“You’re right up yonder from the creek.” Willie offered the apple core to his mare and picked a piece of hay off his trousers. “You truly need a well?”
I breathed in through my nose. Yes, I needed a well. It was wearying, hauling water all the time. I’d spent days digging their wells in the sweltering heat of summer’s end. Had helped hammer up their shacks, repaired one of Willie’s guns when it hang-fired, worked with Ezra’s mare when she’d spooked during storms. I was done. I held my arms out, dramatically dropped Ezra’s bundle on the barn floor, and strode beyond the broad doorway. Outside, gunmetal-hued clouds foamed across the sky, a thundershaker rising from the south.
Ezra followed and grasped my arm. I tugged it back. “Don’t handle me like that.”
“You will wash my laundry,” he said. “It’s your role.”
“I never agreed to that. Find yourself a wife.”
His bushy eyebrows were straight lines across his brow. “It’s nonsense, you off on your own.”
I held my wrist where he’d grabbed me, his thumb imprinted on my skin. Ezra and I had fought the length of our childhood, but our arguments had always felt like sibling sparring, something on the edge of play. This didn’t feel like play.
Disquiet clamored below my rib cage. Surely the feeling was misplaced, just unease from talk of the missing outlaws and the voices on my land. But watching the fury spike across Ezra’s shoulders, the tautness of his spine, remembering all his righteous, anti-suffrage beliefs that threaded deeper and deeper, I wondered. And I felt fear.
“Darn my clothes,” he said.
“Sure enough,” I said. “You can come round and gather them—when you help dig my well.”
“You will do as I say.”
A forgotten moment flickered in and out, of another blistering fight with Ezra. I’d been maybe five, arguing that it was my turn to chop wood;him, eleven and screaming to just get on inside. Ma swept out the door, drying her hands on a rag.Stop hollering at your sister.She reached for him, as if to draw him in for a hug, and he flinched.Ezra?He tossed the axe across the field, stomped away. From the switchgrass, I hefted the blade, wrapping my small hands around the wooden handle. Ma absently dried her hands, a deep wrinkle between her brows. I couldn’t recall what happened next but after that, when Ezra rounded a corner, I’d learned to walk the other way.
I couldn’t fathom his anger, as our parents had raised us in a happy home. I didn’t suppose Ezra’s cruelty was rooted in his zealotry, as he’d been tightly wound as far back as I could remember. Perhaps his fervent beliefs puffed up his need to dominate others, but they weren’t the cause. Maybe someone had hurt him, somewhere I hadn’t seen. Shown him a more ruthless way to live.
Near the windbreak, a few whitetail deer twitched their ears, sunset light flooding the hardwoods. The deer spooked—and ran away. Ezra smoothed wayward eyebrow strands, the veins on his palms bulging. He vibrated in his fury, waiting for me to relent.
Willie breezed outside, hands slid in his baggy, wide-legged trouser pockets, brows lifted. “It’s fixing to gush a thunderclapper.” He riffled through the coins in his pockets, the jangle bright in the terse silence. “We’ll come round the next clear day, won’t we, Ezra?”
I gripped my holster, didn’t break Ezra’s glare. “I don’t trust you anymore.”
Ezra scoffed. “Not sure you’re qualified to judge anyone’s character.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Hear that Lawman comes by, often enough.”
“That’s none of your business.”
I stepped forward, but Willie looped his arm round my shoulder. “Two days, promise,” Willie said.
“Fine,” I snapped. “But I’m done with you today.” I shrugged off Willie and strode through the high grass. I didn’t look back. The uncomplicated days of our childhood felt long ago.
The following afternoon, the air fresh and crisp from a downpour the night before, I hung up the wash, a line stretching from the eaves of my shack to the quaking aspen uphill aways. I’d cleaned my brothers’ wash but was determined to ransom their laundry with help round my homestead. I held a curtain between my fingers and clipped it to the line, sunbeams filtering through the lace pattern, sketching floral silhouettes on my hands. The week before I’d left for the Strip, this same curtain rumpled in my lap, Ma had leaned against the doorframe, quieter than usual. I crouched beside my travel chest, folding linens and shirtwaists. Ma’s demeanor was fragile, unsteady as she navigated this season of change: Magnolia just married, her other three children venturing into the frontier.
“Lord have mercy,” she said. “I’m proud of you—but you sure you want to go?”
I placed the lace curtain deep in my trunk. “Course I want to go.”
She tipped her head back against the dark wood doorframe. “You running?”
“What?” I picked up a sheet, folded it lengthwise. “What would I be running from?”
She lifted her brows, pausing to let that thought hang, and then she held out her hands for the fabric. “Here, let me show you.” She snapped out the sheet, cobalt lines vivid in the sunglow, and showed me again how to fold linens crisp.
“Ma, stop. You know I’ll never be able to fold like you.”
She sat beside me on the floor, sheet scrunched in her lap, blue lines coiled about directionless. “Well, and I’d never be able to shoot a rattler off a fence from fifty paces like you, so I think you’re the one to venture off as a pioneer, not me.”
