The Widows

by Jess Montgomery

  Lily rubs her forehead, as if that will erase the sudden throbbing in her temples. “Well then. I guess there’s only one reason you’re here.” She clears her throat. “We kept the house in good repair, but I’d like a few days to clean from top to bottom.”

  Their clothes, of course they can take those. Books, kitchenware. The automobile. She can go to Lewis Automotive today, demand it. Much of the furniture is theirs; perhaps they can store it for a time in the carriage house? Mama will take them in, of course, but she can’t imagine staying with Mama forever and drawing on her precious resources, the proceeds from the sale of the grocery. What had Daniel set aside in savings? If there’s some savings, she could sell the furniture, maybe start over in Cincinnati in nursing.

  Martin smiles gently. “No, Lily, we’re not here to boot you out. We’re here to ask if you’d consider being the acting sheriff.”

  As Lily gasps, Martin smiles gently. “It’s not a position, with the demands of my business, that I can fill, and Fiona—” He glances down. “Well.” He looks back up. “She told me about your visit earlier this morning. So we thought if you were interested—well, we presumed to bring the paperwork. If we complete it this afternoon, I can take it over to the judge. And you can be sworn in tomorrow afternoon.”

  Tomorrow? Lily can’t breathe or move, as if the air freezes around her, and she with it.

  Tanner misinterprets her hesitancy. “Now, we know it’s a most unusual position for a woman, but with these modern times and all—well, my little woman just can’t stop reminding me of her right to vote and the power of the women’s temperance league!” His chuckle fades at Lily’s stiff silence. He blows his bulbous red nose into a handkerchief and adds, “It would just be until November, until a special election for someone to fill Daniel’s role through next year, until the 1926 election. And Martin will stay your deputy—”

  “If you’ll have me—” Martin says.

  “Course she will. And, Lily, we’d still want you to be jail mistress. So you’d be paid for that, same as always, and a small bonus for the title of sheriff. But don’t worry. The Pinkertons can handle most trouble with miners. They have their own means.” Tanner looks pleased at the thought of those cruel means. “You won’t even have to transport prisoners from Rossville’s holding cell to the jailhouse!” Tanner grins as if being sheriff is no real challenge, so of course even a woman could do it—in title only, of course.

  Lily clears her throat. “How nice. Specially since while transporting a prisoner, my husband was shot.”

  As Lily turns over in her mind what’s being offered, she looks at Tanner Riley, his thin, barely patient, patronizing smile. So much easier this way than electing a new sheriff, one who might make it a mission to ask questions and unearth the truth. One who might not support the Pinkertons the way Tanner would like. A bonus: saving money by not paying her as they would a proper male sheriff.

  But they are offering her something else. They’ve underestimated her, as she finds men so often do with women. They’re offering her access as sheriff to go places, to ask questions.

  “What a kindly offer. I’d be glad to accept,” she says.

  She waits until they leave, then goes back inside the jailhouse. On the front of the unused notebook, she writes her name. “Lily Ross.” Below that, “March 29, 1925.” She hesitates just a moment, then adds next to her name: “—Sheriff.”

  CHAPTER 8

  MARVENA

  Even as night falls on Devil’s Backbone, Marvena beats a rag rug of scraps gathered and saved over time, tied and braided and sewn together. It’s the final chore of the day. She’s washed her blouse sleeve and re-stitched it to its bodice. Swept the cabin clean. Scrubbed the cookstove top. Now, she does not care that she’s beaten the rug so long against the trunk of the oak tree that dirt no longer gusts free. She could beat this rug into threads, then the tree into a whittled version of itself, and still fury and pain would burn deep within her.

  Marvena has beaten the rug for so long that even Shep, snoozing on the top step of the porch, no longer jolts at each thump.

  Thump.

  For the threatened unionization efforts.

  Thump.

  For Daniel’s death.

  Thump.

  For Tom, missing.

  Thump.

  For Eula, still gone.

  Thump.

  For poor Frankie, inside the cabin, sulking over having to breathe in steam from the kettle and drink more elderberry tea, because yesterday’s trek had brought back her rattling cough.

  Thump.

  For Lily’s graciousness in their shameful meeting, and for the doubt gripping Marvena’s heart that Daniel’s widow will come with news about what she’d found in Daniel’s notes about Eula. Still, upon returning the previous day Marvena had quickly sidled into Rossville, left Daniel’s lunch pail with Nana, instructed her to put it out on her porch. She’d hurried out a back way without being spotted. If Lily comes to Rossville, she’ll see the pail. There’s but one long dirt road in town, with just foot and mule paths elsewhere, and Nana and Jurgis’s house is one of the first upon entering the town.

  Thump.

  For her beloved John, sealed forever in Devil’s Backbone. Leaving her a lonely widow, too. Leaving her to carry on their work for unionization at Ross Mining.

  Thump. Thump. Thump!

  For her own heart cracking open with deeper sorrow than befits friendship. For the fear, rising from a vault deep in her heart, that John died knowing better than she did that part of her still yearned for Daniel.

  With her next thump, a memory loosens: Shep has the same markings as a coonhound they’d had years ago, one Marvena had witnessed being mauled by a black bear. Daddy had run out of the cabin, half-drunk, but clear-minded enough to know eight-year-old Marvena didn’t normally scream, so he’d grabbed his shotgun. He shot the bear and then the mauled dog to put it out of its misery, then taught her to shoot, right there, his face taut with fear. He’d made Marvena shoot and shoot and shoot both the dead bear and dog over and over until she couldn’t much tell the remains of one from the other. Sometimes, you’ve got to do the hard thing no one else wants to do, he’d told her.

  Recollecting the scene feels like a bad sign. Suddenly her arms and hands ache and tremble. She stops beating the rug and it flags in her hands.

  Marvena drags the rug with her—not even caring that she’s sweeping up the very dirt she’d just thumped out—and sits down on the porch step. Shep moves over toward her, nudges her arm insistently until she scratches his scruff. He sighs happily, settles his head on her lap.

  A snap. Marvena startles, sits up. Maybe the snap is just a critter, emboldened by nightfall to creep too close to her cabin? Another snap. No. It’s a foot carelessly cracking some stray branch or other felled by the passing harsh winter.

  Shep lifts his head, turns his gaze to the darkness.

  Marvena attunes to the trespasser’s tread. Her hunting knife, freshly sharpened, is in its sheath on her waistband, her pistol strapped to her ankle. Her shotgun is just inside the door.

  At the next snap, Marvena stands, pulls her knife from its sheath, just as Jurgis Sacovech steps into the clearing, then jumps back, hands up. “Whoa, Marvena—”

  Marvena re-sheaths her knife. “You know to holler out when you get close.”

  Jurgis looks down, accepting the reprimand. Then he glances back and calls, “Come on!”

  Around the corner of the cabin comes Alistair, Tom’s son. Marvena grins, happy to see her nephew. Then she notes the boy’s coal-darkened face, and her grin slides away.

  Course he’d have been taken from school and put in the mines to work off his father’s scrip, just as soon as Tom was thrown in the holding cell. In the shock of Lloyd’s death, Tom’s disappearance, and Daniel’s death, Marvena is ashamed to realize she hasn’t thought of this.

  Alistair’s face knots and he fights off tears. Marvena rushes to the boy, hugs him. He curls, quiveri
ng, into her embrace. At eleven, he’s nearly as tall as she is but still just a child.

  Marvena looks up at Jurgis. “But they can’t—” The boy is too young, even by non-union standards, to be in the mines.

  “Rules don’t matter to the likes of Luther,” Jurgis says. “Specially now. Reckon you were right—Sheriff Ross was holding Luther in check, at least a little. But Luther’s gone and closed the school—repairs, he says.”

  Years before, Daniel had pressured his half brother into having a simple one-room school in Rossville, free to all, sufficient for teaching the children up to age fourteen.

  “Repairs?” Marvena snorts. “That skinflint just don’t want to pay the schoolmarm!”

  “Without the sheriff…” Jurgis gives the boy a pointed gaze. “We need to talk.”

  Marvena releases Alistair. She looks in his eyes. “Go in the cabin. Tell Frankie I said you can have th’rest of the corn pone.”

  The boy hesitates at the mention of the dense bread, made from cornmeal, lard, and water, so Marvena adds, “There’s sorghum, too.”

  He lights up at the reference to the sweet yet savory dark syrup made from sorghum cane. Marvena usually nurses a few quart jars through the year, until she can barter again with one of the farmers who follow the time-honored yet tedious process of boiling the cane down to make the syrup, sugar cane being more precious and expensive to come by. But Alistair’s hopeful expression at the thought of the sweet reminds her that he really is just a child.

  “And you can have all you like,” she adds.

  Marvena watches as Alistair bounds past Shep and into the cabin. Then she turns back to Jurgis. “I know you’re not here just about Alistair.”

  “Well, that’s partly why. But there’s several points of concern—”

  “Get to it.”

  Jurgis’s jaw tightens. He looks at Marvena defiantly. “First, what the hell were you thinking, going into Kinship?”

  “You know of that?”

  “Everyone knows of that by now.”

  “Well, if I’d known about D-daniel…” Marvena pauses, hating the quaver in her voice at even saying his name.

  “You were supposed to lay low. But instead you go to the sheriff’s widow—”

  “Goddammit, I didn’t know! And I was going to Daniel—” Suddenly Marvena’s arms are shaking, as if beating the rugs really had tested them to soreness. “I didn’t bring up unionization with Mrs. Ross, if that’s what’s a-worrying you.”

  Jurgis lifts his eyebrows and crosses his arms. From the woods around the cabin’s clearing, night sounds start to creep closer. “Well, why in God’s name did you go, then?”

  The truth bursts out of Marvena. “Because of Eula! The damned fool girl’s been gone since mid-February.”

  “I’m sorry, Marvena. There’s been talk, that Eula’s been seen, with Pinks. Getting in their fancy cars. Likely run off with one of them. After all, miners are paid in scrip—no good to her—while Pinks are paid, and pay, in cold, hard cash. She’s abandoned us, Marvena. And now we’ve got bigger things to worry about. Can’t you just let this go?”

  Marvena’s hand moves to her knife after all. She stares, cold, at Jurgis. She wants to run him through for saying that. She won’t do it of course—she hasn’t made it all the way to thirty-five living hand to mouth, especially as a woman, without learning to carefully gauge every word and action.

  “Let this go? You mean, let Eula go? Let my daughter go? Would you?”

  Jurgis looks at her directly, now, and she sees in his gaze that yes, yes, he just might. Many men would. Men who think nothing of using a woman, like she’d been used, like Eula had been used, who see it as a point of pride, even as they toss aside the woman like a dirty dishrag for the same fool carnal pleasures.

  But not men like Daniel.

  Jurgis says, “Eula’s probably happier with whoever she ran off with—miner or Pink. Or even by herself. Even if you can suss out her whereabouts, she won’t thank you, and no good would come of it. More’n likely, Eula’d get back by betraying all she knows of our efforts.”

  “All right, then.” She wonders at her own voice sounding stilted, distant, as if it’s echoing back to her from across a holler. Jurgis nods, as if that settles the matter of Eula. But Marvena is not going to let go of her daughter that easily.

  “I told you, few days ago at Lloyd’s, it looked like the sheriff took Tom from the holding cell,” Jurgis says. “Well, now the talk is that Tom killed him on the way back to Kinship.”

  Marvena stares hard at her old friend. “I figured that much out when I visited Mrs. Ross. You really believe that?”

  Jurgis shakes his head. “Don’t matter what I believe. The deputy, Martin Weaver, was in Rossville this morning, with other men, asking questions. Wanting to know how to find you.”

  Marvena lifts her eyebrows.

  “No one gave you up,” Jurgis says. “Not this place. Or your still. And I’m telling you, maybe it’s time to lay off organizing.”

  “No! Now’s the time to press harder. Tom was more’n likely set up. Why, with Daniel gone, Luther would be free to get a more supportive man into office—”

  “Marvena! That’s dangerous territory! You can’t go accusing the sheriff’s brother—”

  “We live and breathe dangerous territory,” Marvena says. “Now, you take Alistair on back, and you tell the men we’ll go on as planned.”

  “Marvena, you have to take in Alistair, and we have to stop union talk for now.”

  “No. If we stop now, give in now, when will we get the momentum back?”

  Jurgis looks as shocked as if she’d pulled her knife out after all. “Marvena … you can see, with Tom gone, they’re putting the boy to work in his stead. Today wasn’t so bad, but soon enough they’ll put Alistair in the narrowest shafts, setting dynamite for new veins.”

  She presses her fingertips to her forehead. Her hands have gone suddenly cold. She’s already lost so much. John. Eula. Daniel. Tom. What will those losses mean if she doesn’t take this moment to push the men toward real change?

  She sees Alistair’s face. Then the weary faces of the men, at the last meeting in the cave near Marvena’s still. Some from Ross Mining. Some from other companies in Bronwyn County and beyond. The quest to unionize Ross Mining is quickly growing into a regional movement.

  “If I hide Alistair here, the men will know I’ve lost heart. Then someone will say where I am. The new sheriff and his men will come, looking for Alistair and Tom. And here is too close to the cave. Once that’s found, where can we meet that’s safe?” She pauses for effect. Her gift, the gift of speechifying, has caught up both her and Jurgis. “But if they see Alistair, a mere boy, working the mines, won’t that enrage and embolden them? That, with Lloyd’s death, may be the tipping point we need. As foolish as it may have been for me to go into Kinship, it was even more so for me to have hidden up here. I can do no good by hiding. So tomorrow, I will go down to the town as I ever have, working among the women, pretending I’m just there to help Nana with doctoring. Tonight, Jurgis, you will take Alistair back home with you. Then gather the men. We will meet in the cave—”

  “Tonight! So soon?”

  “We can’t let the men lose heart. So, yes. Tonight. Spread the word to the men as you can, and have Nana spread it to the women. Just the men we know are fully on our side. We need to meet while Luther’s distracted by Daniel’s death, and afore the men lose steam. They need to know Daniel…” Marvena pauses, but this time, it is to keep her voice from cracking. She clears her throat, goes on. “… t’know Daniel was on their side.”

  Jurgis gives Marvena a long look, and for a moment she fears he’s going to revolt. She holds his gaze steady. At last, though, he says, “And will they believe you?”

  “Yes. They will. Because it is true.”

  Jurgis stares at her. Marvena reads in his expression a mix of wonder and dismay at her coldness, but she keeps her gaze steady.

  “W
hat about gathering the dynamite?” he asks, his voice nearly a whisper, as if even the squirrels and other small woodland creatures might be Luther’s spies. “We haven’t even started!”

  The plan was to get enough men to walk off that Luther couldn’t quickly or easily replace them, so that he’d be forced to let the men decide for themselves if they wanted unionization. And to get the most loyal to sneak dynamite out of company storage—not so much at once that it would be missed, but enough over time that they could use it to defend themselves if necessary or threaten to blow up the Rossville depot and tracks if Luther won’t listen.

  Up from Rossville rises the sound of the train whistle, the last departure of the night.

  Marvena stares down at her feet and at the rug. An idea comes to her. The sticks are small enough to roll up several in a rag rug. And, why, womenfolk love to work on such crafts, so there’d be no suspicion at a gathering of select miners’ wives making rugs. What if she could get the women to bring her dynamite, sneak it out in rugs, hide it in her most secretive spots in the woods and cliffs on Devil’s Backbone?

  Then she thinks of the school, closed for so-called repairs. If asked, she could say the women were making them to sell in Kinship to raise funds. And that would solve another problem—she’d have an excuse to go to Kinship to find Lily if the woman didn’t find her as promised.

  Marvena plucks up her rug. She looks at Jurgis. “Don’t worry. I have a plan.”

  She heads into her small one-room cabin, with Jurgis behind her. Alistair is sitting at the table with Frankie, trying to get her to eat the corn pone and sorghum that Marvena had said was his.

  Marvena puts the rag rug down by the door and swallows the coal-hard lump back down from her throat. How can she do this to Alistair, her own nephew, when just days ago she protested the notion of Lloyd’s older boy in the mines? But she hears again her daddy’s words from so long ago: Sometimes, you’ve got to do the hard thing no one else wants to do. When she stands up, she looks evenly at the boy. “Alistair, you’re going to have to go back with Jurgis.”