She thanked me, and we crunched the popcorn balls in silence. After a time I brushed my hands along my apron and asked, “You were saying something, about the missing cowboys?”
She tucked a piece of hair back into her French braid, turned toward me. “Here’s the thing: No one’s seen hide of them since September. Their wives back in the Dakotas are pressing for answers, screeching about foul play.”
I wrought my knuckles, unease anchored in my stomach. “Why does anyone even care?” I scratched at a dry patch on my wrist. I couldn’t figure why folks didn’t just let this story die. It was the Wild West: People disappeared. “Men roam, leave their wives all the time.”
“Story goes,” Olive said, “that they weren’t just cattlehands but Wild Bunch outlaws.”
“Well,” I paused, “damn.”
“Bitter Creek, that gangly, unnerving Wild Bunch outlaw, he’s haunting social gatherings, questioning homesteaders—all a’fire about the mystery.” Olive studied the sunshine striking from a low cloud. “I don’t fancy folks impassioned about one cause or another.”
I broke apart my popcorn ball, hands sweaty, the crumbles sticky in my palm. Out in the frontier it was vigilante rule—everyone creating their own order. It didn’t matter what the law said, it mattered what folks decided about you. Sometimes a claim of self-defense would saveyou, other times you’d be hung before nightfall. “You think the county’s moving toward vigilante law.”
“They just haven’t chosen their target yet,” Olive said.
Sakes alive, we didn’t need more trouble. It was enough, just surviving winter. Perhaps Olive was right, that folks sought someone to blame, but I couldn’t turn myself in, as men never believed a woman’s story. But—no one had found the bodies. My corner of the frontier should be safe from a witch hunt.
My translucent bags of geese feathers fluttered in the breeze, sunlight a’glow through the linen, the feathery silhouettes gray shadows. I realized her earlier implications about Stot: I’d killed the cowboys, yet he was under fire. Once again my choices heaped havoc onto someone else.
“And it reasons,” I said, “that the Wild Bunch could target their enemy, the Lawman, and me being neighborly with him—”
“Just take care of yourself, Amelia. Be watchful.”
“You as well.” I gnawed my lip. “And you can call me Minnie.”
She snorted. “You truly don’t let folks in, do you?” She took my hand and squeezed. “Think about the dance, won’t you?”
She stood, brushing her hands along her faded raspberry-pink calico dress, and crossed my pasture, her empty basket hanging off the crook of her arm. My posture was taut, sweat slipping down my back.
Olive turned, spoke from across the field. “You do know: There are folks who can handle your dark spaces.”
She walked up the hillock again and, soon enough, disappeared into haze. The scraggly branches along my horizon blurred, and distantly cows groaned. The sun tripped across the sky, day quickening toward the coming darkness of night. I strode downhill. I had work to do.
At candlelighting, I propped a wooden panel against the raised bark of a blackjack oak, a few tubes of oil paint clutched in my palm. I’d salvaged the board from a broken crate, the surface already primed with gesso. I was determined to paint with color again. Across the sky, the lush sunset soaked upward while the laundry lingered on the line and a pile of logs hulked beside my axe. I stepped forward, held a flat sable-haired brushvertical—then I painted the expanse in rushed, impressionist strokes, drenching the board in thick smears of vermilion and cobalt and amber. After the sky darkened several shades, I dropped my brush into the wheatgrass, hefted my axe, and went to split firewood. A while later, with the sun fallen beyond the curve of the earth, in that ghostly luminescence of twilight, I walked on past. I spotted something within my painting. There seemed a shape moving among the grasses, a flick of a withered shawl, the elegant curve of a collarbone—an impression of a woman not wholly there.
Apprehension squirmed round my shoulders. I’d read a story last year inNew England Magazineof a woman who’d lost hold of her reason, haunted by a figure crawling about her hideous yellow wallpaper. I couldn’t remember what had become of her. There was risk if someone glimpsed my sanity fracturing. Even though old folktales just wandered my resting mind, if I seemed the slightest bit unmoored, I could end up trapped and caged, imprisoned in an asylum. I turned the board around and walked on, oil paint smearing like warmed wax across my thumb and along the swoop of my palm, the air pungent with the sharp scents of mineral and woodland.
Chapter Sixteen
The next day I slammed my shovel into the dirt, forcing the tool farther into the earth with my heel, the ground hard and unyielding, the air today watery and too thin. I tossed the load, the brittle red clay crumbling in oblong circles and squares. If only I’d finished digging my well before winter. But no, here I was, still burrowing, my shovel barely edged beneath the surface. The sun submerged below the tree line, and a butter-yellow light speared between the branches. Winter echoed with faint sounds, like a lingering of long-gone summer crickets. The periodic whinny of the wind or the rustle of an animal scampering through brush. My shovel hit a rock, and the ricochet reverberated up my forearms into my biceps. I huffed out some air and leaned over the handle.
It was Christmas Eve, and I was alone. The days and years and seasons of my life blurred, the colors of our farm oat and sable and Magnolia’s favorite rose-pink dress. But Christmas, those moments stood at attention. Evergreen and white, cranberry and gold. Magnolia and Pa before the fire, caroling. Willie pulling Ma to her feet, candlelight flashing on the pine boughs, my hand grasping Magnolia’s, and we’d whirl round the room. Ezra scowling from the corner, smoothing his wiry waves of hair into place. Pa muttering prophecies of spring:Now, did you note them stripes across the catapillas? We’re in for a long winter; Ezra arguing about rings aroundthe moon or low quantities of acorns. I’d lie about seeing the thick tail of a coon or woodpeckers sharing a tree, send Ezra into a tizzy. That had been my life. But I was here, right at present, creating my own story. Memory was a lost place—distorted with time, forever ungraspable.
A remembrance settled over me, of the Yuletide celebration the year before, when families from across the county had roamed over to celebrate on our farm. A scratchy wool throw blanket wrapped around my shoulders, racing downhill, winter grass brittle on my bare feet, cold air scraping down my throat in gasps, our laughter an echo across the lowland. Beside me, Willie bound through the prairie, lifting his legs high, trying to avoid the inevitable burrs from catching on his new slacks, his hands full of Lark’s clothes. I couldn’t believe Lark had fallen for the prank, Willie daring him to stand outside naked for ten minutes, but, of course, we’d stolen his clothes and headed off yonder to the millpond.
There was a holler, and I peeked over my shoulder, skidding downhill over gravel, grasping Willie’s arm so I wouldn’t fall, a laugh cracking from me. Lark sprinted after us, his skin a white glow in the dark, a cowboy hat held over his unmentionables, the golden bonfires of the celebration a blaze along the rise.
“I’ll handle the clothes. You stall him.” I caught the bundle from Willie, then rushed downhill, the garments smelling of horses and sweat. I reached the pond and jumped across stones, headed to the mossy outcrop in the middle. I slipped on some algae and grasped the wide-flung oak limb overhead to steady myself—dropping Lark’s clothes in the wallows, his overalls a blue smudge sinking in mire. Willie and Lark ran up then. “Ah, hell,” Lark said, scowling at his clothes in the shallows, and then he rushed me.
He swooped me round the waist and tossed me over his shoulder. I gasped and called for Willie, but he just grinned and let Lark haul me away, surely to toss me in the pond.
“Lark.” I smacked his back. “Come now, this satin will pucker, and my ma will have my head.”
“Well, you might as well take it off then. You’re headed for the water.”
He lowered me, my bodice sliding along his bare chest, my ankles and hemline dipping into the freezing water, the creek trickling on by. His usual grin pressed into his face, but it felt thin at the corners. “I reckon we should be careful,” he said.
I looked at my fingers, narrow and tapered along his chest. “When have I ever wanted careful?”
