The Widows

by Jess Montgomery

  Nana picks the lunch pail up off the porch floor.

  “I’ll take care of Shep,” Nana says. “You watch out for you and Frankie. Then come back in a few days for those rag rugs. I’ll watch for Lily Ross. She’ll stand out, in this town. If I sense we can trust her, I’ll send her your way. You’ll see. She’ll find news of Eula in Daniel’s notes to set all our hearts at ease.”

  CHAPTER 13

  LILY

  Lily slows as she passes first her grandparents’ old farm and then Elias’s farm on Kinship Road. Beside her on the bench seat is a basket of baked goods for Marvena and Eula—muffins and biscuits, left from the funeral supper buffet but still fresh—and Daniel’s shotgun, a Winchester Model 12 he’d kept over the mantel. After Abe Miller left, she’d gone back in the house and retrieved the shotgun. The stocking gun doesn’t seem sufficient for her new role. Until she can get a revolver, the shotgun will have to do.

  There are twists and turns aplenty on Kinship Road but only one hairpin turn on the road, just past Elias’s farm. The turn, which parallels the sharp bend in Coal Creek where the Kinship Tree grows, forces Lily to come to a near stop. Brush and berry bushes and other trees hide the Kinship Tree from view, but for just a moment Lily sees herself, running down the road from her grandparents’ house and turning off onto the footpath leading to the twined tree.

  After the bend, Lily pulls off just west of the footpath. A fist forms in her stomach, punches up through her heart and into her throat. Here is where Daniel’s been found. Where he was murdered.

  She’s meant to go straight to Rossville, to find Marvena, but Lily sets the hand brake. She presses the palms of her hands to her cheeks, suddenly too warm even in the chilly weather. She imagines Marvena and Frankie, walking down this side of the road so as to face the flow of traffic. She remembers Frankie saying she’d cut her foot on broken glass at the hairpin.

  Lily gazes across the road at the field, where a few cows gathered under a lone burr oak tree for shelter from the misting rain. She forces herself to imagine each moment as it supposedly unfolded: Daniel slowing by necessity on the hairpin, somehow the prisoner getting Daniel’s gun, forcing him to stop. The prisoner getting out of the automobile. Daniel jumping out—but would he do that, unarmed? Perhaps he thought he could run the prisoner down. But the escaping prisoner shot at least four times—once shattering the window glass, once hitting the door. Two more hitting Daniel, in his stomach and in his chest. With which of the four shots? It shouldn’t matter, and yet it does. Lily’s eyes sting as she realizes she’ll never know this detail unless she talks to the murderer, makes him confess.

  She blinks hard, forcing her thoughts back to Frankie cutting her foot on the remaining glass, sloppily swept off the road. What mother, Lily wonders, would have her daughter cross from the roadside offering the privacy of trees in order to relieve herself by an open field on the other side?

  Lily gets out with her shotgun, strides to the open field. She kneels looking for glass, sifting through pebbles and weeds along the fence and in the road’s edge.

  There is no glass.

  She crosses back to Daniel’s—her—automobile, goes around it to the footpath that leads to the Kinship Tree. It’s tempting to let her mind wander down that path, to the happier times of jumping in the pool with Roger, but she focuses on her search. Just a few steps down the path, she finds a trampled spot where one might easily take care of privy needs. She also finds the pile of glass that a child, with urgent need to relieve herself, might overlook.

  It makes even less sense that someone would have swept the glass from the other side of the road to here than Marvena having her child pee on the other side of the road.

  She calculates: two hours from Daniel leaving her side to being shot on the way back from Rossville, is possible but tight.

  Yet what the evidence of the glass and logic tells her is that it’s more likely that Daniel never made it to Rossville. That he’d been waylaid at this spot, so perfect for an ambush, on the way to Rossville, that his automobile and his body had been moved to make it appear he’d been shot on the way back to Kinship.

  Back at her automobile, Lily studies the driver’s door—the missing glass, the bullet hole. Her hand trembles as she reaches to the bullet hole, puts her finger to it. There is an angle, as if the shot had come from a high position.

  Lily turns slowly, looks back across the road, to the open pasture and the cows. If he was shot going this direction, toward Rossville, he would have been attacked from the pasture side or the road because of the shots in the driver’s side door. Surely, as sharp and experienced as Daniel was, he’d have seen the attacker, or attackers, coming.

  A story rises unbidden from memory, of Daniel telling her of Roger’s death from a German sniper. It was the only story he’d shared in detail from the Great War, the only one that visibly moved him. Daniel told her the sniper had shot several times, unsure in the dark if the first round had met its mark.

  It was pre-dawn when Daniel had last left her side. It would have been barely light by the time Daniel was at this hairpin on his way to Rossville.

  Lily stares at the burr oak in the pasture, the tree by which the cows huddle. She climbs the tree with her gaze, stopping when she spots a limb hanging half-split. Not lightning; there have been no recent violent storms. The weight, then, of a man.

  Lily gets back in her automobile, releases the brake, starts again to Rossville, but as she comes out of the hairpin she sees the dirt lane to the Gottschalk farmhouse. Lily knows she must confront the widow Gottschalk, ask her what she knows, demand to speak to the farmhand, Rusty Murphy, who had found Daniel.

  But first, she must get to Marvena, find out whether in fact Frankie had cut her foot on the wooded side of the road. Find out more about Marvena’s relationship with Daniel and about the missing Eula.

  * * *

  The rain has stopped by the time Lily reaches Rossville.

  This is only her second time coming to the mining town. She only vaguely remembers coming with her parents once, as a child, on a Memorial Day when Daddy decided they must visit the graves of his parents.

  Daddy rarely talked about his childhood in the town. His mother had died from some unnamed, untreated illness, and shortly after that his father had died from a fall off a mine shaft elevator. Daddy, at seven, made his way to Kinship hidden in the back of a mule-drawn wagon, then hiding in the alley by the grocer’s. The elderly grocer and his wife, who couldn’t have children, caught him digging in the trash and took him in, giving him their last name of McArthur.

  At the crest of Devil’s Backbone Mountain, dense green forest alongside the twisty road abruptly give way to the hollow below, wherein lies Rossville: land ground out and refilled for the industry of pulling coal from the surrounding hills, their old names long forgotten, now just Mine No. 1 and Mine No. 2 and on through Mine No. 5. Near ridgetop on each is the opening to the mine, square, reinforced with wood beams. Coal freighted out by man and mule goes into tipples at the mine shafts at ridgetop and then is sent rattling down enclosed chutes that spine down hills flayed of timber, down to open tops of coal cars on the tracks.

  Dust rises constantly from the coal house and open train cars, then settles over the town, a gritty sigh. The tarry smell of coal—chuting raw from down the mountains, burning in ovens for cooking and heating, moving through town in railroad cars—infuses every nook of Rossville.

  Lily slows to study one of the boys at the bottom of a chute. She guesses him to be eleven, though she knows Luther would tell her he’s the requisite age of sixteen but small for his age, and who could argue? For many mining families, certifications of birth are rare; and the more who work from a family, the better off the whole household. He stands up on a ladder watching the coal spill into the top of a coal car. It’s his job to gauge when the car is full enough, to push up the lever, to stop the spill of coal. A man stands watching the boy, rings a bell to signal the train pulling down the track to
bring the next coal car for filling. The boy goes up on his toe tips each time to reach the lever. If he falls, the coal will swiftly bury him.

  It strikes Lily that the rare times Daddy referenced Rossville it was with a guilt-stricken turn to his voice; that Daddy had insisted last September that he help with the rescue efforts at the Widowmaker because he had escaped Rossville so young and so easily.

  Lily drives slowly past the mining operation and the rail yard and depot, noting on either side of the road the company houses: meager boxes with only tweaks of gable or roofline to distinguish one from another, nested tight together, crouching over the lean road.

  Marvena had told her to look for Daniel’s pail out on a porch rail. She drives up one side, turns, drives down the other. She doesn’t see the pail. Lily stops, gets out, carrying her shotgun low and partially covered by her skirts. Maybe by walking, she’ll spot it.

  At one house, Lily hears a ballad being sung by the woman as she shakes out rag rugs on her front porch step. The ballad, in circulation for a few years now, is familiar to Lily:

  “Down, down in yonder valley

  Where flowers fade and bloom

  Lies our own Pearl Bryant

  A-mouldering in her tomb.”

  On goes “Pearl Bryant,” the true story of Pearl, murdered by a jealous lover, the theme consistent, though flourishes vary from singer to singer.

  Lily shudders, realizing that Daniel’s murder is likely to make its way into a ballad. She doesn’t want the chorus to be that he was shot by a prisoner who got away.

  She approaches the porch, but the woman goes inside, slams her rickety front door as hard as it will allow. Lily tightens her grip on her shotgun. Will anyone even be willing to help her find Marvena Whitcomb?

  A door squeaks across the street. Lily whirls. There on the porch stands a squat older woman. She looks up and down the road, clearly afraid of something, and gestures to Lily to come up on the porch.

  Lily looks around, sees no one on the street. The old woman is a good six inches shorter than even Lily’s five-foot-three, and her face is soft and round. But there is a sharpness to her gaze, a grimness to her smile. And she’s holding something behind her back.

  Warily, Lily tightens her grip on her shotgun as she approaches the house.

  The woman brings a lunch pail from behind her back, just long enough for Lily to get a glimpse of it, and of D.T.R. scratched under the rim. Daniel’s pail.

  Lily looks up at the woman as she puts the pail behind her back. Softly, Lily says, “That pail is—was—my husband’s. I loaned it to Marvena Whitcomb. Is she here?”

  The older woman stares at the star on Lily’s lapel.

  “Lily Ross?” An accent—not quite German, maybe Polish—thickens her words.

  Lily nods.

  “Ah. Interesting.” The woman taps the tin star but, unlike Abe, with fascination.

  Lily can’t help but smile a little. “It was a surprise. So is Marvena Whitcomb here, or—”

  The woman moves her hand from the star to Lily’s face, and her expression changes to concern. “You are wearying yourself, child. Come in for just a little, have tea.”

  “That’s very kind of you, but perhaps you could just tell me who you are and—”

  “I am Nana Sacovech. I tell you how to find Marvena. First, though, tea.”

  “But—”

  “Mrs. Ross.”

  Lily looks back at Nana.

  “You’re more stubborn than even Daniel was, may he rest in peace,” Nana says, shaking her head. “Life is hard. Have tea.”

  CHAPTER 14

  MARVENA

  On the trek back from town, Marvena and Frankie search out pokeweed and fiddlehead fern for a salad. Frankie says she’s hankering for beets, too, for supper. It’s a mite early to harvest, but Marvena lets Frankie pull a small bunch of beets from the garden. Then, after settling Frankie down to rest, Marvena parboils the beets. While they cook, Marvena centers her new rag rug in front of the potbelly stove. She admires the rug, heart swelling a little for what it represents and because it’s right pretty. In a few days, she’ll go back to Rossville, collect the other women’s rag rugs, each rolled tightly around a stick or two of dynamite, then boldly walk out of the town and take the dynamite to her favorite hiding places.

  When Marvena comes out on the porch to peel the cooked beets, she hears an automobile coming up her thin, rutted lane. Daniel’s. She knows that sound as surely as birdsong. She sets down her pail of beets. As the automobile comes into view, her hands automatically rise to tuck back strands of her hair.

  Then she shakes her head at her own foolishness. Of course it’ll be the deputy, Martin.

  When the automobile stops on a flat grassy patch in front of her cabin, Marvena stares at the driver’s side door with the bullet hole, the space where the window should be.

  Marvena carefully keeps surprise from her expression and takes an accounting of the other woman as she emerges from the automobile: her sturdy stance with fine squared shoulders, her bow mouth, her blue eyes—brighter today than when they’d first met, but still sorrowful. Even in a thick coat, Lily Ross is a petite, shapely beauty. A woman meant for finer things, lovelier places. And yet she seems perfectly relaxed, holding Daniel’s shotgun in one hand and a basket in another.

  Course Daniel had wanted her.

  Marvena gives her head another bitter shake, ashamed to think Daniel so shallow. He’d seen more in Lily than surface niceties.

  Lily takes a few steps toward Marvena and starts to greet her, but Marvena spots the star pinned on Lily’s lapel. “Why’re you wearing Daniel’s badge…?”

  “I’m not. He was buried with his. This is mine. Temporary appointment, courtesy of commissioners, until the election.”

  “The commissioners have gone and made a woman sheriff?” Hell, as John’s widow and by her own grit she’d had to work hard to be accepted as a leader. And somehow, this fancy Kinship woman gets appointed? “Well, don’t that beat all.”

  For a moment, Lily looks bemused. But then her expression hardens. “Not just any woman. The sheriff’s widow.”

  Marvena flinches at Lily’s raw statement.

  Lily goes on. “I reckon I’m a figurehead only—to their way of thinking. They’re counting on a woman not asking too many questions.”

  “Yet here you are. Say your piece, then. If’n you found something in Daniel’s notes about Eula, you’d best be telling me.”

  “He didn’t leave behind any notes.”

  Marvena clenches her fists. “Then why’re you here, a-pestering me?”

  “Word is that your brother, Tom, was the prisoner Daniel was sent to collect. That Tom somehow wrestled free, and killed Daniel, and made his escape into the woods. There was a manhunt for him, but it’s been called off. Of course, manhunt or no, if he shows his face again it’s likely whoever finds him won’t wait to ask questions before they start shooting.”

  For a long moment, the two women stare at each other. Then Marvena flings her arms wide. “Well, feel free to look in my cabin and around my property. He ain’t here, but you don’t have to take my word for it.”

  “I believe you. But I’ve learned a few things you need to know. And I have a few questions, too. I can ask you, or ask around in Rossville.” Lily’s hand trembles on the shotgun.

  Damn. Maybe the woman doesn’t know how to handle a gun after all. Last thing she needs is for the sheriff’s widow—the new sheriff!—to accidentally shoot her damned foot off on her property. “Before you go poking into every hill and holler, asking fool questions you mayn’t want the answer to, you might ought figure out how to handle a shotgun.”

  Lily stills so suddenly that Marvena catches her breath. In the next instant Lily sets down her basket, lifts the shotgun, fires. A squirrel falls from the tree. “Do you like burgoo stew?” she asks with a grin.

  Marvena grins back. Well then. “Daniel learn you that?” She eyes the cabin door, worried Frankie will
have been awakened by the gunfire.

  “My daddy. He grew up here in Rossville. Used to go hunting with his daddy.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He was orphaned early—his mother died of some illness; his father was killed in a mining accident in Rossville. Daddy was taken in by the McArthurs in Kinship—they never had children—and he took their name, inherited their store.”

  “Lucky man!” Marvena snaps her words, as cleanly as spring peas.

  Lily turns red, suddenly overtaken with emotion. Marvena regrets her comments. Of course Lily’s daddy wasn’t lucky—dying alongside John in the Widowmaker this past fall.

  A moment ticks by, accounted for only by a new wind stirring the crabapple blossoms’ sweetness, and in that spare slice of time Marvena’s heart turns a mite tender, spiting her desire to count Lily soft and spoiled.

  Maybe she is. But she’s also trying to find her way. Just like Marvena had, after John.

  A little more gently, Marvena says, “Well, did your daddy learn you how to clean a critter once’t you’ve killed it?”

  Lily looks so stricken that Marvena nearly laughs, and then her almost chuckle folds into a sigh. “No use standing there like a fool trying to catch your death of cold. Get the damned squirrel and come on in.”

  * * *

  Marvena lays the squirrel out on the small table by the potbelly stove. Damned if Lily hadn’t hit it perfectly square in the head; not a bit of meat will be wasted. With some root vegetables, the squirrel meat will cook up into a thick, savory stew—a welcome break from another meal of soup beans, dried pinto beans she’d bartered for, cooked with onion and bacon fat and water. She hates to admit it, but the biscuits Lily’s brought will also be a welcome break from corn pone. With the salad of beets and greens, she and Frankie will eat like royalty this night. Frankie is still napping, and Marvena is for once thankful at how deeply the child can sleep.