Of Honey and Wildfires

by Sarah Chorn

  More than that, was my hair. Before, my father’s violet coloring had always marked him as something else, though it was easy enough to hide with the right hat and kerchief. Now, however, it was I who held that dubious honor. Here, in this place, I saw my father and Annie’s violet locks. Behind Annie, her husband was jade in coloring. I hadn’t seen her children long, but I knew they were likewise colorful. In contrast, my own onyx hair stood out, marking me as other. I didn’t like it. There would be no blending in here. Not the way I could out there, beyond the Boundary. I felt exposed. Suddenly, my lack of shine felt like an accusation, like an admission of a crime I had not known I’d committed. I had my father’s violet eyes. That was all we shared between us.

  “And your wife?” She looked around him, peeked into the shadows cast by the moon dancing on the scrub oak. “Where is she?”

  “She died in childbirth.”

  “I’m sorry,” Annie said, and she did look sorry. Her eyes went wide and filled with tears, her mouth opened and shut silently, and then she took her brother’s hand and led him inside, leaving me to trail after.

  I was acutely aware of crossing that threshold that night, the feel of moving from the known, into the unknown. The cabin itself was small and warm, informal but full of the oddities of life, bits of cloth, a comb, a mirror, small boards and chalk for writing, books, a basin of water, and so much more. Things acquired through life and stability. Things I’d never had. Never even dreamed of having.

  We were quickly seated at a long oak table that took up most of the space in the cabin and served bowls of hot soup with chunks of bread. I picked at it nervously, wary. Whatever appetite I’d had, fled.

  Still, I felt my father’s eyes on me and I ate. Even then, I did not want to disappoint him.

  Across the room, the two children stayed well away, but whispering behind their hands, gazes fixed on me. What a curiosity I must have been to them, and truthfully, I was just as curious about them, but shy with my regard. I had not seen other children before. Not that I could remember, at least, and their presence filled me with an odd mix of excitement and trepidation.

  My da told Annie his story, about his years in the mountains. Meeting my mother in some far-flung town, his marriage, my birth, and then that fateful second birth, whereupon both my mother and sister died. Then, he said, he was so torn apart with grief, he took me on his saddle and put wherever we had been behind us. He put fire to the trail and ran from his shadows. Spent some time with me, trapping and hunting, until he realized that a girl couldn’t act like a man grown. A girl needed structure and education. A girl needed to be civilized.

  “Are you staying?” Annie asked, voice full of hope. “You could hide out somewhere—"

  “I can’t,” Da said. He cast his eyes to the far wall, as though he could see through it. “You know me, Annie. My life wasn’t made to be lived in one place.”

  I don’t know why I hadn’t realized it before that moment. Perhaps I was so young, or perhaps I was so caught up in what was happening, I didn’t stop to think that my father would be dragging me all the way out here to dump me at the feet of strangers. I didn’t think that this journey was one long goodbye. If I had, perhaps I would have savored it more.

  He must have been desperate. I realize that now. Desperate, to dare the Boundary with his own daughter, who might not survive it. Not once, but twice, for I learned during his conversation with my aunt that I had been born in the mountains, well within the Boundary.

  I do not harbor anger for him. Not truly. As a child I did, but now I am wiser and I understand the way of it. He loved my mother with every part of him. She was the only creature in the world that could tame the wild of his soul, and she was gone. I was nothing but a reminder, every day, of what he’d lost.

  A body can only live so long with a wounded heart and a bleeding soul.

  He did not leave me because he wanted to. He left me because he had to.

  They spoke in soft tones for some time before I started nodding off and Annie ushered me and her kids to a loft upstairs and bade us rest. I was exhausted, but not used to sleeping under a roof. Uncomfortable, I tossed and turned the night away, listening to their whispered voices down below as they haggled away my future in a pool of yellow shine light.

  Her kids, my cousins, did not speak to me. They huddled together on the bed they shared and stared at me with wide, startled eyes. I watched as dreams took them and darkness filled the loft.

  It was warm, and the blankets I was given were soft.

  I would like to say that I whiled away the hours weeping terribly into my pillows. Perhaps I should wax poetic about the night quaking with the force of my despair, but it was not like that. My sorrow was a dark, secret thing, a stray cat hidden in the coldest corner of my soul. I fed her scraps. I watched her grow.

  Sometimes it is the wounds we do not see that leave the deepest scars.

  In the morning, I listened to the cabin, quiet, save for my father’s heavy boots tromping around while he gathered supplies. Preparing to leave.

  I crept down the stairs, a blanket wrapped around my shoulders. I pulled the door open, wincing as it screamed on hits hinges, slicing into the still morning. My breath hung in the air. My feet crunched over the cold earth as I stepped away from the cabin, toward my father. Diaphanous fog blanketed the scrubland, hanging on trees, making ghosts of the small glade we stood in the center of.

  Da was tightening his blankets to his saddle, motions tense and jerky. I knew he knew I was there. I could see it in the stiffening of his shoulders. “Da,” I said. That, and only that.

  He let out a long, low breath, head sagging, his body going still. “I was hoping you’d be asleep.”

  “You don’t even want to say goodbye?” I wanted him to face me. To see the pain on my face. He was my home, and he was leaving. What did that leave me with?

  “Little flower,” he finally turned, and I saw tears wetting his cheeks. I’d never seen him cry before. Not even when he got stuck with the antler of an angry bull elk. “I won’t be gone for long.”

  We both saw the lie, and let it rest between us like a dead, shriveled thing.

  “Annie is a good woman with a lot of love. You will be better off with her. You’ll go to school. Learn to read.”

  Da had never learned to read, and it was always an embarrassment for him. He’d speak of reading frequently, of the magic of books unlocked for the person who knew the way of them. Even at that moment, I could hear the yearning in his voice. He wanted what every parent wanted. He wanted to bequeath me with opportunities he never had. Right then, however, all I could focus on was my abandonment. Somehow, his desire made me feel all the more hollow.

  “I don’t want to learn how to read.” I sniffled. Wiped at my nose. “I just want you.”

  “Cassandra, I will be back soon, and you will show me all the stories you can read. You will be dressed in fine clothes and eat at fine tables. You will have a future here. One I cannot give you in the mountains. The wild is no place for a little girl.”

  “Da!” I sniffled, my voice seemed muffled by the stillness and mist that shrouded us.

  “Enough!” He barked. He hardly ever raised his voice, so I jumped and put more distance between us. “You will stay here, and you will mind Annie, you hear me? You will be a good girl. You will attend your studies, and you will listen to your betters. This is not an argument, Cassandra. This is what I require from you. Do you understand?”

  Do you understand.

  It is, perhaps, one of the cruelest sentences, and so often spoken to children.

  I understood nothing, and somehow, I already knew everything. My life, as it had been, was over, and I was brought to this place to be birthed into another. I understood that my insight was not wanted, nor needed. I knew that it was my job to accept my fate with grace.

  What else could I do? I nodded and fisted my blanket, watched as the only home I’d ever known prepared to ride off and lose himself. He
finished tying up his provisions and I knew it was time. He knelt before me. “Don’t forget me,” he whispered, gripping my chin with his thumb and forefinger.

  Perhaps being forgotten is the worst thing an adult can imagine, but as a child what mattered wasn’t the forgetting, but the removal. Being isolated. I was a stranger in a strange world, too small to navigate these waters. Too young to understand what was happening. Everything narrowed. Reality became defined by the shattered-glass sound of my own frozen screams.

  I did not know that a person could feel so powerfully. I did not know that sorrow could scald.

  I was not sad that he would forget me, or I, him. I was afraid because suddenly I knew what it was to be cold. I was frightened because now I understood the awesome power of the word alone.

  When I was a child, I did not know how much life could hurt.

  I have gained one truth over the years: The heart is a knife. Each beat of it cuts.

  We locked eyes. He nodded once, already pulling on his cold, distant mask. Then, he stood up, got onto his horse, and rode away, the mist swallowing him up as though he never was.

  I watched the spot, the small hole in the trees he’d disappeared through. Watched it for what must have been hours, waiting for him to return. Waiting for him to show up again with a big smile, “Just kidding, little flower,” he’d say.

  But He never returned. The birds chased each other through the sky. The day slowly melted away the mist.

  When I look back on that moment, what I remember most is the sunlight. The way it spilled into that small clearing like a river of molten gold or a waterfall of honey. My entire life had changed in an instant, but the sun remained unmoved.

  I smelled wood smoke and sizzling fat. My stomach moaned. The door opened and Annie appeared, wearing a thin shift and a thick shawl, her hair pinned up high and covered by a light bonnet. Her smile was sad, and somehow knowing as well. She wrapped her arms around my shoulders. “He’s gone then?” She asked.

  She didn’t wait for an answer before she pulled me into her embrace. I let her hold me close. She was not my mother, but I needed someone to cling to. Everything I’d ever known had just ridden away.

  “Oh, you poor, sweet thing,” she whispered against my hair. I let her wrap her arms around me while I grew more and more brittle. More and more cold.

  Touch me, and I might shatter. Hold me, so I can stay whole.

  What kind of man leaves his only child in the arms of strangers? What kind of pathetic daughter was I, for being so easy to leave?

  I know now that he was desperate. I know how love can twist a person. But as a child, all I saw was the knife, and all I felt was the wound.

  “Come inside and eat,” Annie said. She wiped her eyes and smiled at me, and I tried to smile back, but something inside was frozen.

  She knelt before me. “Chris, your da, has always been his own person. He’s a good man, but he’s never been one who could deal with the hard realities of life. He’s more prone to running than sorting through his soul. He’ll come back, Cassandra. He’ll come back as soon as he realizes what he’s left here. Don’t blame him for being broken. Sometimes the world is too hard for the people who live in it.” She pressed her lips against my cheek. “He’ll be back. I swear it.”

  I nodded and let her take me inside to break our fast. I now know what resignation tastes like. It is savory, like fresh bacon cut from the side of one of Annie’s pigs.

  And that’s how I started my new life.

  The train thundered away on the tracks. The gentle sway of the car should have been rocking him to sleep. Instead, he was wide awake, eyes fixed on the other side of the window. Mountains. So many mountains. He’d never seen such things. Of course, he knew of them. He’d spent hours upon hours tracing his fingers over those wrinkles on the maps he’d studied. He was an Esco, after all. He was well versed in the formations of the earth, and what it hid under its skin.

  He’d just never actually seen them.

  They were tall. So tall, and so…

  “You ready for this?” His companion asked, settling his bulk into the chair across from Arlen. Sterling Wallace was in his early fifties, with brilliantly combed mustaches and age spots on his bald pate. Beside him, Elroy McGlover, Arlen’s bodyguard, snored peacefully, his brown hair mussed against the glass.

  They’d boarded the train in People Town, and were almost done with their four-hour ride through all the unclaimed in-between. This was the last leg of their seemingly endless journey. He was ready for it to be over. Ready to see what lay on the other end of these railroad tracks.

  Until then, he marveled in the adventure of it all. He’d never seen anything like the frontier. Up they went, and up, and up. Up until he felt like was riding through the sky itself, scattering the stars with his fingertips and laughing with the moon. Silvery starlight showed him a world thick with pine trees. The fabled West peeking from between their trunks like a bashful lover, tempting him to savor its hidden delicacies.

  It would be his when his father retired, and that would be a long way off. Which was fine. Running an empire was a lot of work. He was well-versed in the numbers, but he had a lot to learn before he was ready for the kind of responsibility Matthew Esco would require of him.

  “When will we get there?” Arlen asked, pulling his gaze away from the scenery outside.

  “We’ll hit the Boundary in about ten minutes.” Sterling shifted in his seat. “You took the tonic?”

  Arlen grunted and waved the empty vial in the air. The tonic tasted horrible, but the Boundary was fatal to anyone who passed through it without the substance in them. Everyone on the train paid not only for their ticket but for the life-saving medicine, which his father had strict, complete control over. Matthew Esco knew everyone who went in and out of the Boundary. Kept an ancient, weathered book in the safe at home, full of names and exhaustive research on each person.

  “It’s a horrible experience, even with the tonic. You’ll wish you were dead, but the train slows down to give you time to recover before we hit Freetown. It’s a kindness, really. I always feel like the Boundary is turning me inside-out when I go through it.”

  Anxiety twisted Arlen’s gut. He’d heard of people passing out, throwing up, or wetting themselves. The tonic just allowed them to pass through the Boundary alive, it didn’t soften the experience. His hands twisted in his lap. Every person reacted differently. He couldn’t predict how he would do, and that unknown made him anxious. He was an Esco, he had some measure of pride to protect. He could not allow himself to be brought low by this passage.

  “We get off at Freetown first, visit with the governor. He’s a pompous ass. He thinks he has the whole world under his thumb. Smile and nod at him, Arlen, but don’t make promises. You offer him an inch, and he’ll take a mile.”

  “When one is a big fish in a small pool,” Arlen said, taking off his spectacles and rubbing them with a kerchief, “one must be content with what one has.” It was one of those sayings his father marched out every time something wasn’t going quite the way Arlen wanted it to. Another way of saying, “don’t forget how small you are and how little you matter.” Arlen loved his unflappable father. He’d love him even more now that an entire continent was between them.

  “Exactly,” Sterling said, smiling beatifically at him. He couldn’t help but think that Sterling saw a ten-year-old boy when he looked at Arlen. It was exhausting, this need to eternally prove himself to others. To constantly be trying on his father’s shoes, and finding they still didn’t fit.

  “What’s the plan?” Arlen asked. He knew the outline, the rough draft, but he’d been so caught up in the journey, he hadn’t thought to ask about the details. Anything, to stop focusing his nervous energy on the impending Boundary.

  “We’ll stay in Freetown for a few days before we move on out, toward the shine fields. We’ll stay in Grove while we tour the wells. Depending on how things are going there, we may stay a while or move on up north
to the mines.” Sterling’s pause was heavy and full of meaning.

  “You don’t like the mines,” Arlen surmised. He’d heard stories but never probed to learn more. Sterling’s pursed-lip discomfort piqued his curiosity.

  “No towns near the mines,” the man said, the words carefully measured. “None you’d want to stay at, anyway. A few gambling dens, some places where the shine-addicted can get their fix, places where fallen women work. Mind, usually your father will have a missive waiting that will change all of our plans. We won’t know what to expect until we get to the Transfer office.”

  “Sirs, please fasten your lap belts,” the conductor was an ancient fellow, but he walked with the bowlegged gait of a sailor, and seemed completely comfortable on their rolling, jolting train car. “Here’s your bag,” he said, handing each of them a hefty paper sack. Elroy roused himself, rubbed his eyes, and grabbed the proffered bag, blinking away his confusion.

  “Almost to the Boundary?”

  “Just about.”

  Elroy fumbled around, patting at the pockets of his coat. He let out a relieved sigh and pulled the small vial out, flipping the cap off with his thumb, and threw his head back and downed the clear liquid in one easy gulp.

  “You’re certainly cutting it close, Elroy.” Sterling’s voice was just tart enough to thicken the air and make a lasting impression.

  The train started to bump and jostle as it decelerated, wheels screaming, and suddenly the need for lap belts became perfectly clear as Arlen’s body was thrown uncomfortably about on the plush leather seat. Finally, they leveled out, the tracks on either side hemmed in by pine trees so tall they looked like fingers scraping against the sky, plucking at all of its diamonds.

  “Why does the train slow down?” Arlen asked. “Other than to give us time to recover before Freetown?” Nerves again, they were eating him up inside. Why hadn’t he asked this before he’d left Union City? Why hadn’t he prepared himself? For that matter, why hadn’t his father prepared him? Arlen should know these things. He should be ready.