Seasons pass, years rush on by.
Time, unstable on the prairie. As the century turns, the press of advancement is heavy, wheels clawing at my bones, metal automobiles scraping across my veins, smoke puffing toward the sky. Women fought for and won rights, a war spread across my entire body, times changed. Once, my prairie was quiet. Now, everything moves faster, louder, grander. My throat congested, my breath tinged with soot.
Alongside Crooked Creek, a woman roams through amber bluestem and, at her garden, kneels against my moist soil. Her name is Gail. Holding her cloak against her neck, the homesteader presses through the gusts to her porch, tumbleweeds whipping up into the firmament. These tales of Crooked Creek evolve, just as my body is ever changing, just as stories are rewritten over and again, memories of these women resurface and re-form, until I’m not sure where my own memory slips into myth. I try to tell you about myself, about this particular patch of rolling hills, but I cannot quite grasp my essence. I wonder, what does it mean tobesomething or other? Which parts of one’s story are truth and which are imagined? Which parts matter when cobbling together an identity?
I am so tired. I am so many fragments.
Stir about a bit, Minnie. Listen. Knit yourself into this patchwork quilt of memory. And hold on.
Chapter Thirty-One
Oklahoma Territory—February 7, 1893
two weeks later
Iwhacked my hammer against a rusted nail. Beyond the fence’s pale wood, colorless oat grasses and wild rye matted together. Their feathered ends still, unchanging as midwinter dragged on. All season long, my prairie had been moody and sworling. Almost as if she was caught somewhere between fury and heartbreak. Weather in Oklahoma lands was primal and brutal—that feral unpredictability of No Man’s Land. One day soaked in sunshine, a blizzard whirling on in the next. The air could snap in a moment and remind us winter was long from over.
Today the sky was blanched. A daytime moon perched above the wooded hills. A haphazard, imperfect circle, that last off-centered oblong before tomorrow’s full moon. Everything felt unfinished.
I’d removed a pocketful of nails and some boards from a bashed-up buggy I’d found in the wallows, the materials perfect for a fence. Fencing my quarter section was long, slow work, but I savored the weighted feel of swinging my arm through the air.Willie was off yonder, his crooning echoing about the lowland. He’d brought over some laundry, but I hadn’t minded overmuch, as he’d set to work oiling my plow. The morning after the barn raising, Stot had upbraided him something fierce. Bedraggled and terrified of the outlaw, Willie had sat quiet, for once without excuses, his lanky shoulders hunched over my breakfast table. I’d pushed out my door, milk pail in hand, and a while later the two of them had exited my shack, Stot’s arm looped across Willie’s shoulder, Willie promising to do better, them all a’sudden the best friends this side of the Mississippi. I wasn’t ready to trust that Willie would change, but maybe he’d finally looked at the dark parts of himself.
I lined up a nail, my bootheels wobbling on overturned mud, struggling to find the earth below the crispy wild oat stalks. I’d been off balance these past weeks, overfull of wonderings and worry. I longed to talk with my steady, insightful sister. After these seasons away from her, I was no longer outraged—just heartbroken. There was a gap where she’d once been. I couldn’t imagine how we could reconcile. As time stretched on, the ache didn’t ease, but deepened, craggy and festering. I didn’t know anymore how to piece my memories into order again. I wiped dust from a nailhead, pressed the point against wood.
And Lark. I missed what once was, the friendships I’d had the width of my life. I recognized now that I hadn’t been in love with Lark. We’d had something simple and untested. We hadn’t known how to walk through dark truths together. It was spring meadows and lanky summer ponds. Boundary walls and safe harbors. Not love in the rough hews of this broken world. Lark was from another age, different memories, from a Minnie who didn’t exist anymore.
I slammed my hammer against a nail, a bullfrog rumbling off beyond and some starlings rustling in the brush. The day full of prairie sounds. Yesterday I’d visited Niabi. We’d studied the groundcover and wind currents to gauge how the surroundings would affect a bullet. She’d tucked her hair behind her ears, gripped her pistol, and loosed her shot—with both eyes open, practicing as I’d shown her. I alignedthe next board, and it was then that I heard hoofbeats along the edge of my land. I studied the horizon, not recognizing the paint horse, a russet tobiano mare. A star was golden on the rider’s vest placket.
Sakes alive, it was Frank Canton, the deputy marshal, come calling. I balanced the dangling board against my fence, then removed Pa’s push dagger from my boot and slipped it in a pocket. I straightened my apron over my blade and walked toward the marshal through the high grass, my heart a’rattling against my bones.
“Afternoon,” I hollered.
“Good day, ma’am.” He pulled up on his reins and dismounted. “Is it Miss Hoopes?”
I nodded, and he introduced himself. “Care for an afternoon tea?” I gestured toward my homestead, Willie hidden on the other side of my shack.
“You needn’t trouble yourself,” he said, his wide black mustache rigid over his cheeks.
“Ain’t no trouble.” I pulled a thistle off my shirtwaist, my other hand gripping the square handle of my dagger. His gaze flicked about my yard, then my clothing, as if he could see a hidden stain of blood on my hands. “How may I help you, Marshal?”
He spun his pocket watch, eyes shrewd. “Been to town this week?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
“Suppose word hasn’t roved down to you then, about them missing cowboys.” His palm adjusted on his pistol’s buffalo-horn grip.
“Those cowhands?” I cocked my head. “Who folks say headed off yonder, chasing gold?”
“I’d surmised that, too, but—” His gaze was tight on my face. “Their bodies were found.”
I stepped back. “What’s that now?”
“Uncovered the bodies of those missing outlaws in them north woods, just beyond your quarter section.” He flipped open his pocket watch, closed it, tracked my hand clenched in my pocket. “Shot up by a Peacemaker. Buried quite a bit underground, but that preacher by thename of Poor, his hound found them. Guess the foxhound was digging in the roots of a water oak.”
“Well, by nation.” I shook my head, blinked, allowed myself to look shocked. “They surely have passed on?”
“As no one’s seen hide of them since the race, I suppose that’s when someone dropped them.” He studied the hammer sticking out of my apron pocket. “Now, Miss Hoopes, your claim being just beyond, it would’ve been natural for you to have heard the shots, to have perhaps even witnessed their murders.”
I fluttered my hands to my heart, widened my eyes. “Course that day was lawless and smoky and full of all sorts of sounds—but I did not witness any murders.”
