Marvena gently nudges Frankie forward. Frankie limps on in, and suddenly Marvena is aware of the oddity of Frankie carrying one of her shoes. In the parlor, Marvena sits just on the edge of a settee. Several women in the parlor stare at them. Marvena pulls Frankie into her lap.
Marvena’s gaze settles on the big chair by the fireplace. A man’s chair. Imagining Daniel there, she blinks back stinging tears.
An older woman clears her throat. Marvena looks up to see her shooing the other women into the dining room. She also sees Lily in the set of the woman’s mouth, the steadiness of her eyes. Her weary look belies that she knows loss inside out.
“Mama,” Lily says as she sits in a smaller chair, “where is Uncle Elias? This girl’s foot is hurt, and she needs tending.”
“Out back. I’ll go fetch him.”
Mama. Marvena quickly puts it together: Lily’s father, Caleb McArthur, had died alongside John, trying to rescue two trapped miners in the Widowmaker last fall. So this was Caleb’s widow. Marvena knows all the names of the seven men who died. No doubt, Lily and her mama do, too, but as John’s common-law wife, Marvena hadn’t taken his last name, so Lily wouldn’t have made the connection. Daniel had spoken with obvious sorrow about his lost father-in-law on his visits after John’s passing.
Now Frankie slips from her mother’s lap and joins Jolene on the big ornately floral-patterned wool rug in front of the fireplace. Frankie stares at a china-faced store-bought doll, but Jolene shows her a doll crafted from bits of wood and metal with a painted-on face. Marvena’s heart clenches. Of course he’d made his rustic dolls for Jolene as well. His daughter.
“Do you want to take off your coat?” Lily asks.
“No!” Marvena instantly regrets the snap to her word, but she doesn’t want Lily to see her torn blouse. “I’m sorry. I had no idea that Sheriff Ross—” Marvena starts. She suddenly can’t catch a full breath, as if an anvil has fallen onto her chest. “I wouldn’t come, had I known. I ain’t been down to Rossville for a couple of days—word hadn’t spread up to me yet. I … I didn’t know.”
“It’s all right,” Lily says softly.
A steeliness in Lily’s eyes belies her soft-spoken manner. Lily has had a few days to adjust to Daniel’s death, and now cold anger is battling for the upper hand over pure sorrow. Marvena knows those feelings from having lost John.
Marvena quickly calculates: her last visit to Rossville was three days before. Jurgis’s words echo: Tom was taken by some Pink. He was grabbed at dinner break yesterday, just after noon.… Daniel must’ve come awful early to pick him up.
Suddenly Marvena’s trembling so hard that a strand of hair falls across her face. She pushes it back, her shaking hand nearly poking her eye.
“Sheriff Ross has been helping me with my other daughter. Eula. She’s been missing. Since the middle of last month.” Marvena calculates. “Near on six weeks. He—he last saw me a little over a week ago, and I told him she was gone, that it might be like her to take off, but not without saying bye to Frankie here. These sisters, they love one another. Anyhow. Daniel said he’d see what he could find out, get back to me, but then—” Marvena stops, unsure how much to explain. “Then, he didn’t, an’ like I said, I haven’t been to Rossville for a few days, because—” Well, she can’t say because her friend Jurgis, who has taken over organizing the men with her brother, Tom, warned her away, since Tom was taken prisoner for talking unionization. So she gives a partial truth. “Because my little one’s been sick.”
Lily looks quickly at their daughters. Marvena looks, too, sees that Frankie and Jolene have become instant friends, the way only very small children can before they become aware of adult strictures. Frankie pulls something from her pocket, whatever the magpie child found alongside the road, and hands it to Jolene.
“She’s better now,” Marvena says.
Lily looks back at her. “You don’t live in Rossville?”
“No. Cabin. Up a ways in the woods on Devil’s Backbone.”
“Oh. And your daughter—your other daughter, Eula—lives with you?”
“No. In the boardinghouse. Since December,” Marvena says, averting her eyes. Both women know what a woman living in a boardinghouse means in a coal town. “She’s sixteen. Old enough to make her own choices,” she adds, willing the tears not to well in her eyes.
After John died last September, she’d put away her tender feelings in a box, where she kept all things too hard to coddle, and focused on the work of unionization, barely able to keep her heart together after losing John, never mind being able to comfort Eula for her loss of a beloved stepfather, as well as her first love, Willis, in the Widowmaker.
Tears prick Marvena’s eyes after all. No wonder Eula had wanted to escape from their difficult life. From her. To pack up her tenderness and earn her own way in the world, even if that meant trading on her youth and beauty at the boardinghouse.
“Still, you contacted Daniel to report that she was missing,” Lily says softly.
This is far more formal than what really happened. Truth be told, she’d never meant to complain about Eula missing, but when she’d last seen Daniel fear for the child overwhelmed her and she’d flung herself into his arms as she sobbed out her worries.
“Girl has a hard head, and we quarreled aplenty, but she always came once a week or so up to the cabin to see her sister, so when she stopped showing up, I asked the sheriff to check—”
“You didn’t go check yourself?”
“I—I had my hands full with my other young ’un.” Marvena offers a small—she hoped convincing—smile. Can’t admit here of all places that she didn’t go to the boardinghouse for fear of running into Pinks who might question her about John and who all he’d turned to the cause. “Anyhow, I asked the sheriff to track down if she’d run off with some fella. He said he’d help, that he’d come back to tell me.” Marvena looks at Lily, directly but cautiously. “How—”
“He was shot. By a miner. A prisoner who he went to pick up in Rossville, I’m told. The prisoner hasn’t been found. There’s a manhunt for him.”
Marvena flinches at Lily’s raw words. A prisoner. Tom? The last time she’d seen Daniel, a little over a week ago, Tom had found her sobbing in Daniel’s arms over Eula. The men had fought, saying awful words, Tom accusing Daniel of trying to take advantage of Marvena’s sorrow since John’s death, of being a coward for not going public with his support of unionization. Of making up his friend in the Bureau of Mines. For a moment, each man had looked angry enough to kill the other. Daniel had taken the first swing, overpowering Tom, until Frankie’s cries brought Daniel back to his senses. Could Daniel have truly been so angry at Tom he’d turn on the cause—on her? Could Tom have nursed enough wrath to overtake and kill Daniel?
Marvena wants to find her brother and demand the truth. Yet her heart rends—life demanding contradictory things—for if Tom is Daniel’s killer then he must run, never come back, or his life will be forfeit.
“Maybe—” Marvena’s voice cracks on the simple word. She clears her throat, starts over. “Maybe Daniel made notes about what he might have learned about Eula’s whereabouts?”
Lily’s eyebrows lift, as if she is startled by the notion. Well, Daniel fussed every time he visited over reading to Frankie and teaching her her letters and he’d written her through the Great War, so why wouldn’t he make notes on his cases?
But then Lily says, “I can check to see if he made note of anything about your daughter.”
“Thank you. That’s right kind.”
Lily hesitates before countering, “You may be able to help me as well. I have no idea who that prisoner from Rossville might have been. If you’ve heard anything—”
The women’s eyes meet. Marvena reads Lily’s gaze: Daniel wouldn’t have been shot by a prisoner. He wouldn’t have let that happen.…
“None of the men want to tell me much,” Lily says, emphasizing the word “men,” leaning forward as if they might be conspirato
rs. “But surely you can understand how I’d want to know all the details about Daniel’s last moments, so if you hear anything about the prisoner’s identity—” Lily stops as her mother and a tall, thin man come in from the dining room.
“This is Elias,” says Mama. “Dr. Ross. I’m sure you don’t mind him tending to your young ’un’s foot?”
Marvena looks at Elias. More gaunt than the last time she’d briefly seen him a few years back in Rossville, covering the spare space from his automobile to the main office of Ross Mining in a few long strides, glancing around nervously as if fearful someone would jump him. Of course, she hadn’t talked to him then or the other rare times she spotted him in Rossville.
The only time she’d talked to him was when she was fifteen and Daniel was twelve and they were at the Kinship Tree and she comforted Daniel as he cried that he had to run away, that he couldn’t take his father’s beatings anymore or hear his father call his deceased mother a savage whore because she’d cheated on him. And then he’d confessed that this time in the barn, instead of taking a belt whipping across his back for some misbehavior, he’d struck his father with a pitchfork and then kept hitting him, wanting—yes, wanting, though Marvena said surely he didn’t mean it—to kill his father. But Uncle Elias had found them and stopped Daniel, and Daniel then broke free and ran to the Kinship Tree, where he and Marvena were planning to meet anyway. Elias had shown up at the tree. She knew of him—Daniel always talked about his uncle affectionately—but this was their first introduction. Elias had pulled Daniel away from her, said he was taking the boy to live with him and his family in Kinship proper.
Marvena didn’t see Daniel again for three years—until Daniel’s father died, leaving his small buckwheat farm on Kinship Road to his brother, Elias, his mining operation to his older son, Luther, and nothing to Daniel. Shortly after, Elias retired from doctoring in Kinship and moved his family back to the farm.
That’s when she and Daniel resumed meeting at the Kinship Tree, even though by then she herself worked at the Rossville boardinghouse.
Now Marvena thinks: even then they’d had regular meetings. She starts to smile, but then fresh grief overcomes her, and she bites her lip as she watches Elias fold himself down to the floor. He has a tray of swabs and bottles and gauze, items Marvena reckons Lily’s mama had gathered because course Lily’d have such fine supplies on hand. Jolene throws her arms around his neck, squeals, “Uncle Elias!,” and he hugs her for a moment. He says, “I have to take care of your little friend’s foot,” and peels Jolene’s arms away.
Daniel talked about Elias sometimes, about what a great man he was. But Marvena, though she’d never tell Daniel, did not think so highly of him. Elias had never bothered to tend to the people in Rossville, the men working the mines his own brother established. There was a company doctor, but he was worse than a butcher, so most people relied on their own know-how or luck or looked to one of the older women in Rossville, like Nana Sacovech, for the healing arts. Elias, it seemed, wanted nothing to do with Rossville.
“What is your name, young lady?”
“Frankie.”
“Well, Miss Frankie, may I have the honor of inspecting your foot?”
Frankie stretches out her leg, allowing Elias to hold her foot.
“This is well bandaged.”
“Mama did it,” Frankie says.
Elias turns to Marvena. “You did a good job. How did she lacerate it?”
“On glass. On the main road,” Frankie says.
“Where, exactly? People will be driving home soon and we don’t want their automobile tires harmed. We should get it cleaned up.”
“Dunno where ’xactly,” Frankie says. “Near a big curve in the big road. I had to pee.”
Lily gasps. “By Ada Gottschalk’s farm?”
Marvena frowns, spooked by Lily’s odd response. “I don’t know that name.”
That glass—it had seemed suspicious, swept aside, but not just to the edge of the road. Moved to the brush. The dropped jar of another moonshiner? But moonshiners didn’t brazenly use Kinship Road.
“This will sting a little,” Elias says as he cleans Frankie’s foot with rubbing alcohol, and Frankie yelps. Jolene pats her hand and Frankie calms, even when Elias gets out a needle and suturing thread. Frankie squeezes her eyes tight while he makes quick work of sewing together the cut, then bandaging with fresh gauze. Marvena snags up her sleeve, folds it, and puts it in her pocket and is relieved when no one comments.
“You’re all set,” Elias comments. “Bravest young lady I’ve met, at least since I had to mend another girl’s foot, years ago.” He looks at Lily, but she glances away.
Lily says, “It’s getting late. I’d drive you and your daughter home, but—”
Marvena’s shocked. “You drive?”
Lily nods. “Daniel taught me.”
Marvena’s eyebrows shoot up. That was more broad-minded than she’d thought him to be. She clears her throat, then says, “He was a good man.”
“Since I don’t have Daniel’s automobile, perhaps you can drive them,” Lily says to Elias.
“No!” Marvena doesn’t want him to know where she lives. Why should she trust this man who wanted nothing to do with Rossville? He’s uncle to both Luther and Daniel, true, but he reminds her mostly of Luther. “We’ll walk. Well, I will. I’ll carry Frankie.”
“Mama, my old shoes are bigger and would fit over Frankie’s bandage!” Jolene pipes up.
“What? No!” Marvena protests.
“She’s outgrown them,” Lily says. “She has another pair.”
Of course. Two pairs of shoes, maybe more, for a daughter in a well-off man’s house.
“We’ll pack you some food, too. Jolene, Mama, fill Daniel’s lunch bucket.”
Marvena starts to protest again. But the scent of food—good salt ham, fresh-baked bread, green beans, and corn—wafting in from the dining room makes her mouth water. And Frankie is staring at her with begging eyes. Marvena nods.
“I can fetch the bucket later,” Lily says, adding, “after I get our automobile back and have some time.”
To everyone else in the room, it sounds like Lily means after she’s had time to grieve. But Marvena notes the steely look in Lily’s eyes, and she realizes the other woman is going to come find her, find where she and Frankie live, as soon as she can. Hope, as fragile as a match flame in a wintry wind, flares in Marvena’s heart, flushes her face. Will Daniel’s widow really find news of Eula and go to the effort to bring it to her?
Before her hope sputters out, Marvena leans forward and nearly smiles as Lily does, too. Then Marvena whispers, so only Lily can hear, “When you come to Rossville, find Nana Sacovech. Don’t ask for her directly, but look for the sheriff’s lunch bucket left out on a porch rail on the main street of miners’ houses. She’ll send you my way.”
CHAPTER 7
LILY
Lily’s first thought upon waking the next morning is, Marvena. Such an unusual name. Marvena. It snags at her, taunting.
She rushes to the wardrobe and runs her hands over the sleeves of Daniel’s suit jacket, smoothly pressed. She breathes deeply the scent of his Chesterfields and menthol hair tonic still infused in the fabric. Just a few pants and shirts hang in the wardrobe; his socks, undershirts, underwear, and grooming supplies fill a bureau drawer. He was buried in his wedding suit. She’d asked about his revolver and immediately felt foolish as Martin and Elias and the undertaker exchanged looks. Of course Daniel’s murderer would have run off with his revolver. She’d told the undertaker to dispose of the suit and underclothes he was wearing when he was killed but had taken back his shoes, hat, and billfold. Perhaps someday Micah would want them.
Now she dips her hands into the pockets of Daniel’s suit jacket, testing the seams with her fingertips. She feels only the silk and then disappointment. She wishes for some scrap of evidence—anything—that might tell her more of her late husband’s relationship with Marvena, Eula, and littl
e Frankie.
“I brought you some tea,” Hildy says from the doorway.
Lily turns to see her best friend staring at her wide-eyed. Only then does she realize that she’s clenched Daniel’s jacket between her fists, stretching the fabric as if she means to rend it.
“I don’t want tea, Hildy. I need coffee. Good, strong boiled coffee.”
Last evening—after everyone else had finally left—Mama and Hildy had insisted on staying over and tending to her, nagging her to drink tea infused with Vogel’s Tonic.
“Oh!” says Hildy. “I’ll take this down. I can make boiled coffee right quick—”
“No!”
Hildy recoils, and Lily is sorry to see the hurt in her sweet face. But she can’t bear another day of Mama and Hildy hovering over her, fussing at her that she should rest.
“I’ll be down in a moment,” Lily says, tamping the harshness in her tone. Will she ever know how to speak naturally again? Or will every word, every moment, forevermore be tinged with hurt and anger?
“At least let me help you get dressed.”
Lily takes a deep breath. “I’m fine. Really, I am. It’s time for me to do it myself.”
“Already? But…” Hildy’s voice trails off. She stares down at the teacup, clicking against the saucer in her trembling hand.
“It’s not going to get easier anytime soon, Hildy,” Lily says. “Not until I—” She stops, not ready to say, not even to her best friend, that she can already feel Daniel slipping away from her. Meeting Marvena and learning that Daniel had had a relationship with her made her question her and Daniel’s life together. She needs to know the truth of his death—and life.
Mama always thinks she asks too many questions. But she has to keep asking. Because, eventually, she will have to live with his death, but she can’t live with the notion of his murder explained as being at the hands of an escaped prisoner. She knows Daniel too well to believe he’d be bested by a prisoner and knows, too, that it’s possible the men looking for the prisoner, even Martin, might keep the truth from her. To protect her, not necessarily from harm, but because so many believe women are too sensitive for life’s brutal truths. That’s only, Lily thinks, because they’ve not experienced the brutal truths life gives particularly and uniquely to women.
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