by Chloe Garner
“Don’t care what you think ‘a Lise,” Sarah said. “Don’t care what she thinks ‘a you or me or anyone else. But Rhoda’s got a grip on ‘em, all three of ‘em, and not ‘cause she’s wrong.”
“Are you suggesting they get a vote?” he asked, his eyes sharp.
“No,” Sarah said. “Ain’t nobody knows better than me that ain’t gonna happen. But you gotta signal, Jimmy. We’re in a gunfight and they’s the only ones on our side. You don’t signal, they’re gonna shoot you by accident, and I ain’t gonna blame ‘em.”
He swallowed.
“What are you suggesting?”
“I’m gonna tell ‘em what’s goin’ on,” Sarah said. “No politickin’, no hidin’ cards just ‘cause I like the feel of ‘em there against my vest. Like it or not, they deserve hearin’ it, and that’s what’s gonna happen.”
He looked at her for a long time, and she could feel the gears of decision working. For once, she hadn’t put it to him in anger or frustration. It was simple, in her mind.
“I have reasons for keeping the things I do private,” he said.
“I know you do,” Sarah said. “And I can’t rightly say it ain’t been workin’ for ya.”
“They aren’t all careful with information,” he said slowly. There it was, there in the wiggle of his little finger, the way his foot was pointed, the threat that he might just stand up, dismiss her, excuse her from his confidence. It wasn’t intended as an ultimatum, but there it was anyway.
“I see your point,” he said, licking his lips. “How do you intend to control the evening?”
Sarah smiled.
“Tonight, we ain’t gonna eat like we’re in Intec,” she said. “We’re finally gonna eat like we’re in Lawrence.”
--------
When Sarah came out from her bath, walking into the front entryway, she found Jimmy coming down the stairs.
He was straightening the cuffs on a soft shirt, one with bright colors and a high collar.
The pants he wore were leather-fronted, the hard leather of someone who was accustomed to work and who needed clothing that was going to hold up under it as well as he was.
He let his arms drop.
“I just asked myself what Thor would wear to dinner at the Lawson house,” he said. “How did I do?”
“Didn’t think you had it in ya, Lawson,” she answered. He fought it, but he couldn’t help smiling.
“Yea’rn’t th’ on’ly one who c’n w’eer a cost’m,” he said, and she closed her eyes, shaking her head.
“Ain’t an accent you can fake, Jimmy. Elaine taught you coastal language, and it stuck.”
“She taught you, just as much,” he said. She shrugged.
“Maybe all I was ever made for was Lawrence.”
He dropped down the rest of the stairs on springy knees.
“Well, if you aren’t ever going to leave Lawrence, we’ll just have to fix Lawrence as it sits around you,” he said.
She pursed her lips, but didn’t rebut.
Tonight was going to be enough of a win for her and for Lawrence that she didn’t need to.
They waited on the porch in rocking chairs, smoking gremlin, watching a buckboard as it made its way off of the horizon and up toward the house escorted by a half-dozen riders.
Six horses.
Sarah rocked easily, feeling the grind of the wood under the rockers, the way the uneven planks popped and gritted as she rolled over them, watching to see who was horseback.
She held a rifle across her lap, but it was a tribute to tradition, rather than a real effort at defending herself. She recognized the big chestnut that Peter had brought with him from the coast, and she recognized the little mare pulling the buckboard, as well as the wandering way that Kayla ran her.
“She can’t get a straight line out of that mare to save her life,” Jimmy observed.
“Not to save her life,” Sarah agreed.
Merlin and the stableboy came out of the barn, but Sarah whistled at them and waved them back.
The riders came all the way up to the house, dismounting and tying off their horses under Sarah’s watchful eye.
Little Peter, Rich, Wade, Thomas, Rhoda, and Sunny.
Sunny rode side-saddle in a perfectly respectable homesteading dress, a tough canvas front aproning a simple canvas high-collar dress.
Rhoda wore a dark blue shirt that buttoned to her throat, riding pants not at all unlike Jimmy’s, a cowboy hat, and a duster.
It wasn’t Sarah’s duster. Sarah’s duster was a man’s duster, owing largely to her size, but also because she didn’t like the narrower tailoring of the women’s dusters, but a duster it was, and Sarah appreciated how comfortably Rhoda wore it, as well as how much better she was with her horse than even the Lawson men.
Kayla stopped the buckboard in front of the house and Wade and Little Peter went back to help her and Lise into the house, between Sarah and Jimmy. Rhoda was the only one who stopped.
“I ain’t done it in years, but you never outgrow your roots in a place like Elsewhere.”
Sarah nodded, and Rhoda winked, going inside.
Sarah and Jimmy waited another moment just breathing the sweet of the cool night air, then he stood and she followed him into the house.
The table in the dining room was covered with a simple linen cloth, no candlesticks, no brightly-dyed napkins, no silver place settings. Sarah put her hat on the peg in the front and hung her duster next to Rhoda’s, then went to sit in the seat she’d been in the first family dinner, second down, next to Jimmy.
Lise had chosen not to change her normal clothes, but everyone else had at least made an effort. Kayla looked like she’d designed and manufactured a dress specifically for the evening. Gold and ivory, it was built exactly like Sunny’s dress, but buttons and ribbon and bunched hems here and there that emphasized the design of the dress. It completely missed the point of Lawrence, but Sarah appreciated the effort.
“Rhoda said that you were going to make some big changes,” Lise said. “That you finally had Jimmy on a leash and that he isn’t going to rule by fiat anymore.”
“I ain’t said no such thing,” Rhoda answered. “Told ya he was gonna listen, no more.”
“First we eat,” Sarah said. “If I gotta teach you what a proper conversation is for dinner, I’ll go get a switch, and believe me, I ain’t got no hesitation usin’ it.”
The table fell still, and Sarah nodded, looking at the kitchen. A woman opened the door to look at her, and Sarah nodded again. The woman came in by herself, carrying two plates. She put them down in front of Peter and Lise and left to get more.
“What’s this?” Lise asked, holding her hands up to either side, looking down at the loaded plate.
“Hearty,” Sarah said.
“Real food,” Rhoda crowed.
Sarah and Jimmy were next, and Sarah looked down at her meal with some satisfaction.
Sure, the cook had taken some license with what Sarah had told her, but that was still a proper Lawrence meal, the likes of which the homesteaders would have put on the table the night after a wedding or for a new mother’s first night back with the family.
Thick-cut steak, fried roots, griddle-cake gremlin bread, and a gremlin-leaf salad with crumbled cheese.
“I didn’t know y’all made cheese out here,” Rhoda observed.
“Used to,” Jimmy said. “I didn’t know anyone was doing it again.”
“I didn’t, either,” Sarah admitted. She waited for Thomas and Rhoda to get their plates, then she picked up her fork, solid steel, from her own house, and nodded.
“My house growin’ up, if you ain’t finished eatin’, you weren’t ready for talkin’, yet.”
Rhoda sat straighter, looking at the kitchen.
“My house, there were seconds.”
“You are so sexy,” Thomas said, and Rhoda grinned at him.
Sarah smiled.
“’Spect we could make that happen.”
The
table dug in with varying degrees of enthusiasm as the cook returned with a tray and poured gremlin tea for everyone. Sarah, for her part, appreciated the meal, but she didn’t taste much of it. She watched the rest of the Lawsons as they ate, noting that Jimmy seemed completely content with just the meal in front of him. She really was in charge tonight.
The table ate in what was the first easy silence Sarah could remember with all of the Lawsons there.
“Going to need one of you to volunteer to spend some time up at the mine,” Jimmy said. “I want us to have a visible presence up there…”
Sarah touched his arm.
“Meant it, Jimmy. You clean your plate, then you get to talk.”
He looked over at her with a sort of false-chastening and dipped his head.
She nodded, cutting through her steak.
Jimmy’s cook may have had an opinion, but she knew her way around cooking meat, and Sarah actually put away her consideration for what would happen next to eat her steak.
Nothing but meat and salt.
Just like she’d told the woman.
There were other ways to prepare a steak, seasonings Sarah had no objection to at all, but this, the simplicity of it, was something she’d missed dearly.
“I can’t eat this,” Lise said. “It’s not healthy.”
“Suit yourself,” Sarah said. “But I meant what I said.”
She returned to her own meal, not looking up again until she used the last bit of gremlin bread to wipe her plate clean.
She looked over to find the cook standing in the doorway again and she nodded once more, easing back in her chair with a full sense of contentment.
“Have I found your birthday dinner?” the woman asked, taking Sarah’s plate.
“Just as soon as you figure out my birthday,” Sarah said wryly, but without unkindness.
“Already told her,” Jimmy said around a mouth full of food. She turned to correct him again, but he’d finished in time with her, and the cook took his slicked-clean plate from in front of him as he took a deep drink of tea. He coughed.
“Still don’t see how you drink that.”
“Beats hot water, by any measure,” Sarah answered. Rhoda didn’t come through on seconds, but she was the second load of dishes, not far behind Sarah and Jimmy, and Rich and Wade sat back with matching sighs, reaching for their tea. Sarah nodded.
“All right. Now that’s a meal. We’ll have beer in the front room in a minute, so I want to keep this short. There’s someone huntin’ either me or Jimmy. Don’t rightly know why, but we’ve got some good guesses. Considered fightin’ it out, out there, and that’s why we stayed away so long, but in the end, it looked like hunkerin’ down in Lawrence was our best bet, so that’s what we’re here to do. Gonna need every one of you what can hold a gun to keep up.
“We’re gonna start buildin’ here on the front hill, houses for all of y’all, and if you want any say-so in how they go, you ought ‘a step up and make it happen yourself. Jimmy or I will set out plots.”
“Why not just live here?” Lise asked.
“Because this is my house,” Sarah answered, trying not to seed animosity. “You get your own.”
“I want one as big as this,” Lise said.
“Not going to happen,” Jimmy said. Sarah didn’t interrupt as Lise looked at Jimmy.
“Then I want this one,” she said, and he shrugged.
“Also not going to happen.”
“Other than movin’ the rest of us up here, what are we doin’ to get set?” Rhoda asked.
Sarah nodded.
“We’re going to fortify the house, and we’re going to put in monitoring security along the way to help us.”
Rhoda crossed her arms, looking as though she was ruminating something else, but Thomas was the next to speak.
“How are we getting absenta out of the mountains?”
“I’m working on it,” Jimmy said.
“Not good enough,” Rhoda said, and Jimmy tipped his head to the side as he looked at her. He still wasn’t going to tolerate people taking to him like that. Rhoda shrugged. “You’re asking men to risk their lives because you say you have it under control,” she said. “I want to hear what you’re planning.”
“I keep the details to myself,” Jimmy said, his voice tight in a way Sarah was guessing only she would hear. “My mother taught all of us that the best secret is the one that only lives in your own head.”
“You tell Sarah,” Rhoda said.
“Sarah is my wife,” Jimmy said. “And even given that, Sarah and I have numerous secrets from each other.”
“Do we?” Sarah asked.
“How do you find absenta?” he asked.
“That ain’t a secret,” she said. “You just can’t be bothered on account of how complex it is.”
“And if I asked you to show me?”
She let this settle before she answered.
“No,” she finally said. “I wouldn’t.”
“What if I asked?” Rhoda asked. Sarah shook her head.
“Wouldn’t put that on you for anything,” she said. Rhoda narrowed her eyes, confused and Jimmy sighed.
“We think that they’re hunting the knowledge of how to find absenta,” Jimmy said. Thomas raised his head.
“They want to take Sarah?”
“Right now, he thinks it’s me,” Jimmy said. “Which eliminates some of the paths of knowledge for how he’s keeping tabs on us, because most of the investors knew that it was Sarah who figured it out. He’s willing to use Sarah against me, to try to flush me out, though, which was why we stayed away. When we decided he was after her…”
“You came home,” Thomas said, nodding. “You should have done it sooner.”
“My priority is this family,” Jimmy said. “If someone’s hunting me, I’m going to take it on somewhere else. I’m not going to bring it home with me.”
“Then you’re dumber than burnt grass,” Rhoda said. “That’s why we’re strong.”
“You’re strong because of me,” Jimmy said. “And I’m not going to let someone use you against me.”
“I want to know how to find absenta,” Lise said.
“And I told you unless you ate your dinner, you weren’t gonna be a part of this conversation,” Sarah answered.
“I want to know how to find absenta,” Little Peter said.
“If we all know, then we’re all targets, and the odds that they’re gonna get all of us are zero,” Wade said. “They give up and go away.”
“But so does our corner on the market,” Jimmy said.
Sarah nodded as the table reoriented to look at Jimmy again.
“Right now, the frontier towns are barely generating any absenta,” Jimmy went on. “Elsewhere and a couple other towns are coming up with a little, but the world is starved, and prices are up beyond where you guys would believe. I hardly believe it. And right now we have the only source.”
“You’re puttin’ wealth b’fore your wife’s well-bein’?” Rhoda asked. Jimmy looked sideways at Sarah, who shrugged.
“She wouldn’t choose anything different,” Jimmy said. “Right now, the strongest of us has the secret. It doesn’t matter what happens, no one else is going to get that secret from her. She’d die first.”
He spoke slowly, and there was a waxing realization in Sarah how right he was.
She would die before she told someone else how to open that box.
It would kill every town up and down the range. Every one of them that didn’t have Jimmy Lawson to see to them.
“She should at least tell you,” Rhoda said. “Wade’s right. More targets means there’s less incentive to come after us.”
“They already think it’s Jimmy,” Thomas said.
“This is Sarah’s. End of story.”
Even in his Lawrence clothes, Jimmy had enough authority to his voice alone to shut down the conversation.
“So how are we going to get the absenta down out of the mountains?” Rhoda
finally asked. Jimmy pursed his lips.
“When I was in Preston, I saw a material that they were using to ship the high-end liquor. Hard, lightweight, and very difficult to get into. You seal it chemically and you have to have the right tool to get it open again.”
“The wooden boxes,” Sarah said, and he nodded.
“I’m going to replace them with numbered crates that are much, much harder to steal.”
“Jumpers are still going to try to hit the mule trains,” Thomas said. “Especially if the price of absenta is up that high.”
Jimmy nodded.
“Thor told me you guys have been bringing down boxes every time you go up, but they’re just piling up, up there. We need a way to get more out at once without making a target out of ourselves.”
“And get it down the line to Preston,” Sarah said.
“That part’s easy,” Jimmy said. “I take it, for now, and later, we run our own trains.”
“Our own train,” Sarah said. The feel was so elusive to her she couldn’t actually believe it, though she could see his perspective: it was all a matter of hardware.
“No,” Thomas said. “You’re not going to Preston with a carload of absenta. You don’t leave Lawrence again until we know that whoever is hunting you is done.”
Even Sarah was surprised by this.
“Excuse me?” Jimmy asked. Thomas sighed at him.
“If no one else is going to say it, I will. I may not be a part of a lot of the gunfights, but I care about this family as much as you do, and I know that you risking your life for no other reason than that you’re too stubborn to let someone else do it… that’s not good for us. It’s not good for any of us. So I don’t want you going past Carson without Sarah and one of the rest of us with you until we all agree that it’s clear.”
“That’s… not how this works,” Jimmy said.
“What’s going to happen if you go get yourself killed?” Rhoda asked. “What’s going to happen to us?”
Jimmy drew a deep breath, his mouth working around a distinct anger that wasn’t going to help anything.
“What would you suggest?” he asked.
“A rail to Magnum would be a good start,” Sunny said. The entire table turned to look at her, down at the far end of the table. She looked at them with her dour eyes.
