The Widows

by Jess Montgomery

  “Mama! Mama!”

  Marvena’s eyes snap open at Frankie’s desperate bleats. She rushes up the path and finds Frankie, undergarments still down at her knees, staring at her left foot, which is bleeding through her stockings. Her shoes are to the side.

  Racing to her daughter, Marvena hears an unnatural crunch beneath her own thinly soled boots. She looks down, spots shards of glass, mixed with hay, dumped behind the brush.

  Marvena leans on a boulder and pulls Frankie to her lap. She studies the child’s foot, sighs at the pieces of glass stuck in the sole. Poor child—no wonder she’s whimpering. But Marvena gives an order—“Sit still, child!”—and begins easing out the shards.

  When she finally gets the glass out, Marvena pulls off her coat and top and rips the sleeves off her thin blouse, the blouse she’d scrubbed free of Lloyd’s blood on her washboard just days before, and uses it as a bandage for Frankie’s foot. After she finishes, she looks at her daughter, sees the child’s eyes clutching her with need.

  Marvena pulls the bologna sandwich out of her coat pocket and hands it to Frankie. By the time Marvena’s hand is back in her pocket, wrapping around her own sandwich, Frankie has the wax paper off of hers and has taken the biggest bite she can, filling both cheeks, struggling to chew. Her eyes have already started returning to normal. Marvena lets go of her own sandwich. Frankie will need it on the return trip.

  “Why’d you take off your shoes?”

  “You told me to be neat!” Frankie sniffles.

  Marvena sighs. As Frankie finishes her sandwich, Marvena goes back through the break in the bushes—black raspberries, a variant of their red cousins, not yet in bloom. She stares down at the mix of hay and shattered glass. She picks up Frankie’s shoes, then toes the glass again. Odd. There’s no reason for hay to be here. Nor the glass. Someone has dumped them here.

  She glances back toward empty Kinship Road. Her face stings suddenly, not from the wind, but as if someone has slapped her, and the smell of the cold spring morning—a heady incense of dampness and earth coming back to life—stuffs her nose and closes her throat. From a distance, a red-shouldered hawk cries. Marvena shivers. The hawk is a sign to be alert, to consider carefully one’s situation.

  It hits her for the first time that Daniel won’t be at his fine Kinship home by himself. There will be his wife, his children.

  She returns to Frankie, orders her to put her shoes back on, but Frankie yelps while trying to put her shoe back over her bandaged foot.

  Marvena picks up Frankie’s shoes. Then she hunkers down. “Come on. Piggyback.”

  Frankie climbs on, clasps her waist with her legs, her neck with her arms.

  Marvena straightens, slowly. “Not that tight.”

  Frankie loosens her grip. Marvena hooks her arms under Frankie’s knees and climbs up the path to Kinship Road, the only paved road outside of Kinship itself in Bronwyn County.

  “Mama? Will Uncle Daniel still be mad? Last time we saw him—”

  Marvena knows very well what happened the week before when Daniel came to her cabin, the awful fight between Daniel and her brother, Tom, the terrifying moment of doubt that her pleas would not pull Daniel back to himself, that he’d keep hitting Tom until her brother was dead. But she doesn’t want to discuss that with her daughter.

  “You mustn’t call him ‘Uncle,’” Marvena says. “Outside our home, he’s Sheriff Ross. You can’t—just don’t—” Marvena’s voice wobbles to a stop. She hadn’t considered the hazards of a young child’s tongue waggling freely.

  And yet, when Daniel began visiting her again last fall for the first time in ten years, after the Widowmaker explosion took John, that’s exactly what she’d told both daughters to call him.

  She opens her mouth to offer further explanation of her relationship with Daniel, but it suddenly seems too complex even for her, let alone for a six-year-old child. And anyway, Frankie sighs and begins to hums softly until she eventually dozes off. In the silence nestled in Frankie’s soft breath, with each step toward Kinship, Marvena thinks of her brother, of her elder daughter, and plans what she’ll say to Daniel.

  CHAPTER 5

  LILY

  At Kinship Cemetery, as the pastor begins—“Our dear Brother in the Lord, Sheriff Daniel T. Ross, was taken from us to soon”—Lily breathes in the cold air, the scent of the previous night’s rain mingling with earth so strongly that she tastes it, metallic and bitter.

  Suddenly Lily wishes for her father. Instead of sitting on a hard wooden chair, tottering on a dirt clod, by the empty grave, instead of insisting their children sit in such chairs on either side of her—It’s proper! Mama had insisted—she wishes she’d opted to do as her father had at burial services for family or friends when she was a child. He’d stood with her by the big cedar tree at the back of the cemetery. There’d been something so comforting about the big, rough trunk against her back, his big, rough hand wrapped around hers.

  Now Lily gazes over the hollow grave, past Daniel’s coffin on the other edge, to the far corner of the cemetery, past where Daniel will be buried, to the McArthur family section. For Daddy and her brother Roger the only remains here are their names, engraved on In memory of markers.

  At a tug on her skirt, Lily looks down at Jolene, wide-eyed and trembling. As the pastor rushes through the final prayer in a race with coming rain, Lily pulls Micah into her lap and takes her daughter’s hand.

  After the service, Lily lets Mama and Lily’s best friend, Hildy, take the children, so she can shake hands and nod at condolences, even as she looks, as she had outside the church earlier, for Rusty Murphy, the last man to see Daniel alive. Not spotting him, she looks for his employer, Ada Gottschalk, knowing it’s unlikely the reclusive widow would come, but then again, Daniel had been good about checking on her—

  Suddenly a man approaches Lily, catching her attention. He is unusually tall, looming in his fine gray wool coat and his carefully brushed black fedora. He, like the Pinkertons, is an outsider with authority, but unlike them he doesn’t countenance his pride with a smirk.

  Abe Miller. Lily knows him, knows that he works for George Vogel of Vogel’s Tonic—the company that makes a medicinal tonic with a small enough percentage of alcohol to make it legal under the Volstead Act. The tonic is sold everywhere, including the general store in Kinship. She, like most housewives, keeps a bottle on hand.

  Abe has been part of the warp and weave of her life, a shadow in the background during two key moments early in her life with Daniel. She’s also seen him now and again in town, espied him from afar talking with Daniel. Now he is coming toward her, purposefully, and he means to say something to her, and Lily gasps as the notion comes to her, a cold whisper from the back of her mind: He must know something about Daniel.

  At that moment, Mama steps in front of Lily, holding Caleb on her hip, saying that she and Hildy will go on ahead to the house with Luther, to start preparing for visitors. By the time Mama is finished and Lily can look around again, Abe Miller is gone.

  Daniel’s uncle Elias lingers with Lily to receive the last of the mourners, and then finally it’s just the two of them and a small gathering of men by Daniel’s coffin, waiting patiently with shovels.

  As Elias takes her by the elbow and walks her back to his automobile, Lily wonders why only men have the honor of seeing the dead through to the final moments, as if women can’t bear the sight of burial, as if all that will follow isn’t the harder share.

  * * *

  They’re a half mile or so down Kinship Road when Lily breaks the silence.

  “Thank you for driving me.” She shivers. Even with her heavy coat and hat, she’s cold, for Elias’s Model T is from before the war, an open-carriage model.

  “I wouldn’t have it otherwise,” Elias says. “I can come into town and drive you anytime.”

  “We’ll be getting Daniel’s automobile back, though?” Even as she asks the question, Lily realizes that she means to go to Ada’s farm to talk to
Rusty, to find out what either of them might know about Daniel’s last moments.

  “Lily, the automobile. The children will see…” Elias slides into flat silence.

  Bullet holes? Bloodstains? “They’ve seen worse already—their father’s coffin,” Lily says. “It was Daniel’s automobile, not the county’s. Mine, now. I want it back soon.”

  “When it’s repaired,” Elias says.

  “How long will it take?”

  “I don’t know. They—they had to order new glass for the driver’s side window.” He means Lewis Automotive, the only automobile dealer in town. Daniel’s Ford is a newer 1924 model, complete with windows that can crank up and down.

  “The window was shot out—why didn’t you just tell me? All I’ve been told is that Daniel picked up a prisoner at Rossville, a prisoner who somehow wrested Daniel’s revolver from him and shot him. I want to know everything you know.” Though long retired as a doctor, Elias serves as the Bronwyn County Coroner as needed in cases of violent or unusual death. In his tenure as sheriff, Daniel had only called upon Elias a few times. He lived on the farm next to Ada Gottschalk.

  Lily continues, “I want to know if he was still alive when you—”

  She stops at the sudden sound of Elias’s sob. She’s never known him to cry, even when his wife and daughter died from influenza seven years before. She stares at him with wonder and no small share of envy. Her own grief has hunkered down, deep within, waiting for something—answers to her many questions, perhaps—before it can loosen, rise, disperse.

  “A farmhand on Ada Gottschalk’s farm heard the shot. Rusty Murphy.”

  “Martin told me that much.”

  “Rusty found Daniel’s automobile,” Elias goes on. “Then he found Daniel.”

  Lily thinks back to the last moments she shared with Daniel. She’d tried to fall back to sleep after they’d made love. Maybe he’d left their bed earlier than she thought. But the chickens were already stirring, sunlight grazing the top of the hill, when she’d started her domestic ministrations. So she must have arisen around 7:00 a.m., with Daniel leaving perhaps a half hour or an hour before that. Two and a half hours or so for Daniel to go to Rossville, fetch the prisoner, make it most of the way back, get attacked, be found, for the Gottschalk farmhand to go and find Elias, for Elias to come to Daniel, for Elias to then come to her.

  Daniel couldn’t have lingered, then, in Rossville, with the prisoner. He must have been in a hurry to get back to Kinship. To her.

  “Did you talk to Rusty? Ask him what he saw?”

  “No, Lily. If anyone did, it was Martin, but I’m not sure what Rusty could tell him. You know he’s not too sharp.”

  Lily nods. She’s familiar with Rusty. Every now and then, Daniel hauled him in for drunkenness and disorderly conduct, usually on a Friday night.

  Lily shakes her head to clear it, to refocus. They’ll be home soon, with no time or privacy for talk at her house, and Lily knows Elias will avoid discussion after that. Like Daniel, he’s always been too protective of her. She rushes on to her next question.

  “The undertaker wouldn’t let me see him fully,” she says. “All I know is he was shot. But did he suffer? Linger?”

  “He was shot once in the stomach, again in the chest. Close range. No one survives that for more than a few minutes. Not even Daniel.”

  At this, Lily can’t breathe. Then she inhales cold air, drawing it in as deeply as she can, until her chest feels as though it might crack.

  She says, “The prisoner, who was he? Someone has to know.…”

  “A miner. Brought in for roughhousing.”

  The image of the miner outside of the church, just before the funeral service, flashes before her. He’d wanted to ask her something. What did he think she might know?

  “The prisoner’s name. I want his name.”

  “Oh, Lily, I don’t know.”

  “But wouldn’t Luther know? Since the prisoner was a miner?”

  “Not likely. Luther’s men handle the miners who get out of line. Lily, let it be. Martin, Luther’s men, others—they’ll find him. If he’s to be found.”

  This new notion, Daniel’s killer going free, twists Lily’s stomach. It is so easy to disappear in these hills.

  She considers the situation: by “Luther’s men” Elias means the Pinkertons.

  They’re all too often thugs and thieves, Lily, Daniel had said more than once after busting up disturbances the Pinkertons created at the Kinship Inn, where they stayed. Why, they saunter about the county as if their company’s badges make them better than other men.

  And yet he’d welcomed the harelipped one into their home the night before his death.

  Now Lily shudders at the memory of the Pinkerton, how his eyes made her feel filthy, how Daniel, usually protective, so keen on the man’s message, hadn’t even noticed.

  As much as Lily dislikes Luther—he’s just as cocky as the men he hires—she vows she will ask him the name of the miner. And the name of the Pinkerton who came to her home. She will, she decides, even go to the Kinship Inn and look for both the Pinkerton man who came to their house and Abe Miller.

  She deserves to know the details of Daniel’s death. She needs to know them. For she already realizes that the cold fury gripping her heart won’t ease, that she won’t be able to be a proper mother, to find her way with the new child, with Jolene and Micah, until she does.

  “Lily, I want you to know that Daniel was already gone by the time I got to him,” Elias is saying. His simple words crackle, shattered glass. “I couldn’t save him.”

  Lily looks over at Elias, looks at his hat, the same hat that hadn’t been able to hide Daniel’s blood on his coat a few days before. She imagines Elias embracing Daniel, aching to hug life back into him, as she’d once seen Elias try with his own child.

  Finally, Lily’s heart softens. “I know you did, Elias; I know. I’ve always trusted you.”

  Elias looks over at her, with a sad smile. “Not always.”

  “Not right away,” Lily says, offering the correction as comfort. “But ever since you saved my life. Always, since then.”

  They make the rest of the trip in silence, Elias’s gaze intent upon the road and Lily staring past the rolling hills, letting her mind wander back to the day she’d met Daniel.

  Lily hesitated as she stared down from her high perch in the Kinship Tree—maybe Mama was right. Maybe she was too old—today was her seventeenth birthday—for such foolishness.

  But then she heard her brother, Roger, whooping as he ran up to the tree. Lily grinned. Though he’d bolted first from their gardening tasks at their grandparents’ farm, she’d quickly passed him on Kinship Road and made it to the tree first.

  She leapt.

  The thrilling shock of cool water and then—for just a moment—weightlessness, enjoying the sensation until she could stay under no longer and swam to the surface. Next: a joyous burst of air into her lungs, and then the gentle float downstream.

  Roger joined soon enough and round and round they went, laughing and jumping, shucking the notion that they’d become too old for all of this, even as their futures loomed—Roger destined to join Daddy in the family business of McArthur & Son Grocers next year after graduating from high school. Then he’d likely ask Hildy Cooper, Lily’s best friend, to marry him.

  But Lily chafed at the notion of marrying after high school, feeling no interest in any of the young men Mama deemed suitable. She wanted to set off in the world, find her own way.

  One more jump, she thought, before returning to their grandparents’ farm. After all, Daddy was trusting them to take care of what needed doing while he went back to town to mind his store. A few days before, Lily’d asked when Mamaw, as they called their grandmother, would be back and why Mama had to be at the Cincinnati hospital if Papaw was there, too, and Mama had hushed her, telling her she asked too many questions—and to just mind Daddy and Roger.

  Lily leapt again.

  But this
time, Lily hit the surface too close to the bank, in the deepest part of the pool. She hit bottom on large, sharp slates. She tried to push off, but the force of her fall had driven her left foot between two rocks. She was caught and she could not pull free, nor could she swim to the surface.

  Water filled her mouth. Unbearable pressure mounted in her lungs. Suddenly hands grabbed her wrists and pulled, hard. Hot pain wrenched her left foot, but she was rising, rising, breaking the surface, and there was Roger, pulling her finally to the rocky bank.

  The next moments were as much of a bloody, mangled mess as the outer toes of her left foot, shredded flesh from bone. She’d later learn that Roger carried her to the Gottschalk farm, where he and Mr. Hahn Gottschalk got her on a wagon and took her to the Ross farm next door, where a retired doctor and his family lived. Dr. Elias Ross concluded he’d have to amputate the little toe. Infection was already setting in, and they didn’t have time to waste getting the town doctor.

  The next clear moment brought the realization that she was lying on a dining table. A woman leaned over to Elias, asking, “Who do you want to help? Luther or Daniel?”

  Snapping at her, he growled, “Don’t ask me to choose! Just fetch one!”

  Then another gray stretch of time, and coming around again to see another man. Through her pain, Lily gathered only a hazy impression of him: tall, broad, dark-skinned, dark haired—a sketch of a man. Except for his eyes.

  Those eyes, dark and sharp, catching her, holding her, and though she’d never seen this man before, Lily thought, Oh. There you are.

  She’d learn his name in the weeks to come. Daniel T. Ross. At the moment, all she knew was that in the first instant he looked angry, but then, as he looked at her, fury melted from his gaze and steady kindness rushed in.

  As she realized the doctor meant to amputate her toe, Lily started crying and asked Daniel, “Would you trust him?”