“In what capacity?” I asked. “As your jeweler?”
“As my wife,” he said.
Your mother was a fool, my dear. I was young, and I was not half as wise as I thought I was. What your father and I had was strong enough to survive in the middle of a desert, atop a mountain in the Arctic, and I let a city drive us towards his grave. We could have stayed in Chicago. We could have returned to St. Louis. We could have gone anywhere in the world besides damned De Soto, but I—
I am getting ahead of myself.
Your gran took the news of my intention to run away with the army doctor as well as anyone would have, which is to say she neither cursed him with impotence and baldness nor did she and her sisters summon natural disasters and mechanical failure to impede our journey north. She helped me pack, which is more than I could have expected from her. My cousins were beside themselves with joy and jealousy both. I promised to write.
Were your father intending to stay in St. Louis, I imagine he would have courted me through the winter, that we would have wed come springtime, during the revival and awakening of the world. According to tradition, springtime is the only acceptable time for a witch to perform the union ritual, and I could not wait so long to join your father. In three weeks’ time he’d accepted his discharge from service and packed his bags and come to collect me.
In ways we had not in our letters, your father and I spoke of the future on the trip north. It was a pleasure to be able to sit beside him, to explore the lines on the palm of his hand as he spoke of looking forward to teaching medicine rather than practicing it.
If I had valued our future as much as my own freedom, I would not be writing you this letter. Your father would be alive to tell you of our time in Chicago.
I imagine he would tell you of how we stepped off the steamboat into a windy January afternoon, how I held my spine straight and my chin up though the cold and the air brought water to my eyes, and I to your father’s side. How he held an arm around my shoulders to protect me from the wind as the porter loaded our bags into the carriage. How I remained tucked against him for the duration of the ride from the ferry landing to the university.
I would like to think he was excited to have me with him as we dragged our belongings inside the looming gray terraced house where faculty and their families lived. He would not have told you of what we did that night, after we had finished putting the place together so it began to resemble our own home and agreed without speaking that we would sleep in the same bed.
If your father were still alive, he would tell you that the next morning, a Monday, he and I bundled up against the wind and made our way to the city’s hall. I was nervous, as I knew several states had laws against whites marrying outside of their race and I knew Illinois still forbade whites from marrying blacks.
It was the first of many times I would fear for our safety, and the safety of the children I had begun to hope of having. It was the first of many times I felt I had betrayed the father I never knew when I claimed to be white. All the clerk cared to see was our birth certificates and our proof of address, and he was satisfied with what your father showed him. That your father’s army discharge papers were in the stack must have helped. The clerk barely looked at me throughout the transaction.
Your father’s hand was steady as he signed his name to the certificate of marriage. Mine shook. I was not quite nineteen years old, and was excited and scared. After it was done and the pen returned to the clerk, your father took my hand in his, and the shaking ceased.
We never discussed a ceremony. Many times in my young life, I had witnessed a union ceremony at the roadhouse. They were often conducted on the nights of a full moon, and they required blood, as most difficult tasks do. The women in our family do not join themselves to men who are weak, or hungry for power, or unable to accept that the Christian Bible is a story, not a stone tablet handed down from their God himself. Witches pray to no god, and honor only the earth and the powers on this earth. Contracting with spirits on the other side, I believe, is what has led to the formation of those terrible things man calls religions.
If your father and I had stayed in St. Louis, we would have stood before the rest of the MacPherson family and their kin and recited our vows not to our witnesses but to each other. We would have cut each other’s palms with a dagger used only for such a ceremony. We would have performed, in our own room with the door closed, a ritual to ensure our fertility, and your father would have been recognized as kin to the MacPherson family.
This was how I chose to exercise my own freedom—by living among those who would cower or worse if they knew of the things I did in the light of day, and by binding myself to the man I chose not with blood but with ink.
Your father would tell you I was not happy in Chicago, that we did not have so much as a palmful of dirt to call a yard and I could not make use of the sloped rooftop. He would tell you, fondly I believe, of how I attempted to grow herbs in boxes on the windowsills, how I could not rely on nature because we did not get much sunlight in the winter months so I touched them often, sang to them often, carried on conversations with them often.
He would not tell you of the first argument he and I ever had. I will. I was wrong.
We were walking together on a damp afternoon. Students on bicycles rang their bells as they hurried past, and groups of men wearing white coats and stern expressions passed us by from time to time. I paid them no mind. I was listening to your father tell a story of a spectacle that had occurred in the operating theater that morning when I reached out to dance my fingertips over some sleeping vines clinging death-tight to the side of a lecture hall.
The vines, or at least the few I touched, rustled as if some live creature had awakened beneath them, and bulbs of pink and purple burst forth and blossomed. Your father jumped as if a shot had fired, and though he had known what I was capable of, having seen it in the windowsill garden and suspected it from the obsidian glass and the altar and all the other strange things that made our flat a home, I also know he was scared. Not of me. For me.
He reached across my body to grab my wrist, and I looked around to see more than a few bystanders staring at me.
“Walk faster,” he said in a low voice he had never used before and never would again.
I did not speak again the entire way back to our flat, and he did not release my wrist. I felt as if he were dragging a disruptive child home from church, and was both ashamed and angry. Once the door was locked and his hands were freed, we faced each other.
“What were you thinking?” he asked.
“I wasn’t,” I said. “It isn’t as if I can control it.”
“Surely you can! Don’t you understand the danger you put yourself in when you do things like that?”
“This is America,” I said. “There are no witch hunters in America.”
“Oh, no? Why don’t you ask the good people of Salem, Massachusetts, about witch hunters?”
Your father took my crossing my arms over my chest for agreement. I went to him then, tucked myself against his chest, and wrapped my arms around his waist. If I had known, I would have forced myself to be happy. I would have done so many things different if I had known what would happen. But our future was nowhere in sight then. It was just your father and me in a cold and crowded city, and I promised him I would be more careful.
For the next several years, your father would tell you, he and I tried for a baby.
Your father was afraid for my safety, and with good reason. I could only imagine what would happen to a child in this city, a girl child who amused herself by braiding a horse’s mane with only her thoughts or lighting and extinguishing oil lamps in shop windows with the blink of an eye, reading strangers’ thoughts and announcing them to all in earshot. We would have to remain indoors until she was old enough to control herself. We were a long way from St. Louis.
So I grew, among the other herbs, sprigs of wild carrot, or bishop’s lace. After lying with your father, I would chew the seeds. It
is most effective if taken as a tincture for seven days after, but we were newly wed and thought of ourselves as such for years afterwards. I do not believe he suspected. I believe he thought we would become parents when the time was right.
On a calm evening in June of 1855, your father returned home from the medical college with his usual mass of papers and books tucked inside his satchel, holding a telegraph in his hand. He all but hummed with anticipation as he turned my attention from my spellbook to kiss me.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“We’re expecting a guest,” he said. “My old commanding officer.”
“For how long?”
“A weekend,” he said. “Maybe a bit longer. He says he has news.”
“Splendid,” I said though I did not mean it.
I cleaned the guest bedroom, as we had taken to calling the room that ought to have been our children’s had your father’s bride not been selfish and stupid. Opening the windows to blow away the dust and burning white sage to clear the energy in the room was as much for my sake as for our guest’s. Your father picked him up from the train station, and I began preparing dinner. On a normal evening your father was the one who cooked, as my green thumb did nothing to assist me in culinary efforts, but this evening was not normal.
The men were laughing at some old story as they came up the stairs, a story that continued even after your father unlocked the door and allowed them both entry. Their boots clomping in the entryway was a sound to which I had yet to grow accustomed, as our home only ever admitted your father and me, or your father and a few of his colleagues from time to time. Not soldiers.
Lieutenant Henry Ness was a tall white man, taller than your father and built solid. In those days he did not wear a beard, nor had his brown hair begun to turn silver. It was blond from the time he had spent out west, and the tanned quality of his skin made him appear older than he was. He walked with a limp. That told me what his stature had not, what neither he nor your father would. In most circles it is considered poor manners to read a person’s health when shaking their hand for the first time, but none of my kin were around to take me to task for doing just that. Ness left the army not by choice but because he had taken an arrow to the hip. It would take time and resilience for him to ride a horse without agony again.
“Li Lian,” Ness said correctly for the first and last time, “it is a pleasure and an honor to be a guest in your home.”
After dinner the men smoked tobacco pipes and I cleaned up. The hour grew quite late, but our minds were clear and sharp. Your father was prepared for Ness’s proposal. I was not.
Ness said, “Matt, I know you’ve got a real bright future here, but it doesn’t take a bright man to teach. You get what I’m saying? The country’s bigger than it used to be, and it’s safer to move out west than it was two, three years ago. All the same, it’s hard as hell to find someone as intelligent and dedicated as you are actually out there practicing medicine. A lot of places don’t even have a doctor. You should see what happens to those places come wintertime, or when a sickness breaks out. I’ve been through some ghost towns in my time—you’d think the Indians had had at them. Wasn’t the Indians. It was folks trying to start a town without any sort of law in place.”
The question hung in the air, and Ness answered it.
“Nebraska.”
“Nebraska,” your father repeated.
“Yep. De Soto, in particular. They need a sheriff, and they’re going to need themselves a doctor.”
I excused myself and began preparing for bed then, my thoughts getting away from me. The word Nebraska brought to mind open plains and tall grass and houses spread so far apart it wouldn’t matter if the trees I touched became heavy with fruit when they ought to have dried up, or if I walked outside without shoes and brought up wildflowers in my wake. Chicago was a cage. Out in the wilds was where my heart wanted to be.
More than the wilds, though, I wanted to be where Matthew was. If he had wanted to stay in Chicago, I would have made my heart want the same thing. I would have given him the strength to tell his old friend no, and I would have stopped chewing wild carrot seeds to keep our children from growing inside of me. In time I would have learned to love that ugly city, to like wearing gloves like a proper lady, to mind my tongue when I was speaking to the other mothers when our babies were old enough to need walking to school. If that was what he wanted, he would still be alive right now.
He wanted to go to De Soto. He told me so when he and Ness finally quit jawing sometime around one in the morning and he climbed into bed with me. My back found his chest though I was still half-asleep. In his arms, I thought his words made sense.
“I think we’re moving to the Nebraska Territory,” he said.
And I said, “I think you’re right, my love.”
5
IT WOULD BE A LIE to say your father and I had no way of knowing the three highwaymen were set to come the night they came.
The three years that passed after our arrival in De Soto blurred together. I grew my garden on the land behind our cabin, and we wanted for little. You had already quickened, but my belly had not begun to show, at least not to anyone unfamiliar with my body. If it were up to your father, I would have stayed home the rest of the year and turned the place into a nest. We were happy, and I felt no portend in the wind.
I had been standing sideways before the mirror, guessing at how much longer we would have to wait for you to arrive without turning to clairvoyant magick, when the glass shimmered the way still waters move when disturbed by a pebble or an adventurous fish. An image of your gran appeared before me. Though she startled me, I was pleased to see her. I would have told her so, but I could no more converse with her image than I could have with a telegram. That was not the sort of spell she had Worked. When the message finished, I dressed and went out to the kitchen to join your father.
“Ma tells me three highwaymen stopped at the inn a fortnight past,” I said.
“How’s she know they were highwaymen?”
By then your father ought to have known the answer: she just knew. She never revealed how. She knew the men’s faces and she knew their names. It may have been she saw their intentions smudged on the glassware they left behind, or hiding in the shadows they cast upon the dusty floors. Perhaps it wasn’t magick at all. They could have got themselves loosened up on your great-auntie Griselda’s corn whiskey while your gran and Auntie Lucinda sat themselves awhile, listening and laughing at what the men revealed.
“Let me guess,” said Matthew. “She just knows?”
I planted a kiss on his forehead, which did nothing to smooth his worry lines.
According to your gran’s message, the three were headed west through the Nebraska Territory. They had spoken of a debt owed, and they brought with them no good omen.
“What’d she say they looked like?” your father asked.
“She didn’t,” I said.
“How are we supposed to know it’s them, then?”
“If we see strange men numbering three, I reckon we’ll know.”
“This is Nebraska. Strange men abound.”
Your father had used sage and rosemary to season the eggs and potatoes he cooked for breakfast. He asked before he did it, knowing the uses I had for white sage. The sage used for seasoning is not the sage we use for cleansing. They are different families of herbs altogether, and it is the white sage you do not want to give away or ingest. White sage burns well and the burning does away with darkness and malevolence, but it will make a body sick if taken by mouth. Telling the difference is easy even in the dark. Cooking sage is a green gray and smells of mint, while white sage is silver gray and smells of nothing though it glows like smoke. Never share the white sage with any but your cousins, and do not judge harshly the man you choose for thinking them the same.
After breakfast, your father and I went ahead as if the day were the same as the one come before, but I know the message nagged at him. Your father knew w
ell enough that our magick was real and if it offered a warning, he would do well to heed it. He went into town to open his office for his patients while I stayed behind to tend our garden. It was a quiet day, and a fine one.
When your father returned that afternoon, I was still working in the garden, my hands painted with fertile dirt and crushed sage. Streaks of it stained my face from my fighting with the breeze over an errant strand of hair. Your father asked if I was making a charm, and I told him yes.
“What for this time?” he asked.
“Unity,” I said. “So long as the poppet I make remains intact, it will keep us and the baby safe.”
“It will?”
“Mm hmm.”
“Well now,” he said, kneeling down and brushing back my hair with his hands, “that’s my job, ain’t it?”
What happened next, my dear, I will keep for myself. It would be the last time we ever lay together.
That evening, your father and I took a light supper and sat out on the porch to watch the sunset. I liked to watch the sun set and hold your father’s hand while it did so, and once darkness fell we bolted the doors and lit a single oil lamp. As we prepared for bed, I heard horses on the path leading to our front porch.
Neither of us spoke. I peered out the front window and saw two men on horseback. One of the men dismounted and helped the other, who was slumped forward against the horse’s neck. The injured man leaned on his companion as they hobbled towards our front door.
On an ordinary evening, I would not have hesitated to open the door to help someone in need, as your father was the only physician for miles around and we had grown accustomed to folks calling on him at all hours of the night. But the bad omen and memory of your gran in the mirror stayed my hand. Rather than open the door, I peeked through the curtain.
The uninjured man was short, like as not in his fourth decade. Though he was small and his dark hair silvering, I knew by the way he carried himself that if he got it into his mind to be violent, the violence would come to him easy as breathing. His eyes were squinted as if he were sentenced to walk the rest of his days through a dust storm, and he wore a powder horn on his belt, a bandana around his neck. On the back of his right hand was an old brand. I do not think he was cruel by choice, but a life of cruelty had made him so. Even before he spoke, I recognized him as Mexican.
Devil's Call Page 4
