December 1893 and January 1894
Earth
the same land—springtime 1087
eight hundred years before
Let me tell you a new tale.
Through the eons, I become something new, re-forming and evolving, my plates jostling mountains and carving rivers, the stretch of a valley, the burst of a volcano, my body reconstructing again and again. Alteration is something I know. But now change comes suddenly. Once, my body was wide, sweeping prairies and lost forests. Now, they hammer metal veins into my forearms, the railroads fissuring like river and tributary across my chest. Once, the buffalo rubbed their backs on my grassland, their rolling creating rainwater wallows for birds. With their hooves, they aerated my soil for new growth. But the buffalo disappear. And I am thirsty. My skin crackles and withers, and faraway through time, dust storms blossom across my robe.
The cries are getting louder. They writhe and they ache.
Across my body, women are screaming. It’s time.
Minnie, do you hear me? I see you pause, watch the scatter of shadows between the hickories, and I’m trying to tell you—I understand heartbreak, I understand lonesome. But you’re not alone. There’s a community of women waiting for you.
For you to know the ancestry of this land, we must start at the beginning. Once, longago before time, there was a woman named Prairie Rose. She’s the woman in your mirage—burrowing through bramble, journeying somewhere unknown. Prairie Rose lived. But then, she was remade into folktale. She becomes a flower, made of petal and thorn. While a southern wind rages, she battles to bloom on my meadows. Whirlwinds, always blustering against wildflowers.
Have you heard the unearthly tales, of the violent removal of the Natives, the unfathomable horrors and brutality? I watched. An era full of anguish and terror. Haunting voices bled into my body, sorrow loop-stitched up my spine. The echoes of Prairie Rose’s agony quakes through my fields and my woodlands, her wails tangle inside the void. But, she endured. She bloomed.
Prairie Rose is just one of my stories, there are many.
Winter comes again, and I shudder. Haze creeps like gossamer over my meadows; the midnight hours lengthen and swell; the wind whips. Crevasses gnaw between my bones, hot flashes swamp over my shoulder blades, my body weary with age and mistreatment.
Minnie, are you listening? I’m rewriting memory.
I chronicle a narrative of this land, of these rolling hills nestled up to Crooked Creek. Of the women who’ve walked here—and the history they left behind. Do you understand? Like a quilt draped across time, women patchwork across my body. Lives stitched together, the quilted pattern repeating.
The story, this folklore of women, is always beginning again.
Let’s restart.
Chapter Fourteen
Oklahoma Territory—December 22, 1893
four weeks later
Ibunched the withering wool of my shawl below my jawline, the wind surly as all wrath. Winter spiraled deeper and deeper until springtime felt like a misremembered past. I led Cricket through the broad doorway of my barn into the carriage room. Patches of glow patterned with the dark across the packed-dirt floor. I felt in my bones the transition from bleak, howling winter to the quiet shadows of my barn. At his stall, I hung Cricket’s bridle and saddle blanket, then tugged off kidskin leather gloves, warming my palms against my red flannel petticoat. I exhaled tepid air on my hands and rubbed Cricket’s flanks, his gaunt barrel expanding with heavy breaths. He nickered—and I jolted. I’d become used to hush. There was peace in the steady expectancy of quiet.
Grayed daylight streamed through the wooden planks into Smallhopes’s empty stall. It was strange to not hear her stomping. I flexed and unflexed my frozen fingers, then grabbed Cricket’s hairbrush off a nail. I missed Smallhopes—but I’d needed this barn. I’d traded herto the proprietor of Enid’s general store for some furniture, a stove, and the materials to build my barn. I’d wavered. The wife had offered her five sons to build my barn, a flock of chickens, twenty dollars’ credit for food over the winter, and packets of sunflower and wildflower seed. I’d been eyeing those frivolous seeds. “Add that sketch pad and charcoal set,” I said. “And that’s a trade.”
And so they’d built my barn. With leftover wood, I’d hammered together tables and built a bed frame into the wall of my shack. By tugging a length of canvas across the grass, I’d dragged my stove inside. I’d scattered the seed, rigged a chicken coop, and scowled at the fresh paper. I didn’t have time to paint: This age of my life was wind, soil, work. On another venture down ol’ Chisholm Trail to Wakita, I’d traded one of the cowboys’ shotguns for a milk cow, Mrs. Dawdle. My palms wet on the Winchester, thumb brushing the checkered walnut stock, anxiety knotted in my gut. There was risk that someone would recognize the long gun—but I was hungry.
“Alright,” I spoke into the smoky shadows of my barn, my voice gritty in the silence. I brushed my knuckles along the bridge of Cricket’s nose. “You’ll be safe here, old buddy. Good night.”
Outside, the wind spittled, and coyotes clamored from off faraway. Golden light spread along the horizon as another lonesome night rushed forward. My land was tawny brown and rounded in dusk, pocketed with shadows and mystery. I pulled up my shawl and leaned into the gale, pressing through the current like wading through muddy Kansas ponds. The stitches on my gloves had frayed, the leather wispy, my hands brittle in the cold. Something shifted along the ground, and I searched for a rattler. I’d smashed another snake the day before last. But there was no rattle, instead a squeak and whistle threaded along the wind, as if a draught spun through a keyhole of an elm.
I scoured the shadows smudged between the hickories. All evening I’d felt as if someone narrated fireside legends to me. Fragments of wide tales, glimpses of other lives lived. A disquiet, that inexplicable feeling of not being alone. My rifle was propped beside my bed, so I pointedmy broom toward the sounds—in the gloom of dusk, that would do the trick if someone was out there. But there was no one.
Just a rattling, muffled and hoarse. As if voices called across a great distance. An impression appeared before me across the landscape. The vision was like an ambrotype photograph developing on a plate of glass, a transient image of ghostly, dimensional shadows and granular lines. Glass dipped into a puddle of silver nitrate, a form slowly emerging, a world taking shape. I glimpsed a woman astride a buckskin mustang, clothed in brown Levi’s waist overalls, galloping along a distorted expanse as if silver liquid spilled across the illusion. Gold snapped across the phantasm, the gilt braid round the woman’s cowboy hat, the stars on her spurs, details coming into focus, then fading away into mist. The apparition wasn’t fully developed, as if it existed in that space between when the glass was set in the chemicals and when an image came to be.
I blinked, but the daydream didn’t vanish. Warmth kneaded my boot soles, as if my land breathed hot fire, as if the earth was awakening. Distinct notes emerged from the chatter, sound collapsing into something resembling words.Memories intertwine, and then perhaps,a new history of women arriving.
I didn’t understand what was happening. I must be filling up the quiet and the broken and the hidden places of myself with old tales. I must, for what other explanation was there? I’d heard of diseases of the mind, of women who heard voices or saw prophecies. Of women locked in asylums. But I didn’t feel like I was unraveling. I held my shawl tight against my throat. “Is something there?” I yelled, air rushing into my mouth.
On a sudden, the mirage dissolved, saturated colors and graphite shadows disappearing last. It was quiet, and I was alone.
