The Widows

by Jess Montgomery

  “I’m not sure how receptive Miss Whitcomb will be to our comfort,” Elias says now. Lily and he had visited Marvena after Elias completed his examination of Eula’s body, to tell her the assessment that the girl had likely fallen. Elias had asked to pay for the coffin and burial, and Marvena had refused his offer of a burial at Kinship Cemetery—the nearest cemetery to Rossville, with the old one closed, snarling that she didn’t need charity and that she could pay for it herself. The conversation moved on to a church service—but she’d held firm against that, though she was willing for Lily to attend the burial.

  “She’s part of our community,” Mama says. “So we have to try.”

  Then Mama presses down on her hat with one hand, hugs the waxed-paperwrapped cake to her ample belly with the other. “Well then. Let’s get a move on.”

  * * *

  Marvena eyes the gifts of food warily, and Lily knows she’s thinking, Charity.

  Lily says, “Mama’s dried-apple stack cake is very good.”

  Marvena turns cold, cinder eyes to Lily. “I’d reckon so,” she says.

  Lily suddenly realizes that their presence means Marvena feels she must lock away her sorrow. Lily looks at Elias, kneeling again, this time with Jolene and Frankie.

  “How’s that foot of yours?” he’s asking Frankie.

  “Oh, lots better!” Frankie says.

  Elias places a hand gently on Frankie’s shoulder. “I’ve brought you something.” He reaches in his pocket, pulls out another butterscotch button.

  “Thank you,” Frankie says, unwrapping it eagerly. She sucks on the candy so hard that her cheeks dimple, her lips poking out. Her eyes grow wide at the taste.

  * * *

  As Elias drives through Rossville, the few people—women mostly, very young children, a few elderly men—watch his passing automobile, wary at its unfamiliarity. Several women, though, solemnly wave at Marvena. The able-bodied men, of course, are at work. Elias, Lily, and Marvena sit in the front seat, staring rigidly forward.

  In the back, though, Nana Sacovech and Mama jabber over the tops of Jolene and Frankie’s heads, like old magpies who’ve known each other for a lifetime. Between them, Frankie and Jolene sit quietly, Jolene holding her friend’s hand.

  Just outside of Rossville, instead of going straight on Devil’s Backbone Road, Elias takes the left fork. “Shortcut,” he says.

  Lily wonders if he knows this route will take them past the new entrance being blown in the side of the Widowmaker under the old Rossville Cemetery, wonders just how much Luther talks at home about his business plans.

  When they get to the hill, Mama and Nana Sacovech fall silent. All of them—except Elias, who keeps his eyes rigidly on the rutted road—stare at the side of the hill, a great maw blasted out of its side, wood slat frame holding the opening firm.

  An explosion inside the hill shudders the road, their automobile. The men working outside don’t pause; they’ve gotten used to the boom and shake of constructing a new tunnel.

  “Your nephew has ’em working fast.” Marvena’s tone twists bitterly.

  “Two of my brothers are buried up there,” Nana says, pointing up to the closed cemetery, its hilltop crowned with headstones jutting up like thorns. A cross-barred gate blocks the road to the cemetery. “And my grandfather and grandmother.”

  “The cemetery is no longer used,” Elias says.

  Lily startles at the matter-of-fact statement, harsh for Elias.

  “Don’t keep us from wanting to visit the dead,” Nana says, crossing herself.

  “How will the graves keep from poking through?” Jolene asks. Lily glances back and sees the fear widening her daughter’s eyes.

  “It will be fine, honey,” Elias says, back to his usual soothing way. “Your Uncle Luther has had tunnels like these built before. He knows what he’s doing.”

  Lily turns forward, tries to catch Marvena’s gaze, wanting to find some way to offer comfort, but Marvena stares out the side, looking away from all of them.

  * * *

  At Eula’s graveside service, Lily at first sits in the back with Mama, the children, Elias, and Hildy, plus the pastor’s wife and two stern-looking women, their expressions clearly showing they’ve been pressed into service from the church in Kinship. Only Marvena, Frankie, and Nana sit in the front. Gazing at the empty wooden chairs, Lily wishes more people from Rossville were there, but it is a workday and Luther certainly isn’t going to stop work for Eula’s funeral.

  Pastor Filmore’s familiar words drift on the breeze: “We cannot understand the mystery of God’s ways, or why a young woman is taken from us so soon, only hold fast in our faith in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, knowing he shall rise again in the Second Coming to judge the quick and the dead.…”

  It seems to Lily that this life holds enough judging as it is. She moves up to the front, by Marvena, ignoring the stares and gasps of the pastor’s wife and her friends. But inside she smiles at Mama’s slight, approving nod and is pleased when Jolene moves up to sit by Frankie.

  When the pastor is finally done, Frankie stands and leads the closing hymn she’d selected, “Precious Memories.” Soon the other voices fall aside to the haunting beauty of Frankie’s voice and words of the refrain: “Precious memories, how they linger, how they ever flood my soul—”

  After the service, Lily carries sleeping Micah over to Daniel’s grave, still unmarked. It will be months before the headstone is in and placed. Lily sees it in her mind’s eye: Daniel T. Ross, Beloved Sheriff, Husband, and Father, Jan. 15, 1893–March 25, 1925. Daniel, the sign maker, would have approved of the crisp lettering.

  Lily hears her name, feels a touch on her arm. She turns to face Marvena.

  “I’m so sorry for this loss. Eula should not have died so young,” Lily says.

  “None should die so young, but in the mines men and boys do all the time. To the likes of Luther Ross they’re part of a machine, not worth as much as mules. This isn’t going to stop me organizing the men in Rossville. What I need to know is this—will you, as sheriff, oppose or stay out of the way of a public forum at the Kinship Opera House?”

  Lily glances at Daniel’s blank headstone. What would Daniel have her do? She waits, breathless, for an answer to come to mind, even for one of his ever-promised signs. Finally, she exhales, looks at Marvena. “I will have to deputize at least a dozen men who are sympathetic—or at least not trigger-happy on the subject. Luther will bring in more reinforcements. We’ll need our men to make sure they don’t get too far out of control.”

  “I’m willing to wait a week—but no longer. Does that give you the time you need?”

  Lily nods.

  Marvena starts to walk away, but then Lily calls to her. The other woman turns back, stares at her with cold, cinder eyes, silent, waiting.

  “I’m—” Lily swallows hard, not sure if she can say what she’s thinking. But she takes a deep breath and forces the words out: “You told me that you didn’t know if Daniel was Eula’s father. But I’m guessing—I’m hoping—that he loved her like a father.”

  Marvena’s eyes flash with sorrow, and she looks away. “He did,” she says softly.

  Of course he did. Love for the man her husband was floods her heart. Of course.

  Finally, when all has been bitterly wrung from them, Marvena and Lily step apart.

  Marvena returns her gaze to Lily. “The other day you offered to drive me and Frankie back to our cabin. If you could do that today—just you—I have something to show you.”

  Lily nods. Elias can take everyone else back into Kinship.

  CHAPTER 24

  MARVENA

  This boom—deeper, distant—rattles Marvena’s cabin, shudders from floorboards up through her legs and spine. The tea in her and Lily’s cups sloshes but not over the tops of the cups. Marvena knows not to fill them all the way when there’s dynamiting.

  Lily stares out the window at Frankie on the front porch with her Daniel dolls. Playing, so Marvena t
old Lily, though the child was really on the lookout for her uncle, in case Tom was fool enough to come to the cabin. She’d gone to the cave to tell him about Eula, but he was gone. Had he left the county after all? She hopes so. Yet she couldn’t imagine him leaving without Alistair, any more than she could imagine Eula running off without saying good-bye to Frankie.

  Boom. This time Lily says, “Doesn’t that scare her?”

  “You get used to it, after a time,” Marvena says. “Sound you have to worry ’bout is the alarm. Though by the time that goes off, it’s usually too late to help those in need.”

  Lily looks from the window to Marvena, then down to her cup. She inhales the steam. “Not even a dollop of shine?”

  “I’ve shunned my evil ways, Sheriff.”

  Lily lifts an eyebrow at the sharp sarcasm and takes a sip.

  “Sassafras,” Marvena says. “Builds your blood. Useful after—”

  “Marvena. I know you didn’t want me to come up here to talk about women’s troubles.”

  Marvena studies her, considering. Now is the moment—finally fully trust her or not. She slips behind the quilt curtain. She kneels, pulls the lockbox out from under the bed, opens the box. For a moment she lets her hand rest on the letters from Daniel.

  Then she picks up just the candy box. Back at the table, Marvena’s hand trembles as she pushes the box across the table to Lily. “When you didn’t come back after your first visit here, I went to see Joanne Moyer at the boardinghouse. She told me that Daniel had asked after Eula, and that she’d told him that Eula had taken off with some young miner, a new boy who hadn’t stayed long. That he insisted on searching Eula’s old room, and that he rushed out, upset and angry after searching. I reckon he found this. Don’t seem like much. But studied the box, inside and out, for a right long time, and found something it would be easy for you to miss, if you just took a quick look.”

  Marvena opens the box. The scent of chocolate—sweet, bitter—drifts up. She points to the scrap of cloth. “Go ahead. Take a look.”

  Lily unfolds the cloth and sees a tiny diamond. She looks up at Marvena, questioning.

  “After you came with the news of finding…”—Marvena pauses, swallows hard.—“of finding her, I got out this box back out. Sifted through.” Marvena looks at the box, the pitiful remnants of Eula’s everyday life. She shakes her head to as if that could remove the memory of that awful night, comforting Frankie for hours after Lily left and then sitting by herself at the table and staring into this box by the coal-oil lamp, staring at the few small items that were all she had left of Eula. And then, in the light, catching the glint of the tiny diamond stuck in the corner of the box, realizing that the jewel must have fallen from an earring or perhaps a necklace?

  “Oh my. No miner could afford—” Lily says, voicing the conclusion that Marvena had come to. “Did Daniel know? That Eula was seeing more than miners?”

  Marvena keeps her eyes steady on Lily. “Tom told him he suspected as much. Daniel said he was going to find out who the Pink was. That he’d break him with his bare hands.”

  “Do you think Daniel would have believed Joanne? About Eula taking up with a miner?”

  Marvena lifts an eyebrow. “I wanted to believe her, so I’ve told myself Daniel would have, too. But what do you think your husband would have believed?”

  “He’d have thought that this Joanne was lying. Covering up. What if word got around that Daniel didn’t believe Eula simply ran off with a miner? What if one of the Pinks hurt her? And heard that Daniel was digging for the truth?”

  “Nana did tell me that Eula came to her, asking for bitter herbs, for something that would make her cramp enough—”

  “Eula was pregnant? When did you learn this?”

  “A few days after your first visit here. I was visiting with Nana and some other women in Rossville, and Nana told me.”

  “So Eula lost the child—” Lily looks away for a moment.

  Marvena puts her hand on Lily’s arm. “I’m sorry; this is a hard—”

  Lily looks back at her. “I’m sure you’re telling me this for a reason. Anything you know about Eula might help me figure out what really happened.”

  “Well, Nana also told me that when she saw Eula next and asked after her, Eula just laughed. Said, oh, the herbs didn’t work, but that was all right. She’d found a better solution. As if there are so many choices for a single, pregnant girl!”

  “Maybe she did get the miner to run off with her. Maybe they had fallen in love but had a quarrel, he went too far—”

  But Marvena is already shaking her head. “I know Eula. Truth be told, I can’t believe she’d have a change of heart like that. Daniel must have found this box in Eula’s old room. Left in a huff, or so says the boardinghouse proprietress. Maybe he found something else, too.”

  “If he found something else, it wasn’t in our house. I looked everywhere, trying to find any notes he might have made about Eula. Maybe he saw the diamond? Or just didn’t believe Eula would run off in love with an unnamed miner who’d only been in town a few days?”

  Lily stares at the tiny jewel, taps her finger on the table, thinking.

  After a spell of silence, Marvena says quietly, “There’s no Pink that would just run off with her. And I know Eula—leastways, how she was after Willis Boyle died last fall in the Widowmaker. It seems her tender heart died with him. The Eula who went to work at the boardinghouse…” Marvena pauses, suddenly feeling too strangled to easily talk. She swallows hard, forces herself to go on. “What if Eula thought the father had means, tried to blackmail the Pink? Some of them, after all, have wives elsewhere. So what would a Pink do in that situation? I’ve calculated it out, and last time Eula was seen was during that brief warm spell in early February, when the ice along the creek bank would have been breaking up.”

  Lily looks up at her and Marvena is relieved to see that she understands, that there’s no need to say aloud the hurtful conclusion: that the man would have killed Eula and dumped her body in the creek, taking advantage of the warm spell.

  Lily starts to speak, stops.

  “Say your piece. I can take it, whatever it is,” Marvena says.

  “There was a mark along Eula’s neck.”

  Marvena swallows. She hadn’t seen her daughter’s body. Lily had insisted that it was not necessary, that she needed to remember Eula as she had been when alive.

  “Go on.”

  “Elias said it could well have been a thick vine or tree root that caught Eula, held her body,” Lily says. “But roots like that don’t break easily. I used to jump from the Kinship Tree when I was younger, and one time, I got so tangled up, and my foot caught under a stone, that I would have drowned if my brother Roger hadn’t pulled me free. It rended my outer toe. Roger and some neighbors next to my grandparents took me to the Ross farm. Elias took care of me, and that’s where I met Daniel—” Lily stops, bites her lip. “Anyway. It’s easier to imagine that something was tied around her neck, something heavy.”

  “Like an anvil. Or a pickaxe. There’s plenty of things like that around,” Marvena says. She hates the quiver in her voice.

  Lily nods gently. “Yes. And over time, the rope could work free in the currents as the ice thawed and the water started moving freely again.”

  Marvena picks up her cup. The liquid sloshes as her hand shakes. She wishes that liquid were some of her shine. She holds the cup with both hands, like a child, and takes a long sip. “Well, anyway,” she says at last. “Likely, that’s what a Pink in that situation would do. Easier than paying blackmail to a girl like Eula. Or taking care of a child.”

  “Martin told me that Luther says Harvey Grayson is married,” Lily says. “Supposedly he’s now in Kentucky visiting his wife. What if on the night he came to our house, he told Daniel that he knew someone in Rossville had news of Eula—instead of simply ‘there’s a prisoner to fetch’? Grayson had to know Daniel would come after him if he figured out he’d been taking up with Eu
la.… Daniel wouldn’t even have to know Eula was pregnant. Or that Eula had been harmed.” Suddenly Lily looks feverish. “Did Daniel ever tell you about the time that he forbade me from going to his boxing match?”

  Marvena frowns. “He din’t tell me every little thing about you. What does that—”

  But Lily doesn’t seem to have heard the question. “I went anyway.”

  Of course. Marvena feels a smile taunt the corners of her mouth, in spite of the mind-numbing sorrow of recent days. Of this day.

  “And I was attacked. Pulled out into the alleyway. Daniel got there in time, pulled the attacker from me,” Lily says. She shudders, as if seeing the memory all over again. “His face … he would have killed him.”

  It takes Marvena a moment to realize that Lily means Daniel would have killed Lily’s attacker. “But, he din’t?”

  “No. I think only because Mr. Vogel and Mr. Miller and their men came along. They took my attacker away. I never knew his name.” Lily stares at Marvena. “If Daniel was threatening to tear up a Pink for sleeping with Eula when she was willing … what would he have done if he’d found out someone had hurt Eula? He wouldn’t have hesitated to hurt him. Even kill him. I’m sure that’s not a side of him that only I’ve seen. In fact, I’m sure he went to great effort to hide that from me. To hide a lot of things from me.”

  For a long moment, the two women’s eyes lock. Marvena says, “Lily I’ve told you, he was loyal to you—”

  Marvena stops, feeling herself about to break down.

  But it’s Lily who cracks first. The words wrench from her. “Goddammit, Marvena, I know he was loyal. Maybe too loyal, to people like George Vogel. Can loyalty have a dark side? Yes. But I know he was also loyal to his children, including Eula.”