He gathered his wife, and I kept causing such a racket, blood smeared all over my palms and hemline, no one noticed my ma and her literary society friends slip into the saloon. Through the window, I saw Ma swing her hatchet, her dandelion-yellow dress fluttering, the arc of her bell sleeve distorted through the smoke-smudged glass. A flash of lightning in thunderclouds. That moment, witnessing Ma take axe to the bar top, watching her fight with abandon for what she believed, rooted in my memory. Ma tirelessly worked round our farm in her impeccably stitched homespun gowns. She resembled all the other mas, with perhaps a pinch more spunk, a bit more joy. But I watched her closer after that, and I realized: My ma walked through town different. She didn’t let anyone tell her how a woman was supposed to be. A woman could be whomever she wanted. And now, here I was, homesteading on land that was to be my own. My ma and her ma and all the women before her would be so proud that I had carved out a space of my very own.
If I could only keep ahold of it.
Cricket and I dashed below glossy, emerald branches, the leaves’ shapes blurring as we rushed on past. But they were holly leaves, not magnolias. I searched round the Browns’ farm until I found Olive downby the creek, washing linens. The gilt of dawn spilt into the gorge, time stretching and pulling, heavy on my chest. I dismounted Cricket and climbed down to the bank, clumps of dirt loosening under my boots.
Olive called hello, her hands sunk in the water, white linens elegiacally floating in the creek. I glanced behind me, wiping my palms down the front of my skirt. She dropped the cloth and dried her hands on her apron. “What is it?”
“The bodies of the missing outlaws were found.” I updated her that the marshal hadn’t outright tossed blame at them. “But my gut is that he’s looking at your family—and Stot.”
Olive stumbled back, sat on the bank, red dirt drenching her lace skirt. “We can’t have that.”
“No.” I dropped beside her. “Suppose we get him to look another way.”
Her hands rested in her lap, her bearing still.
“Hey.” I gripped her shoulder. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have worried you. I don’t think anything must be done yet—there’s no evidence against your family.”
She crossed her arms, a wet rag clenched in her fist, water soaking her sleeve. “How come you just know we ain’t done it.”
“It’s not who you are.”
She dropped the rag into a bucket with a plop, a spray of water misting my hands. “What if they attacked us, and it was self-defense?”
I gripped the lapel of my jacket, my fingernails brittle and too cold. She couldn’t confess to my crime. “I know that ain’t the tale.”
She walked to the water’s edge, bent to grab the linens. Light dappled along the current, the stream tugging ever onward.
“But I’m not finding another solution,” she said.
“You can’t claim self-defense,” I said. “It makes you seem desperate.”
“Iamdesperate,” Olive said. “If the marshal frames us, and folks rile up about horsefeathers, as they do—I’ll do whatever it takes to protect my family.”
“I’m behind you.” I joined her before the water.
I couldn’t allow them to confess to my crime. I slipped my hands into the cold water, grasped the slippery, rectangular bar of homemade lye soap. Last night, before the waning flicker of my oil lantern, I’d considered different scenarios and strategies. I couldn’t find a wiggle anywhere. So it seemed, if I didn’t discover a solution soon, vigilantes would either come for the Browns or for me. That was law in the Wild West.
I grabbed a sodden length of gauzy linsey, rubbed the bar on the clothes, cleaning free the residue of earth. “Don’t claim self-defense. We’ll find a way.”
And we would. I thought of what Stot had said a few weeks past, about finding the balance in a world without rules, of searching for the less bad among all the awful choices. The white cloth submerged in the foggy water, beneath the iridescent stretches of soapy clouds. Wriggling across the creek’s mirrored surface, something almost seemed to take shape. A sweeping valley, someone else’s barn, other women, a different community. I recognize the townsite as Bethsheba. Women walked the dirt pathways of Bethsheba’s arms, the wind howled against the wooden boards of her bones, and Bethsheba shivered, her freckles of nails glinting in the morning glow. Just like the hazy women in my oil landscapes: something there, but not quite.
I’m not sure I’m in the right story anymore.
The words sank into the pit of my stomach: I felt distorted, the pathway through my life indistinct and warped. Other moments in time wavered in the water, nebulous and ghostly. I scrubbed at the sheen of red dust from Olive’s laundry, my hands aching along the sides.
Chapter Thirty-Three
The following afternoon I brushed Ezra’s mare Frailty, my fingers dipping in the hollows between her worn patches of chestnut hair. As I caressed Frailty’s bulging stomach and sinewy muscles, her ears flattened. She needed a wash. “It’s just the wind, sugar,” I told her, then carried a bucket out to the well. Outside, a norther whipped furious and brutal across Ezra’s homestead. I tied the rope around the handle and turned the windlass. There were sounds on the wind, breezes whistling through loose boards. I kept overhearing remnants of a faraway conversation, kept wondering about these stories rising from the silence. I hauled out the pail, the damp metal brittle. My fingers were red, my nails jagged.
The ancient voice narrated something longlost. As I untied the flaxen rope, fragments of a woman’s tale broke apart from the crack of the wind. I pressed back through gusts, toward the barn. I was still cross with Ezra, but when he’d asked me to examine his pregnant mare, I couldn’t say no. I hoped he’d continue the generosity I’d noticed at the Browns’ barn bee. I thought through my past, wondered whether I should rewrite the version of Ezra I’d fashioned, if perhaps there was something about him I just hadn’t recognized yet. I held my slicker tight at the throat and waded back to the barn. There was so much sky on my brothers’ land. Smooth brome stretched to the edge of the earth, the sun already muted along the lower pastures. The dreary winter sky barelybrushed with pigment, just a weak smudge of topaz and rose. I longed to grasp charcoal and show color with gray, to find something hidden between shadow and murky beige. Last week Stot had arrived with a gorgeous walnut-stained oak easel he’d carved. I’d finished my moody-blue and oatmeal-brown landscape, the one with Sally Ann Thunder Ann Whirlwind as an ephemeral vapor. Before dark fell, I’d gallop on home and perhaps sketch a new terrain.
Inside Ezra’s barn, I dipped the sponge in the water bucket, hoping to provide comfort for Frailty, soothing her with a hushed monologue, gossiping about the handsome feller who lived just north aways. Perhaps Stot would stop over this evening, talk with me by the fire. Maybe he’d have a solution for the bodies. Something must be done: I just hadn’t rustled up a strategy yet. These past weeks Stot and I had shared of our pasts, a little here and there—tales of our families, pranks of our youth. Unsurprisingly, he’d been an ungoverned little boy, not understanding arbitrary rules. He carried himself with unbreakable honor, but then he’d catch my eye as he sliced carrots beneath the kerosene lantern or as he fixed a molding board along my ceiling, and I’d glimpse such unbidden roguishness in him. He was just so much of one thing and then entirely another, and I couldn’t quite untangle who he was.
He’d been helpful round my homestead, though. Framing my windows in pine, straightening a wobbly drawer. My hands stilled, overcome with memories of Stot’s last visit, a couple of evenings past. He’d lounged on my sofa, his green eyes watching me. I ran the back of my hand across my forehead, smearing soapy water. Sometimes he was too unbearably magnetic. His stature, that scent of nutmeg and sunlight—he took up all the space inside my thoughts.
I squeezed the sponge over Frailty’s flank, washing her brown and white patches. Though Stot had become a friend, I’d never uncovered why he’d been shot or what had happened with the outlaws. Although mystery seemed a part of him, I felt as if I knew him in truth more than I’d known Magnolia or Lark. But of course that was nonsense. I’d known them the width of my life.
The stable door slapped open, fracturing the slush of dripping water. At the doorway, Ezra straightened a brush on its peg. I dropped the sponge in the bucket with a plop and stepped around Ezra to grab my gun belt.
