THE ICE DOWNSTREAM
By Melanie Tem
Smashwords Edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press
Copyright 2011 by Melanie Tem
Copy-edited by Erin Bailey
Cover designed by David Dodd
Background image courtesy of: http://kiwirose-stock.deviantart.com/
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OTHER CROSSROAD PRODUCTS BY MELANIE TEM:
NOVELS:
WITH STEVE RASNIC TEM
WITH JANET BERLINER
UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOKS:
Blood Moon – Narrated by Mikael Naramore
Slain in the Spirit – Narrated by Ann Richards
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Contents
The Ice Downstream
Downstream, the ice on French Creek was starting to break up. It rumbled and rasped all the way up past Torey's house. It shook the world.
"Ice breaking up downstream," her father warned, as if she didn't know.
Torey frowned and nodded, kicked restlessly at the rungs of her chair. She'd finished her supper a long time ago, but if she left her father at the table alone he'd forget to eat. She knew his food must already be cold.
The leafless grapevines on the arbor outside the kitchen window screeched across the glass, a cold sound that set her teeth on edge. "Ice breaking up," her father said again. He mumbled and was hard to understand these days, but she could see his breath in the chilly air of the kitchen, and she imagined that she could see his words and even his thoughts, no two of them alike and all of them about Ryan. "Sure sign of spring." His tone made spring this year sound dangerous, and Torey understood why.
Her father pushed his chair back stiffly and stood up, leaving most of the food on his plate untouched. Torey resented that, even though she cooked as much to get warm as to please him. She stood up, too, and scraped the leftovers into the pan. She would throw them out onto the snow for the birds, who couldn't possibly be finding enough to eat when this winter had gone on so long. Earlier, her father had objected to her doing that, saying the birds had better get used to winter weather. Now he didn't seem to notice.
"It's hot in here," he said, and turned the thermostat down even more. Torey heard the click of the furnace shutting off.
She wanted to yell at him but since Ryan had died she didn't dare. Instead she said, almost under her breath, "I'm freezing."
"We don't need the heat on so high at night," he said, and Torey was surprised that he'd heard her. "There are plenty of blankets."
She put more blankets on her bed and was, in fact, warm enough, but still she didn't sleep well. The ice kept waking her up, and her father's cries for Ryan. She wished the dreams would come to her instead. All she could dream about was the ice breaking up downstream, when she should have been dreaming about Ryan.
She'd expected him to haunt her. He must still be mad at her for that time last year when, just to bug him, she'd sneaked into his room and messed up his baseball card collection; Dad hadn't believed that somebody almost fifteen years old would do something so mean and childish to an eight-year-old, and so she never had been blamed, except by Ryan, who knew. He must still be mad at her for not having been the one to fall through the ice that morning, even though she'd yelled at him that it was stupid to go so far out so early in the winter. Her father was mad at her for that, too, although he didn't say so. They must both still love her; she was still, after all, her brother's big sister and her father's daughter. They must both, she thought, have a lot left to say to her.
So she kept waiting for one of them to say her name again. She braced herself for Ryan to shove past her and race ahead up the long snowy road to the school bus stop on the highway. She searched for his little-boy ghost in the thin swirly frost that every morning had formed on her bedroom mirror. The frost would have been pretty if it hadn't been so cold; at first, Torey had traced designs in it with her fingertips or cleared away patches so she could see her reflection, but lately she hadn't wanted to get that close to the radiant closeness and, anyway, she hadn't wanted to see herself in the glass.
Ryan had been dead all winter now, and she'd seen no trace of him, not even in her dreams. He was gone. He really was dead. All she seemed able to dream about was the violent melting of the ice downstream, and then French Creek flowing full and fast and rich with life again. Because they were warm dreams, she didn't tell her father about them; they made her feel like a traitor.
Her father stood in the doorway now, looking out through the locked storm door. He hadn't been out of the house since they'd found Ryan's body under the ice. He didn't go to work anymore. He didn't shovel snow. He didn't build snowmen or slide down the hill; Torey was too old for such things, but she'd have done them with him if he'd asked. The cold sunshine lit up the edges of his silhouette, making the white tips of his hair look golden. He kept rubbing his hands, but not very vigorously, as if really he didn't care whether they warmed up or not. Beyond him, through the glass in the door, she could see that it was still snowing, even though the sun was out.
The ice on French Creek boomed, and her father said, maybe to her, "With the ice this thick, we'll have floods." He backed away, shut the heavy inside door that kept that much sunshine out of the house, and went to sit in his chair.
On Saturday mornings, her father used to read to them. Torey had been getting restless; she was too old to be read to, too old to do anything with her father and baby brother. The last few Saturdays, she'd sat sullenly on the hassock clear on the other side of the room, watching the fire in the fireplace, half-listening, while Ryan still squeezed in beside their father in the big warm chair.
Now there was plenty of space on either side of her father, as if he'd shrunk from the cold, and the chair was coated with rime. Torey thought maybe she could fill in the space. Maybe—although she was shivering herself and the tip of her nose was numb—she could warm her father up.
The chair was still surrounded by stacks of books, dusty now and sticky with the cold. She hadn't seen her father read anything since Ryan had died, and certainly he never read to her anymore. She picked up a book at random, opened it at random, held it out to him. "Read to me, Dad?"
She had to say it twice before he gave any sign that he'd heard. His eyes were like snowpack in his gray-white face, and she was sure he didn't see her. It was as if she'd interrupted something, or asked for something outrageous. Finally, he rasped. "It's too cold."
"I'm cold, too."
"It's the dead of winter." His words changed shape after he'd spoken them and then froze in place, like icicles.
Cold radiated from him, and Torey didn't know whether to try to combat it with her own body heat or to stay as far away and keep herself as warm as possible. "But spring's coming," she insisted. "You said so yourself. The ice is starting to break up." She almost said, "Whether you like it or not," but stopped herself in time.
"It'll be cold for a long time yet," he said.
"Winter can't last forever," Torey said at once, stubbornly.
She saw for the first time that a paleness, like frost, had formed over her father's cheeks and chin and around the outline of his mouth, like a double beard. She imagined his throat freezing shut, and his diaphragm, and maybe his heart. "Floods," he managed to whisper. "There'll be terrible floods. We'll all drown."
"I miss Ryan," Torey heard herself say.
Her father gasped as if she'd struck him, and lowered his head.
A gritty film of ice lay like a shawl across his shoulders. Torey put her hands over her mouth, then forced herself to touch it. What little warmth there was left in her hands dislodged the ice from her father, caused it to melt enough that it peeled away in glittering shards and fell to the floor at her feet.
He didn't seem to realize that she'd saved him. He moaned, or maybe it was the miniature protest of his ice.
Over the next few days, the house got colder and colder, while Torey could tell from looking outside and listening to the ice that the weather was getting warmer. Her father sat in his chair all the time now. He slept there. He took his meals there, what little she could get him to eat. He wore his heavy winter jacket, fur cap with earflaps, boots, lined gloves, but ice crystals whitened his beard and coated the backs of his hands until Torey brushed them away. She was afraid to leave him. She was afraid to stay.
Defiantly, expecting him to object and rehearsing what she'd say if he did ("I'm tired of being cold!"), Torey went to the thermostat on the kitchen wall and turned it up to 80. There was no answering click of the furnace coming back on. She frowned and with her thumb turned the thermostat up as high as it would go. Nothing. "The furnace isn't working," she told her father without turning, though she suspected he knew. When he didn't say anything, she said flatly, "You disconnected something," and he didn't respond to that, either.
Torey pushed past him to the fireplace at the far end of the living room. She crouched in front of it, struck match after match from the several books in her pockets and held them to the crumpled paper and kindling she'd surreptitiously laid in. The fire wouldn't start. She checked the flue, stirred the firebox with the poker, tried again. The tiny, brief, nearly heatless flame of each match went out before it could make any difference at all in the chilly air.
The fireplace was made of stones from French Creek, roundish stones and thick flat ones, gray and brown and almost pink. There hadn't been a fire in the fireplace since Ryan had died. Torey sat down in front of it and forced herself to remember: In the crawling and leaping flames, she and Ryan used to try to find creatures who had lived in the creek, creatures who had somehow been mortared into the fireplace and would come back to life if they could just get warmed up enough.
Except when French Creek froze during particularly hard winters—and this one had been the hardest; the creek had frozen solid—it was always full of life. When spring really came and even this thick ice melted, the creek would teem again with squishy brown mud puppies that you never saw until you stepped on them, hard-shelled flickering waterbugs and long-legged spiders, quick little snakes the same gray-brown as the water itself. Torey's father used to say that French Creek was so deep and wide and ran so fast that in northern Michigan, where he came from, they'd certainly have called it a river.
Torey's parents had built the fireplace themselves. When they first bought this little house for eighteen hundred dollars. When they were first married. Before Torey was born. Before Ryan was born. Before their mother left. Before Ryan died. Before this long, cold winter. A lot of things had happened; thinking about that sometimes made Torey breathless. Things she had no idea about, things she knew about only because she'd been told, things she remembered only vaguely, things that were as clear and fast-running in her mind as French Creek when it hadn't frozen up. A lot more things would happen, too, come spring.
Her father shuddered as another muffled boom rattled the house. "Ice breaking up," he said again. At least, she thought that was what he said; his chapped lips moved so little when he spoke now that he was hard to understand. Torey imagined his lips and tongue as cold and hard as the creek stones in the unlit fireplace, as cold as ice. The ice groaned.
These years, when the winter had been cold enough to freeze the creek all the way across and when spring warmth came suddenly, the ice always started melting at a particular place about twenty miles downstream, where the creek widened and slowed past the town of Cochranton. Torey had often wished she lived in Cochranton, so she could be standing on the bank at the instant the first crack appeared, so she could understand melting. As it was, she woke up every night and every morning to the noise of the ice melting downstream.
When she lay in bed that night, the ice thundered, and she heard her father calling Ryan's name. She knew she should go to him, but she was curled up tightly under heavy layers of blankets and she was afraid to move. In the morning the frost on her mirror had started to melt in long strings, pooling onto her dresser. The sky through her window was hazy blue, and she thought she saw faint green-yellow tips on the long-dead branches of the trees along the road.
Fearfully, she went out into the living room. Still in his chair, her father was hugging himself and rocking. His clothes were wet, and water on the floor around him made his boots glisten. Tears ran freely down his cheeks and puddled inside his collar.
Torey held out her mittened hands. "Come for a walk with me. Let's go see if the ice up here by our place has started to melt yet."
She couldn't tell whether he'd heard her, whether he even knew she was there. He was sobbing. The twisting of his body in the chair sent flakes of ice and drops of water spraying, and all around him the faded upholstery was damp.
It would be kinder, she decided, and much easier just to leave him where he was, sitting in his cold damp chair that would freeze up again when the sun set or the weather changed, grieving the rest of his life for his lost son, grieving the rest of her life. She would inspect the ice herself. She turned away from him and started quickly toward the door.
He got up and came after her. The ease and fluidity with which he moved, after so much time immobile in one cold place, surprised her. They both left wet tracks across the carpet; Torey imagined the strings of frozen puddles that would form here later.
When she opened the door, her father winced at the inrush of warm air. Torey hesitated, then took off her mittens, scarf, and heavy jacket and left them in the hall. It had been a long time since she'd worn so few clothes, only a sweater over her sweatshirt and jeans; she felt both freed and exposed. Her father kept his coat and boots on, ears covered and gloved hands in his pockets, but she watched him leave all his blankets and quilts behind in a soggy heap.
They made their way across the rutted road and through knee-deep snow that crusted inside Torey's sneakers. Losing their balance and sliding—but without any of the whooping and laughing she remembered from sliding down this hill with Ryan—they climbed down to where she thought the edge of the creek was. Their tracks blended behind them into one long precipitous trail. Torey's hands and feet were wet and her jeans already soaked through, but she was only a little chilled; her father was panting, as if this first real spring day was too warm for him.
One continuous gray-white surface stretched from where they stood to the island in the middle of the creek, and picked up again on the other side. Torey couldn't tell for sure where land stopped and water or ice began; it was important to know, so that she and her father wouldn't fall through the ice themselves.
She considered taking the dark line of trees as evidence of the edge of the creek bank, but they were uneven and unpredictable. They leaned at odd angles, and their ridged trunks dripped with icicles that somehow made them look both larger and smaller than they were. Torey wondered if it was possible that their roots had broken off inside the frozen ground, so that when the spring thaw came in earnest they'd topple into French Creek, which would be flowing full-force by then and would carry them off.
The ice downstream boomed, and Torey saw movement, a softening and shifting, in the ice at her feet. She crouched, leaned far forward, rested her palms on the snow-covered ice, and put her weight on her hands. The surface was not quite solid, although it held; she could feel the water flowing underneath, and life stirring.
She sat down in the wet snow. She stretched her legs out onto the frozen creek, then lay back and wriggled her whole body flat onto the ice. She was shaking with the pulsing current.
"I miss Ryan!" she shouted, and the ice downstream rumbled.
"Oh, God!" her father roared behind her. "Ryan!"
Suddenly, the ice under her split. Torey felt the crack grow in a split-second from her groin to her throat, and she managed to roll away just as the whole cold, gray-white section broke apart. Icy water seeped, then poured out, drenching her, making the packed surfaces of the creek and the land glisten.
Torey rolled onto her hands and knees and looked for her father. He was farther away than he should have been and at a different angle, confusing her. Then she realized that she was now on an ice floe that was starting on its own separate journey downstream.
Her father didn't seem to notice that she was in any danger, or that she was drifting away. He crouched well up on the creek bank, poking at the edge of the ice with a long thick branch. She heard him sobbing, keening, above the bass growling of the ice breaking up right here, no longer downstream.
Knees and hands slipping out from under her again and again, Torey finally managed to scramble to her feet. Without thinking much about it and without taking aim because she couldn't tell where she was in relation to anything else, she leaped.
She landed in six-inch-deep bitter cold water; there was solid ground underneath. Her father was a hundred yards upstream, still crouching, still wailing, and up to his waist in the frigid water. All around them, the ice boomed, and overhead the sun shone warm and dangerous in the soft blue sky.
Torey sloshed toward her father, fighting the strong current, the slippery footing, and her own strong desire just to plunge headlong into the creek and become part of its traveling, teeming life. The water—still with heart-sized chunks of ice in it—was rising around her father.
They made it back to the house ahead of the flood, which was rising at an impossible pace. The moment she entered the cold house, Torey felt her wet clothes begin to stiffen, and she hurried into her room to change. When she came out her father was sitting in his chair, and through the picture window behind him she saw the flood waters rising.
"You should change into dry clothes," she told him. "You'll catch your death."
He looked at her as if he didn't know her. "I don't want to be any warmer."
"Spring's coming, Dad. Spring's here, whether you like it or not." Suddenly angry, she went and stood in front of him, in his line of vision. He didn't turn his head away or close his eyes, but she still wasn't sure he saw her. "I'm here, whether you like it or not, and so are you."
"Ryan is—dead," he gasped.
"I know Ryan's dead!" she cried, and, daringly, leaned down to put her hands on her father's shoulders. The fabric of his jacket was starting to ice over again. "Daddy, don't do this! Ryan's dead, but you and I are alive!"
"I—can't—stand—it," he whispered. Torey backed away from the crystals of his breath in the air between them.
By noon, the water had risen above the foundation. By mid-afternoon it was almost to the bottom of the windowsills, and a film of ice as thick as her hand had formed. When Torey looked out any window toward French Creek, she saw layers: gray-white ice sparkling in the spring sunlight on its top surface and glimmering on its underside as the still-liquid water struggled to break free, then darker and darker gray layers filled with frantically swimming and swirling creatures, debris, ghosts, down to the frozen and saturated ground.
By evening, Torey was wearing every dry piece of clothing she could find in her closet and drawers, and she was still trembling so violently that it was hard to catch her breath. The water hadn't risen much higher, but the ice had descended, and in the thin spring twilight she could see almost no movement at all either inside or outside the house.
Her father sat in his chair. His clothes had frozen solid. His hair had stiffened into a glittering cowl, and the patches of ice that had formed over his mouth and eyes looked like silver coins.
Torey went to him. She was so cold that she could hardly walk, and her thoughts were sluggish. Everything was very quiet; the ice downstream was no longer breaking up, and even sound seemed frozen.
She bent over him. He seemed to be breathing, slow and shallow, but otherwise he didn't move. She kissed him, and her lips stuck to the cold skin of his cheek, hurting when she pulled them away. "I love you, Daddy," she said aloud; every word formed a cloud between them. "I love you, and I love Ryan, but it's too cold here for me."
At first she thought he wasn't going to respond at all. Then she saw and felt the frost spreading rapidly up over him. She backed away, turned, ran.
Ice was pressing against the door from the outside, and she couldn't get out. Frantically, she ducked inside the cold fireplace, reached up into the short chimney for footholds and handholds, and pulled herself out onto the roof of the house. It was a short drop to the rising ice.
Sliding, falling, struggling to her feet again, she hurried around to the picture window for one last look at her father. He was completely encased in a translucent and impenetrable drape of ice.
Trembling, afraid of the floods but far more afraid of the ice, Torey put her head down and fled.
Sitting with the Driver
Abigail followed the man across the muddy street, past a horse that tossed its head at her, over the wooden sidewalk, under the writhing shadows cast by the flame of the streetlamp in front of the big red house. There was a sign: Kate McKinley's Scarlet Slipper. The letters were made by naked, bending female bodies. Abigail stared at the alien forms. The man rang the bell.
"Welcome, sir" came a cheerful voice in the yellow rectangle of light from the open door. "Come in."
"Ain't here for pleasure, Kate. I got trouble." The man pushed Abigail by the shoulder till she couldn't help but stand in front of him in the light. She heard voices from inside the house, music. He kept his hand on her and all she could do was make herself as slippery as possible, think of herself as some other thing that he wouldn't dare touch. "I got this here girl. I'm going out West, can't take her. Gotta leave her with you."
The woman regarded Abigail for a while, then turned her gaze back to the man who'd brought her and observed, "She's young."
"Old enough."
"How old is she?"
The man shrugged. "Hard to say."
I'm thirteen, Abigail thought fiercely, but she wasn't absolutely sure that was true.
"Doesn't seem right," the woman named Kate said. "Just leaving a child with a stranger like this."
"Lady, she was just left with me."
You won me. The memory prowled through Abigail's head with all the others like it. In a saloon. In a poker game. But I didn't turn out like you thought. She smiled.
"Pretty little thing," Kate said, staring at Abigail again. "Different-looking. Exotic. Where'd she come from?"
The man shrugged again. He was already moving toward the door. The fancy mirror in the hallway, taller than Abigail, caught his reflection. She would not remember his name, but she wouldn't be able to forget his body, which would always be bigger and stronger than she was. "Hard to say. Not from around here, though. Or anyplace else in the States, most likely."
"What makes you say that?"
"Like you said, she looks different. And she acts—foreign."
"Were you born in another country, dear?"
Abigail took a step backward, surprised and frightened by Kate's sudden direct regard. Her thoughts, never fully her own, swarmed. Woods, she was remembering, although not in words. Woods bushes sunshine moonlight a cave in the side of a hill a thicket. And a man's smell a man's hands capturing me taking me inside, holding me pushing inside me actually inside me hurting loving giving me away. She didn't say anything.
"Don't talk much," the man said, well on his way out by now. "Don't eat much, neither. Business like yours, she'll more than earn her keep."
"What's her name? What's your name, dear?"
Jane Martha Julia Susannah Mary Eliz...
"Abigail," the man called over his shoulder from the hitching post in the street. Abigail had been afraid up on that tall horse, and her thighs still ached from trying to spread so far and to hold on, and the man's bulk had been right behind her, pressing against her, keeping her with him until he was finished with her.
"Abigail," Kate repeated, smiling at her. "That's a good, strong name." She held out her hand. Every finger wore a ring, and they all flashed.
Abigail backed as far away from the woman as she could, knowing it wouldn't do any good, knowing she could never get away.
Kate walked up to her and put her hands on her shoulders. Abigail clenched her fists and closed her eyes, but the woman was still there and so was she, Abigail. "Poor little thing," Kate said, matter-of-factly. "No place to call your own."
Susannah you're beautiful Jane you're a bad girl her name is Julia you can have her for a good horse her name is Elizabeth she'll do anything you want but watch out she can change on you she can be dangerous her name is Abigail
"Well," Kate sighed. "I guess you can stay here. Young and pretty and different-looking as you are, there'll be plenty of call for you."
She pulled Abigail to her, put her arms around her, wouldn't let her break free. Run hide attack Abigail struggled to turn her head and sink her teeth into Kate's high breast, but the woman was too strong.
A few years later, lifetimes later, Abigail herself rides west, toward Texas. Mrs. Kate McKinley's Scarlet Slipper is no more or less real than the endless flat prairie. The only thing real has ever been Nathaniel; the only reality is that Nathaniel is dead.
She understands that the prairie is flat, but after she's been staring at it for hours and miles out the dusty window of the rattling, swaying stagecoach, it takes on the appearance of rolling. Her eyes play tricks on her, or the land does, or the land and herself traveling on it are simply not what they seem on the surface to be.
Gray-green sagebrush dots the gray-brown plain. Everything she read about the West before she came seemed to mention sagebrush. Now that she's seen it, crouched beside it, broken off pieces, touched and smelled and even tasted bits of it on the tip of her tongue, she can scarcely believe that it's a living thing. But it grows everywhere.
In the library she found a thin book by a Mrs. Asa Ames called The Holy Hunter in the American West. It talked about sagebrush, of course, sagebrush and sky, but mostly Mrs. Ames devoted her colorful prose to persuading the reader that Indians really did have immortal souls and to detailing the ongoing hunt for them. "I never thought I would become God's huntress," Mrs. Ames wrote, "nor that the souls of wild Indians, which surely must exist in forms far different from ours, would become my life's prey."
The lady on the coach seat next to her, wrapped in a heavy shawl, taps her arm. "Do you intend to give us all the Wild West Pneumonia?"
Abigail looks at her, uncomprehending.
"Close the window, dear, would you please?"
Abigail shuts the window and faces inward again. Now the prairie and the sagebrush and the sky so blue it isn't blue anymore but some other nameless hue could just as well be only in her imagination. Many things in her life could just as well be only in her imagination, but they are not.
"Where are you headed, dear?" the lady in the shawl wants to know.
"Texas."
The lady frowns at her as if she didn't believe her. "By yourself?"
"I'm going to be married," Abigail tells her.
"Oh, my, you must be one of those mail-order brides I've heard tell about!" The lady lays a hand on Abigail's knee. The shawl falls open. The fingernails are long and curved. The lady leans close; her breath is overpoweringly sweet. "Why don't you come home with me instead, dear? My mother and I live alone, and it is a struggle, and we could use somebody young and strong. You don't want to go all the way out there in the wilderness to marry some stranger."
"Little River!" calls the driver, saving Abigail from having to reply. The stage slows.
"Where were you last night?" Kate demanded.
"I went walking."
"In the middle of the night?"
Abigail shrugged. "Nobody was asking for me. It was too late for more customers."
"It isn't proper for a sixteen-year-old girl to be out at night unescorted."
"Proper? This is a brothel. No matter what we do, we're not proper."
"That's not so. The people of this town have always expected me to run a proper establishment, and I intend to do so. In any case, it's not safe, and I'm responsible for you." Kate touched Abigail's hair. Abigail sat very still and held her breath so the petting wouldn't stop, but Kate took her hand away and said quietly, "You more than the others."
"I can take care of myself," she said. Whoever that is.
Kate shook her head. "You're a strange girl, Abigail."
"Good for business," she retorted.
"Yes. Yes, it is."
The doorbell rang and Abigail went to answer it, glad to be out of Kate's affectionate scrutiny. On the doorstep were three young men, two regulars and a very young one, trying his best to look tall and virile.
"Abigail! This here's our little brother Nathaniel. He wants to meet you."
"Little Miss Abigail here will teach you everything you need to know, Nat."
They whooped and clapped him unsteadily on the back and staggered off down the street, leaving behind them the odor of whiskey and the transformation of Abigail's heart. She and Nathaniel stared at each other for a moment over the threshold. Then she held out her hand and said, as she'd been taught. "Welcome, boys. Come in."
She'd ridden the train for the first several days; it went unnaturally fast through the countryside, which seemed right to Abigail. Then, somewhere in what they called Indian Territory, her written instructions said to take the stage.
Since then, she's shared a succession of noisy, cramped stagecoaches with a variety of fellow travelers. This thin cold lady not speaking to her now, primly collecting her things. A bearded man who, asleep or awake, hissed and whistled through broken teeth. An old man reeking of grease, eating plump greasy sausages one after another out of the pockets of his dirty coat. A salesman who'd convinced her she'd need good brushes to keep house in Texas just like anywhere else, and wedged three of his finest into her traveling bag in exchange for more money than she should have parted with from her pouch. These people might as well be sagebrush, for all she understands of their lives, but it's clear they all would use her for their own purposes if they could.
"Vinita!" comes the call, and the stage rattles to a stop. Its weight shifts as the driver jumps down, and Abigail hears him exchange shouts with the stationmaster.
Vinita. Yet another stage stop with a picturesque name and, most likely, a history worth knowing. Abigail stands again at the side of the straight, dusty road. It's midday in October; the high sun is warm enough that she loosens her shawl, wishes she could shed her skin. She's tired, and the dust makes her eyes water.
The fresh team of horses moves into place without anyone driving or leading them. Their harnesses jingle and their flanks shine black and brown. Land and sky stretch out on all sides, toward the west where she's going without knowing what will be there or who she will be, toward the east where she's come from without knowing, either. Tumbleweed stirs. In one of the newspaper accounts she read about the West before she came, the traveler wrote about tumbleweed, but Abigail hardly believed it then.
A new driver climbs up onto the high seat. Abigail looks around; apparently she's the only passenger. "Let's go, miss. Gotta keep to a schedule here."
Abigail gathers her skirts, raises one foot onto the step, pauses. To the stationmaster she says, "Could I sit with the driver?"
The stationmaster guffaws. Abigail feels her face flush, but she folds her hands primly at her waist and waits. "Hey, Sam, the lady wants to sit up with you!"
Finally the driver shrugs. "Hell, why not? Gotta get outta here." He reaches down a hand, the stationmaster braces her foot, and she is pulled and hoisted aloft.
Before she's fairly settled, the driver slaps the reins and the horses are off. Abigail catches her breath, grips the splintery rail across the end of the seat, and gives herself over to the sensations of this time and place: high swift motion, bright sun and bright sky and bright wind.
Before long, Nathaniel was coming almost every night. Abigail tried to keep herself free during the hours he was most likely to come, but it wasn't always possible; if she was busy, he'd wait, shyly at first but with a growing attitude of proprietorship, sitting on the brocade loveseat in the front foyer, his hat on his knees. She'd come down the stairs with the previous customer and let him out, maybe even discuss arrangements for the next visit, and she'd try not to look at Nathaniel, but his profile would be reflected in the tall beveled mirror anywhere she cast her gaze.
Late one night as he was getting dressed and ready to leave, she said from the bed, to keep him, "Let's go walking."
He glanced at her sharply. "What's that? Something you didn't teach me yet?"
She was surprised by the edge in his voice. Up and dressing, she grinned at him. "This is only for preferred customers."
"I ain't got money for walking," he said sullenly.
Half-dressed, she crossed the room to him, took his hands. "Nathaniel, stop it. You got what you paid for. Business is slow. All I want to do is go for a walk with you." That was not all she wanted, but she wouldn't have known how to tell him the whole truth even if she'd thought to.
She had checked; there was no moon. They stepped carefully along the dark sidewalks, their heels rumbling on the narrow planks. No one else was out so late. Abigail felt no restlessness, no desire to be something else, no fear pulling her away. She held onto Nathaniel's arm. "Kate doesn't like me to go walking at night," she told him. "Says it's not safe."
"I'll protect you," he said, automatically and with perfect seriousness. Believing him, she squeezed his arm.
"She also says it's not proper for a young woman to be out unescorted at night."
"Proper?" His laugh was too loud. It echoed and proliferated in the silent town. He pulled his arm away from her; she thought for a desperate moment that he was going to leave her there unprotected in the middle of the night. But he merely adjusted his hat, then put his hands in his pockets. "What difference does it make if you're proper? You're nothing but a whore!"
"Whore is one thing I am," she tried to tell him. The moon broke through the clouds, absolutely full. She had miscalculated. She had lost track of the phases, because she'd been with Nathaniel almost every night.
"Whore means you can't be nothin' else." Moonlight etched his face, threatened to wipe it clean.
Sarah Jane Elizabeth you are who I say you are you are what I need you to be until I don't need you anymore Martha Abigail
She would leave him then she would fly away she would pluck out his eyes and swallow them into herself she would—
He strode toward her and put his arms around her. The very full moon shone down on them, together. "I love you," he said out loud, and she stayed. Somehow fused, this time she didn't change.
Her hand is bleeding from the blade of a yucca plant she didn't realize she'd touched. Surreptitiously she sucks at the blood, standing in the hot prairie sun by the side of the road until the driver calls impatiently to her. Then she climbs back up onto the high seat, ignoring his outstretched hand. Some of her blood is left on the yucca plant. She doubts anyone coming along after them will even notice.
Business was very slow. Kate was cranky and Abigail worried. Kate said the problem was Kansas was slipping out from under them, all the lively young men with money to spend were heading out West for fortune and adventure. She started talking about moving the Scarlet Slipper out to Denver, where she'd heard white women were still scarce enough to be valued.
"I won't go," Abigail said.
Kate looked at her and laughed, the harsh, mirthless laughter that always made Abigail wish she would turn at will into someone or something else who wouldn't know what that kind of laughter meant. "And how will you support yourself?" Kate wanted to know. "An aging whore with no talent but whoring?"
"I can cook and clean and sew and tend a garden." Abigail protested. "I could be a wife." Nathaniel's wife, she thought, but she hadn't seen him now for such a long time that she'd begun to suspect he'd gone out West, too, seeking fortune and freedom and adventure and other things he didn't think she could give him, when in fact she could give him anything he wanted.
Kate put her hands on Abigail's shoulders. "You and I are whores, honey. Nobody makes a wife out of a whore."
"Nathaniel will," Abigail said out loud before she could stop herself. Just the saying of his name steadied her.
"Oh, dear, you've fallen in love with a customer."
Abigail nodded firmly. "Nathaniel."
"And he's promised to take you away from all this."
"No, he hasn't promised me anything. He doesn't need to. I trust him."
Kate shook her gently. "If there's one thing I've learned about surviving in this business, it's that you dare trust nobody but yourself."
"I do trust myself. When I'm with Nathaniel." Or when I'm waiting for him. He hasn't been here for a long time. She stopped herself from counting the days and weeks.
The doorbell rang then, and Abigail pulled away from Kate to answer it. On the doorstep and spilling over onto the sidewalk, the heels of their boots loud on the wooden planks, were half a dozen rowdies.
Abigail sighed. "You boys got money?"
They yelled and whistled and showed her rolls of bills, pouches full of coins. Been West, they boasted. Struck gold. She let them in.
It took every girl in the house and Kate herself to entertain them all, and they had enough money to stay all night. The one in her bed had just rolled over to bargain with her again when the front door crashed open and there were shouts and footsteps pounding up the stairs. She heard him calling her name again and again before she was even completely aware of what it meant.
Abigail sat up, clutched the blanket in front of her. "Nathaniel!"
He flung open the bedroom door and pointed his gun at her and the man. "Whore!"
"Nathaniel!" Naked, Abigail dived for the floor and rolled partway under the bed. "Nathaniel, I love you!"
It took only a few seconds. Shots shattered the air, shattered the mirror above the bed, shattered Nathaniel's reflection. Blood obscured the worn pattern of the carpet. Abigail crawled across the floor and was kneeling with her hands on Nathaniel's warm body when the last breath went out of him, and she couldn't hold it in her hands. It took only a few seconds, and both she and Nathaniel shattered into some other form, countless other forms, shards and slivers of other forms forever beyond her reach.
The man in her bed blew on the barrel on his gun, then laid the weapon on the table beside the bed. "Lousy claim jumper," he complained. "Hey, lady, I still got time comin', bought and paid for."
Abigail observed her body—in which she no longer fully resided—rise from beside Nathaniel's empty body and climb back into bed. Her body was shivering and sobbing. Her body was being kissed and stroked, and was responding. She was not there.
They stay that night at a rude, rambling, one-story hotel which, together with the building where the stagecoach stops and the horses are stabled, makes this "town" twice as big as the last one. A buxom woman with few teeth in her ready smile feeds them surprisingly meaty stew and surprisingly fluffy biscuits, aided by a boy about the age Nathaniel was when his brothers first brought him to Abigail.
Abigail asks the boy his name, but he won't talk to her, won't even let her catch his eye. He serves awkwardly, handles the dishes roughly, looks to the woman for direction. He doesn't speak to anyone.
Warned by the driver of an early departure the next morning, Abigail goes immediately after supper to the sleeping room she's to share with an animated young lady heading east who tells her a perfectly ordinary life story as though it were high adventure. While she chatters on, Abigail partly undresses in the dark and lies down on the narrow bed. Perhaps she can rest a little: she knows she won't sleep.
She gazes out the dirty little window at the full moon in the very black sky, savoring the quiet now that her talkative roommate has fallen asleep, and wondering about the lives she'll be living in Texas. Then she hears a sharp yipping descant not far away and, although she's never heard the sound before, she thinks at once coyotes, remembering a reference from the newspaper. Her blood stirs. The soles of her feet and palms of her hands itch. She knows she'll be hearing coyotes every night now under the full Western moon, feeling the pull and throb of their muscles and the sinking of their teeth. The newspapers also mentioned eagles, bobcats, giant scorpions. Out West, there are many choices.
The sleeping room opens directly off the dining room and so, when a bow scrapes across a fiddle string and whines up and, down a ragged scale, the music might be right beside her, might be inside her chest. The eastbound young lady gives a gay shriek, makes much noise and flurry getting dressed, and hurries out to join the dance, which by now is in full swing. Booted feet stomp and rough voices raise in happy disharmony.
Before long, Abigail gives up entirely on the idea of rest. She dresses quickly and without much care, bloomers and petticoat, waist and jacket, all the layers of a lady's clothing, all the buttons and clasps and bows, but leaves her hair free. Then, holding her breath as if fording a cold stream, she steps out into the dance room.
The eastbound lady sees her and calls, "Abigail! Come dance!" A short man grabs her hands and swings her into the moving circle. She learned how to dance at Kate's, one of the requirements of the job, but this is different, freer and more complicated. The music inhabits her for a few minutes, a few steps, and she cries out. But then the pattern changes in incomprehensible ways, her partner moves on to another lady in a feathered hat, and Abigail allows the music in its strident new key to sweep her out into the Western night.
Walking away from the buildings, she hears coyotes but doesn't see them. In the moonlight, the sagebrush looks like rock. The boy from the dining room is walking beside her. "It's late." she says to him. "You should be asleep."
"You're the one traveling in the morning." The timbre of his voice surprises her. He's younger than he looks, a child.
"I couldn't sleep," she tells him. "Between the music and the moon."
"And the coyotes," he says, shivering a little. Abigail thinks to put her arm around him but doesn't. "Did you hear the coyotes?"
Abigail nods. "Does your mother know you're out here?" she asks, for form.
"Ain't my ma."
"Your aunt, then, or your cousin, or whoever she is to you."
"Ain't nothin' to me. I'm a orphan. Come out from Philly three weeks ago on a orphan train."
Abigail has read about orphan trains, some philanthropist's idea to bring homeless children from Eastern cities out West to be raised by families. Christian charity, most people pronounce it. Slave labor, some critics protest.
It doesn't matter why this boy is here. What matters is that he is beside her in the moonlight when she needs him. Abigail knows to accept what is presented to her, not as offerings and not as signs but as things the way they are. Her blood rises. Her hands and thoughts claw. Behind them, the rhythms of the dance are building.
The boy has climbed atop a rail fence and is pulling off slivers of wood and tossing them into the air. They catch the light and fleetingly become something different—stars, dream images, unimagined forms of life—before they fall among the rocks and dust and sagebrush. In the relentless moonlight, the boy's form wavers.
She goes to him, sees his eyes widen, knows that the change in her is well underway. "Kiss me," she murmurs, not sure the words will be there. But they must sound enough like words for him to understand, for he does as she says, leans precariously from the fence and presses his young open mouth on hers, spreads his teeth. She lays the flat of her hand between his thighs, rubs, sinks her claws in, howls at his pleasure and pain.
The man in the red bandana rode slowly on a sleek brown horse, stopping in front of each house. He carried a long stick. At each front door he leaned from his saddle and poked with his stick, tapping and knocking until the housewife came. Then he sat erect, tipped his hat with the hand that held the stick, and addressed her politely. "Good morning to you, ma'am. Are you married?"
Caroline Whitman said she was when she wasn't. Mathilde Pope threw a basin of washwater at him and yelled that if he didn't get away from her door this minute she'd have her husband put a bullet in his place of business. Tess Leighton announced her engagement to Ben Stearns, which was the first Abigail had heard of it, and, of all the girls in the neighborhood who didn't work at Kate's, Tess was the one she might have called friend.
Each time, the stranger tipped his hat again, nudged his horse with his heels, and rode the few steps to the next front door, Mexican spurs jingling and stick at the ready. Abigail thought for sure he'd pass by the Scarlet Slipper. Stop, she thought frantically. Ask me. When the tapping did come at the door, she raced downstairs to answer it, though she needn't have worried that someone else would get there first, for it was morning and Kate and the other girls were still asleep.
"Good morning to you, ma'am. Are you married?"
"No, sir," she answered firmly. "I am not."
He grinned and dismounted. She pulled the door to her but didn't shut it altogether. All up and down the street, the eyes of the ladies were upon her: she imagined dainty hands over mouths, gossip taking form like butter in a churn.
"Allow me to introduce myself, ma'am." The stranger tipped his hat again, this time to her. "My name is Andrew Merrit, marriage agent, and I have come to offer you a new life in the great American West."
The Kansas moon that night was gibbous, hunched like the shoulders of a beast. Abigail walked, thinking of course about Nathaniel. Nathaniel is dead Nathaniel is dead. The streets ached, shimmered. All she was was pain. The trees bent, became other than trees. Nathaniel's presence was everywhere, and so completely beyond her comprehension that it was of no use to her. Pain, fury, terror had swelled inside her for so long that they had a life of their own; she had no self. In a month she'd be heading West, somebody's mail order bride.
She caught sight of her own hunch-backed reflection in the gutter. She heard herself hissing through her tears, felt the steady deep growling that paced behind her teeth. Shadows flitted. There were no words. There was swift motion, the scent of blood. She stalked, chased, killed.
In the morning, the taste of blood was still on her teeth, and from under her nails she cleaned the skin of the man who'd killed Nathaniel.
As day settles in over the prairie, it seems that there has never been nighttime and never will be again. Abigail feels as if she's never been anywhere else, will never be anything else but a mail-order bride on her way to Texas, where men want women for their civilizing influence, forever on her way, sitting with the driver in a futile attempt to see where she's going.
In the middle distance she sees brown movement. She shades her eyes and half-rises from her seat but can't make out what it is. She points, loses her balance and grabs for the railing. "What's that?"
"Cattle," the driver tells her.
She repeats incredulously, "Cattle?"
"Got no cattle where you come from, miss?"
"But they're tended."
Whether the stagecoach route takes them through the roving brown herds or whether the cattle approach the stage, Abigail can't tell, but suddenly they are surrounded by dirty, shaggy beasts, some with huge horns and some with drooping udders, some with hairless sores on their backs and some with fat heaving sides. A few try briefly to keep up, but their lumbering is no match for the swift, knowing strides of the horses, and one by one the cattle fall behind.
Then she notices dead cattle, bloated shapes in the distance and along the road. "How do they die?"
"Like anything else." The driver is a man of few words, but he does add, "Like you and me."
"There's another one."
"Yep."
"But what kills them?"
"Flies."
"Killer flies? Oh, come now. I find that hard to imagine." She doesn't, actually, and the image of it crawls inside her throat and chest. But she hungers for details. "How could flies kill cows?"
The driver shrugs. "Single out the weak ones."
His narrow, stubbled face seems actually to have tightened around his words. He spits them out carefully in a row, like seed. "How?" she persists.
They pass by another bovine corpse and another clump of live, milling animals before he answers. "Single out a weak or sickly one from the herd, keep after it till it falls. Then it's theirs." Abigail understands, and shudders.
For miles and miles then, neither of them says anything more. Wherever Abigail looks on the prairie are forms of life she's never seen before: plants that look like bones but with brilliant brown leaves; birds with enormous wingspans and ragged blue cries; swarming carcasses, rotting or skeletal, by far the most conspicuous objects in the landscape.
The horses plunge straight into a narrow, shallow creek, barely slowing their pace, and the stagecoach tips. Although Abigail holds onto the railing with both hands, she can't stop herself from sliding partway off the seat. The horses' hooves and the stagecoach wheels make paltry splashes; the water in the creekbed isn't more than a few inches deep and hardly seems to be flowing. They lurch up the far bank and then are thundering along the dusty road again as if they've never left it. Abigail safely resettles herself, without help or notice from the driver.
Along the creek are trees, a whole green grove of them, startling and lovely although there are only five or six. The driver points off to the right. Abigail twists in her seat to follow the line of his whip, nearly losing her balance again.
"Cemetery," he says, and then she makes out the mounds, three of them, dirt still bare among the prairie grasses, and the outsized, weathered trio of crosses. "Family," says the driver. "Mother and two children. Made it this far."
"How do you know?"
"I knew them," he says, and will say no more.
Business picked up a little, as though the shooting had piqued interest in the Scarlet Slipper. Men asked for Abigail; she did what they wanted. In the morning, in the evening, in the middle of the night, whenever his time was up, a customer would waken to the shadow of an owl's wing across his throat, the hardening of a snake between his thighs, the brushing of barely sheathed claws at his eyes.
Abigail was still there, because she was expected to be. But soon she was heading West.
"Dry Gulch!"
Nothing much marks this one as a stop; it's just a low brown building and a lone cottonwood tree. The four exhausted, sweating horses are exchanged for another fresh team, and three men in neat dark suits—missionaries, they tell her with sincere smiles—arrange themselves on the two seats, politely leaving space for her.
The relief driver won't allow her to sit outside. "No place for a lady. Might be Indians. Might be a twister. Never know." So Abigail rides the last long leg of this day's journey inside, trying to sleep, trying to think about Mr. Merrit and the husband who supposedly awaits her in Texas, having no choice but to listen to the missionaries earnestly discussing souls. She is sure she doesn't have a soul. She doesn't think Nathaniel had one, either. If he did, it's gone from her as surely as his body. She doesn't say that to the missionaries, though the handsome one is obviously eager to talk to her about the price of her own immortal soul.
They are to arrive in Greenwood sometime tomorrow. Mr. Merrit will meet her. He wrote that several other brides will be arriving at about the same time from Indiana, Ohio, Missouri. The bachelors of Greenwood and surrounding camps who don't want to be bachelors anymore—which is most of them, Mr. Merrit wrote happily; his business is booming—will already be there, ready to choose and claim their brides. Mr. Merrit took pains to assure her, as if she'd been wondering, that he's reserved all the rooms in Greenwood's one hotel and one boarding house, and that the Reverend Mr. Wright, an old friend, is standing by.