After I’d poured the lye mixture, I moved across the meadow to Stot. He paced, shoulders tense, magnetic in his fury. But he stilled at my approach. I placed a hand on his hip, laid my cheek on his back.
His muscles were strained beneath flannel. Light glowed beyond the cottonwoods, the scent of sweetgrass from off yonder. Stot pinched his hat by its cattleman crease, straightened its angle against the falling sun. “I wanted to shoot him between the eyes.”
“I know.”
He turned, slipped his hands around my waist, his movements tender. He inhaled, his mouth right above my ear. I slid backward down the slope, pulling away, and he gripped me closer.
“Don’t do that.” He spoke into my hair. “Just be with me a moment. Don’t analyze or worry.” He laid his head on mine. “Let me hold you.”
There was agony in the knowing, in being vulnerable enough to show someone your traumas, to allow them to see you. I felt the urge to disintegrate, or explode: An ache pressed and pressed against the walls of my chest. It was painful, surrendering.
But I let him hold me, his cheek on top of my coronet braid. And with time, air returned to my body. I allowed myself to feel safe, to calm. He was a stable rock amid fire and storm and the foreverness of weather. His lips pressed to my braid. “We’re good together.”
I nodded and pulled back. His throat gleamed golden with sweat, his bandolier bunching his shirt tight across his chest. I recognized that I was evolving, that I wasn’t yet settled—and I wanted to be careful with his heart. I brushed my lips against his, then went to feed my animals supper.
While I tossed grain for the chickens and hauled a pail of well water inside, Stot fixed a popped board on the side of my home. A bluebird swooped by. A memory edged over my thoughts, time folding and layering. Dawn light, my ma’s delicate wrists, the bluebird-colored lace of her cuff, her black embossed hymnal.Make sure you tell the Lord about your adventures every day,she’d said and placed her hymnal in my palms. I didn’t know how to begin such a thing. I pushed open my shack door and walked to my bookshelf, oak floorboards creaking. I tipped out my ma’s small leather hymnal, felt the weight of the book in my palm, then slipped the hymnal into my apron pocket, as she’d done every day of my childhood. Life on the frontier was clogged with hazards and escapades and tedium. I wasn’t sure which moments were the sort you told to the God above, but I supposed I could just start talking.
I walked westward along the edge of my prairie, catching the last hour of sunlight, and Stot fell in step with me. It was primaveral, earliest spring,the cusp between one season and the next, when anything could happen. This space between seasons was my favorite time of year—there was such possibility after the long pause of winter. Colors pressed up from my ground, raw and gorgeous, a smear of lime along the groundcover, fuchsia edging the woodland. I imagined other wildflowers blooming: saltmarsh asters and milkweed, purple coneflowers and prairie roses. Stot strolled with me across the fields awhile, the scent of mauve vervain and dewy green leaves pressing through the damp. When the sun slipped down among the treetops, I wiped my hands on my apron and turned back home.
Beneath the porch awning, my oil painting dried on the easel, almost finished. The red of my barn shadowed with maroon, the atmosphere beyond a springtime sky, smudges of luminosity textured across the board. Around the woman, a ghostly blue haze shimmered, as if she wasn’t quite a part of the landscape. I liked it that way, as if stories were forever unfinished.
About the wood nettle, I continued searching for those first textures of spring, for the snowy white feathering of dogwoods and for wild plum blossoms, for yellow sumac and magenta redbuds. Stot offered some oats to Shark, and I yanked up wild chives, the green stalks rising from the dead grass. A zip tinged up the stem, as if the ground zapped me. “I hear you,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
And I wasn’t. This was my land. This was my home. So be it wind or rain or wildfire or heartbreak, I’d be here. The voices rose in treble, speaking across time and distance. A feathering of ruby stems bent in the wind, and I waited. From deep underground, I heard the ancient voice of the earth.
Let’s restart.
Spring
March and April 1894
Earth
March 24, 1935
forty-one years after
Time spins, around and around.
In this age, raging dust storms plague your land, and my red dirt dims to ash. Once, wildflowers bloomed across my prairies, my soil rich and fertile. Now, this quarter-mile stitch of my robe alongside Crooked Creek has become a desolate wasteland. It’s springtime, but I cannot find her.
I’m tired.
I’m congested and diseased, brittle and broken. Heartbroken, with the agony of being unheard. Dust chokes my throat, my skin grays, my ankles scab with itchy, dry skin. I age. But I must chronicle the heritage of this land. The women keep speaking, their voices coalescing into a roar. Their interwoven lives create a history. Not the sort you find in blundering history tomes of wars and political intrigue, but women who created something new with their remarkable bravery. Women who are stunning because of their unrelenting hope amid the everyday agony of life.
Under the midday sun, a woman tips forward into the windstorm, and like me, she’s thirsty down to the marrow of her bones. Do you recognize her yet? Gail’s skirt snaps against her calves, skin gritty with granules of dirt, boots sliding across the hot sands. A storm’s coming.She lowers her handkerchief shallowly in a water bucket, then layers the damp fabric over her mouth so she can breathe. My once green and fertile prairie is now black, smoke, fire. She doesn’t remember when the grass vanished. It dissolved slowly under years of torrential dust and wind, so now she wonders which parts of her memory are real, which parts invented. Memory is such a thin, shifting thing.
There’s a roar on the horizon.
Gail looks northwest, where the black blizzards typically attack. A cloud plumes, more expansive than the roomiest cumulonimbus this sky has ever seen, the black roller gobbling up loose soil as it rushes on forward. She picks up her skirts, and she runs.
Time continues.
The narrative of this land evolves and balloons, stretching on through wars and famine and change. Today, I’m still screaming, but most do not listen. Today, my throat’s sore, my body’s achy, and I’m so dizzy I feel a slosh about my middle, a throb in my side. Today, the storytellers speak of grand adventures. Of innovative technologies, a race into the future, journeys beyond myself into the stars.
Time continues to turn, around and around I spin, and I listen, as your legacy endures. Sometimes you notice me. You bend down, watch my soil simmer aboveground in a wind eddy or study the noises made in tree hollows. Sometimes you even say hello.
Minnie, keep listening. I will tell you such tales. I tell you so you see yourself, I tell you so you see me.
