“Honest to God.” He lifted his hands, his expression earnest. “My ma’s ma emigrated from Ireland, and she told me stories.”
I opened my mouth, closed it, had no idea what to say.
“I’m just saying: Try me.”
I bumped against a sapling. Stot pulled out his knife and whittled a sliver of sapwood, forever patient with me. Beyond the branches, dry lightning scratched across a foggy sky. The clouds were the colors of smoke and salt. I knew Stot could withstand honesty, but I didn’t know how he’d manage something mystical. It was the brave choice to let him know me.
I exhaled, my body releasing seasons of worry. “So I’ve been hearing voices, on my land.” I told him of my worries this past winter and what I believed now: that the flower from Niabi’s folktale of Prairie Rose had been a real woman who’d lived beside Crooked Creek before me. That she spoke to me, along with the earth and other women who’d lived on my land throughout time.
“Is it comforting,” he said, “to hear their voices, when it’s dark and lonesome?”
I nodded. “Well now,” he said, “I’m thankful you shared a story of such magic with me.”
I watched him.
“Someday, I’m sure, something else will seem too dark. You’ll think I can’t handle it.” His gaze resolute, thick black brows angled low. “I’ll handle it.”
He drew a gap in my blanket closed at my throat and tucked a curl back into my braid. I swallowed, my eyes surely wide. A burst of lightning gilt the wild scrawl of a branch.
“As you once reminded me—there’s a wideness to mercy.” He held his body with such enthralling ease, the straight line of his shoulders, the angle of his jaw, his crisp white collar and buttons visible below his waistcoat and slicker. “And when I run across something dark, something too heavy to carry alone, I know you’re brave enough to help me heft it. You never step down. It’s why I choose you.”
My heart thumped against my chest, my gaze snagged on his lips. A blistering moment tugged, hot and alive; then he disappeared into the shadows, embers burning inside my stomach.The fire is in me. I watched the slope of his hat and his easy gait weave through the blackjack branches and exit once more before the bonfires.
Chapter Forty-Four
Cricket and I dashed through the gnarled trees of the northern forest, looped vines and flowering creepers blocking the sunrays. A greenish haze slid across the atmosphere. Something was coming. I hadn’t smelt a prairie fire or heard thunder, but ill ease hung in the air.
We surged out onto the open plains of my quarter section, headed toward the Browns’ claim just over the hills. As we passed the orange and blue and yellow weave of milkweed, chicory, and dandelion, a memory burst full color of the first time I’d raced through these trees and seen my land. It seemed unfathomable that had been just a few seasons ago, not quite seven months. It felt an age, and the woman I’d been lost in time.
Memories layered, time collapsing, the weight of bygone days disintegrating as I became someone new out here on the Oklahoma frontier. Last week, the meadowflowers beginning to riot with their springtime colors, the fuzzy citrine-green sprouts of my sunflower seeds bursting from the undergrowth, I’d hammered up my fence along the eastern boundary with Willie. We chatted of the gossip round town, and I told him about the distance between the Browns and me.
“You know,” Willie said, running his fingers along the curled ends of his mustache, “I’m just about as clever as two bronze pennies rubbed together—you’ve always been sharper than me.”
“Fine excuse is what that is.” I gestured to the fence. “You just prefer jabbering to working.”
He grinned and lined up a nail, held his hammer at the ready. “But I know folks, understand what makes them tick.” Willie tapped the nail, the golden buttons on his jacket gleaming. “Olive cares about you. Olive, she cares about everyone. Just give her some time, love. And find some way to show her how much she matters to you.”
I propped my boot on the low rung, considered the wildflowers, the chicories glistening like flecks of sunlit sky fallen to earth. I could organize a box social to fund the schoolhouse, maybe write friends back in Kansas, ask whether they’d come teach, offer them board on my homestead. I rubbed the dull steel back and forth across my palm, the points abrading my skin. “You know, that’s not the dumbest tripe I’ve ever heard.”
“Yeah?” He twirled his hammer, then looped an arm around me. I leaned my head against his shoulder. Wind shivered through the flowers, the colorful overtones blurring with the green grass. “Homesteading’s not what I’d expected,” Willie said. “But I’m mighty fond of this vast, newfangled world we’re building.”
“It’s home,” I said.
He nodded, his expression half shadowed beneath the narrow ridge of his straw hat, the brim impractical but dashing. I squeezed his arm, then stepped forward, aligned the point against wood.
“What’s in the wind, between you and Ezra?” Willie brushed at dirt on his trousers. “Y’all feuding or just practicing?”
I thwacked the nail. It wedged sideways.
“I’m with you, sure as rain.” He tucked his tool under his arm and stepped forward, took my hammer from me. Wiggled out the nail. “But will you forgive him?” I crossed my arms; Willie tapped at the nail. “Anger’ll eat you up, doll.”
“I suppose I’ve forgiven him,” I said. “I don’t think of him at all. He’s—released.”
Willie rubbed the end of his mustache between two fingers. I took my hammer back, and he chewed on a wheat sprig, his gaze faroff, as if detached from our conversation. And I wondered, in a brutal flash, how many times I’d thought Willie wanted to be anywhere but beside me, his mind elsewhere, when perhaps he’d just been thinking.
Willie pressed the toe of his boot against some knotted grass, tapped down the gnarled and dry groundcover. He shoved his hands in the pockets of his trousers, jangled some coins. “Remember Mr. Becker?”
“I do.” I lifted and aligned a board. I remembered the farmer, his ruddy skin shiny, his laugh a bit too loud, gaze a pinch narrowed. Though he’d charmed most of the county, I’d never liked him.
