But Major was a pin in the map, a familiar grounding thing in an unfamiliar world. The land stretched out in every direction, unbothered by human concerns. There was simply too much of everything. The sky, a bottomless shade of blue. There was nowhere to contain it, no neat edges, no sense of proportion.
It was, frankly, sloppy.
Lessie groaned next to me, cutting through my internal complaints about God’s maximalist architecture. Lessie had beenpleasant enough, a hearty, cheerful sort in the back of the train, even while carrying what looked to be an entire family inside her swollen belly. But now, something was off. I noticed it immediately: the telltale darkness spreading around her neck, the unnatural sheen of sweat across her forehead. It was not the graceful, light perspiration of a genteel woman enduring discomfort but the soaked-through sort, the kind that spoke of something systemic failing in real time.
