by Abi Maxwell
The flatlands had given way to a kind of land that Henrietta hadn’t known existed. Nearly treeless, but cropless too, and faintly red, with alternate pockets and stretches of green across the endless horizon. Little mountains rose and fell on all sides as she twisted her way through the strange land. That family from her woods, they would have had to run on their own feet. They might have had horses, though. What would it have been like to escape through a landscape like this one? Would they have stuck to the snaking riverbed? Would they have been able to hide?
“Charley?” she said to her son, though of course he could not answer. She approached a little gas station and pulled in, got out of the car, and walked around to the far side of the back seat. She opened the door, suddenly feeling like she had to touch his sleeping form, to check to make sure he was still in there, whole and alive. She leaned in, gave his forehead a gentle kiss. She swept her hand across his wispy hair. They would be in Montana within two hours, but she didn’t yet comprehend just how big that state was, how long it would take to reach its western edge.
“We’ll make our own life,” she whispered to her son. It was practice, saying that. By telling him, she was convincing herself, too. “We can do this,” she said, and got back in the driver’s seat.
It was the middle of the night when they finally arrived in the city she’d been headed to. She got a room at the first motel she saw. Within a week, she had found a place to live.
People were different here, it seemed to her. Friendlier. They said hello when she passed them on the street.
“You’ll be a Montana boy,” she said to her son, though she had no real idea of what that might mean.
PART FOUR
Claire
27 April 1852
Dear Sir,
Writing to you after my sister, Mrs. Elspeth Ross, or Mrs. Thomas Ross, you could say. I never had a child and do not know the demands it must put upon one to have three; forgive me if I am jumping to conclusions. Elspeth, my sister, has been a resident of your country nearly fifteen years in counting and she has always kept us in a steady stream of letters. Now four whole months have passed and not a single word. Many times she told me about you in her letters, and therefore I am writing to you. You were her only friend, from what I understand. “Almost like she has a father over there” is what our father said.
Please, I hope to believe she is just up the road and busy in her life, but please if it does not trouble you tell her to send word to very worried family. She is too independent ever since birth. She does not know a woman’s place is what father said, but not cruelly. You see, we all love her dearly. Show her this letter if you must! I never left home and I still care for our parents and home, so I have a lot of time with my hands in the chores to worry. No doubt my sister will respond by telling me I am a fool.
Yours,
Claire Mitchell, 95 Queen Street, Monifieth, Forfarshire, Scotland
30 June 1852
Dear Sir,
I pray not to bother you. Did my letter of two months ago arrive to you? It could have gotten lost overboard. I have never been aboard a ship but I presume it is difficult to keep track of mail in such a state, especially in the case of storm. Truly, just a slip of paper light as an ant to go all that distance, it is no wonder. I do not mean to bother. In the last letter which perhaps you did not receive I asked after my sister, Elspeth Ross, wife to Thomas Ross, worker at the mill, originated from Monifieth, county Forfarshire, Scotland. I begged you tell her to reach me or to tell me what news I need to know as I have not heard. Now I am thinking that even if you did get the letter perhaps you are busy in your farming and you have simply forgotten to just send a note to me to say she is busy and at peace; or perhaps you have something to tell me; yet either way it has occurred to me that you may not have my address. It is possible I forgot to include it. Here it is: Claire Mitchell, 95 Queen Street, Monifieth, Forfarshire, Scotland. I have enclosed the postage.
Yours,
Claire Mitchell, beloved sister to Mrs. Elspeth Ross
1 September 1852
To Kind Citizens:
I write to your newspaper in regards to my sister, Mrs. Thomas Ross, Elspeth, and her three children, Colin, Evan, and Jeremiah, who were residents of your town for fifteen years now if they are still in residence. My sister has always been a faithful correspondent, and our family is now filled with anguish, as her habit of letters has ceased. I beg of you kindest citizens, if you have any shred of news of my sister and her family, please send immediately, address Claire Mitchell, 95 Queen Street, Monifieth, Forfarshire, Scotland. Include your return address and I assure I will repay double your postage.
Kindly yours,
Claire Mitchell
3 October 1852
Dear Claire Mitchell,
My name is Jonathan. I am a ten-year-old resident of Middlewood. When I was a younger boy your sister taught me to read and now I work as an apprentice at the newspaper. It was I who opened your letter. You understand there is no need to print it in the paper. Your sister was one of the kindest people I have had occasion to meet. I hate most to tell you that she and her family have disappeared due to an unfortunate event. Father says this new land is wild. It is unlike the land of Scotland, at least that is what father tells us, though he is from England and has never been to Scotland. This land is full of wilderness and hungry animals such like you have never seen. I suppose it is a risk that all who get on a ship to come this way know. I am so very sorry to report this.
In sympathy forever,
Jonathan Kepper
“I don’t understand what this means,” Claire said to herself. Her father sat across from her in the small, raw room. November already, and already so cold. She had been out walking and taken a long path and not gotten home in time to get the house warm before her father came in. Her mother gone for the whole day and night, tending to a friend out in the country with a brand-new set of twins plus a two-year-old besides. Her father didn’t complain about the cold home, though. Scarcely ever in his life had he complained about how his daughters did—or did not—care for the house. “You dote too much,” their mother had said to him, again and again. Elspeth, Claire felt, had always been his favorite. She had no jealousy, though. Elspeth had been everyone’s favorite. Elspeth could make a dark room glow. Or if not glow, be cast in the rarest kind of light. When she went off on that ship their father had gone back to work at the loom and then he’d come into the kitchen to eat and then he’d gone to sleep and in the morning he’d gotten up to do the same, on and on like that for the next five days, and on the sixth he didn’t get out of bed. Claire’s mother went to him, asked him if he didn’t feel all right, and he said that he wasn’t sure how long it would go on. “What?” she had asked. “How long what will go on, dear?” And he’d said, “Every day I picture coming into the room to see her, and every day I open the door to remember that I never will again.”
“She is still alive,” Claire had heard her mother whisper to him after a moment.
“How do you know?” he’d asked, but their mother wouldn’t stand for that kind of misery. She gave his leg one brisk pat and told him to get up and get to work. He obeyed.
Now, with the letter in her hand, Claire looked across the room to her father. He looked at her, too, and he said, “You seen a ghost?”
“Yes,” she said mistakenly, and then, “No. I am cold.”
“What’s that you have?” he asked, nodding toward the letter.
“Nothing,” she said, and then, quickly, “a slip of paper. Nothing. I was writing something. It’s nothing.”
He rubbed his hands together, so dry and cracked they sounded like the scraping together of kindling, and then he leaned into the fireplace to inspect the fire she had built. Nothing more than a smolder. He said, “Claire,” meaning, of course, that she could do better t
han that. He pushed his hand right into the heat and moved the smoldering log off the top of the pile and pushed the kindling around, and then he took up the small ax and cut himself some more kindling and rebuilt the little fire, and he stood there blowing on it until it roared. “There,” he said, and crossed the room to the counter. Claire remained in that same chair. He called to her, asked her what she had planned for dinner. When she didn’t respond he thought of clapping his hands in her face and snapping her back to, but then he thought he would give her a rest. She had a little crush, he had heard, a little crush on their neighbor Alistair’s son. Apparently she had been seen staring at him on more than one occasion. Had asked her friend Mary all about him. Mary had told her own mother that, and that woman had reported it to Claire’s mother. Her father could have told her it was not a good idea. Now he suspected she might have learned for herself. So instead of bothering her, he decided to do the little cooking he knew how to do. He put the pan on the fire and cracked all the eggs in the basket into the pan, and he poured what was left of the buttermilk in, too, and he stood there stirring while his daughter sat blank-faced in the chair.
He had been a fool to make her go—Elspeth. He thought that now as he stirred, though he had no idea why he should think of it so sharply at just that moment. Of course he had thought of it most moments of his life since that time, but it had tended to be a murmur of a thought, a background noise in his mind that would not quit. He would say to his wife, “This is a good pudding,” and underneath he would say, Elspeth. He would say, “More work this year than ever,” and behind that Elspeth. “Need to repair the roof” or “Do you like that book?” or “Samuel’s wedding this Sunday,” and Elspeth, Elspeth, Elspeth. Why hadn’t he himself gone to the new country? Why hadn’t he sent his own wife? They’d been groping in the dark long before marriage, too. What if that had been everyone’s punishment? Nearly this whole country would have been emptied out, he felt sure.
“Claire,” he finally called, when he couldn’t get Elspeth out of the forefront of his mind. “Claire, I can’t get these damn eggs to cook.”
She came to him then. Pushed him aside and looked into the pan. “Christ,” she said. “You’ve made buttermilk soup.”
They ate it anyway, poured it over some biscuits that she cooked in a flash. Her sister had probably just gone off with some man. That’s all she ever seemed to want, anyway. Claire remembered once, when they were much younger, after Elspeth had been at it with Thomas, that she had said, “It just feels so good to be fucked.”
“Elspeth!” Claire had shouted, fear coursing through her, but a delicious laughter welling up, too.
Elspeth let her own laughter out. She tipped back into the sand and laughed and rolled and then sat up and said, “It’s true, Claire. Why don’t you go out and try it?”
“Elspeth,” Claire had said again. At once hungry and afraid.
“At least say it. It feels almost as good to say it,” Elspeth said.
“You better be careful,” Claire had snapped, with no notion whatsoever of just how true her statement was.
In the end, Elspeth hadn’t been, but Claire herself had been much, much too careful. Never any body pressing against her own. Never even any approach of such a body. “Fucked,” she had whispered to herself a few times, when she was sure she was alone. “Fucked.” She wished only sometimes that she had been born with a heart like her sister’s, a wanting one, though she knew that would have meant treachery for her family.
* * *
—
They ate their dinner silently, and afterward Claire cleaned up, then went straight to bed. There, with the candle beside her, she opened the letter back up and reread it over and over again. She even read it backward, on the off chance that there might be a clue, that the child who wrote it might have crafted a secret map for her. No such thing, though. She thought of putting the letter in the fire, of convincing herself to believe that Elspeth had made an enemy and now someone was playing a terrible joke on them all. That’s it! she said to herself. This enemy is stealing the letters that my sister is sending home. Elspeth got up and walked toward the fire, ready to go burn the letter and be done with it, but before she dropped it in she stopped and took a deep, slow breath and told herself to be reasonable, as she always had been. Her father just watched her from across the room. She could feel his eyes on her. What would be reasonable? To tell her father? No. Certainly not. It would be reasonable to keep on. She dropped the letter into the fire anyway, but not because she didn’t believe it. She burned it because she needed to protect her parents from believing it, too.
* * *
—
“Any word?” her mother asked her when she arrived home the following day. Only her mother knew of the letter that Claire had sent to the newspaper. Their father knew that Elspeth’s letters had stopped—of course he knew, her monthly letters were like gold to him—but when Claire’s mother had instructed him not to worry, that most likely she had herself too much work, what with the three boys and a cold winter to keep her from writing, he had if not believed her at least been able to stifle his thoughts and let the women take over. At the end of the day, he no longer asked if Elspeth had written. And when their mother asked, it was only out of earshot of her father.
Though she had resolved otherwise, now when her mother asked after Elspeth, Claire wanted so badly to say yes, that there had in fact been terrible word. She nearly did. Even opened her mouth to begin the sentence. But her mother’s face—those cheeks so rosy today and a sudden brightness from those new babies filling her up. Claire could not bear it. She decided to move forward with her decision. “No,” she said. “No word.”
And now what would she do?
“Go live your own life,” her parents had said over the years.
Also, “You know you could marry. It is possible to marry and make a life without leaving us. It is possible to live down the street.”
Honestly, though, if it weren’t for her shaky belief in God, she might have become a nun. Sometimes she wanted bravery like her sister, but more than that she wanted order. She liked the clean counter. She liked the bare walls. Sometimes she and her mother would spend the entire day in efficient silence, and it suited her more than anything else ever had. She thought of children, sometimes, and certainly she thought of men, of what their touch might feel like—not just their gruff faces against her own, but even their strong hands holding her breasts and their other thing, whatever you call it, she couldn’t say it, of that thing pushing right into her. She liked the thoughts, sort of. Not enough, though. She liked the clean house and the silence much, much more.
Claire had never expected Elspeth to miss home quite so much, and part of the shock of it was that it didn’t seem like her longing came from any real-life suffering. Judging from her letters, her house had always sounded warm enough. The village nice enough. In time she’d had the friendship of a neighbor. They always had enough food. And eventually she’d even had enough books to keep her endlessly occupied. Her children had always been healthy and good. She had never been made to understand just what a famine across the land looked like. But the longing Elspeth wrote about, not just for her family but for the actual land—their particular dirt and sharp grass and their particular view of the ocean, their angle of the sun—all of this shocked Claire. She hadn’t known her sister to care for anything quite so tangible and plain. Oddly, though, when Claire thought over it enough—because she had years to do so—she decided that her sister’s longing for it came from a place not in fact tangible at all, not plain, either. It was precisely because her sister always had her head in the clouds that she cared so much about a thing like how the sun fell on her new home and whether or not her sons’ voices would turn out to sound like her own father’s, as she wanted them desperately to. Claire thought that if she herself were to leave the land, she might miss it, but not for that sort of reason. Sh
e might miss her parents. But a new way of life? If she had wanted it she would have taken it, and if she had taken it, as Elspeth had, then she would have wanted it.