Winner, Midwest Fiction, National Indie Excellence Awards
Finalist, Historical Fiction, National Indie Excellence Awards
Longlisted, Best Indie Book 2023, Shelf Unbound
Silver Medal, Plains Fiction, Independent Publisher Book Awards
Honorable Mention, Historical Fiction, The Eric Hoffer Book Award

         

 

 


CHAPTER ONE

I’m not one to pass much time thinking about things before I do them.  My father shakes his head and says that’s how his beauty Eliza got into this trouble.  My mother smirks and wonders out loud how I can think I’m so special when all I know how to do is get into trouble.

Alone in the midnight blackness, for once I do stop and think.  I stand on the riverbank thick with cottonwood and willow trees and stare at the water as it rushes past, brown like the mud that nearly brought me skidding to the hard ground as I stumbled to get here.  I shiver even in all I’m wearing, both my skirts over my drawers and corset, two blouses, little jacket, two moth-bitten shawls, stockings and best boots, the only ones with no hole in them.  I dare not leave anything behind.  I’ll need it all, the coins, too, tucked inside the string bag stuffed in the pocket of my inner skirt.  Even under all that, the chilly air squeezes in on me like a too strong boy who wants what he wants and sees no reason why he shouldn’t have it.

I push my dark hair back from my forehead.  Tonight of all nights I dare not start thinking.  I should just lay hands on John’s canoe and go.

He’ll hate me for it when he comes to.  But that’s the least of what he’ll hate me for.  And what do I care anyway?  For every speck of hate he’ll have for me, I’ll have twice as much for him.

The liar.  The cheat.  The brute I married.  Though now I half wonder if I really did.

I shake my head hard, as if that will clear it, and tell myself again that tonight is no night to dwell on the past.  I can’t spare the time.  Or lose my courage.  If I linger too long, the drink will wear off and John will rouse.  He’ll come looking for me even before he sees my clothes are gone; I know it.  Then what?

I shudder.  Almost better that a wolf or bear find me first.  And either would be better than a ghost to rise before me, unearthly white from the plague that got him.  Who knows how many souls are buried along this river?  If you make the mistake of dying on a steamboat, that’s your fate: eternity under the riverbank or your corpse swept away with the water when it changes course.

It’s the fear of creatures both alive and dead that sends me edging again down the grassy slope, closer to the river.  It’s so dark I can’t even make out the bank on the other side, but I know this clutch of trees and believe it’s close by here that John lays his canoe.  The water is moving fast—faster than it looks when I see it in the day.  When I see it but have no scheme to climb inside that old boat and let it free on the river to carry me far, far away.  Now that I can truly imagine myself on that treacherous journey, I shudder again and my foot slips in my stupid shoe.  I give a little shriek and grab at the shrubs around me to stop from sliding into the current.

When finally I settle again, I try not to pant but to keep silent.  What if someone heard me cry?  Yet I pick up no shuffling among the trees.  I can hope it’s too cold for anyone to be afoot.  And hard as my ears strain, all I can hear is the river.  No, I hear something else, too, that familiar screech.  A panther.   Distant, thank God.  And upriver, not the way I’m going.

I’m going to Hermann, I remind myself, where the Missouri meets the Gasconade.  I hear tell there’s a post office there, and somebody once said there’s an inn, not that he’d seen it.  I could find work, and not the kind I do here, that leaves my hands blistered and crusted with dirt and my back bent as if I were already old.

I’m not old yet.  Yes, I’m four and twenty, but if I hold my tongue and keep my eyes downcast I can pass for younger.  I still have my looks, near fresh as ever.  When my courage is up I don’t doubt I could marry again, though I wonder why I’d want to.  I know now all that does is make a man free to do what he wants with you and in near one year I’ve had enough of that for two lifetimes.  But if ever I changed my mind, what’s to stop me?  For if John Haycraft could amble into this town and forget everything that went before, why couldn’t I go to Hermann and do the same? 

That thought makes me feel like a girl again, strong and bold.  I remember when I would lie in the grass and stare up at the blue, blue sky, dreaming of being far away from here, away from these rutted fields, away from these people who don’t care if they never see past this stretch of river.  Even if they came from somewhere I can’t conjure, from Kentucky or even Virginia, they don’t think about that anymore.  It’s as gone from their minds as if they woke from a fever.  Even for my father it’s that way.  When I was a girl I thought all the time about what lay beyond the curve in the river and for a time I was fool enough to think John Haycraft would take me there.  Lately I’ve started wondering about it again, knowing if I only dared, this coursing water could lead me to a different life than the one I’m stuck with now, these pitiful days that stretch out one after the next all the very same.  If I stay put here, the days won’t change until the day I’m dead.

I’ve walked further downriver—due to the fact that’s closer to our place and John is more likely to be lazy than not—when I startle at a soft laugh behind me.

“Well, well.  What’re you out looking for this time of night?”

A woman’s voice and I know it in an instant.  My head spins around and I see my sister Sarah.

“You’re not looking for John’s canoe!”  She says it in a triumphant kind of way, eyes gleaming, like she’s sure that’s what I’m after.  “Why do you need that?  You’re not going anywhere.  You wouldn’t go in the day,” she tells me, “let alone in the dark.”

If somebody had to find me I wish it were our sister Visa Ann, but she would never be out at this hour.  Even our brother Asa would be better to find me than Sarah.  But it’s Sarah who can pick up a change on the wind.

She eyes me.  She’s dark-haired like I am but older and harder of feature.  People shouldn’t tell her that, but they do.  Even our father does.  “You’re not going anywhere,” she repeats.  She’s sure she’s on top of me in this.  “And even if you do, he’ll come after you.”

I don’t want to tell her much because every word will make it back to our mother’s ears, and maybe John’s, too.  “This has nothing to do with you,” I mutter.  That Sarah keeps telling me I won’t go puts even more fire in me.  I spin back around and lose my footing, which only makes her cackle louder.  I know she won’t think for a moment of helping me.  Sarah’s our mother’s daughter through and through.

“You’re wearing both your shawls, too,” she mocks me.  “You must think you’re really going.  Why this time?” and in that question I hear a curiosity she can’t hide.  We all in our family live so close, one on top of the other, which means she knows my shame, and like our mother she enjoys it.  Look at our beautiful Eliza!  So special but still getting that from the man she begged to marry.

“Because this time was one too many,” I tell her.  I wonder if John will admit the true story once I’m gone.  I doubt it.  It casts no good light on him.  I doubt he’ll stay, come to think of it.  There’s nothing for him here.  Like us Harpers, John Haycraft owns no land.  Couldn’t he hunt anywhere, and trap?  He’d be better off trying his game somewhere new.  He’s the sort of man you don’t mind seeing the back of once the shine’s worn off and you have to look straight on at what little is really there.

But despite everything, the thought of John gone, forever gone, does pain me.  I feel a sting behind my eyes and look away to hide my face.  See?  It did me no good to start thinking again.

“He woke up, you know,” Sarah says, in that same triumphant tone.  I know something you don’t.  “I heard him calling for you and not in his nice voice, either.  I came out to warn you.”

That’s a lie.  Sarah doesn’t want me to get away from John.  She wants him to find me then see what he does after.  I put my back to my sister and keep moving, my eyes madly searching.

“So where you think you’re headed?”  My sister’s voice taunts as she matches me step for step.  “Hermann,” she guesses, and I hate that my plan is so obvious it rises to even her mind.  “That’s not far enough,” she tells me.  “Haycraft will sure enough find you there.”

Then I spy the canoe, my salvation, in front of me to the left, its paddle lying in the middle like it’s aiming to split the boat in half.  It’s always John who puts the canoe in the current, laughing that I’m not strong enough, but tonight I will find the strength to do it.

Sarah must see the canoe, too, because she rushes forward to set herself between it and me.  She pushes her hands into my chest, hard, so that I stumble backward.  “You’re not leaving me to mind Mama’s brats on my own,” she tells me.  Now her voice is rough as her hands.  Then she puts her fingers in her mouth and lets loose a whistle so sharp and loud it could wake all those ghosts under the riverbank.

I scramble past her for the canoe.  And though she yanks on my skirts and my hair and bangs on my back, somehow I push it closer to the river.  I feel as if a kind of mad force has gripped me, as if I can do things I never could before.  Sarah whistles again, even more of a shriek this time, and after that I hear a commotion behind us and figure it has to be John coming this way, just my luck, scrambling fast through the trees and the shrubs.  So he was out already, roaming and looking, just like Sarah was.  They were a pair, the two of them.  My sister just found me first.  And if she was going to warn anybody tonight, it was going to be him and not me.

She’s on his side and no wonder.  This wouldn’t be the first time she wants what I have, but this time I’m ready to give it up.  Maybe she’s drunk the potion I must’ve drunk when I first met John Haycraft, which full wore off tonight.

I’ve got the canoe only a few feet from the river when he finds me.  I spin around to face him.  My clothes are torn from Sarah’s pulling and my hair is crazy wild, but I’m calm inside now I can’t undo what I started.  Sarah backs off a pace as I watch John’s eyes move to the paddle I’ve taken in my hands.

“Put that down, woman.”

I will not, but I don’t spare the breath to tell him that.  I just raise the paddle higher in the air.

He stares at me, panting, hands on hips and eyes narrowing.  People didn’t trust him when he showed up here out of nowhere, since they didn’t know him and they didn’t know his family.  It wasn’t much more than a year ago, but I must’ve been young and stupid then because he won me over with his sweet talk and his stories.  Then his kisses started and that sent me over the edge.  Even now, when there’s dirt on his trousers and I can smell the drink from here, any woman would tell you he’s a fine-looking man.  I must’ve thought that was good for something when I married him.

“What I said before doesn’t matter,” he tells me.

It does matter, but I won’t give him the satisfaction of another go-round on the topic.  “Just let me go,” I say, though now I doubt I need his permission.

“I don’t think so.”  He cocks his chin at the canoe behind me.  “Don’t start thinking that belongs to you.”

“If I’m your wife”—I keep my voice low—“I’ve as much right to it as you.”

I hear a little whoop from Sarah.  She knows John’ll take those as fighting words and that she wants to see.

He steps closer.  I can tell it’s one of those times he doesn’t know how to handle me.  “I say what you’ve a right to.  And woman, you should know by now that I’m the one who’ll do the leaving.”

Truth to tell, by this sorry point I’m not sure he’d mind my going.  I think he’s had enough of me like I’ve had enough of him.  I just think he doesn’t want me to best him, especially not with Sarah watching.

“She means to go to Hermann,” my sister offers.  Then: “She’s got coins in her skirts.”

John lurches forward faster than I can do anything about it and grabs the paddle from my hands.  He throws that aside and knocks me backward, pushing fierce on my shoulders.  I fall hard, half on the canoe and half on the ground.  Pain grinds through me and I taste blood in my mouth.

He’s on top of me then and I worry he’s going to want to do what he always wants to do, never mind Sarah’s watching.  That brings me to.  I push at his hands, beneath my skirts now, but for once it’s not my drawers he’s after.

“Her pockets!” Sarah shrieks.

He’s ripping at me, he’s tearing at me, I can smell the drink strong in my nostrils, and when I know he’s going to find my string bag with the coins, I stop fighting.  That really makes him mad—it always makes him mad when I pretend I don’t care what he’s doing—and I can tell I’m right because he doesn’t just rip the bag out of my pocket.  He rips the whole pocket off then raises himself halfway up to hold it high above me in the air.  Still astraddle, he stares down at me for a moment then whips the bag down and across my face.

I close my eyes tight and don’t let loose the tiniest whimper.  I know what he wants and I won’t give it to him.

So he does it again.

Behind John, Sarah makes a sound.  This might be too much even for her.

“You gonna cry, woman?” John grunts.

I will not.  I don’t care how many times he does it.  I don’t care how much blood I have in my mouth.  I didn’t cry when he threw those words at me tonight and I won’t cry when he throws his fists at me now.  He hates when I go cold like this, when I don’t react at all, because he knows he can’t get to me then, whatever he does.  I surprise him with the strength I have.  Really, I surprise myself.

He relaxes and I find that crazy strength again.  I kick my legs out at him and hit him somewhere, I don’t know where, or care, but this time it’s him toppling backwards.  I scramble to my feet and whirl around and push the canoe closer to the river, it’s so very close now, and then it’s edged out over the water and I fling myself inside and the force of my body pushes the canoe all the way into the river.

The rushing water takes me fast, so fast.  I turn around on my hands and knees in the rocking canoe and see John and Sarah on the bank staring after me.  I don’t think I’ll ever forget their faces, splotches of paleness in the black night, looking like they’re seeing something they’ll never forget, either.

I feel a stab, then, quick and sharp, for the life I’ve lived here, for my father, for my younger sisters… I may never see little Minerva again, or Lucinda, or Visa Ann.

The canoe takes no heed.  It’s moving and I’m in it.  I have no paddle, I have no coins, I’m spitting my own blood out of my mouth, but I’m in it.



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