The ground appeared to wobble, as if the earth wanted to remind me that she was alive. I swiped my handkerchief across the back of my neck, the rhythm of the Lawman’s shoveling unbroken. This day had depleted me of all sense. But as I slammed my blade into the parched dirt, I wondered what else was hidden in this wildwood, wondered who was buried deep in the earth. Linking back through time, others had lived on this land. Other lives, forgotten underground, their stories lost.
After tossing the cowboys’ bodies into the chasms we’d dug, I removed their gear and slapped their horses’ flanks, setting them free. From their bags, I looted some ammo and pots and a worn copy ofIvanhoe. I burnt the rest.
I thrust a pistol and a few saddle blankets against the Lawman’s charcoal vest.
“You’ll be alright?” he asked, straightening a cartridge bandolier across his chest.
“You do realize this is a race,” I said, tossing his words back at him as I vaulted onto Cricket. “Ride quick.”
And then I dashed westward toward the land office, the leftover blazes smoldering, a haunting sound calling out after me. A deep, primordial groan knotted in with the wind, the rhythm pulsing almost like words:Settle in, I have stories to tell.
Chapter Seven
The prairie grass before the land office swarmed with red-faced farmhands and thin, disheveled families. I wandered in search of my brothers, the crowd muttering of illegal deals and claim jumpers and the sooners who lurked in bushes. I just knew something would go wrong. I gripped my scattergun’s handle and didn’t flinch.
I found my brothers before a bonfire, Willie toasting the sunset. They’d staked claim to neighboring homesteads a thirty-minute gallop from my quarter section. Close enough to help build shacks or dig cellars, but far enough that they wouldn’t interfere with everyday chores—I’d see them every few weeks or so. If they noticed my burnt clothes and all-overish disheveled appearance, they didn’t comment. Ezra just scowled at the brume smeared along the side of my palm. Willie pulled me into a Virginia reel spin, our boots stomping a circle round the dusty ground. From the edge of the crowd, Ezra pressed his square thumb across his record book, crisping the paper flat.
Bonfires and disputes rose throughout the night, and then, at sunrise, I filed claim. Dipping the pen in an inkwell, looping my signature, the image of my scrawled name on paper visceral and sharp, the new memory rewriting over all those of my past.Section 1, Township 26N, Range 8W—that square quarter mile was mine.
In the afternoon, south of the new Enid townsite, my brothers and I rendezvoused with Pa and Lark’s dad for the rest of our supplies. Sweat swamped in an arc across Pa’s rough-spun shirt, and when he spottedme, a broad smile broke across his face. I swung from Cricket, and he tugged me into a hug, his gaze sweeping me, surely assessing if I was altogether unharmed.
“I got my own land, Pa,” I said, the tension in my body easing a moment.
“God above, I’m so happy for you.”
As I roped Cricket beside my other horses, Whiskey and Whistlejacket, my brothers and their buggy clattered up in a flurry. Pa congratulated them, heard tale of the pastures they’d found. Beside the buckboard I’d packed with my chest and other necessities, Pa tightened a knot rigging my Belgian draft horse Smallhopes to my buggy. After I finished loading up, I thanked Pa for hauling down my supplies. He clasped my shoulder. “You still got my push dagger in your boot, the one you stole when you were twelve?”
My fingers clenched the ledge of my wagon, as an image scrambled my thoughts. My palm slick on the Peacemaker’s walnut grip, the chalky texture of cayenne pepper on my fingertips. The awful shape of the cowboy’s face; the squeaky, guttural cadence of his voice; the splatter and gush of his blood. That faded red bandanna, misted with dust and wrinkling at the stitches. Pa considered my posture, tapping the tortoiseshell pocket watch clipped to his vest placket, the beat sounding with a ting. Pa never missed much. I shuttered away horrors of the rush, the texture of the cowboys’ blood still a faint stickiness on my palms.
“Your brothers say you’re off aways on your own.” Pa’s eyes pinched at the corners. “But that’s what you wanted? You’re sure-footed?”
“I’ve got your push dagger.” I swallowed. Straightened the bridle across Smallhopes’s jaw. “I also stole your buffalo-horn ’73 Peacemaker.”
He chuckled and squeezed my shoulder. “Proud of you, sweetheart. Be safe.”
We bade each other Godspeed: Pa headed north to Kansas, I journeyed to my claim, and I hadn’t seen hide of the lot of them since.
Six long, hot days of solitude.
I’d glimpsed the Lawman through the trees, thrashing across the fields on his mustang or slamming his shovel into the parched dirt. Reckoned I should have been frightened, having such a neighbor—but I didn’t have room for worry. Supposed I’d lost that somewhere between the cannon boom and the prairie fire. I’d snuck through the wildwood a few times, studied the way the Lawman designed his camp, and the man wasn’t a fool by any stretch. But other than those moments, my days were sky and horizon and distance.
Everyone told that life on the frontier would be desolate, with long winter nights stretching into oblivion. Most would fear the far-reaching stretches of quiet and this notion of isolation. And sure enough, No Man’s Land was vicious and unexpected. My days had been filled with steamy, backbreaking work establishing camp, my nights long and musical under the sparkling black arch of an autumnal sky, a deep quiet with just the brush of my horses’ tails against my tent and the ongoing prattle of crickets. But in all these moments, I didn’t feel alone. There were so many voices on my land. The squeak of wind through branches, the clack of my horses’ hooves on hard ground, the rustling in the grasses, as if the earth narrated something to me. I felt surrounded, comforted even, by what lived on my land.
Today a storm foamed along the southern horizon. Smallhopes and I galloped up a black hill, the wayward ash rising about her flanks, her powerful legs a burnt cinnamon that faded to alabaster below her knees. Dew wet my forearms, and mist singed my teeth. The air cold and wet, as if the rain was already here. We cantered over a rise, and in the lowland, my ramshackle camp came into view. I’d hung some waxed canvases between stakes, and there, with my horses and the unrelenting wind, I’d made a home.
I angled my thighs, guiding Smallhopes around the fiery scarlet sumac tree. I needed to run Whiskey and Whistlejacket as well before the rain. On my homestead, there was much to prepare, endless days of work. I’d foraged for berries and nuts and shot the prairie hens thatwandered about. Tomorrow I’d plant potatoes and perhaps the following morn, if rain softened the earth, I could dig my cellar. And I must build a one-room shack, or dig one into the hillside, before snow dropped from the sky. I patted Smallhopes’s withers to slow her down and vaulted off. Soon I would let her go—the bartered goods from selling my horses would be crucial to surviving winter. I rubbed Smallhopes’s bare back and led her under the drooping canvas. Afternoon light seeped through a length of black fabric and glowed navy on my hands as I tied her to a stake. I threaded a simple rope bridle onto Whistlejacket, my blue roan mare. “Your turn, honey.”
I wondered what my mother, my grandmother, all the women of my heritage would think of me creating a space of my own. I would have to spend five years proving up, establishing a homestead on this quarter-mile section, and then this land would be mine.
Faroff, rain clouds darkened toward midnight, inked shadows smudging the base of the clouds. I itched to grasp a piece of charcoal and sketch the storm, to capture that feeling of impending rain after a season of drought. I tilted my face skyward, and then, almost imperceptibly, a fizzle brushed across my cheeks.
Rain was coming.
I lifted my hands, and the damp shivered across my palms. I mounted Whistlejacket and plunged again into the great unknown.
Whistlejacket and I dashed along the ravine, a storm rumbling from beyond. After such frenzied days racing and establishing camp, the stillness was surprising. There was a deep sense of hush. An ease and a hope. A duality of satisfying isolation alongside a growing awareness of sound in the quiet. There was something alive in the silence.
Thunder boomed, and before me my barren landscape appeared sown with rosy prairie flowers, almost as if a translucent glazing of raspberry paint swept over the expanse. I heard a creak and grumble, and a shapespiraled up from the ether, like rose brambles bending before an unrelenting windstorm. Unease pricked my spine—that tangible recognition of pause before storm.
