“Just the water, thanks.”
The dismissive tone was unmistakable, so I spun on my heel to leave and collided with Jewell’s ample bosom. For a moment the whole world was a mass of wine-colored velvet and black buttons before Jewell grabbed my arms and set me straight.
“Fetch a light supper for our guest, Biddy.” She talked straight over my head to the stranger behind me.
“She says she just wants some water.” The tension between the two women was palpable, and I added a weak, “ma’am” at the end of my statement.
“Nonsense. Boil some tea. Toast some bread, and open the last jar of marmalade.”
Without any further argument, I ran out of the room to do Jewell’s bidding. By now both Sadie and Mae were in the kitchen, and Mae had already put a kettle on.
“Who is she?” Mae was asking as I walked in.
“Her name is Gloria.” Sadie had sliced the bread and was putting it on the toast forks to pop into the oven. “Jewell knows her from way back. In California.”
“And she’s beautiful,” I added, measuring out the tea.
“Well, you just be careful of that,” Sadie said. “Such beauty often comes with a price.”
Once the bread was toasted, Mae spread it with generous swoops of marmalade, and I took the tray back out to the parlor. I had the impression that Jewell and Gloria called an immediate halt to their conversation as soon as I walked through the door. Both seemed poised like cats on ice, so I backed out of the room as soon as the tray was settled on the little table by the sofa and ran up to my room.
I was brushing my hair, wanting to clean up and make a good impression on our guest at supper, when Jewell walked in.
“I’m takin’ my old friend into my room for a little chat. Her bag’s down in the parlor.”
“Do you want me to bring it up to you?”
Jewell chuckled. “Nah. I want you to do some lookin’ for me.”
“What kind of looking?”
“Pretty thing like that, travelin’ like she does, she’s bound to have some money on her. I want you to find it, count it, and let me know just what she’s bringin’ to the house. Better yet,” she added before turning to leave, “just bring it to me. Don’t want her to have a chance to hide it away.”
She left me sitting, brush in hand, my mouth open in a protest I would never voice. My life had been torn apart once by the simple act of pilfering money from a suitcase, and as I looked down at my hands still clutching my hairbrush, I could almost see the taint of that past crime lingering on my flesh.
She asked me to do this because she knows I’m a thief. A thief and a killer. And if I am all of this, what small step would it be to become a—
I longed for Sadie’s strength to defend me against Jewell’s request, and when I finished plaiting my hair, I went back to the kitchen, where Sadie and Mae were preparing the evening meal.
“Biddy!” Mae handed me my favorite treat—a slice of salted, raw potato—the minute I walked through the door. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”
“Go on and tell us,” Sadie said. “What did Jewell do to you?”
I told them about Jewell’s suspicions of Gloria and her request of me, and by the end of my gloomy tale, Mae gave me another slice of potato.
“Well, do not do it,” Sadie said. “Take the bag upstairs and tell Jewell you looked but found nothing.”
“That would make me a liar,” I said.
“Then I will do it myself.” Sadie wiped her hands on a kitchen towel and walked toward the door. “I have no problem at all lying to that woman.”
Although I would have been happy to move back into Sadie’s room and give Gloria mine, Jewell decided to let her live in one of the new little cabins out back.
“It’s not likely she’ll be doin’ any business for me anyway,” Jewell had said with a scowl that night as the five of us ate supper together. “It’s tough enough gettin’ them excited over plump little Mae, here. Ain’t nothin’ gonna make them go upstairs with a pregnant woman.”
At this announcement, Mae squealed and clapped her hands, and a look of absolute hunger came over Sadie’s face.
“Ah, Jewell,” Gloria said, “you’re every bit the warm, nurturing woman I remember.”
“I’m givin’ you a free bed till next summer, ain’t I? There’s not a lot that would do that.”
My servitude toward Jewell somehow transferred to Gloria, and the first morning she took the little path to the first cabin, I followed behind, my arms laden with clean linens. In the days since her arrival, one of the men had constructed a bed frame from the leftover lumber, and we had stuffed a ticking with what straw and goose feathers we could find. Jewell donated a bureau from her room, and Mae carried over a tiny three-legged table from the parlor. A tiny little stove had appeared out of nowhere—I fully suspected that Jewell had coerced its donation from a disgruntled miner who just wanted to go back to his farm—and I gave her the chair that had sat next to the window in my room.
“I wish it were a rocking chair.” I laid the folded linens on the bureau. I could just imagine the cozy scene of Gloria in this tiny cabin, holding a newborn baby.
“I don’t think a rocking chair quite suits me.” She dropped her green satchel on the floor.
“Well, I think you’ll like it here anyway.”
Gloria seemed ready for me to leave, or at least to remain silent for as long as I stayed helping her get the cabin in order. But the spirit of conversation overtook me, and I found myself prattling on.
“The women here are so nice. I feel quite at home.”
“Really.” Gloria cocked an eyebrow at me—a feat I would practice for endless hours with my mirror. “Well, I wouldn’t put too much stock in any of them, especially Jewell. She’s nothing but a big old snake waiting to pounce on you, little Biddy. You stay clear of her.”
“How bad can she be? You came back to her.”
“Not all of us are lucky enough to have choices in life. You listen to me. First chance you have to get out of here, you run. Fast and far.”
“I wouldn’t consider leaving.” I unfolded the first sheet. “God brought me here, after all. He’s got to have some purpose in it. Why do you think He brought you here?”
Gloria gave a little laugh that, coming from anyone less beautiful, would have seemed downright sinister. “For all I know, God and I don’t even know each other exists. And I think we’re both happier that way.”
She and I continued puttering around, staying clear of each other. She hung a pair of simple yellow curtains over the window. Then, when the bed was made, she set her case on top of it, and I paused, certain I would see exotic treasures.
“Here,” she said, handing a bundle of fabric to me. “Hang this up. From the shoulders, mind you. Not the back or you’ll ruin the shape.”
I unfolded it to find a beautiful green dress trimmed in black velvet. A series of wooden pegs protruded from one wall, and I draped the shoulders of the bodice over two of them. I stepped back to see that the garment was hanging straight, and was struck by the realization that the dress took on a perfect figure. A life of its own. Nothing I owned had ever looked this good on me, let alone hanging on a hook in a one-room cabin.
“My mother would have loved this.” I allowed myself to finger the fine stitching at the gathering on the back of the skirt. “She always said a woman’s most important ally is a good seamstress.”
Gloria’s smile turned warm. “She sounds like a wise woman, your mother.”
“She is.” Somehow the pride I felt at having Gloria’s approval dulled the pain of talking about her. “Rather, she was.”
“Oh.” Gloria pulled out a handful of stockings and handed them to me, gesturing toward the top bureau drawer. “She died?”
I nodded. “About a year ago.”
“Mine too. When I was about your age.” Another dress. Three petticoats.
“My mother was”—I paused, waiting for the strength to say t
he word, momentarily fascinated by red lace—“murdered.”
Gloria’s eyes narrowed and something like a chuckle rumbled deep in her throat. “Mine too. Or she may just as well have been. Would’ve been quicker.”
“What happened?”
I was fully prepared for her to tell me it was none of my business, but she was sitting on her new bed, staring into her empty suitcase wearing an expression of such tragic elegance that she could have been the heroine in one of the tales Phoebe and I used to concoct. If she refused to tell me, I would probably spend the rest of the evening making up my own details.
But she didn’t refuse.
“She was killed,” Gloria said, a wry turn to her lips. “This life killed her. She hated it so much she passed it on to me, then kept herself full of enough morphine to forget about what she did to us.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. The coldness in her voice was almost frightening, and I felt guilty at the twinge of fascination her story carried with it. “Do you miss her at all?”
Gloria snapped the case shut. “My mother was a whore. Before she died, she made sure that I was one too. So, no, I don’t miss her. Not one day.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again, this time with sincerity. I closed the bureau drawers and ran my hand needlessly along its top before moving toward the door.
“Wait a minute. Let me tell you something. That ‘kind woman’ who wants you to think she’s doing all of us a favor by taking us in was pounding the nails in my mother’s coffin long before she took sick. She wants to destroy us, Biddy. She wants us all to be as mean and miserable as she is, make no mistake. You may have walked in here pure as a dove in snow, but you won’t walk out that way. Not if she has anything to say about it.”
“I’m hardly pure,” I said, thinking how surprised Gloria might be if she knew all I had to hide.
“You’re close enough, from what Jewell tells me. Get away while you have the chance.”
25
But of course I didn’t get away. If my journey taught me nothing else, it’s that nobody goes anywhere in a Wyoming winter. The best anybody can do is find a place, hunker down, and wait for the storms to pass.
But this winter was a far cry from the last. Jewell and the other women had nearly an army of willing men to see that they were well supplied with firewood, so at the very least we had a cozy fire burning in the kitchen for all those long evenings. We wrapped hot bricks and ran bedwarmers under our blankets, so I fell asleep every night feeling toasty warm. The same comfort awaited me downstairs each morning, along with a piping hot breakfast, courtesy of Mae.
The house was rarely silent. It was again a winter spent telling stories, but now it was I who sat enraptured, listening to lives I could hardly imagine. While my life had been confined to two sets of four walls—with a stagecoach in-between—these women seemed to have had most of the world under their feet. Sadie told stories of New York City, both terrible and wonderful. She’d sailed halfway around the world, seen exotic islands, and lived upon the vast, crashing ocean. Gloria had lived with celebrated beauty, telling stories of men literally showering her with gold dust.
“Don’t see none of that money now,” Jewell would say, lighting one of her thin cigarettes.
“You’re just upset that you didn’t get a piece of it,” Gloria would reply, squinching her nose at Jewell and looking even more beautiful.
Of course, to hear Jewell speak, neither Sadie nor Gloria had done anything to compare with her own life of adventure. One time she said, “If it weren’t for me, that whole city’d still be nothing but a mud strip with a dock.”
“What city?” I asked.
She looked at me as if I’d just grown a third eye. “San Francisco, of course.”
The other three women groaned.
“You can pooh-pooh it all you want,” Jewell said. “But I’m tellin’ you, I’m the one that brought class to that place. And you just watch. I’ll do the same thing here.”
Then they all laughed, giving Jewell mock reassurance.
During the hard months of winter, very few men came to enjoy the ladies’ company. Many left the camp altogether, seeking warmer lodging until spring. Jewell complained it was because she didn’t have anything to offer them besides Sadie and Mae, and if the men weren’t keen on giraffes and elephants, they were just plumb out of luck. Some did, however, like to share our company and play cards in our warm parlor. The first time a man settled himself at the little table and asked, “Who’s up for a game?” I felt a surge of excitement and sat down at the next chair.
“What do you know about playing cards, kid?” The man was older, maybe forty, with a graying beard and soft eyes.
“Deal them and see,” I responded with a glint of my own. By the end of the evening, he was glad we were just playing for beans.
Gloria’s warning that I should get away from here seemed as far removed as the home I would go to. In fact, there wasn’t anything about this place that didn’t feel like a home. I was safe, protected, warm, fed. The day I sent the letter to Aunt Nadine, I felt I was severing a tie between us rather than establishing one.
One night as we were sitting around the kitchen table, Gloria got the strangest look on her face, excused herself, and left. Sadie, Mae, and Jewell exchanged a knowing look, and Mae was almost beside herself with bubbling glee.
“What is it?” I asked, looking at each of them in turn.
“It’s time for the baby! It’s time for the baby!” Mae clapped her hands.
Seized with the same excitement, I was eager to go out to Gloria’s cabin to help. I’d been watching Gloria’s body expand for months and was thrilled every time she allowed me to put my hand on her stomach and feel the life within. But now Sadie put her steadying hand on mine and told me to wait.
“It might be morning before the child is here,” she said. “You go and sleep. You can see the little one tomorrow.”
Disappointed, I said my good nights and went to my room. It was late March, and soft, wet flakes were dropping lazily from the sky. I opened my window, still in love with the stinging scent of new snow, and took a deep breath before closing it again. The house was quiet except for the faintest hints of conversation coming up from the kitchen. Somehow I knew the other women wouldn’t be banished to their rooms to wait for the arrival of the baby. Rather than feeling resentful, though, I felt a certain appreciation for my exile. For the first time in a long time I felt wonderful, like a carefree child.
I knelt beside my bed and felt the cool fabric of the quilt against my forehead as I asked God to keep Gloria and the baby safe through the night. I intended to stay there praying until somebody came upstairs with the news, but after a time I was half aroused from sleep when Mae came in.
“Is the baby here?” I remember asking.
“Not yet, dear.” Mae helped me under my covers and tucked me in.
The next morning, though, I ran down the stairs and burst into the kitchen, only to find it empty. I called throughout the house before poking my head out the back door. Sadie was on her way in, coming from Gloria’s cabin. She looked exhausted, her gray eyes rimmed in red, her skin pale. But she was smiling.
“Go and see the baby,” she said.
I stopped midway to Gloria’s cabin to give Sadie a quick hug, then tried to bring about some composure before walking in. Both Mae and Jewell were there, although Jewell was complaining loudly about never understanding why people pulled such a fuss over something as ordinary as a baby. She took one last look at the bundle in Mae’s arms and left.
“It’s a little boy.” Mae held the child in front of her.
Gloria lay on her bed, sleeping, looking more beautiful than I think any woman has ever looked. Her face was soft and peaceful, her hair golden. To me, she was a princess, and Mae held in her arms the newest little prince.
“Would you like to see him?” Mae asked. “Here, sit down and hold out your arms.”
I sat in the chair next to the stove and he
ld out my arms for the squirming bundle. He was wrapped in a blanket, though one little arm had escaped, and he waved that fist to and fro until I caught it with my hand and let him curl his fist around my finger.
“Did she give him a name?”
“Danny,” Mae said. “Isn’t he perfect?”
He was, as far as I could tell. He let out an enormous yawn, closing one eye and scrunching up half of his face to do so. I thought about that little boy I’d seen in the foundling home in St. Louis, and I wondered how any woman could look at a child like this and then stick it in a turnstile box.
“Does she love him?” I asked.
“Does she—
Well, of course she does, silly. What kind of a question is that?”
“A silly one, I guess,” I said. “I wonder if I’ll ever have a baby of my own.”
“Now, Biddy, you’re just a child. There’s plenty of time for that later. Give that little one to me, and let’s see if Auntie Mae can’t get him to go to sleep.”
I got up from the chair and handed Danny over to Mae as soon as she had settled into it. She took the baby and nestled him close to her, gently swaying back and forth, singing a soft lullaby.
I sat on the floor and—without any protest from her—rested my head on her knee. I couldn’t help but think of all the horrible names the people back home would have for little Danny. And for Gloria. For Mae and me too. There was, of course, no husband to be Danny’s father, and while there were plenty of men nearby, none seemed in any hurry to claim a bride.
Mae had told me once that she was just nineteen years old. “Not much older than you, dearie!” she’d enthused. Thinking of that now, I couldn’t help but be afraid about how quickly time could pass. Only two years ago I was a sheltered child. In their stories, Gloria, Mae, and Sadie all told of losing their innocence—embarking on this life—when they were just my age. It seemed an inevitability.
Besides the birth of baby Danny, the spring thaw brought new life to Silver Peak. Every day new faces appeared around the camp, some of them coming into Jewell’s parlor for a drink or a game of cards or a visit upstairs with Mae. Others took to congregating in her yard, setting up games of horseshoes and speculating—often loudly—about the pretty blonde hiding out in the back cabin.
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