Night Fires in the Distance

by Sarah Goodwin

  We didn’t touch; I didn’t feel able to step forwards and embrace her. We didn’t say goodbye. Martha only turned to the door and opened it. The light from the candle barely reached outside, and as soon as she left she was swallowed up by the darkness.

  Missy whined and I closed the door, sitting back down by the table, looking at the candle on its saucer. There was no way I could go back to sleep, not with the wind whispering outside, carrying Martha away into the night.

  Chapter Thirty

  Laura

  “Gone! The bitch slipped out while I was sleeping and ran off.”

  Jamison thumped his cup down on the table and made me jump. He’d been red faced and furious when he arrived just after dawn. He wanted to take Will out to search for Martha by the creek as soon as we were done with breakfast.

  “How’d she get loose?”

  Jamison scrubbed a hand through his beard. “Must’ve cut through the ropes with one of the tools, she made a goddamn hole under the door. Now I’ve got to fix the barn and get the planting done without her, the selfish bitch. After I kept her fed and clothed through the winter.”

  I glanced over to where Rachel was combing out Beth’s hair. “Can you keep your voice down?” I asked him.

  Jamison looked to Will, and Will glared at me. “Get more coffee on, for a flask,” he said.

  I went to the stove, wishing I was brave enough to fling the pot at his head.

  Hattie was sitting on the supplies chest, hands folded in her lap. I wasn’t expecting her to help. She’d done nothing but sit on her ass the night Jamison came back with her. There was me, sweating over a pot of venison stew and a loaf of bread baked with soft, white, store flour, and she, dressed in that same beribboned dress she’d worn at Christmas, laughing and leaning on Jamison’s arm. Will had hardly been able to keep his eyes off of her low cut front. She was like one of those exotic birds in a cage at a fair – all song and puffed up feathers.

  “You got any whisky?” she asked over her shoulder.

  “None.”

  She sighed, one hand straying to a faint set of bruises on her wrist.

  “Think she had help?” William was asking Jamison.

  “You mean, do I think there’s savages waiting nearby to come burn down my house? No. No, she’s brown on the outside, white as a lily underneath, her own people’ll have nothing to do with her. She talks about ‘em like they’re dogs.”

  Hattie tipped her catlike face up and glared at him. “What’d you need that slut for?”

  “Are you gonna plant all those fields? Are you gonna mend the barn and plant brush fences?”

  She looked down, cowed.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “We’ll all come across and help you out,” William said.

  “Thanks…think Clappe’d help for a couple’ve decent meals?”

  Will snorted. “You think he’d be any help at all? I’ve been looking over at his fields the last few days, not a straight line anywhere. My guess is he’s never even ploughed before.”

  “Could you spare your boy?”

  Thomas was watering the oxen. William scratched his cheek as he thought about it.

  “Can’t say he’d be much help to you, best wait ‘til we can all come across.”

  William stood up and motioned impatiently for the flask of coffee. I filled the watchman’s bottle and wrapped it in a piece of sacking.

  “Hattie’ll be keeping you company,” Will said, already turning his back and sliding his boots on.

  When the men’d departed in the wagon I picked up the dirty plates and started stacking them. Hattie stayed where she was, looking at the far wall with bored, unsatisfied eyes.

  “He’s making a big fuss over that whore,” she said finally, crossing her bare legs beneath her dirty skirt. “He don’t need her for planting anything, her or her bastard. I think he’s just mad as hell she left him, ‘stead of him leaving her some place.”

  Her husband’s coarse mouth had already set my teeth on edge and hers was no better. “Kindly keep your language civil in front of my children, Mrs Neaps.”

  “’Mrs Neaps’,” she simpered, mimicking me, “how come you’ve still got those fancy English airs about you when you live in this barn?”

  I looked up from the bucket and found Rachel’s eyes wide, dislike rolled off her like stink from a skunk.

  “You know what they say, manners don’t cost a thing.”

  She snorted. “Men like your husband didn’t come to me for manners.”

  I put down my cloth and leant on the sides of the bucket, “And men like Jamison don’t take too kindly to lazy sluts who can’t wash a dish.”

  Her jaw, full of crooked, brownish teeth, went tight, I went back to my washing.

  Once everything was dry and my anger had banked down a little, I took the girls outside and found Thomas just coming out of the stable.

  “Thomas, would you cut some stove lengths, I’ve a lot of laundry to do while it’s clear.”

  “Sure,” he glanced to where the wagon had been, “Pa and Mr Neaps out looking for Martha?”

  “For all the good it’ll do them. Two idiots hunting an Indian, she could be sitting between them and they wouldn’t know it.”

  He laughed and I allowed myself to smile.

  As he went to fetch his axe, I turned and looked out towards where the ravine ran through the prairie. In the far distance I could see the wagon, like a toy. A movement caught my eye and I saw Cecelia standing by her soddie, a tiny figure in the distance. She was waving.

  I frowned, held my hands up to shield my eyes from the pale sunlight.

  She waved a few more times, then, seemingly sure of my attention, she pointed across the prairie, slightly east of where I stood, to where Jamison’s house was. After pointing for a few seconds, she turned and pointed away, not towards the ravine, but still further east.

  I whipped off my bonnet and waved it over my head. Martha had run to Cecelia, that had to be it. From there she’d gone east, and that meant Jamison could search the ravine all he wanted, he wouldn’t find her.

  She waved back at me, then went still and just watched me. I looked back and, for a few moments I felt my fear towards her, for what we’d done, grow lighter in my chest. Though I’d prayed and suffered, the wanting would not go away. For the first time I looked right at what we’d done, like staring at the sun ‘til you could see it even when you looked away. I knew I’d never stop seeing it then, that I would always think of her. I was still afraid, deep inside myself, but not of her, of what it was that pulled me to her. Like the world was suddenly backwards I was afraid of everything that might come between us, or would keep me from her.

  *

  Jamison’s search was useless, two days after Martha disappeared he was forced to admit defeat. Martha had gotten away. She was free and Jamison had only bitter little Hattie to work for him. I was more than pleased.

  When we were finished with our own work, planting the fields up, readying the garden and fixing the damage that the winter winds had done to the house and barn, William drove us over to Jamison’s farm in the wagon. We were all going to have to pitch in to get Jamison’s field’s ploughed and planted in time. I treated the extra work as the price for Martha’s freedom and I was happy pay it.

  The soddie Will had helped build in the fall was still standing, smaller than ours but sturdy, with a barn beyond it. A yard of trodden dirt was strewn with splinters of wood and bone from where he’d chopped stove lengths and divided up deer. A smoke house sat off to the right and tacked on to the end of the soddie was a tarpaper line shack - Martha’s new living quarters. I thanked God she’d never spend the night in there, it looked like a kennel.

  “Mornin’” Jamison was coming back from watering his one remaining horse, “Hattie’s got coffee on inside, you want to leave the children with her?”

  “She’s not coming out?”

  Jamison grunted. “She’s got work to do inside, place looks l
ike a pack of dogs’ve been through it.”

  I picked up Nora, Rachel took Beth by the hand. Inside Jamison’s soddie I found Hattie, her hair dirty and hanging loose, hard at work trying to make dough, working a sloppy mess in a bowl with her hands. I recognised the calico dress she was wearing, it’d been Martha’s.

  She looked up as I set Nora’s cradle box down on the plank table by the mixing bowl.

  “If she starts squalling don’t think I’m gonna change her, I’ve got enough to be doing.”

  “I see that.”

  There was only a tick, shelves, the stove and a pair of chairs in the room. I guessed that the chest at the end of the tick held clothes. Everything was dusty, with soiled dresses and shirts hanging on the chairs unwashed dishes stacked in a bucket by the door.

  “You can stop it with that look as well,” she pointed a dough clagged finger at me, “I don’t have any brats to pick up after me.”

  Ignoring her, I put my hand on Rachel’s shoulder. “We’d best get out to the field. There’s work to do. Why don’t you fill up the flask and I’ll fill one for Mr Neaps.”

  I took the coffee from the stove, filled the flasks and didn’t offer another word to Hattie. I hated to leave Beth and Nora under Hattie’s beady eyed glare, but there was no time to waste and William would never let Rachel stay behind when all hands were needed.

  We’d brought both yoke of oxen with us, one team pulled our plough while the other pulled Jamison’s. We worked at it hard until just gone noon, by then a pile of stones had built up at the end of the field where the children and I had been dumping them.

  “Laura, go fetch out the food will you?” Jamison said, as if I were his servant. William waved me off to do his bidding and I went to the house with a scowl so deep that I could feel it stiffening on my face.

  Inside the soddie Nora was awake and whimpering hungrily, so I took her up and set her to feeding. Beth was wiping dishes as Hattie washed them, but aside from that the house looked no cleaner.

  “They sent me in to get the dinner.”

  “On the table, are you blind?”

  Hattie had managed to bake her wet dough into a gummy loaf that hadn’t risen more than a hair’s breadth. It sat in a cloth lined basket with a jar of molasses.

  “Beth, sweet pea, do you want to come have dinner with me and your sister?”

  She nodded, dropped her rag and climbed down from the chair.

  Hattie pursed her lips, but said nothing as I took my daughters outside.

  We ate hungrily. No one dared mention that the bread was unrisen and over salted. I wasn’t pleased with the meal, if only because I’d always laid on a good spread for Jamison when he came by. I remembered the pie Martha had baked for her visit with us. Had she been a white woman she would have been a good wife to Jamison, better than he deserved. I hoped one day she’d make a pie for a man of her own, who loved her. At the very least she deserved to raise her baby in peace.

  We were spending the night at Jamison’s, so that we could start out early as possible on the rest of the ploughing. We’d brought our ticks on the wagon and a basket of food, cornbread, bean stew and chokecherry jam tarts. I could almost hear Jamison’s stomach sigh in relief. I knew he had to be missing Martha’s cooking.

  Hattie ate little and spoke less, while Jamison got out a bottle of whisky and poured Will drink after drink. When he started telling stories about the slaves he’d owned in Texas, I decided it was time to put the girls to bed, before he got to unsavoury talk. Thomas put his tick down on a free bit of floor and lay down to sleep, curled under his blanket.

  I stayed up, refusing to make the first move towards the dirty dishes. Hattie had done some work towards cleaning the place up, but the soiled clothes were still there, piled in a corner now and the floor was scattered with crumbs and dark spots where coffee or grease had been spilt.

  The fire died down and the men grew drunker. Even Hattie was spark eyed from drinking a few cups of whisky. Uneasiness began to slide up my spine. I didn’t want to go to bed, no matter how tired I was. I didn’t trust either of the men, or Hattie, come to that.

  “See, if she’d been a slave, like I’ve been saying they should be, I could have her found and brought back,” Jamison said. “Sooner the government gets its head straight on the matter, the better. I could triple the size of my land and have niggers farm the lot for nothing. Grow corn as far as you can see.”

  William was nodding, ruddy firelight reflecting in his eyes.

  Hattie rubbed a hand on the back of Jamison’s neck. “Soon as they pass that bill, settle this place officially, we’ll have our own house, two storeys, won’t we?”

  “Three storeys, four! Get ourselves a porch, grow tobacco and make whisky. Build a bigger farm than my daddy ever dreamed of.”

  He grabbed Hattie and hauled her into his lap, devouring her mouth while she wriggled against him. I looked away but from the corner of my eye saw that he was pulling up her faded dress. She wasn’t wearing drawers. I got up, but William grabbed me and tried to pull me to his lap. I pulled away. Jamison laughed and Hattie’s shrill giggle made William curse after me. Tripping on my skirts, I went to our tick at the back of the room, beside Rachel and Beth. They were sleeping. I picked Nora up and cradled her in my arms. The three of them around the table looked like demons in the fire’s glow.

  While Jamison embraced his wife, Will stepped around Thomas’s bed and came towards me, kneeling on the tick and breathing whisky breath on my face.

  “Don’t be so cold to me.”

  I calmed Nora but kept her against me. “Lay a hand on me and I’ll shoot you while you sleep.”

  He laughed. “You wouldn’t dare. You’ve got nothing without me.”

  I just glared at him, praying that the hate in me would show in my eyes, wiping out the fear. He took my wrist in his hand and squeezed until the bones ground together. I clenched my jaw to keep silent. He huffed a laugh, struggled to his feet and went back for more whisky.

  I laid Nora back in her cradle box and curled up on the tick, facing the drunkards, watching over my children.

  *

  We left for home the next morning. After a night of barely sleeping, listening to Jamison’s coarse talk and his panting efforts on his new wife, coupled with the work of preparing and sowing the fields had me dead on my feet by the time we loaded our ticks into the wagon and set off. I would have expected a gift of some sort, as thanks for the work we’d done. As it was, Hattie’s lack of generosity wasn’t the greatest ill I was suffering.

  Two nights of having Will’s hands paw me in the dark while Jamison and Hattie coupled blatantly not three feet from us had me wishing for a bottle of strychnine to lace his coffee with. The anger didn’t dissipate, even on the long ride back to our soddie. I didn’t say a word to Will, though I doubt he noticed, being as sick with drink as he was.

  Rachel and Thomas were both filthy, as there’d been no chance to wash anything more than our hands and faces. I was dusty, my nails rimed with earth. Both Beth and Nora had become fretful with being away from their home and their dolls, though Beth soon perked up when Will let Stick out of the barn.

  While the girls stroked and petted Stick, I went to check on the garden and found green sprouts already coming up through the soil. Further out, the corn and wheat were almost two inches high, beyond that the grass waved, as bright and new as the down on a chick.

  It was a busy day, but by the time the sun started to sink, I had everyone washed, and our clothes clean and dried. It was a relief to have control over the cooking again, to celebrate an end to Hattie’s efforts I made a thick stew and a pan of cornbread sweetened with some of our precious ‘company’ sugar to have after.

  Tired from helping me with the cleaning, Rachel started to yawn as I served the meal, and soon afterwards I put her and Beth to bed. Thomas, sore from a hard day of tending to the oxen and the garden for me, soon followed, then it was just me and William at the table. That night at least, it
was a relief.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Laura

  The weather got hotter. It hadn’t rained for weeks and the dirt was dryer than ashes. Every evening I hauled water and poured it over the onions, beans and roots that I was growing, but nothing could be done for the corn and wheat. We just had to hope for rain. Will wasn’t speaking to me more than he had to, but if anything that made me worry more.

  I looked towards Cecelia’s place last thing each evening as I watered the garden and every morning when I emptied our pot. I looked for her at least a dozen times a day. I never saw more than a distant figure in the fields. I no longer cared if what I felt was wrong, was dangerous. All I needed was to speak to her, just once. I needed to know what she thought of it.

  I was looking for her when the cloud came over the horizon.

  Shielding my eyes from the sun, I looked up and saw the strange, shimmering cloud as it grew on the edge of the prairie. Around me the grass waved and hissed in the wind.

  “Ma,” Thomas ran up behind me. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know.” I squinted. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before, but it was coming closer, making a huge shadow on the waving grass of the prairie. “Where’s your father?”

  “In the barn.”

  “Your sisters still in the house?”

  “Yes.”

  “Get inside and give a shout to Pa, tell him to come out here.”

  After a few minutes I heard Will coming over and turned to look at him. The cloud was a few minutes away, there was a sound on the wind, a chattering, clicking, like seeds being poured.

  “Shit,” Will’s eyes were round. “What in the world?”

  Will and I ran to the soddie and closed the door. I shut up all the windows and Will peered through the shutters as the cloud came closer. The sound of clicking grew louder and was followed by soft sounds, lots of them, all at once. Something tapped on the roof, falling like heavy rain. Rachel and Beth sat on their tick, clutching each other’s hands, Thomas stood by the wall, eyes wide.