The day had passed, Stot and I tunneling underground, the air a perfect winter warmth; I didn’t need my cloak and could feel sunglow along my forearms. Stot burrowed deep into the earth, filling buckets with soil, and I’d turn the windlass, hauling the pail up to pour aboveground. Except for a jaunt to feed his animals and change out of Willie’s ghastly shirt, Stot had tended my homestead. All day. With a bullet wound. I had to study him to even register change in how he moved. He mainly used his hale arm, adjusting his stance for balance. No matter how he’d gained his notorious reputation, he could work. It reminded me of Pa’s tireless labor, of the steadfast nature of a lifetime of sweat and hardship. But Stot seemed to enjoy farming: There was an ease about him, a settled happiness as he worked my land.
Early in the morning, he’d studied the bees about the sweet clover, with that long-suffering patience of his. Then he’d followed a bee across the meadow, returning after a while with a comb of honey and the location of the hive. I’d gaped at him, wondering why I’d never been so intuitive. Now I heard scrapes and humming belowground as he filled my well bucket. As long as the earth didn’t cave in and smother him, I’d have a well soon. Myown well—water, here beside my shack. I ripped up wild onions and tossed them into the pot. Maybe I’d gotten this man all wrong. Instead of wreaking havoc across the frontier, it was almost as if life had fought him, hardened him. What in blasted tarnation had happened with the Wild Bunch? I wanted to argue that tales of the Lawman were just sensational storytelling round bonfires, and yet—hadn’t I just nursed him after a gun battle?
I twisted the ladle about, the oil and rust tinge of the stew foaming with caramel brown. It smelt halfheartedly of winters in Kansas, a faint, faraway remembrance of the past. Sometimes life on my homestead seemed but a phantom of life before, but today felt vivid and present. I thought of another warm winter’s day nearly a year ago, when Lark told me he wouldn’t be homesteading.
Impressions of that afternoon rolled over me: crouching down, slicing fur from a rabbit’s body, sunshine a gloss on my collarbone, Lark leaning against a maple sapling, listening for game. Light glinting inside ripples of creek water, a willow bobbing below the water’s edge. Unbuttoning my shirt, readying for a swim. That moment, when I’d glanced over my shoulder, my overblouse undone and loosened from my skirt, wind on my bare skin, and I’d recognized Lark’s discomfort. His palms pressing into his eyes, his bearing weighted. Saying that he was fond of his life in Kansas, that he didn’t want to gallivant off to outlaw country in search of something, that he didn’t wantmeafter all. I’d held my blouse closed, the ivy-embroidered linsey falling off my shoulders, wintry air slicing up my neck.
On my homestead, I ran my hand up the back of my dress, felt the buttons and the dips. In the end, like Magnolia, Lark hadn’t come along. I’d been discarded to venture off alone. My closest friendships, the ones I’d held on to the width of my life, had disintegrated with one brutal divide. I reimagined my life now as a long quiet, alone on the prairie. I dropped a pinch of my boiled salt into the pot, noted the melody of Stot’s humming. This wasn’t the life I’d dreamt nor the man I expected about my farm, but Stot sure as hell dug a better hole than Lark.
I tossed a clove of garlic into the pot. Blast, I was supposed to smash the garlic first. With my ladle, I raised some broth above the surface, studied the gummy texture. Beyond the black curve of trees, the sun dimmed behind the broad gray clouds of an Oklahoman sky. Nightfall was coming. The prairie seemed to tip backward into the darkness, and the horizon swayed. I shielded the glare of sunrays with my palm. The ground shuddered, as if the large hands of someone’s god grasped the edges of my land and shook. A zip, zap.
I slammed down the lid of my pan, grasped my pistol, and stepped toward the forest-green shadows. There was a sound, like breath pushed through closed teeth, and a short buzz. Perhaps one of my horses sneezed, faroff.
Let me tell you a new tale.
I spun. A cluster of sugarberries swooped in the wind, their small green leaves shivering like ripples in water. Springtime colors. The leaves dissolved, juniper to chartreuse to sable, then gone. The branches returned once more to the forlorn limbs of winter. I felt off balance. I searched the meadow for movement, but the expanse was now static, as if attached once again to the core of the earth. I blinked, eyes dry in the winds. Boots pressed against soil, I adjusted my grip on my pistol’s ivory handle, the etchings denting my skin. I watched my land, waited. But there was only silence. And yet I could smell summer flowers. Rose vervain and honeysuckle and fresh hedge parsley, as if time wasn’t stable out in the vastness of my prairie.
Gusts whistled through the high grasses, and I tugged at a loose thread on my apron. The haze stuttered into focus: a woman in a rocking chair. Afghan pulled across her lap, newspaper held open, the scent of orange pekoe tea, and I felt swept into her story. She resembled every homesteader I’d known, and yet—she was a startling likeness of my mother. The newsprint fuzzed, letters coming in and out of focus.Let the women stir about a bit.I stepped forward.Their freedom has been purchased by the tears and heartaches of generations of women to whom freedom was but a name.I squinted, butthe vision blurred into fog. My skirt snagged—a jumble of burrs gripped the fabric. I untangled my skirt from the oats and tugged the burrs off, the seeds piercing my fingers. I didn’t understand this phenomenon, of glimpsing moments of another’s life.
“Minnie.”
I flinched and spun around.
“You alright?” Stot asked.
“Course I’m alright.”
His gaze brushed across my posture, the grip on my revolver. I sheathed my gun.
Dirt edged his temple, the carmine shade vibrant beside his mossy-green eyes, black hair. He wiped a rag over the angles of his face. Then he sauntered forward, trousers slunk low on his hips, a cowboy swagger, as if he drew from the slow tide of the earth.
“Oh—” I wiped my hands on my apron, stepped forward. “Is that well water?”
He leaned against the wood siding of my shack, peeked in the soup pot, a mug dangling from his hand. “Your soup smells off.”
“It does not.”
He crouched beside a small board, an oil landscape awash with moody grays and blues. His fingers hovered over the raised texture of the wheat stalks I’d carved with a palette knife. He glanced over his shoulder. “Did you paint this?”
“I did.”
He studied my painting for a long moment, sunlight glinting against the metal cup. “Who’s the woman?”
“What woman?”
He pointed to a translucent vapor hovering at the dip of a hillock, like a funnel cloud sworling. I hadn’t noticed how the highlights gathered. The brushstrokes did resemble a woman strolling in a pale Regency gown, loose hair trailing behind, lights an array round her frame. But I hadn’t painted a woman. She wasn’t there.It was just a reflection off the glazing I’d mixed of paint and linseed oil, just a trick of texture and luminosity.
He watched me, brow furrowed. “I like it.”
“Okay.” I held my arms. “So did you find water?”
“I did.”
I took the cup from him: clear liquid pooled inside the silver tin. A well, on my land. I sipped.
And spewed out rancid water.
I gasped.
