“No.” She crossed her arms, her blond plait brushing the lace cuff of her overblouse. “I’ve never been you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? We’ve always—”
“Minnie, stop.” She lowered beside me in the bramble, her knee bumping my hip. “I don’t want to argue with you.”
I unwound my cape and looped the wool over a low branch, the bough arching above a cluster of snowdrops. Though one of the first flowers of springtime, snowdrops felt like an omen. Their delicate white bells bent earthward as if they wept. Magnolia was making a mistake, and I didn’t know what to do. I took her upturned hand, and she folded forward, resting her forehead against my collarbone. I wrapped my arms around her, and she muttered against my blouse, “I don’t want to go. I want to stay here, where it’s comfortable.”
As a child, she’d grasped my palm and followed me through faroff pastures, holding on while I discovered new worlds. But homesteading in outlaw country was beyond measure. I supposed I should forgive her fear, having lost both her parents so young, but goodness—why couldn’t she ever take a risk?
She found a new safe harbor instead. “And that future husband of yours?” I asked.
She sat back, wrought her hands, her joints shiny and almost translucent where bone pressed against skin. “Well, this week he’s talking of building a home on down by the millpond.” She let loose an effervescent smile. “I like his ideas.”
I blew at my hair. “It’s fear-flooded and sluggish.”
She grasped her knees, studied me with those dark-brown eyes that never quite stopped thinking. “Just because you want some grand adventure and I don’t, doesn’t make my dreams any less.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“Well,” she said, tucking a lock back into her braid, “you just said it wasfear-flooded.”
“Fine. I do think it’s living in fear. A foolish grasp at control.” I unearthed another morel and tossed the mushroom into my basket. I sighed and thumped my back against the elm trunk. “I don’t understand you anymore.”
Magnolia brushed a thumb along her white boots, the leather clean, without even a smudge. She dug out a morel, her posture austere, as if she was containing her own shape. “You don’t have to understand my choices to support me.”
Her lips were pursed, that elegant curve of her brow, the rose hue smudged under her pale skin, her small, deft fingernails brushing the soil from a mushroom: I couldn’t hold on to the rapidly shifting pieces of her anymore. We were changing: Magnolia, soon a wife; me, chasing after rush and exhilaration. I was losing her—my tether to who we’d been dissolving. I didn’t know how to let go. But it seemed I had to let her make her own mistakes.
On my homestead, the horsefly zipped across my forehead, and I swatted him away. Though Magnolia and her husband now tilled their own farm, on a stretch of smooth brome down beside the old millpond, leaving her had felt like a death. Our lives forever apart, our relationship broken—irreparable as if she had died. I shoveled more rows until moisture poured beneath my shirtwaist and my hands ached. Sweat soaked between my toes, so I untied my boots and sank my bare feet into the mud. The burn had enriched my homestead, causing all the nutrients to seep into the clay. The soil was sandy and rich, wetted by rain and warmed by sunglow. With the hush of isolation, my hands in the dirt, I heard a groan. I sat back on my heels and scraped my wayward strands back into a plait. As I looped the length around my head like a coronet braid and shoved in hairpins, Iscrutinized the prairie. It was almost as if someone were retelling a story I’d once known. I didn’t suppose I was losing my grasp on sanity, just that in my solitude, I could hear the space between silence.
I gulped from my canteen and noticed movement near the windbreak. A flock of bobwhite quail freckled about the understory. After grabbing my Winchester and boots, I stalked across the meadow toward the birds, the soft whir of their calls quaking between the rye grass. A twig cracked—the pointed ears of a gray fox twitched, and the quail scattered. I pinged off a shot, missed. Sighing, I looped my rifle’s strap across my body and turned away from the hunt, slipping instead into the forest.
The cool shade of the wildwood washed over me. I roamed deer trails, popping violet hackberries into my mouth and unearthing roots. After filling a pocket with chinkapin acorns, I stumbled upon a sapling with velvety, coral-colored persimmons. I plucked one off the branch and ate, the bitter tannins puckering the sides of my mouth. Once the first frost passed, I’d gather the ripened fruit to dry in the sun. Dried persimmons were a luxurious treat, almost like gingerbread. The brush thinned before me, an expansive prairie opening beyond. I crept closer, adjusting the angle of my Winchester across my back to avoid a low branch, and scanned the claim just beyond the wood.
I heard a thwack and reverberation before I saw him. The Lawman hammered a long beam, framing his shack. His sleeves were rolled up, unfiltered sunlight casting harsh shadows in the shirt’s creases. The muscles of his forearms flexed as he adjusted the angle of a sill, the naked wood linked between two corner posts. He glanced toward the thicket. Ran a wrist across his brow, wiping away sweat. How in hellfire had he heard me? I hunkered down, bit my lip.
His camp was methodically organized, tarps angled from stakes, several rows of vegetables already planted—andhe’d dug a hollow for rainwater. Blazes, that was a mighty clever notion. I itched to sneak onto his homestead, study how he’d constructed the shallow clay basin. By all accounts the Lawman was troublesome, but even I’d admit that was a good idea. I pushed off the slope and continued homeward. There wasmuch to be done, winter whisking in soon. An ancient oak had fallen across the pathway, the log rotted and smushed in places. I stepped over and continued on.
Slipping my hand into my pocket, I rubbed the key talisman I carried with me every day. One dawn, aways away in the deep of our childhood, Magnolia and I had ravaged across meadows and woodlands, gathering early spring blackberries and looking for some mischief or another. A flicker of dappled forest light had shone on the brass hue of the key, its tines sprouting from the earth. I’d pulled the skeleton key from the soil. It was small, perhaps to unlock a cabinet or gate. I’d been young enough that it felt like finding treasure. I’d wiped off the dirt with my apron and slipped the key into my pocket. The next day, Magnolia had strung a silver chain through the oval bow and held the talisman out to me in her palm. I’d worn the key round my neck for years after, a hope for extraordinary futures.
That had been long ago.
Chapter Nine
Igathered potato tubers in my apron and stepped beyond my waxed canvas tarp into the sunlight. The sweet, earthy scent of an October day sketched out all the empty spaces. My skirt caught on a sandbur, the bluebonnet cloth wrapped around the spiky seed head—I tugged. The burrs knotted up in the weave and wouldn’t release. Right there, where the fabric bunched, a maroon smudge puddled over the indigo flowers. No matter how hard I scrubbed, I couldn’t cleanse the bloodstain.
The cowboys kept on haunting.
I gripped tight my apron, the cloth heavy with potatoes, and unwound the golden, barbed seedpod from a blue floret. From the east, a shrill sound scuttered beneath the wind, a rumble like many voices. Foreboding swelled within me.
But it was only a woman and two girls walking across the prairie. I dabbed a cloth on my collarbone, my fingertips raw from the prickly sandburs, and strode toward them. I checked my wristwatch—today’s daylight was half used up. Sunbeams soaked the woman’s face, her skin a luminous deep brown and her black hair swept up into a bonnet. One hand wrought her skirt, a linsey-woolsey hued sepia with dust and dotted with clovers, and her other hand fidgeted with the red-checked edge of cloth in a basket. I noted both fierceness and hesitancy—she seemed giddy to come calling but also worried about how she’d be received.
“Afternoon,” she called.
I nodded, wiped a hand across my forehead.
“I’m Mrs. Olive Brown. Everyone just calls me Olive.” She pointed over her shoulder. “We’ve claimed the quarter section just east over the hill.”
“Ah.” I returned her smile. It felt brittle, not having smiled in a season. “Welcome. Amelia. Miss Hoopes.”
