I scraped a lucifer across his matchbox, touched the spark to the tip of a cigarette. “Sometimes I’m buried too deep in the mud to even see a toad.”
He scooted me closer. I smelt the bitter tang of whiskey and faraway wintergreen. “So you left home and raced.” His exhale lifted the wayward strands off my neck. “So your sister could be happy?”
A deep gap stretched between the clouds: the sky empty and lonesome. I didn’t know how to bring words to my memories, of who I was before. Stot’s hand trailed up my back, and I started at the beginning.
“I loved Lark my whole life,” I said. Stot’s hand hitched. I rolled the cigarette between my fingers. “Growing up with Magnolia was the best part of childhood. I loved her, more than anything.” I flicked off embers. “Or so I thought.”
“You can still hurt those you love most,” Stot said. “It doesn’t eliminate your love for them.”
I glanced at him. “Perhaps.”
Could that be true? It seemed senseless. But loving her was one of the only real things I knew. A hazy image overcast my thoughts—of shaking salsifies as wide as cabbages with Magnolia, the white seed puffs loosening and detaching. The cloudlike seedpods taking off and floating away into golden sunshine. All those roomy, expansive afternoons, all those long seasons stretching back to when memory began—I was losing grip, my memories beginning to fade. To leave Magnolia had felt like a death. I couldn’t fathom how I could betray her, if I truly loved her. Stot widened his legs so I could turn and see his face. I slipped a hand in my pocket, rubbed the blunt tines of my skeleton key. Told him how Lark and I had started sleeping together last winter, how I’d believed we’d marry someday.
“What happened?” Stot asked.
“He married her.”
“And you left?”
“I ran away.”
A plume of smoke coiled from my chimney, and the sound of the hearth’s fire crackled through my shack’s walls. “But why are you punishing yourself?” he asked. “She married your feller.”
I picked at the winter-dead grass. Across the meadow a barred owl whooped his eight-beat call. “Now, I realize she’s your baby sister,” Stot said and threaded my palm into his, “but could you be romanticizing her in your memory?”
My memory, the past forever tumbling and churning. The morning after we’d quarreled in the forest, as dawn bled red-orange through my eyelet curtain, Magnolia crawled into bed with me, her arms slipping round my narrow shoulders, her chin pressed against the center of my back, her forehead smoothing wet tears against the wisps of hair at my nape.It’s always you and me,she’d said. I’d murmured that phrase as a child, her afraid of barn owls and monsters, her ringletstucked up in a puffy white bonnet, her lashes translucent. It’d always been us two—and Lark. I’d thought he was mine. But he was hers. In the rosy vapors of morning, her body warm and soft against my back, I considered how she’d always been sweet on Lark. I’d thought it youthful infatuation, but it seemed she loved him. Of course I wanted her to be happy, to step out from my shadow, of course I did—but why this choice? I supposed I should be proud. She’d the gumption to chase after the man she’d always wanted. I grabbed her forearms, held on, whispered back,Marry him.
On my prairie, the owl’s call elusive and wilting, I untangled my hands from Stot’s, settled them in my lap. Time stretched; the owl flapped his wings. “There’s more.”
Perhaps Stot was right, that I idealized Magnolia’s memory. Memories shifted and changed, all that was past distorted, until I wasn’t quite sure what was truth and what was the story I told myself. Under the starlight, Stot’s hands on my back, I told him the rest.
“I slept with Lark, my sister’s husband, the night before their wedding.”
There were those moments I didn’t want to remember, in my father’s barn. It smelt of whiskey then, as it did right at present, but then the woodiness stale, the tannins sour. There were so many sounds, meadowlarks roosting in the eaves, laughter prowling the wind currents, my moans in the dark, and then there were no sounds. My fingertips pulsed as I swept my palms over Lark’s damp shoulders. The hay prickled my scalp, all those translucent bluebells Magnolia and I had foraged and plaited into my hair—the blooms crushed and beginning to wilt. And Lark. His outbreaths stirred my wayward strands. He pushed up from the straw, his palms brushing the heavy sides of my breasts, and rolled off me. We stared at the ceiling, rectangular slats of alder wood nailed together with cracks obliging streaks of starlight and the air backlit with floating dust. A draught groaned along the barn, the squeak as air slipped inside. He rose and yanked on his trousers, moonlight grazing the musclesof his back, shadows edging out the hollows. Time thumped as he shoved his flannel into his waistband. A distant giggle drifted across the fields, the stomp of a horse. He didn’t say anything. He drew up his suspenders and climbed down the ladder, his eyes raking my half-naked form one last time. He left.
I hadn’t been thinking, when Lark had found me in the foggy shadows before the barn and kissed me. There’d been a thirst, a possibility that somehow we could go backward.Everyone will fail you,Pa often said.It’s better to trust none but your own self. But I couldn’t trust myself neither. I had no control. I was a madly spinning tornado, destroying all in my path.You’ve never had any restraint,Magnolia had said. I unclasped the chain around my neck and let my key talisman fall into the straw. Everything that we had been was past. I must find my own space, my own wide skies. Somewhere safe, where I could allow my tornadic winds to expand and evolve and someday, hopefully, dim. To love Magnolia was to leave.
On my homestead with Stot, the owl keened, the beats of his call thumping across my wrist like a pulse. I studied my blackened nails, the mud smudged along my forearm, the oil settled into my palm, my regret screeching along the broken spaces of the wind. I unbuttoned and rebuttoned Stot’s cuff, the calluses on my finger pads snagging on the paper.
Stot took my hand and brushed his fingers along my palm, relaxing the tension I held in my hand. He didn’t say he understood, didn’t say anything at all. He just kept on holding me as we sat in the gap of what once was. It was quiet, the night full of haunting, the sky so dark.
Midwinter
February and March 1894
Earth
August 12, 1873
twenty-one years before
You’re in the right story,I whisper, but I don’t think you hear.
It’s cold as the days fall into midwinter. Frost encrusts my fingertips, icicles cling to my hair. I tell you of Willie Matthews and Sally Ann Thunder Ann Whirlwind, of Prairie Rose and the everywoman homesteader. I rove my memory backward twenty years into the thick of the Wild West, the age of thundering cattle drives. The terrain you live on is the same landscape as Old Chisholm Trail, once the hunting lands of the Cherokee, and further back in time, the homeland of the Wichita people. I squint and see much that is forgotten. Women lost in the wind swarm of history, stories never told.
Willie Matthews dashes alongside a gorge, the fringes of her chaps snapping, summer heat fizzling across her shoulders. The range gleams red, the horizon endless. She carves between the blackjacks on her mustang, steering the longhorns downhill, the clamor of ten thousand hooves echoing about the lowland. A tapestry of ancestry, a community knit through the landscape of time.
But Willie Matthews becomes fable. Sally Ann is forgotten. Their voices diminish to a haunting, just myth whispered on the wind. Minnie, do you see? In isolation, one slips toward oblivion.
