I glanced at my wristwatch. Five minutes.
Behind me, thousands of covered wagons clamored with unruly children, chattering chickens, moaning cows. A mother sat on the bench of her prairie schooner, a fabricated smile static below her crisp poke bonnet, a basket of fruit clutched between her hands, a bawling toddler gripping her skirts. Around me crowded a flock of buckboard wagons and buggies. Before me, a smudge of roughened cowboys and criminals cloaked in black vests and Stetsons, leaning forward over their racehorses. They stretched for miles along the boundary line, their jackets a long smear of graphite across the muted soil. Soldiers maintained the line, hands resting on their rifles. And beyond, our prairie.
The expanse sloped to an unending horizon. A vast sweep of bone-colored pastureland strewn with craggy grasses and clumps of red soil; the meadow shades of gold and saffron and crumbled redwood. The earth, bursting with stories. The land, rumbling with sound.
I sipped from my canteen. The tea leaves failed to mask the foul-awful, salty taste of the water. In a buggy beside me, my older brother Willie patted his brocade waistcoat, searching for a smoke or the time, his other hand clasping the horses’ reins. He caught my gaze, and his face split in a wide grin full of teeth and mischief and premonition. On the bench beside him, my eldest brother, Ezra, glowered at the boundless universe before us, his whip clenched in his fist. Willie gossiped with the folks next to us, making pals along the way, as he always did. Those sweltering weeks camping before the territory opened, I’d hauled barrels of water from the creek to sell for twenty cents a ladle, while Willie had charmed a circle round town,collecting friends and whiskey. And Ezra, well, he’d scowled at the skyline and yelled at the sun to get moving.
My brothers sought broad ranges suitable for crops and cattle, hopefully miles and epochs away from my own claim. Rather than a barren patch of grassland, I’d scouted rolling fields, nestled up to a wandering creek and flanked by a wildwood. Weeks ago, we’d raced across the Strip, training our horses and determining our route. Beneath the prismatic summer sun, I’d pressed my black ankle boots into the dry clay and eaten from a bramble of sand plums. I’d found an isolated space, perfect to breed my horses. I yearned, desperately, for somewhere faraway, with clear water trickling by.
Wind lashed hair across my face. Minutes now.
And then the hollers and shuffling vanished—even the horses held their breath. It was a quiet distinct from anything I’d known before. The hush eerie and unsettling and somehow full: heavy with hope and longing. I slipped my fingers along Cricket’s buckskin withers, hummed a reassurance to him.
The crowd tugged toward the prairie, awaiting the distant boom of the cannon. I untied the bow clasped round my throat and dragged the navy gingham of my bonnet across my face, swiping off layers of dust and sweat. I shoved my hat in a pocket and swallowed, breathless.
One minute.
A wail sounded behind me, some babe unaware of the gravity of this moment. The cry shot shivers down my neck. The roar of the wind ebbed, abandoning us to silence. A pause. I felt on the edge of my own story, tottering between known and unknown. I gulped soil-flecked air, leaned forward, gripped Cricket’s black mane, my heart thrashing against my bones.
Boom.
A thunder of hooves, a riot of gunfire, the cannon’s echo haunting the length of my spine. I kicked Cricket, and we shot forward.
The crowd roared with hollers and whoops as we galloped downhill. Dust surged in a thick red vapor. The sound unfamiliar, a combustionof flesh and cloth, sweat and expectation, like the reverberation of thunderclouds.
Buckboards jolted and coughed. Wagons crumpled, wooden limbs strewn about the dirt.
A stallion reared, legs kicking at the dust cloud, panicked. The rider held on, face ashen, veins bulging on his forehead. Then he was thrown backward, tossed to roll about the prairie, surely now trampled to death. Before me, another horse collapsed.
I jerked Cricket’s reins, avoided the calamity.
Behind me, my brothers’ buggy shattered across the terrain—but they still followed. Those on racehorses shot ahead, the schooners fell behind, and a mist of carmine and brown swelled between. The wind tasted of dirt and minerals, of the deep mysteries lost in the underneath. Below, the ground throbbed with hoofbeats. The earth pulsed, as if we shook a heartbeat back into the dying land.
A spoked wheel busted in the gorge of a buffalo wallow: The buckboard rattled, then crashed. I gripped Cricket with my thighs and leaned into the swelling clouds of earth. Nothing seemed solid. Just sound and motion. Everything a nebulous whirl, carbon and ash and copper and the white of claim flags flashing like starlight, the dust blurring this moment to something like a delusion. This race etched itself over my past, redefining all that came before. I recognized it would become a pivot of my life, separating after from before.
Round the fires, folks whispered of what horrors might come on this day, of what some might stoop to in pursuit of their greed. Robbery, assault, murder. In this territory, my natural lawlessness would have value. This was a day where you needed to lose control, to be comfortable with those hidden corridors of your flesh, to explore your own darkness. I didn’t know my limits nor what I could live with.
What I knew? I wouldn’t be going back north, and I had no idea what I’d do to stay. I’d never much respected rules. And that was what scared me. Not prophecies of blood or ruin, but my thirst for so much, for everything, for something of my own.
Chapter Two
Iplucked at my split riding habit, the skirts sunk in the creek, the white hem now a sodden smear of amber clay. Sure enough, the race had hardly begun before my brothers’ buggy crashed.
Willie crouched beside the half-submerged wheel, his ostentatious fringed chaps soaking in the mud, his fingers clawing at an imperceptible fracture in a spoke. His grip slipped across the sludge. He was already half drunk, the day long from over.
“Well now, I’ll just rip this spoke off, hammer another on, and we’ll be a’going.” Willie pushed back his flop of hair and knocked his hat into the muck. “Damnation.”
Ezra shoveled mud away from the wheel, his tweed waistcoat straining across his stocky frame. As always, Ezra said nothing.
“That’ll take too long.” I puffed out some air.
After the cannon boom, rushers had spread in all directions, covered wagons lagging, racehorses dashing away. The roar dimmed, and I could hear isolated sounds now: the echo of distant gunfire, some pa berating his child, the clink of a metal cup in a barrel. Nesters waded past through the gully and climbed the rise. If we didn’t get out of this creek bottom, them bastards would steal my land.
Before me, the spindle of an oak chair sank in the mire—my brothers’ buckboard overflowed with unnecessary supplies. If we’d just tied our provisions about our horses and left the cursed buggy in Kansas, like I’d argued all summer, we wouldn’t be stalled. I’dalmost ditched my brothers last week to join Annetta Daisy and her community of women. Bonfire lore went that in the run of ’89, with revolver shoved in her waistband and stake in hand, Daisy leapt from a train, staked claim, and reboarded before the train passed on by. Supposedly, she’d held on to her homestead despite a gun battle. And rumors went that she’d help any woman file and stake claim: they just needed a six-shooter and a horse. But I hadn’t left my brothers. Supposed I wasn’t up for friendship. So here I was, stuck in a swamp.
Willie sighed and stood, hands pressed to his back. “It’s a doozy, the broken wheel.”
“It’s not broken, just stuck in this abyss.” I yanked a shovel free of its ties and cleaved the blade through the clouded water. “Just dig, alright?”
