“No, Mama!” Frankie protests because she is lonely, not because she knows to worry for Alistair’s fate. But Alistair, after only one day in the mine, is smart enough to be scared. Marvena sees it in the tight shine to his eyes.
“You be a man, now,” Marvena says to her nephew. “Do the hard things you have to do.” Then she offers him the only comfort she can, knowing full well it may be a lie. “Everything … will come out right. Mark my words.”
From the porch, Marvena and Frankie watch as Jurgis and Alistair vanish into the night’s chill darkness. An owl’s call shakes Marvena back to the moment, and she shudders at the sound—a sign of death. Past … or future? Daniel, a believer in signs ever as much as Marvena, would have also frowned at the warning.
Marvena shoos Frankie back into the cabin and sets to making another ministering kettle of hot water. Tonight, they will gather in the cave, and she’ll need to take Frankie with her.
CHAPTER 9
LILY
Late that night, after the children are in bed, Lily lies wide awake, waiting. She wants to make sure they are asleep before she steps out of the bedroom to go up to the attic, her last hope for finding clues within the house about Eula. If Daniel had done any investigating as Marvena asked, he might have taken notes after all. But he wouldn’t have put them where Lily could easily find them. She rarely went up to the attic—that was Daniel’s task—and it would be odd to their children to see her climbing the stairs. And these past days have been so upsetting to them, no need to burden them further with odd behavior.
Odd. With Marvena’s sudden appearance in her life, on the heels of Daniel’s death, her life feels completely odd. At odds, in any case, with the life she thought she’d had: Safe. Secure. A close, honest marriage. But Daniel had kept Marvena from her.
That fact had trotted alongside her all day, like a wolf waiting to lunge at her throat. When she’d gone to ask Hildy to be jail mistress. When she’d told Mama the news of her being acting sheriff and listened to her explode with worry. When she’d walked over to Lewis Automotive and demanded the return of Daniel’s automobile. Her automobile. She could drive it, she assured Mr. Lewis, without the replacement of the side window.
She’d instructed Mr. Lewis to let her know when the new door and window were in. Behind the garage, by herself with the automobile, she stared for a long moment at the bullet hole in the driver’s side door, the missing window. She’d looked inside, noting that all the glass that surely must have fallen onto the bench seat and floorboard had been cleaned up. Then she’d slowly eased into the driver’s seat, trailed her hand over the steering wheel, hand lever, hand brake, and key in the ignition. Had he been sitting here, when he’d been shot? Or had he gotten out of the automobile first, started to give chase?
Now the images of the missing window, the bullet hole in the driver’s side door, haunt her as she stares into the dark, yearning to drift off to dreamless sleep.
It occurs to Lily that all the times she’s lain awake at night, restless and troubled, have been because of Daniel. When he was away at war. Before that, when they honeymooned in Cincinnati and he went out, against her wishes, for one last fight in the boxing ring. Before that, when she was recovering at the home of Elias and it was, for a few days, Daniel’s job to carry her downstairs in the mornings and upstairs at night, and though he refused to look down at her face, she felt his fingers trembling, aching to curl into her body. She’d ached for that, too, though then he was twenty-four to her mere seventeen years of age.
She aches for that now, as she stares across the room at the wardrobe, right by the window. There is enough light—it is a full moon—glinting through the curtains that she sees that she’s carelessly left the wardrobe doors open. She looks at the gray lines of Daniel’s clothes and realizes she’s seeking among them a glint, a glimmer, a movement.
Focus, Lily admonishes herself. She lights the coal-oil lamp on the bed stand, planning to head up to the attic, but she finds herself in front of the wardrobe, shivering, touching the sleeve of one of Daniel’s work shirts. She pulls it on over her nightgown. Inhales. His scent is still on his shirt, musky and yeasty and salty and smoky.
In the hallway, she pauses, thinking she hears Jolene moaning. But then it’s silent, save the creaks of the house. She slowly opens the door to the attic—that door’s hinge, so rarely tested, is silent—and treads carefully up the stairs. In the attic, Lily briefly touches the crib, then steps around the box of ornaments, an old rocker. There, against the back wall, is Daniel’s old footlocker.
Lily kneels before it.
On the top is her wedding suit dress, a bit dated but still a lovely olive-green linen. She studies it. She needs something to wear to the swearing-in ceremony tomorrow. She’s only put on a few pounds since her marriage, and she’s not yet showing with this new child. Surely the jacket will fit and she’ll only need to take out a few stitches in the skirt’s waistline.
Next she carefully lifts Daniel’s army uniform, studying the medals still pinned to the jacket front, the Verdun with the orange ribbon, from France to all U.S. men who’d fought in the Meuse-Argonne, the Victory Medal with the rainbow ribbon and the three metal crossbars: Meuse-Argonne, Ypres-Lys, Defensive Sector. She runs her thumb over the silver Citation Star, precisely pinned in the middle of the ribbon.
Daniel’d earned it trying to save her brother, Roger, and several other men. Roger had fought alongside Daniel, part of the American Expeditionary Forces’ Thirty-Seventh Division—tagged “Ohio’s Own” because most of the men came from the state—Seventy-Fourth Infantry Brigade, Roger an assistant gunner to Daniel, a machine gunner. But Daniel hadn’t been able to save Roger from trying, on his own, to take out a number of German soldiers and, in so doing, drawing the attention of a sniper.
Lily carefully refolds Daniel’s uniform and places it beside her dress. Next Lily spots a thin packet of letters from Daniel, sent during the war. She starts to reach for them, but then she sees Daniel’s old boxing gloves. She hadn’t realized that he’d kept them.
When she and Daniel first moved here, she’d sometimes see him punch a bag he’d hung in the carriage house. Then he’d stop, lift his gloved hands, his left arm only going up far enough to make a corner with his body. She’d pretended not to see the pale, pinched look around his mouth, bitterness at the fraction of mortar shell from the Great War still biting into the muscle of his left shoulder. Those nights he moved slowly as they made love, while she took the lead. They never talked about his lost boxing career, his years fighting for George Vogel.
Lily carefully sets the letters aside and pulls out the gloves. The leather is tight, stiff. She runs her finger over the thick stitching. With sudden, desperate need, she picks apart the knot holding the two gloves together. One glove drops to the floor; the other she holds to her face, pushing her nose into the opening, inhaling slowly, deeply, the scent of leather.
Daniel’s hands were large, so there is no need to loosen the laces as she slips on the gloves. She bites into the tan trim, savoring the satisfaction of feeling her teeth sinking into the leather, as she pulls the gloves on the rest of the way. It reminds her of biting into Daniel’s belt so long ago to endure the amputation of her little toe and what she’d foolishly thought would be the worst pain of her life.
Daniel never let her put on his boxing gloves. Once, after they’d moved here, while unpacking, she’d playfully started to put them on, but he’d snatched them away.
I told you before, some things aren’t meant for women … not a woman who’s my wife.…
It was a rare argument. Startling. Like the one they’d had on what would be Daniel’s last night on earth. Perhaps she should feel guilty, pulling on his forbidden boxing gloves, just one day after his burial. But they’d spent their marriage doing things proper, and now …
She savors having her hands where his had been. The gloves wobble ridiculously on her thin wrists. Lily stands, moving to a clear area in the middle of
the attic, and takes a few light swings just to see if the gloves will stay on.
They do, and she throws a harder punch into the air, and then another. The punches come faster. She thrusts her fists forward, first right, then left. Her right jab is faster, more controlled, but her left is stronger. Something takes over; she forgets about her children sleeping, that attic noise might stir them.
A punch at Daniel, for holding back the knowledge of Marvena.
A punch for Eula … his daughter? The possibility, lurking at the back of her mind ever since Marvena’s visit, jabs up from her gut and through her heart.
A punch for Marvena.
He’d hate for Lily to act like this.
Well, she hated him for keeping Marvena secret, this whole other relationship, important enough that the other woman brazenly came calling, expecting Daniel’s help as her right.
Punch, jab.
Had he thought her so foolish, so simple, that she would have turned cold to him if he’d told her the truth about a past lover and, possibly, child? Or was she foolish and simple to cling to the notion of past?
Punch, jab, uppercut.
Let Daniel stop her. Let his spirit come back, show her one of his precious signs.
Daniel’s boxing gloves are suddenly too heavy. Lily’s arms fall to her sides, shake. But she savors the soreness. A call-and-response between anger and ache.
Was this how Daniel felt when he trained, when he fought?
Then she feels something in the right glove that she must have dislodged with her swings. An edge of the paper teases her fingertips.
She pulls out the pieces and stares at them in her hand. The faded bluehair ribbon is the one she’d given Daniel, all those years before.
Her gaze shifts from the blue ribbon to the paper, a ticket for a boxing match, Daniel Ross versus Frederick Clausen. The ticket is dated August 20, 1917.
Daniel’s last fight after their marriage.
His last fight before enlisting in the Armed Expeditionary Forces.
His last fight, at least in a ring.
She stares at the blue ribbon, as if it can transport her back in time.
Lily still limped a week after the emergency surgery, but she held her shoulders straight as she slipped through the barn door, determined to see Daniel once last time before returning to her parents’ house in Kinship. To bring him a slice of buttermilk pie.
But once inside the door, Lily stopped.
In the far corner, his back to her, was Daniel. He’d stripped off his shirt and pulled on boxing gloves. Sweat soaked his undershirt as he pummeled again and again a punching bag hung from another hook.
She took in every bit of him with her gaze—the bow of his head as if he worshiped at the swing of the bag, the pull and stretch of his muscles with each wrathful thrum, thrum, thrum of his fists against the bag. She felt in that beating rhythm his intention to keep going until mind and memory and muscle all melted to mere spoonfuls of sopping grayness.
In every punch, she felt each moment of her time at the Ross household: the blurry, fitful days after Dr. Elias Ross performed emergency amputation, right there on the dining room table; sorting out details about the people tending her: Sophie, the doctor’s wife, who was so much younger than Elias, and Ruth, their ten-year-old daughter, and Miss Mary, the old woman who was their live-in helper; realizing it had been decided for her that she’d recuperate at the Ross farm, because Mama was still in Cincinnati with her parents, and Daddy and Roger were busy renovating the store, and here Elias could keep an eye on her and make sure infection didn’t set in. She’d known in general of the Ross family, of course, and that the family had founded Ross Mining and Rossville, and had assumed—naively it now seemed after living here—that such a family must be fine and proper.
From Miss Mary, she learned that the man who’d calmed her at surgery was Daniel, Elias’s nephew—and that she recovered in Daniel’s old bedroom. Elias and Sophie had taken him in when he was just thirteen because his father, Elias’s brother and founder of Ross Mining, was so abusive to him. With Lily here, he slept in the barn, no longer used except for two field horses, where he also was training as a boxer. He’d been a boxer from age eighteen but recently been hurt in the ring. Elias had gone to retrieve him, tried to talk him into studying medicine, but because he was a “savage,”Miss Mary said with disdain, he was going back to boxing. Lily asked why she called him savage—just because of the boxing?—and Miss Mary said no, Daniel’s mother had been a full-breed Leni-Lenape Indian woman, who had worked for Daniel’s father’s first wife. Shortly after that wife—may she rest in peace! Miss Mary proclaimed—died from breast cancer, Daniel’s father had remarried the Indian woman.
Now, watching Daniel land each punch, Lily did not find him savage. He was beautiful. She felt her face flare with heat, just as it had when he’d carried her up and down the stairs as she healed. As it had the previous night at dinner when she’d looked up to steal a glance of him at dinner and caught him staring at her. A tender moment, until it was interrupted by his older, by ten years, half brother, Luther—who, she learned, had inherited Ross Mining from their father, while Daniel had been entirely cut out for years. Luther had cackled with glee that Daniel’s “whore” would be jealous.
Lily knew what “whore” meant. She didn’t care. She was sorrowful when Daniel stood, announced he’d be leaving for good the next morning, to go back to Cincinnati to resume his boxing career. And then he’d strode away. Through the dining room window, she’d watched him mount his horse and ride off.
This morning, she’d tied up her hair with the pretty blue ribbon that Mrs. Ada Gottschalk had given her on a visit because, the dear woman said, she knew Lily’s own mama was preoccupied. Lily came down the stairs on her own, using the cane that Dr. Ross had given her, and was disappointed that Daniel was not at breakfast.
She’d insisted on cleaning up for the family and then cut a slice of the buttermilk pie she’d helped make the night before—“Daniel’s favorite pie,” Ruth had whispered when they made it, as if this were the deepest secret about the man—the pie that Daniel had left without tasting. Lily left her cane in the kitchen and took the slice of pie out to the barn.
And so it was that she found herself staring at Daniel thrusting his fists into the bag as if he wasn’t aware she was standing there, and for a moment Lily feared she’d made a terrible mistake, the mistake of a young girl’s foolish heart.
But suddenly he stopped. Without looking at her, he spoke. “This is not a sight for girls.”
“I’m not a girl!” Lily snapped. “It was my seventeenth birthday the day you met me.”
Daniel pulled off his gloves, tied their laces together, and hung them on another hook by his shirt. He turned and looked at her. Held by his gaze, she moved steadily forward.
At a divot in the floor she stumbled, but though he lifted his hand as if wishing to catch her, he did not move toward her. He held her only with his eyes, trusting her to right herself.
Finally, she was before him, handing him the plate. He cut off a bite of pie. She focused on taking in the details of his face—the cauliflowered left ear, the thin slice of scar above his left eyebrow, the hard turn of his lips, the sharp slope of his nose.
He ate a bite, then another and another. She watched his throat move with each swallow.
He finished the pie. “Delicious,” he said, with a flash of smile. But then his expression reverted to seriousness. “I’m only back because I had an injury, and my first loss, in the ring. I’m just here to heal and train so I can go fight again in Cincinnati for George Vogel. Do you know who that is?”
“No. And I don’t care.”
“You should. His name strikes fear into the hearts of many men. He runs a huge operation … never mind. I’m leaving tonight to go back to Cincinnati. Lily,” he said, turning her name into a sigh. “You’re too young for me. As Luther would tell you, I’m not a nice man.”
She inhaled, savoring th
e spice of him. “I don’t want a nice man. I want a good man.”
It was Daniel’s turn to catch his breath. Emboldened, Lily tried to stand on tiptoe. Too soon. She started to fall, and this time he did catch her. The plate shattered on the barn floor. Lily lifted her mouth to Daniel’s, and for one sweet moment he pulled her to him, his fingers gripping her arms, her own fingers finding the muscles in his back.
But the door opened and there was Miss Mary, fussing and yelling for Elias.
Daniel made a fist, kissed his thumb, pressed it gently to Lily’s lips.
“I will be back,” he whispered. “When you’re old enough.”
“How will I know you’re all right?”
He grinned. “Just watch for a sign. My mother would say a hawk, looking at you.”
Lily gave him a soft smile. Then, slowly, she knelt to pick up her blue hair ribbon. Before turning to leave with Miss Mary, she tucked the ribbon in his right boxing glove.
When Lily comes back to herself, she is on her knees, next to the footlocker. Daniel’s gloves are on the floor. The ribbon and ticket are in her fist.
She unclenches her hand and looks for a moment at the items. That he kept the blue ribbon surprises her as uncharacteristic sentimentality. Keeping the ticket, though, surely had to be for another reason. A reminder of some sort? Two years after their initial meeting, they’d met again, when Daniel returned to Kinship for a boxing match. Shortly after that, they’d wed at Mama and Daddy’s house, then gone to Cincinnati for their honeymoon, staying at the Sinton Hotel, a gift from Daniel’s boxing manager, George Vogel.
They’d argued over a fight scheduled during their honeymoon, Lily not wanting him to go, but Daniel told her no one crosses George Vogel, insisting he owed George this one last fight—a rematch with Frederick Clausen, the man who’d bested and injured him two years before—and had stormed off to fulfill the obligation. She’d wept herself to sleep with worry when he didn’t come back, but she was too fearful to go into the strange big city by herself to find him. When he came back the next morning, he’d been calm and quiet. He told her nothing of the fight or his activities after it—only that he’d won, had celebrated with George and his cronies, and had enlisted in the American Expeditionary Forces.
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