The Widows

by Jess Montgomery

  “He did?”

  “Are you denying he was here?”

  “All right. He came by. Like I told the sheriff, I don’t know much. She went out a few nights with another boarder here. A kid from Germany. Or maybe Liechtenstein. Anyway, the next morning, they’d neither one come back.”

  “A miner?” And yet she’d fallen in love with a miner. With John. And so had Eula. Maybe in spite of losing her sweetheart Willis last fall, she’d fallen in love again. “What was his name?”

  “I don’t know. Not like people here check in and out on a hotel register.”

  “I want to see Eula’s room.”

  “It’s not her room no more. Look, after she came back, like I told the sheriff, I gave away her clothes to the other girls.”

  “Gave?”

  “Fine—sold! You know how it works. Look, you want the money I got from them—”

  “No! I want to know where my daughter is!” Marvena’s voice rings around the room.

  “I told you, Eula took up with this miner. They left. Neither ever came back.”

  Marvena releases Joanne, steps back, but doesn’t sheath her knife. Joanne stays with her back against the wall, as if Marvena’s gaze has pinned her there.

  Timidly, Joanne says, “You said the sheriff had something of Eula’s from here?”

  With a sinking feeling, Marvena realizes that she shouldn’t have revealed that. “It’s just a small chocolate box with a few notions.” Marvena thinks of the feather and rock and comb. The tiny diamond, stuck in the corner, winks at her again. “Didn’t you give it to him?”

  Joanne shakes her head. “Like I told him, like I’m telling you, I got rid of all of Eula’s things. She didn’t have much. He insisted on searching and I sent him on up, even though the room was still empty, then. There was no point in stopping him. He was determined. Scary.”

  “When did he come by?”

  Joanne thinks for a moment, then says, “Musta been about a week before he died.” She shakes her head. “I was right sorry about that. He was a good man.”

  Marvena considers. Daniel must have come here right after seeing her the last time. After she sobbed about Eula being missing. After his fight with Tom. She could imagine how he looked to Joanne, his eyes still bright with fury. Unstoppable.

  “And after he searched the room?”

  “He came charging down the stairs, even angrier than before. Didn’t look at me. Just rushed out. He wasn’t carrying anything, though he could have tucked something inside his coat. Like that box. But I cleaned that room myself. Swept, turned the mattress. Nothing in there but a bed, empty dresser, washbowl, and pot. I couldn’t figure out why he’d be so angry.”

  “Did he say where he was going?”

  “No. And the mood he was in—I wasn’t about to ask him.”

  Marvena stares at her for a long moment. But there is no duplicity in Joanne’s face.

  “Has anyone else come by asking about Eula?” Marvena asks. She doesn’t want to mention Lily by name, to reveal they’ve met at her cabin.

  Joanne shakes her head.

  Marvena sheaths her knife. “I’m leaving. You will not tell anyone else I’ve been here.”

  Joanne’s hand flies to her throat, strokes it. “What makes you so sure about that?”

  Marvena grins. “You really want to tell Luther Ross—your boss—that you’ve been talking with the likes of me?”

  * * *

  A bit later, at Jurgis and Nana’s house, Nana says, “It’s all here—except Rowena’s.”

  Nana, Jurgis, and Marvena are in the back room, looking at the five rag rugs, tightly rolled, each containing two sticks of dynamite. Ten sticks. They’d hoped for a dozen.

  “Forget Rowena’s,” Jurgis says. “It’s too dangerous for you to go into the tent city—”

  “Isn’t it worse still to deny the gift of the risk Rowena and her boy have likely taken?”

  “You don’t know that he did pull the dynamite—”

  “I’m certain he did,” Marvena says. “His father died at the hand of a Pink.”

  “I’ll go with her,” Nana says.

  Jurgis looks at his mother. “What? No, Mama. It’s too dangerous.”

  But Nana smiles up at him, reaches up, pats his cheek. “Now Son, who’s going to question an old healer woman going to the tent city to do her healing arts, with her two assistants?” She turns her sunny smile to Marvena and Frankie. “Besides, it’s been a while since I’ve taken herbs for poultice, teas, and such.”

  Jurgis sighs. He’s not going to talk his mama out of this. The morning bell sounds—ten-minute warning for work to commence. The plan is for Marvena and Frankie to leave while the men are at work and the Pinks are near the work sites.

  Marvena kneels down. “Help me gather this up, Frankie,” she says.

  Carefully, they secure the rolled rugs with twine, and then they put the bundled rugs in Marvena’s large tote bag.

  Marvena cups Frankie’s petite face with her hands. “Now listen, if something happens, if we’re stopped, you don’t know anything about this, all right?”

  Wide-eyed, Frankie nods.

  “Promise me!”

  “I promise, Mama.”

  Marvena looks up at Nana. “You too.”

  “Marvena, you can’t take all the blame—”

  “Yes, I can,” Marvena says.

  They walk down Kinship Road, nearly out of Rossville and up the rise to the tent city.

  * * *

  An hour and a half later, Marvena and Frankie are in the hills of Devil’s Backbone to place the dynamite in two of Marvena’s hiding spots, safer even than the meeting cave near her still. They made it to the tent city with no problem, and Nana went about her way delivering various herbs to people she knew could use them. Marvena quickly added Rowena’s promised sticks and rag rug and went on with Jolene.

  They hike up and down steep slopes, winding new paths between and around buckeye and silver maple trees, Frankie delighting in the fuchsia blooms of low-growing redbud trees, grace notes against the soft green of the forest, but it’s time the child learned more practical lessons of the land, and Marvena points out the pawpaw trees, which in the autumn will bear large green-skinned oval fruits. Later as they work their way through thickets of black chokeberry bushes, Marvena gives pointers on finding the tangy berries they’ll bear in the fall.

  All this makes Frankie hungry now, though, for Marvena catches her pulling up morels, about to shove them in her mouth.

  “Stop!” Marvena grabs her daughter’s hand and studies the morels, the lumpy caps with deep waves. “Look at these carefully, Frankie. False morels. The real mushrooms have longer caps with more even ridges, and if we cut them lengthwise, they’d be hollow inside. The false ones are poisonous and can kill you!”

  Frankie’s eyes widen as Marvena tosses the morels to the ground. “But it’s hard to tell the false from the true ones!”

  The comment strikes Marvena. Eula had once said the same thing, as Marvena taught her mushroom hunting. For a moment, Frankie’s face blurs, and Marvena sees Eula as a child. She clears her throat. “Yes. We’ll look for morels after we’re done with our work. Seek out some tulip poplars. That’s where fiddlehead fern often likes to grow, and if we find morels growing there they should be fine—but we’ll take them home and cut them open to find out. Here, take this now.”

  Marvena reaches in her pocket and pulls out a wax paper packet of deer jerky—a precious gift from one of the miners’ wives in the tent city—and allots a strip of the tough, salt-cured dried meat to each of them.

  They eat their sparse meal as they continue until finally, top of Devil’s Backbone, they come to a remote clifftop, jaggedly craning out like a headless neck.

  They work quickly, unfurling half the rag rug bundles and hiding the dynamite in a deep crevice in a formation, tall as a man and wide as a cabin, of large rocks and boulders, tumbled so long ago that moss greens the gray stones.

/>   She bids Frankie to roll up the now empty rugs and put them back in her sack, and then she treks to the tip of the cliff. Marvena loops a rope around a sturdy oak at the top of the cliff and belays the other end of the rope around her waist, then rappels a few feet down to the most secure hiding space her father ever showed her, an ancient pine growing out of the cliff face of bedrock. The tree is one among many, but it stands out to her for the peculiar twist and turn of its limbs, like arthritic fingers. She tucks the last parcel of dynamite into a crevice behind the pine. She starts to climb back up to the top, back to Jolene, but the cry of a distant red shouldered hawk catches her attention. She turns, looks out across the expanse between this cliff and the next, spots the bird circling high above.

  Then she looks below, to the hills covered with pine and budding-out trees. It’s the start of April, and soon the hills will be lush with tree blossoms, heavy with sweet scent. She’d loved to take Eula out to enjoy these woods, teach her about paths and trees and mushrooms and pawpaws and berries and wild herbs, as she is doing with Frankie. Had Eula trekked these paths that Marvena long taught her, side by side with a boy she loved? Could that explanation, so simple and easy to believe, really be true? She wants to believe it so much—

  “Mama?”

  Marvena’s heart double flips at the sound of her daughter’s voice. “Eula?” she whispers.

  Then the voice calls again for her.

  It is Frankie, calling for her. Marvena turns her gaze from the valley and begins climbing to the daughter, who is present.

  CHAPTER 17

  LILY

  A day later, Lily stirs to momentary wakefulness. She vaguely remembers being brought here, to the house she grew up in, then Elias coming to check on her, Mama insisting that Lily and her children stay so Mama can tend her back to health.

  Now a coal-oil lamp burns dimly on a corner table. Someone has left a blue Ball canning jar filled with a small bouquet of yellow jonquils.

  Lily shifts in the bed, testing for soreness. The stickiness on the thick wad of cloth between her legs tells her that she is still bleeding, but not as badly as earlier.

  Lily slips back into sleep, dreaming: she’s in a boxing ring, dressed in just her slip, Daniel’s boxing gloves fused to her wrists. People cheer, but she can’t see them or her opponent, yet she keeps swinging and punching, unable to stop, and after a while she can’t move her fingers because she no longer has any, Daniel’s boxing gloves having replaced her hands.

  Lily. A voice from outside the dream. Arms pull her close, rock her in ancient, soothing rhythm. Lily relaxes into the embrace, hears heartbeat thrumming, smells lilac and talc. Mama.

  Sometime later, Lily opens her eyes, meets her mama’s gaze soft with sorrow. “Mama,” Lily says. “This is more than I can bear.” She longs to weep, but her tears remain stubbornly locked in her heart.

  Mama kisses the top of Lily’s head, keeps rocking her, says, “No, child. This is just more than you should have to bear.”

  * * *

  Two more days and nights of sleeping, longer awake times filled with Mama insisting she eat broth and bread, cleaning her, changing her dressings, inspecting each cloth for blood and clots, muttering with provisional hope as the blood lessens. Sometimes Hildy comes to help.

  Lily lets them tend to her without struggle or embarrassment. It’s what women do—tend to the bodies of their loved ones in life and in death—she’d helped tend Mama birthing Caleb Jr. after all, and what’s more, they’ve had to tend to her thusly before.

  Her dreams shift to that bright, sunny August day on her seventeenth birthday when she was weary at the prospect of another day spent canning in Mamaw Neely’s kitchen.

  She dreams of running down Kinship Road after her young, strong, thoughtless, beautiful brother, seventeen and laughing and alive and blissfully unaware he’ll die so young. She dreams the thrilling shock of cool water after jumping from the Kinship Tree, the deep plunge to the muddy bottom, the push up from the slick rock to the surface, the joyous burst of air into her lungs, the gentle float downstream.

  In her dream, it’s just her and Roger on a hot, itching, overly bright August day, alive and whole, jumping in cool water over and over, laughing in their endless careless, carefree cycle.

  It’s day, this awakening. She reaches down, tentatively, between her legs. No padding. She’s clean, wearing a soft pink nightgown. Too big, one of Mama’s. Lily gets up, stiff but moving of her own accord. She pulls back the quilt to eye the sheet. No bloodstains.

  She brings the quilt back up to her chin, troubled by her dream of her and Roger at the Kinship Tree, seemingly better than the nightmare of being in a boxing ring with Daniel’s gloves for her hands. Considered together, the dreams seemed to imply that her life had been better, safer, before meeting Daniel. Lily stares around the room, her heart pounding as she blinks back tears. This had been her room, when she’d lived here with Mama and Daddy. She closes her eyes, not to sleep again, but to remember.

  On Lily’s nineteenth birthday, August 2, 1917, just a week before Daniel’s Kinship boxing match advertised on the playbill, Daniel had shocked everyone by coming to Mama and Daddy’s house. He pulled from his pocket the blue ribbon Lily had’d given him, held it out across both palms as if he were offering the world’s most precious bolt of silk. With her hand, she closed his over the ribbon, and Mama pointedly harrumphed, while Daddy fought off a grin.

  After days of chaperoned visits, Daddy had mercy on them and drove them out to the Gottschalks’ farm. Daniel and Lily had barely been able to keep a proper distance between them as they walked toward the black raspberry bushes along Kinship Road.

  That night was the boxing match. Lily told Daniel how she looked forward to attending, and Daniel recoiled, telling her the boxing ring was no place for a woman—not women like Lily, anyway. When she protested, he’d said he’d been miserable, waiting for her to be old enough to properly woo, and here she was, acting like a child. And with that, he’d walked away.

  Later that night, Lily went to bed early after supper. She slipped under her covers still dressed and counted to one thousand, and then she got out of bed, opened a dresser drawer, and dug out the few coins she’d saved from gifts and odd jobs. She opened the window, wiggled through, dropping into the bushes below. Then she ran, still hobbling a bit after the loss of her toe two years before, toward the center of town.

  Lily bought her ticket and made her way to the standing-room-only area in front of the stage. She’d never felt such a press of bodies. The smell of sweat and perfume and alcohol roiled with body heat. Her pulse thrummed in her ears. She gasped with relief when she got to the front, then gasped again when Daniel came out. His bare torso was already slick with sweat from warming up. The crowd rhythmically chanted his name—“Dan-iel, Dan-iel, Dan-iel”—and Lily’s heart clanged against her chest wall.

  The other boxer rushed in, overeager, wanting to best his opponent in his own hometown. Daniel threw a swift right punch into the other man’s jaw. Blood and a tooth spewed from the man’s mouth. The man swung at Daniel, who easily avoided the punch.

  And then Lily felt a tug in her heart, like a ribbon linking them, and Daniel’s eyes turned to her. Connected. Flashed. Angry.

  Her gaze replied: Daniel Ross, if you want me to be your wife, you must not, you will not, ever keep me out of any part of your life, ever again.

  The other boxer swung, clocked Daniel in the jaw. The crowd booed. Daniel threw a left uppercut that knocked the other boxer back but not out.

  And then a man grabbed Lily. He pulled her hair with one hand, her arm with another, and Lily screamed, but no one noticed, or if they did, no one cared. In moments he had her out in the alley, pinned against the brick wall.

  Lily had tried to kick him, but he was far too big for her. She caught a glimpse of two men she knew, men who often came into her father’s store, screamed one’s name. They paused, stared down the alley as she screamed for their help, but they we
nt on. In the next instant the man who had grabbed her had a knife to her throat.

  He pushed his face close to hers, and his foul breath turned her stomach, “No one’s a-coming to save you, so it’ll go better if—”

  But suddenly there was Daniel. His arm went around the man’s neck, pulled him away from Lily. The man dropped the knife in shock. Lily sank to the filthy ground.

  Daniel was still in only his boxing shorts and shoes. His upper lip was starting to swell.

  The man flailed. Daniel tightened his chokehold. The man groaned, stilled.

  “I’m going to kill you,” Daniel had said flatly.

  The man wet himself, the dark stain spreading down his shabby trouser leg. He started pleading. Lily stared up at Daniel, shocked. She saw that he meant it.

  “Daniel, no, we can get Sheriff Tate, or…”

  Daniel looked at her evenly. “We’ll save the county the expense of jailing him, and other girls”—even with all that had happened, his emphasis on that word cut her—“from being hurt, at least by this son of a bitch. So, mister, I’m going to kill you.”

  But in the next moment a large, round man in an expensive suit came out the back door of the opera house, followed by an unusually tall, gaunt man in a fine gray coat.

  “Oh, we can’t have that,” said the stout man. He was smoking a cigar. The smell, mixing with the alley’s smell of urine—feline, canine, human—made Lily gag. “I could get you off of murder charges, but it might cost more than you’re currently worth to me. Now, who is this fine young woman you rushed out to rescue?”

  “My fiancée,” Daniel said. “Lily McArthur.”

  “Oh, I see.” The stout man appraised her, like he was assessing a horse or an automobile. He was so ridiculously round that he should look amusing, but even in the dim alley Lily saw the cold lines around his mouth, the uncompromising hardness of his eyes.

  Meanwhile, the tall, gaunt man looked bored as he pulled back his coat, put his hand on a revolver. An automobile pulled up to the end of the alley. Lily’s attacker moaned anew.