I held my jaw. The horizon wobbled, my boots unstable. Cricket stamped, uneasy, and I touched his wheat-brown withers, returning to myself.
“Come on now, women can’t tend land on their own.” Ezra smoothed the ends of his chambray under his waistband. “It’s the dead of winter, our farms are struggling. It’s high time you admit forfeit and move here. That’s your role.”
I clenched the lapel of my cloak; threadbare dusk light overlaid his pale skin. “I belong on my own land.”
“Enough.” He grabbed a tin can of chew off the fence and threw it across the yard, his knuckles red with sweat. The can clattered in the high grass. “I’m cross and done with your antics.”
I gripped Cricket’s saddle horn, my forearms shaking, and mounted. “I won’t be back.”
Ezra grasped my ankle and tugged me off. My shoulder bashed the ground, my arm knocking out of socket. I rolled onto my side, cheek pressed into the dirt, gasping for air. Cricket stamped, and Ezra yanked his reins. “Quiet, you ninny.”
I drew my hunting knife from my boot sheath. “Don’t tug at my horse.”
He wiped his hands together. “You will forfeit your homestead to my control and come tend my home.”
I pushed up to a seated position, left arm drooping across my belly, a creeper vine grasping my bootheel. “No.”
“No?” His voice unnerving and low.
“I will not leave my home,” I said. “Your farm is your problem. Figure it out yourself.”
Ezra strode back, yanked me up by the collar, his rectangular face before mine, eyebrows askew. My blade slipped between my fingers, falling into the creeper. He spit in my face. “Disgusting, useless woman.”
He dropped me and kicked, the wood of his boot sole shredding skin along my forearm. I coughed, mouth flooded with blood and dust, and found the knife in the bramble. He kicked again, clobbering my stomach, and I flung the blade, the eerie zip slicing the sound of eventide. The knife struck true, where his shoulder met his collarbone. He stumbled backward, ivory chambray disappearing into shadow.
I yanked out my Colt and stood. My body swayed.
“You won’t shoot me.” Ezra held his shoulder.
My gun trained on Ezra, I leaned against Cricket’s mane and murmuredsteady, my command for the handless swing mount. “You know I don’t miss.” Blood pooled in my mouth, and my words came out slurred. “My blade would’ve been between your eyes if I wanted.”
The color drained from his face.
Cricket lowered his head, kneeing down so I could mount. I swung my leg over and eased into the saddle, pistol trained on Ezra. “Try any of this again, and I’ll kill you.” The expanse of his homestead blurred, my grasp on reality hazy. Blood dripped from between Ezra’s fingers and splattered the earth. “Unless the Lawman slaughters you first,” I said, “when he hears you betrayed him.”
“You have to be loyal to betray.”
“He won’t care.” I anchored my boots in my stirrups. “I’d be scared, Ezra.”
Cricket galloped away, the prairie vibrating as we tore across the earth. Night fell, opaque and thick. I shouldn’t have been surprised, once again, by the vileness of humanity. This past year I’d observed depravity and baselessness. I expected folks to be unwholesome cowards who’d fail me. But then I’d let some hope in. Somewhere, deep inside myself, I’d a notion that perhaps I’d been wrong. That day we built the Browns’ barn, I’d begun to wonder whether Ezra would change. To hope, that had been my weakness. For of course there was no space for hope on the frontier.
I tied a rope about my waist to keep in my saddle if I fainted. I tucked my limp arm against my stomach, sank my blood-slicked hand into Cricket’s black mane, and laid my head upon him, held on. He’d bring me to safety, if such a place existed. But I needed someone, no matter how deep and dark their secrets went. I couldn’t survive this alone. Before me, the horizon trembled, and the wind groaned, an agony etched in the curve of air. It was as if Cricket fell out from below me and I floated, as if I spiraled into the endless beyond, split in two, a Minnie who hoped and a Minnie who was honest. A woman arising, a woman half smoldering.
There was a whoosh, a crack of air, an uncanny awareness of the mutability of the here and now. A phantasm materialized over the landscape of a sky clogged with smoke, of strange, faraway scents, and of a gravelly rumbling I’d never heard before. I glimpsed the homesteading woman again—she walked through amber bluestem grass, wind snapping a sky-blue floral dress about her hips, dark hair loosely piled atop her head in voluminous Gibson waves, white oak basket looped over her forearm. The vision mimicked a quick, impressionist sketch—unsharpened charcoal, shifting baselines, the clouds a haphazard smudge, the woman a contour of lines.
The mirage slipped away as a mist; the woman vanished. Time wobbly out on the prairie. I lost hold of the thread, of my own story.I am many fragments,someone whispered. The endless horizon before me turned gauzy and indistinct, the atmosphere scenting of orange pekoe tea, Cricket a rhythm of galloping, and then I remembered no more.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Osage Nation—February 11, 1894
two days later
Midmorning light warmed my eyelids, my dreams hazy with mirages. Of vast, barren spaces and a gilded, burning land, of breezes carving patterns through a wolf fur cloak, an oblong moon casting a silvered glow. The Native woman’s profile tilted skyward, her feet planted against upturned soil, as if she bloomed. Of the homesteader clutching damp cloth against her mouth, the terrain behind her scorched, of a cattle drive foaming across my land, last sunglow glinting like fire in the oat grasses. Flame and smoke, ember and rainstorm and drought. I rolled from my bed these past days, a fur spread before the fire. Pulling a blanket coat over my shoulders, I shuffled about Niabi’s lodge. My body ached and all-overish screamed, as if my bones and ligaments sucked in deep sighs and moans. I shimmied into my skirt and grabbed my overblouse from where it hung off a drawer. A cough racked my body as I threaded my hands through the sleeves.
I’d arrived after sunfall, bleary and disoriented, unable to communicate much to Niabi but the necessity of sending Wa-ah-zho to Stot, to warnof the impending vendetta against him. Niabi had set my arm back in its socket, rubbed salve on my scrapes, sat beside me as flame writhed across the ivory canvas.
Now light shattered in an array through the smoke hole and shadows patterned across the russet floor in lazy streaks. It’d been more than a day, and Wa-ah-zho had not returned. I held the pieces of my shirt together over my chemise, too worn to button. I folded onto the ground and laid my head in my hands. Though I knew disappointment was the way of the world, I still broke all over again.Course men are wicked, darling,my pa said,but that’s precisely the point.I just hadn’t realized how many times I could feel abandoned and betrayed in one year. I’d come so far, allowing myself to trust others again, and yet it seemed that failure, not resilience, was the constant in humanity.
