A gentle tug on her skirt makes her look up. There’s Frankie, starring up at her. And Tom, Nana, and Jurgis right behind her.
Tears spring to Marvena’s eyes. They’d all come to wish her well. She hops off the stool and scoops up Frankie.
Nana looks up at Tom. “I should have brought her tea! Calm her nerves. Chamomile.”
At that, Marvena smiles.
Jurgis gives Marvena a long, somber look. “Just speak from your heart, Marvena. Like you did in the cave.”
“Will Jolene be there, Mama?” Frankie asks anxiously.
“I hope so,” Marvena says. And she hopes Lily will be there. They haven’t seen each other since their encounter with Luther and Elias. Their choice, and the pain of what they’d chosen, will forever bond them. Marvena sighs at that thought. She and Lily—Daniel’s old lover and best friend, and his wife and love of his life—bound.
In response to the sigh, Frankie says, “I could sing you a song to make you feel better!”
Marvena hugs her. “I’d like that. Which one?”
“How ’bout the one about prayin’ at the river?”
Marvena’s eyes prick, as she remembers that Frankie had sung it for Lloyd’s mourners, so long ago, on the day that Daniel died.
“That would be right lovely,” she says. She sits back on the stool, pulls Frankie up to sit on her lap, and holds her beautiful child while she sings, “As I went down in the river to pray…”
LILY
“Will Frankie be there?” Jolene asks anxiously, tugging at Lily’s skirt as they walk down the street, around the courthouse on the corner, toward the opera house.
“Of course,” Lily says.
“Can she sit with us?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, can I sit with her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are she and her Mama coming with us, after?”
Mama has insisted on a birthday picnic, down by the Kinship Tree and, after that, black raspberry picking on Ada Gottschalk’s farm—with the widow Gottschalk’s blessing, of course. Mama has sent word that Marvena, Frankie, Tom, Nana, and Jurgis are welcome to join them.
“I don’t know!” Lily says. Jolene huddles closer to Hildy.
“We’ll see,” Hildy says, giving Lily a long look.
Micah wriggles in Lily’s arms, and Lily stops mid-stride. She lowers him to the ground. “Can’t you walk? Be a big boy like Caleb Junior?”
Micah’s face crumples, his mouth turning down as he works up to a wail.
“Come here, Micah!” Mama calls. He runs to his mamaw and she takes his hand. She shakes her head at Lily, then continues down the street, Caleb Jr. on her left, Micah on her right.
“Lily?” Hildy’s voice is tenuous. “Are you … all right?”
“For God’s sake, yes! Could everyone stop asking me that?”
The women and children continue down the road, the excitement of the morning sapped from them. They’re all quiet, except for Lily; as other people pass by and smile and nod at her, she returns the gestures—automatic, perfunctory.
Jolene breaks their group’s tense quiet: “Look, Mama! You’re in the window!”
Everyone else stops to look, so Lily does, too.
There in the bank window is a new poster, already replacing the one advertising this afternoon’s forum being led by Marvena.
It’s a campaign poster for Lily Ross, Democratic candidate for Bronwyn County Sheriff.
A few weeks before, Fiona Weaver had come calling on Lily and asked if she’d consider running for reelection this coming fall, in her own right in a special election to fill out Daniel’s term until the next election in 1926. The notion had stunned Lily at first, but as more callers—men and women—came by or asked her as she slowly returned to work, she finally decided that yes, she would run.
Lily peers at the poster. She puts her fingertips to it. So long ago … and yet it also seemed like yesterday … she’d stared at another poster here, the one advertising Daniel’s boxing match: “The Middleweight Fight of the New Century for the Greater Appalachian Region.” He was beautiful to her then … everything she’d wanted in life.
Lily swallows hard, clears her throat. “Who made this?”
Hildy points at script at the bottom: “Endorsed by the Committee to Support the Reelection of Lily Ross, Sheriff, Bronwyn County.”
“I have a committee?”
“There’s a lot of talk about what you did in Rossville.”
Mama touches Lily’s shoulder. “Look at me, child.”
Lily turns, faces Mama.
“These people love you for what you did,” Mama says. “If you hadn’t brought in the Bureau of Mines, and somehow gotten Luther to open up to unionization talks and make that part of his deal in selling out to Wessex—well. The whole county would have been torn up. I don’t think we’d be enjoying a peaceful stroll down Kinship Road.”
A knot deep inside starts to loosen. These people don’t know. They can never know.
As they pass the grocer’s, Mr. Douglas is sweeping the front stoop. He calls a greeting.
Hildy mumbles, “I’ll catch up. I need to check on an order I placed.”
Lily glances up, but Hildy is already over by him, listening and nodding. He’s stopped sweeping. The trilling sound of Hildy’s laugh seems to delight Mr. Douglas, a widower. His eyes are on Hildy, his face alight. And she is blushing.
Mama elbows Lily. She is smiling as well.
Lily looks at the sign swaying in the gentle breeze: “Douglas Grocers.” The sign used to read: “McArthur & Son Grocers.” Mama’s smile seems to say, Somehow, child, life goes on.
“Oh,” Lily says, and the knot inside loosens further.
MARVENA
The opera house is stuffy, crowded with some townspeople, but mostly miners from Rossville and throughout the county, come on foot and muleback and driven in trucks by farmers and supporters—however they could get here.
People gathered here will vote overwhelmingly for unionization. That this is a formality doesn’t stop the crowd from cheering when a Mine Workers of America official finally stops droning on and asks for Miss Marvena Whitcomb to come on up.
As the crowd cheers, Marvena takes the stage. She smiles, waves, but she’s also looking around, looking for Lily. They haven’t talked since that afternoon at Elias’s house, but her mama has sent word that later Marvena and Tom and Frankie and Alistair and Nana are all welcome to join them for the picnic at the Kinship Tree to celebrate.
Even as the crowd quiets, shuffles, awaits Marvena’s speechifying, Marvena remains silent, seeking Lily. How many might not be here if she and Lily had not sacrificed their own desire for vengeance?
She finally spots her. Lily holds her gaze for a long moment. Even at a distance, Marvena can see the sorrow etched around Lily’s mouth, her eyes, what it cost to bring them to this moment. She sees that Lily is noting the very same in her own face.
Then Lily offers her a small smile. A little nod. All these months, Marvena’s tasted bitterness on the back of her tongue, as if it wells up from her heart. But now, as she sees these faces, the bitterness starts to dissolve.
Marvena looks away then, and the restless crowd falls further silent as she starts: “A wise friend once told me that life gives us all up and death rends us flesh from bone. And haven’t we all seen so much of that? Sooner or later, we have no choice about that—we lose fathers and mothers, our husbands and wives. If we’re lucky, we’ll not live to experience losing our sons … and our daughters. We’ll lose ourselves. But in the meantime, shouldn’t we have some choice about how we live, what we believe about ourselves, about human beings?”
“Yeah!” someone shouts, and voices around him echo the cry.
Loudly, clearly, Marvena says, “Well, you do have a choice!”
LILY
The knot fully loosens, and from somewhere deep inside a fist punches up through Lily’s stomach, into her heart.
/> “Mama,” she whispers, “I’m not feeling well.… I’ll meet you all back at the house.”
Lily works her way through the crowd, out of the opera house. She runs around the courthouse corner, toward home. She stops abruptly, seeing Abe Miller standing on her porch, leaning against the rail, smoking a cigarette.
“I’m heading back to Cincinnati. This will be my last trip to Kinship.”
Lily stares at him. No one left George’s employ without his blessing.
Abe allows a thin smile across his face. “Oh, don’t worry about me. I’m still in Mr. Vogel’s employ. Just not here. This territory has been released.”
This is George’s penance to her, for his part in Daniel’s death. Moonshiners here in Bronwyn County are free to produce without selling a portion at a discount to George’s operation, and she is free to prosecute moonshiners or not, as she sees fit.
“I can do no more,” Abe says, “except ask if there’s anything you’d like to know?”
Lily studies him, but the smile has already slipped away. There are no clues in his expression. Then it hits her. There’s only one thing she wants to know.
“Those article clips. Did Daniel … did he…”
Abe starts down the porch steps. Lily’s heart clenches. Is he really going to walk away without answering her? But then he stops, then turns, looks back at her. “Sometimes newspaper articles get things wrong. Mr. Clausen was severely injured that night in the alleyway after that last fight with Daniel. That is all.”
“But … then, where are he and his family now?”
Abe smiles thinly. Lifts his hat again. Gives a small shake of his head.
Lily watches him walk away, watches the street long after he’s gone.
She sinks to the top porch step as the sobs come suddenly, convulsing her. She hates Daniel for a moment, hates him for ever having returned to George Vogel, hates him for not having found another way to serve his penance, for making the choices he had, for being dead.
But then a memory, from when they first moved into the sheriff’s house, comes to her.
“I just found an empty’s bird nest on the eave over the back stoop. I need you to help me clean it out,” Lily said, as she descended the cellar stairs.
Lily nearly laughed at Daniel’s horrified expression. Lily, certainly not! It’s a good sign. For a happy home!
Lily saw that he was nearly finished with the cellar shelves, made from fieldstone and wood cleared from Elias’s property, for Lily. He’d teased her the past week that this wasn’t really their house, that after all the house belonged to the county, that the sheriff only lived here if elected. Yet he’d made the shelves she was so eager to fill with home-canned goods—green beans, corn, tomatoes, mixed vegetables, applesauce. His favorite black raspberry jam.
He stood up too fast, banging his head on the cellar ceiling, bringing dirt and dust down into his thick black hair. He cursed under his breath. Lily laughed after all.
But then the baby turned, kicked. “Ow!” Lily said, and this time Daniel laughed. “The baby wants you to know that an empty bird’s nest is a good sign,” Daniel said.
“If the birds have moved out?” Lily was incredulous.
“It means the birds are making way for a new family.”
“You know, you wrote me in the war that I’d see a hawk come close to me as a sign of you being safe,” Lily said. “I kept looking—and never got my sign.”
He grinned at her. “Guess I figured you’d know I was fine and I didn’t need to send it!”
Lily hears someone coughs and looks up to see a woman with a baby carriage.
“Mrs. Ross? My husband doesn’t know,” the woman says, “but you’ve got my vote!”
In spite of everything, Lily smiles. She stands up. “Thank you.”
The woman gives a satisfied nod. Lily watches her walk away.
Maybe she’s waited long enough for a sign. Maybe, like Mama no longer taking sentimental note of the changed grocer’s sign, she needs to find a way to move on.
Lily goes back into her house, to her kitchen, and begins packing up pies that Mama and Hildy and Jolene had made for the picnic. One of them, she sees, is buttermilk. Daniel’s favorite.
* * *
“Mama, can we go pick black raspberries now?” Jolene asks. “And can we have some with the buttermilk pie?”
Lily, sitting by herself on cloth spread by the Kinship Tree, looks at up at Jolene and Frankie. Both girls are holding pails, looking at her with eager grins.
“Please? Soon it will be dark, and if we don’t get them today it’ll be another year.”
Lily looks back at Jolene, then at Frankie, their expectant faces lifting to hers, waiting.
She smiles. “All right, then. Gather everyone who wants to go. It’ll be dusk soon.”
Ten or so minutes later, they’re all down the lane. Lily thought Mama would have wanted to stay behind, but there she is with everyone else, butts up as they bend over to peer at the black raspberry bushes, right along with the children, yelping when fingertips snag on the thorny stems but calling out in glee about whose pails are filling up the fastest with the berries.
“Pull from just below the berry, now,” Mama admonishes everyone. “Don’t break the stems, lest you don’t want any next year.”
Lily smiles. Mama, always clucking around, mother hen—
A screech from above catches everyone’s attention. They all stop, look up in the dimming sky, even the children.
A red-shouldered hawk circles.
Lily sets her pail down, goes to Micah and Jolene, lets her arms spread like wings around her children—son to her left, daughter to her right. They’re restless, but she pulls them close, tight, and they still, watching the hawk with her.
The bird dives, swooping down as if for prey, and Lily sees that the hawk’s plummeting toward them. But she lands on a branch of the sycamore tree just across the lane.
The hawk stares down at them, all of them—Mama and Hildy, Marvena and Tom. The children: Alistair and Frankie, Caleb Jr. and Micah and Jolene.
At Lily.
Lily looks at Marvena.
And Marvena gives a slight, quivering smile, then nods.
At last. Daniel has sent his sign. He is, after all, safe somewhere in the great beyond. And she knows that she made the right choice.
Lily stares up at the hawk for a long time.
Suddenly the hawk rises, shaking the branch with her takeoff, and Lily watches, even after the bird’s disappeared, even after her children have broken from her embrace and run back to the bushes with the other, until she feels a tug on her sleeve. It’s Marvena.
“Come,” she says.
And so Lily goes back to her children and family and friends, back to picking black raspberries.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Do ideas find authors, or do authors find ideas?
The former concept seems mystical; the latter, pragmatic.
However it works, I’m glad that the concept behind The Widows and I found each other.
Early in our younger daughter’s freshman year at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio—located in the southeastern Appalachian region of the state—my husband and I were planning on a visit for her birthday. Gwen majored in outdoor education (and currently works as a teaching naturalist) and we knew she’d be keen to get out of her college town and visit nearby hiking areas and state parks.
To the Google search bar! I keyed in something like “places to visit near Athens, Ohio,” and somewhere on the results list was a Web site for Vinton County, which abuts Athens County directly to the west. I clicked on the link, and what popped up on the home page at the time was not information about the place but about a person—Maude Collins, who was the sheriff of Vinton County in 1925, indeed, the first female sheriff in Ohio; the next female sheriff in the state would be elected in 1976. When Vinton County Historical Society officials learned that the 1976 female sheriff was to be recognized as the first female sher
iff in the state, they set about correcting the mistake. In 2000, Maude was inducted into the Ohio Women’s Hall of Fame as Ohio’s first female sheriff.
Maude, who had worked for her husband, Sheriff Fletcher Collins, as jail matron, became sheriff when he was, sadly, killed in the line of duty. Maude had to testify in the trial and was packing up herself and her five children to return home to West Virginia to live with her parents when the county commissioners came back and asked her to fill in for her husband. Later, she was elected in her own right and went on to a career in law enforcement.
But what struck me most about Maude was not the novelty of her being a sheriff as a woman—still something of a novelty; as of 2007, women still represented only 11.2 percent of officers in sheriffs’ departments1—but a photo of her. She was lovely and strong—the kind of woman I would admire in any era. There was something in the mix of tenderness and toughness in her portrait that intrigued me.
I soon found myself thinking the question that haunts all writers and gets them (and their characters) into all sorts of delicious trouble: What if? What if there was a 1920s wife of a sheriff who did not know why her husband had been murdered? What if the murder was not straightforward, as it was in Fletcher Collins’s case? What if that wife decided to investigate for herself the truth of her husband’s death—and soon discovered that his life had its own mysteries?
From there, Lily Ross was born in my imagination. Her personal history, the reasons behind her husband Daniel’s murder, and her life going forward are purely from my imagination and in no way reflect the true story, intriguing in its own right, of Maude Collins.
As for the other voice in this novel—Marvena—again, she is born of my imagination. But as I read more and more about the lives of coal miners, I knew that unionization, and the complexities of organizing unions, had to be part of the story. My father, who worked in the tool and die industry post World War II, was a union leader for the Teamsters at the company where he worked until he left to start his own independent shop, so I am steeped as much in a strong pro-union stance as I am in Appalachian folk tradition (more on that in a minute). I was inspired by activist Mary Harris Jones (aka Mother Jones)—again, her true story is intriguing in its own right—to create my version of a female who comes into her own as a labor organizer, albeit on a smaller scale.
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