Holloway came around the front of the desk and leaned against it, refusing to move on and pester another student. “The second reading I assigned referred to Oakley’s ‘subtle subversion.’ She was a conservative lady in the Victorian era, in terms of her outward appearance, but also an iconoclast. Other examples of this, Caleb?”
“Sorry, what’s an iconoclast?”
Everyone was staring at him now, enjoying the stalemate.
“An icon smasher, a skeptic,” Holloway explained and then, sympathetic to his confusion or else wanting to make his idiocy clear to everyone watching. “She was a rebel, Caleb.”
She was a rebel.
That was what the halter-top girl had written in her one-page college application essay, in reference to the woman she admired. Both of the women, actually. And it made sense that she was now a history expert and that she had broken off things with her creepy dad because she, too, wanted to be a rebel.
Holloway said, “Tell me one thing you know about Annie Oakley or you get a zero for the day.”
Caleb crossed his ankles under the desk and pushed back his bangs, searching his memory for details from the essay. “Okay, so people think she gave in and lost the shooting match to the guy she married later, but that’s only in the movie version. In real life, she didn’t throw the match at all. She didn’t lose on purpose to anyone, ever.”
Holloway sat back on the edge of her desk. “All right. So, you read a little . . .”
“Oh, and some people thought her brother taught her to shoot, but in later interviews he said that wasn’t true. She taught herself. Even her brother didn’t know why people added that lie, but I think it’s because no one could imagine a super-young girl would be so talented and such . . . an iconoclast, I guess.”
Holloway laughed. He’d never heard his teacher laugh before. “I didn’t know she had a brother, and none of that was in the assigned readings, but that’s great, Caleb. Thank you for participating.”
His heart was beating fast. Holloway moved on to somebody else. Everyone was still staring at Caleb, but he didn’t give a shit. He was in his own head, going over what he’d just found out. The McClintock girl in the photo who had supplied him with those details was alive. Vorst’s daughter or not-daughter was alive.
He felt like he’d gotten incredible news about some celebrity who’d disappeared years ago and had suddenly resurfaced. No, that was stupid. She was a real person, someone who used to live—maybe still lived—right in this town. It was more like he’d just found out a friend hadn’t died.
Caleb thought of the essay again, and its writer. The girl had started out talking about Annie Oakley and all the things that made her unique, special and tough. But then by the end she was talking about her sister, because it was her sister who knew the most about Annie and talked about her all the time. And then the girl did the bait and switch that you probably always had to do in college essays, where you seemed to be talking about something from a book and then ended up talking about something from your life, and you got soft, you tried to make the reader cry, because if he or she did, you’d probably get a scholarship.
The woman I most admire who isn’t famous or long dead is my sister. We don’t always get along, and I used to be mad at her for moving out of state. But now I realize there are two ways to get back at your enemies. You challenge them in a shootout or you flee. The fleeing makes sense, especially if you go someplace where you’ll have a good life. Success is the best revenge, right? And even if you have future battles, you have to heal first, gather up your strength.
Annie Oakley got away. My sister got away. She’s in graduate school now. Our mother doesn’t think I’ll get into college. She wants me to work and live at home next year because she thinks I’ll just waste our money and the experience. But that’s not my plan. Even if I don’t go to college, I’ll still move away from here.
Everyone was standing up, sliding textbooks into their backpacks. The girl in front of Caleb pushed a handout in his face. “Hello?”
He hadn’t heard the announcement.
“What do we have to do?”
The girl shook her head—pathetic—but she was smiling. “Answer these discussion questions and come up with a new question for Ruth McClintock when she comes next week. She rescheduled, so now we have to do more work.”
“Ruth McClintock?”
“The author,” the girl said, “The historian who’s coming.” Under her breath she whispered, “And the teacher knows you’re high, asshole.”
“I’m not.”
Ruth McClintock.
He felt like he’d lost something. Kennidy—that was the name on the essay—might not be alive after all. Okay. Easy come, easy go.
But for some reason, it wasn’t. He walked out of the class and didn’t make it to the next, just went to the bathroom and stayed there as it filled with people and emptied again. He sat in a closed stall and hoped no one would look for him while he let the news sink in. He set his elbows on his knees and pushed the heels of his palms into his eyes.
She hadn’t gotten away.
Caleb didn’t know why he’d spent all this time half-believing she was Vorst’s daughter. She wasn’t his daughter. There were no snapshots on the fridge, no framed pictures of her on the walls, only framed yellow newspaper clippings of Vorst himself at track meets and football championships. What kind of father hung up pictures of himself and hid his daughter’s in a drawer? She was something else to him, for a longer time than those other kids maybe, and that was creepiest of all. Why that box contained no naked shots he didn’t know, but he knew there had been naked pictures. Vorst always took pictures. Maybe she—like Caleb—had made an effort to find and destroy them. That was another way they were alike. They wanted no reminders of the shitty times. And if that were true, he should honor her by getting rid of the other things he’d found, like her notebook and all the crap stuffed inside it, including her essay.
But it might have been the last thing she’d ever written, the last thought she’d tried to share with anyone. Was it okay to erase that?
Kennidy hadn’t made it and had probably known she wasn’t going to make it, not to college or anywhere good. Words were cheap, and words in assigned essays were the cheapest. She was saying shit people wanted to read, though he knew she’d loved her sister. That part was real. She’d loved her sister and had known she was disappointing her and had known she’d never get away. If you had all the pieces, the essay and the photo and the smell of licorice candy in your nostrils and the memory of Tang and cheap vodka still burning in your brain, you could tell.
20
Ruth
Again the next day, Nieman did not reply.
Monday morning. Fresh pot of coffee. Pens and notebook on one side, manila folders on the other, laptop on with multiple windows open: 1870 census, footnotes by Riley, map of Preble County.
It had been a long time since Ruth had taken out her file dedicated specifically to all the possible Wolf identities. She reviewed the sources of her previous confusion, the multiple names and identities that editor Laura Boyd hadn’t wanted to hear about, because to her, one bad man was the same as any other.
Not to Ruth.
Biographer Glenda Riley had said the Wolf was “generally believed to be a member of the Studabaker family.” But by whom, and according to what evidence?
Ruth’s own suspects, hardly unique among the conjecture found online, were as follows: an old man named Boose, sometimes spelled Bosse, or his son-in-law, a young Civil War veteran named Rannals, sometimes spelled Reynolds. Spellings were notoriously inconsistent in those days.
Ruth had plenty of secondary sources, all guesses made by others over the years, but as for primary sources, she had only one: an 1870 census document in which a ten-year-old named “Mosey, Ann” was listed as part of an extended “Boose” household. This same year,
Annie was not listed as part of her biological mother’s household, miles away.
According to this document, farmer Abram Boose had a wife and a four-year-old child, but he also had a second orphan helping out—a thirteen-year-old boy named Solomon. When Annie talked or wrote about the Wolves, shouldn’t she have mentioned her fellow survivor? By all accounts, she never did. Reynolds had a wife and a baby, and most likely they lived in a separate cabin on the same farm. A couple with a baby would need help most of all. If the extended family split their orphan laborers, they might have sent the girl, Annie, to deal with the baby and kept older, stronger Solomon in the main house.
“James Rannals” was probably the Wolf. It was a fair guess, the one that felt almost but not completely right to Ruth.
There was one more outlandish option that Ruth couldn’t ignore because it had been mentioned by other respectable writers. Boose or Reynolds could have lent Annie out to their neighbor, as was frequently done. Close by, on a neighboring farm in Preble County, there were two families, most likely related, with the surname Wolf.
Ruth didn’t like the theory. It was pure conjecture; Annie was never named on any document associated with the extended Wolf family. And it was too neat, almost over the top. Because if the Wolf was named Wolf, then Annie hadn’t hidden her captor’s identity. The secret was no secret.
But a woman always kept secrets about these things, or so Ruth thought. Especially one as insistent upon control and propriety as Annie Oakley. It was one of the reasons abuse continued and nothing ever changed.
Ruth spent the afternoon hauling items up from the basement, tagging bags for donation pickup, stacking freebies at the curb and digging through drawers that might contain photos worth saving or documents in need of shredding, avoiding still the opening of other boxes and those two oddly heavy suitcases, one held shut by a flimsy lock.
Still, Ruth was not disheartened. As the piles grew, she felt a momentum building. She was astonished by the sheer amount being flushed out of previously ignored closets and corners. The human propensity to collect and lose track of what one has collected had often delighted Ruth as an aspiring historian. Just last year, in a barn, a family had discovered a crate of letters covered in mouse droppings from the famous suffragettes Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. It had been moved several times and camouflaged for decades by the other clutter surrounding it: books, magazines, tools and old furniture.
See? Things are found all the time. You can never be sure.
But Gwen McClintock wasn’t Susan B. Anthony, nor was Kennidy McClintock Annie Oakley, Ruth mused, opening an old desk drawer to find only more canceled checks and a slew of pink “while you were out” phone messages, blackened with frantic doodles—who bothered keeping those?—that no one would ever want to read or store.
She had already closed the drawer and was turning to go, desperate to have a break from the dank basement. But then she turned back.
If those were messages to a historical figure, you would have made sure to read every one. Her finger slid under the bronze pull. She opened the drawer.
That message on the top, taken for Gwen by a receptionist at her phlebotomy job, was from “the school.” The message read: Expecting you at meeting tomorrow 9 am next Mon re: Kennidy, urgent. The next two messages were variations on the theme. The principal at Horizon High had been trying to reach Gwen several times that month of May. A fourth slip said: Missed you at meeting, urge you to reschedule.
Gwen avoided Horizon High. She would have used work as an excuse. Ruth’s best guess was that Gwen never attended those school meetings and possibly never returned the calls, either. But that hadn’t stopped her from doodling on the pink notes themselves, tracing over the phone number of the principal’s office. In one place, she’d traced and retraced the number 8 so intently that the pen had broken through the page.
21
Ruth
Tuesday
All day Ruth reviewed her notes and tried to avoid checking her email, then gave in. Just one more time. He’ll reply. But Nieman hadn’t.
She decided to call Joe Grandlouis again. She felt guilty the moment he picked up. A baby was crying in the background. She could hear Joe’s wife offering to take over while Joe went to an upstairs office and closed the door.
“I’m really sorry,” Ruth said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your evening.”
“No, no. I got your voicemail from last weekend. I just . . .”
“No explanation needed.”
“Actually, I was looking for the original letter before I called you back. I finally found it.”
“Letter?”
“I’m sorry. New-parent brain. Haven’t slept much in the last couple months.”
“Poor thing. How’s Reka doing?”
There was an awkward pause. “Reka is two years old. The one keeping us awake was born six weeks ago.”
“Oh gosh. I’m sorry. Two years old, already? Congrats. On the second one, I mean.”
“Thomas,” he said. “Named after my dad. Got there before Justine did.”
That was Joe’s sister Justine, who was engaged but not yet married. They’d always been in a playful rivalry over who would have the first children, to be named after both of Joe’s deceased parents. At least Ruth’s brain was working well enough to remember that story.
“Thomas,” Ruth repeated. “Sorry, Joe. I’ve been in kind of a time warp since . . .”
“I’m the one who should be apologizing. It’s still tough, I take it?”
Her throat tightened.
When she didn’t answer, Joe said, “I’m glad you’ve got a good guy to lean on, or I’d be worried.”
In the background, Ruth could hear the sounds of Joe shuffling around his office, the metallic rattle of a filing cabinet being yanked open and banged shut.
“Okay, so I do have it somewhere. From the guy, Bert somebody. That was your question, right? If I’d sent someone your way?”
Ruth was so sure it was someone like Sophie—an organizational contact—rather than a friend, perhaps because she expected a friend to dash off an email letting her know, but that was Joe for you, even before having kids.
“Bert Nieman?”
“I don’t think that last name is right. But definitely Bert, yeah. This was a long time ago. Let me think: over a year and a half. Minimum.”
“Did he send you an old journal?”
“No, just a couple typed pages, like a story.” Another drawer opened and closed. “I took it to be fanfiction.”
She wished he would stop rattling around and just explain.
“Okay,” he said after the last drawer banged shut. “You know about my Sitting Bull essays.”
“Plural? I know the one you were writing that mentioned Annie. You asked me for help with it a long time ago.”
Joe went on to explain that before the second baby brought his productivity to a standstill, he had managed to publish several more essays that he hoped would one day work as a collection.
“One was about Sitting Bull’s prophecy about Custer and his men. Another was about Flying Bird, a young warrior who had premonitions of his family dying in another battle, which later did happen. But the interesting parts of his visions were the cityscapes and things that sound like skyscrapers and high-speed cars, described a century earlier than they existed—that’s the stuff readers want to know more about. As you’d expect, the Flying Bird essay was the one that brought the cuckoos out of the forest.”
“And Bert’s a cuckoo?”
“He sent me this. Hold on. I’ll call you back in thirty seconds.”
Moments after disconnecting, the images arrived to Ruth’s phone: photos of what looked like two typewritten pages, crinkled and stained. She magnified and puzzled over it.
Yellow—
I focus, trying not to lose
sight of the yellow grass and the worn wagon track leading up to the cabin, but I know the man I’m hunting isn’t there. I’ll wait in ambush, as long as I can. Any moment he might come down the road, returning from town in the wagon, bones weary from his trip. Alone.
When the view in front of me begins to flicker like a guttering candle, I focus harder. I try to ground myself more deeply in this place, smelling the wet ground, fallen apples, chimney smoke rising above this familiar stand of woods, from the cabin beyond. But it’s not enough. I’ve arrived at the wrong moment. Despite the bitterness that has brought me to this place, despite my clear desire and undeniable rage, something remains undecided.
And because of my hesitation, there is no other explanation, the yellow grass begins to fade. I can no longer feel the frost-hardened ground under my feet.
“Give her water,” says a voice that doesn’t belong to this time or place.
Not yet . . .
My vision darkens before new images come to replace the old, the smell of apples still in my nostrils, but fainter. My ribs ache.
The familiar voice again. “You’ll see. She’ll be fine.”
Giving up, I open my eyes and accept where I’ve landed, seated on a dark red rug opposite the Chief in his private performer’s tent. A young Indian woman kneels at my side, encouraging me to sip from a tin mug. It must be a pivot point or a sort of hole I fall into on my way to or back from where I’m trying to go.
Bringing forward a piece of hair, I expect to see gray. It’s brown. The backs of my hands are unblemished: the hands of a girl in her twenties, not a tired forty-one. I’m wearing one of the Wild West show outfits I sewed myself. Sitting Bull’s finest eagle-feather headdress hangs on a peg on the far tent wall. If Cody enters and finds me here, he won’t see anything out of the ordinary. If Bill and Sitting Bull and I are all together, this must be 1885 or thereabouts.
Annie and the Wolves Page 14