Speak Through the Wind

by Allison Pittman

  Kassandra felt as though her head were flying downhill completely independent of her body, as images and ideas roared past in a barely acknowledged blur.

  “So after—everything, you are just going to throw me out?”

  “Girl, when did this get to be about you?” Jewell located the black beaded dress and tossed it on the stripped bed.

  “But … it is just so sudden! I wake up and find out I am losing my home?”

  “First off, it ain’t so sudden. If you hadn’t been so holed up in here feelin’ sorry for yourself, you woulda known what was comin’ round the bend.”

  “Feeling sorry for myself? I lost a child, Jewell.”

  “Yeah, that’s just what every workin’ whore needs, some brat to drag with her from place to place. Because second, this ain’t your home.”

  “Where are you going to go?”

  When Kassandra had walked on the beaches of the cape, she loved the feeling of sand being slowly washed away from underneath her feet. Now it felt like a massive wave surging up from behind, leaving her suspended above some cold, wet hole.

  “Things are slowin’ down around here, anyway,” Jewell said. “Gold’s been taken over by all these big operations. Used to be we’d get these great kids comin’ in, spillin’ gold dust out of their pockets. Just ain’t fun.”

  “So where are you going?”

  “Someplace new.”

  “Where?”

  “Wyomin’.”

  “What?”

  “It’s what California was back in the beginnin’. Got silver and gold poppin’ out all over the place. And best of all, there’s nobody there.”

  “Why is that a good thing, exactly?”

  By now Jewell had peeled off the simple cotton day dress she’d been wearing and dropped an impressive whalebone corset around her waist.

  “Help tuck me in, will you?” She turned her back to Kassandra, who took hold of the laces and pulled with all her might. “No civilization. No laws. Tug it again.”

  Kassandra wrapped the ends of the laces around her hands and doubled her efforts.

  “No civilization means no women,” Jewell said, her words sounding as strained as the laces of the corset. “Get it again.”

  “Can you breathe?”

  “Course I can breathe. No women clears the path for a good business-minded woman.”

  Kassandra tied the corset off and watched for several seconds to be sure Jewell could breathe. Satisfied, she obeyed the woman’s silent request and picked the black dress off the bed and dropped it over her shoulders. Jewell turned around, and Kassandra began the task of fastening no fewer than twenty red bone buttons.

  “Take me with you,” she said, glad to be able to ask the question without having to look Jewell in the eye. It was bad enough feeling her shoulders stiffen at the request.

  “I’m not takin’ any of the girls with me, Sadie.”

  “Why not?”

  “Just let me get myself set up, and I’ll send word for you. If we all go out together, there’s no real knowin’ who’s headin’ the place up.”

  “I have no desire to act as madam.”

  “Besides, I like to set up a class operation. Build up some anticipation. Get me a nice place built up, then bring on the women.”

  “But what am I going to do here? Who is buying the house?” She tugged the fabric across the widest point of Jewell’s back. “Where would I go?”

  “Now stop that whinin’. You sound pathetic. You think you’d be able to just pack up everything and head out just like that?”

  Kassandra chuckled. “That is all I have ever done.”

  “So tell me. Does that make me Naomi? Or Ruth?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You know, from the Bible? Whither thou goest.

  “Of course I know it, but I did not expect you—”

  “You don’t think I’ve ever been to a Sunday school?” Jewell asked, sounding genuinely annoyed.

  She walked over to the full-length mirror next to her armoire and studied her reflection, running her hands down the bodice of the dress and turning to check herself at all angles.

  “I’m a sinner, missy. Don’t mean I’m a heathen. You wanna go? Fine. Get yourself cleaned up. If all goes good at the bank, we’re leavin’ in three days.”

  ewell’s plan of heading up the first, best, and biggest brothel in Wyoming territory met with a few setbacks along the way. She and Kassandra left San Francisco, a wagon train of two—one actual wagon laden with trunks full of gowns and lamps and various luxuries to deck out the new place, and one stagecoach with velvet-lined seats in which the two women spent hours and days and weeks jostling along the trails carved out by the rush to find California gold. They still came across the occasional hopeful prospector—sometimes with a family in tow—but it was obvious from the dereliction of some of the more popular stopping posts that the traffic had slowed considerably and that Kassandra and Jewell were going in the more sensible direction.

  They’d gotten as far as the City of the Rocks in Utah Territory when the drivers they’d hired advised against continuing on with winter so fast approaching.

  “Well, I ain’t payin’ you one dollar more than what we agreed on,” Jewell told them, but she did lay out the money to rent the drivers a winter’s bed in an abandoned fur trapper’s cabin and a relatively comfortable room in the settlement’s best hotel for herself and Kassandra.

  They spent their days downstairs, in the hotel’s dining area, playing cards with other emigrants shoring up for the winter. Kassandra was amazed at the ease with which Jewell was able to turn new acquaintances into old friends, always ready with a joke and advice for those living with unrealistic expectations for the California gold fields. Although shed always expressed disdain for what she called “decent women,” she talked to them with such an air of compassion and guidance that they turned a blind eye to the obviousness of Jewell’s profession, though they did take pains to keep a great distance between Jewell and their husbands and children.

  As soon as was deemed safe, Kassandra and Jewell rounded up their drivers—who had spent much of the winter hopelessly drunk—and continued their journey east. The information gathered from other travelers indicated that South Pass in the Wyoming Territory would be a likely place to set up housekeeping. But when they arrived at the settlement, nestled in the center of the mile-wide mountain pass, they found it to be a continuous bustle of activity, with a well-established, if understated, brothel. Jewell would have none of setting up a second house.

  “Besides,” she said after spending only a week scouting out the territory “this place is too transient. Everybody’s on their way to someplace else. All the money’s in repeat business.”

  If Jewell had a mind for money, she also had an ear for opportunity, and she soon came to Kassandra with the news of a tiny pocket of silver about five miles up a narrow, winding pass.

  “Well be the first ones there,” she said, tossing garments into trunks to be loaded by their ever more disgruntled drivers. “The way I hear it, the men ain’t even there yet.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better if there were men there?” Kassandra asked.

  “This way, we’ll be there waitin’ for ’em.” Jewell said. “Nobody spends money like a man after his first big strike. We’ll be the only women, the only booze …”

  And so Kassandra and Jewell spent a second winter together, but this time there was no luxury of a warm hotel with hot meals and entertaining conversation. Rather, when the first storm hit the nascent mining camp in early October, the two women were sentenced to seven months of solitude, virtually trapped in the tiny cabin meant to be a temporary shelter while Jewell oversaw the construction of her house. Not an inch over a hundred square feet, they could not cross the room without their skirts brushing against each other.

  The first day of the new year brought the last day of civil conversation. Whenever the sky was clear and the temperature poked above zero, Ka
ssandra would wrap herself in the bearskin coat she’d charmed out of a trail scout in South Pass and spend as many daylight hours as possible clambering through the snow.

  That spring, Jewell laid out every last dollar she had to have her house constructed right in what she swore would be the center of the Silver Peak mining camp. Fewer than a dozen men had joined the original prospectors, and the yield from the ground was slow but promising. With lumber and labor that seemed to appear out of myth, Jewell’s two-story four-bedroom, downstairs parlor and kitchen, whitewashed, red-roofed house was built.

  Then came the furnishings. Loaded wagons scrambled up the narrow pass full of lamps and linens, sofas and side tables. Case after case of every liquor imaginable and whiskey barrels strapped to lumbering mules. Jewell gave herself the largest of the four rooms, with a window overlooking the main road into the camp. Kassandra was across the hall and down a door, ever grateful for any distance between them after their winter of forced camaraderie. Enough lumber was left over to build one or possibly two little one-room cabins behind the main house.

  “In case I get enough girls to expand,” Jewell said, making frantic notes in the ledger she kept with her at all times.

  “Expand?” Kassandra said.

  They were puttering around the new parlor, laying lace doilies on the end tables and filling the lamps.

  “Well, I ain’t exactly goin’ to make a fortune off of you, now am I?”

  “I don’t think you are going to make any money off of me,” Kassandra said, running a dust rag over the intricately carved arm of the overstuffed sofa.

  “I’d better make enough to pay back what it cost to drag you out here.” Jewell had opened one of the straw-packed cases of gin and poured herself a third glass. “I wasn’t plannin’ on makin’ you a business partner.”

  Word began to spread about the promise of Silver Peak, and soon the vision that Jewell had all those months before came to fruition. Men hungry for money coaxed it out of the earth, and by the time they’d amassed some semblance of personal fortune, they made their way to the red-roofed house. They may have poured in to satisfy thirst, but they showed little evidence of being driven by lust. Jewell attributed their lack of interest to the lack of choice, and she remained doggedly optimistic that once word spread of the trickling silver, the women would come along, too. Soon enough, things began to look up.

  Her name was Mae, and had Kassandra not seen her take the stairs with one or another man in tow, she would never have believed this woman was a prostitute. Mae was plump and pretty with chestnut brown hair and dancing brown eyes. Though she was twenty—-just four years younger than Kassandra—she seemed much more juvenile. Perhaps it was her high-pitched laugh, never far from being a giggle, that made her seem like such a young girl. Or the ever-present dimples in her soft, round cheeks. Or the habit she had of clapping her hands in quick, happy demonstrations whenever she was even slightly pleased. Whatever the reason, Kassandra felt an immediate envy of the woman who could demonstrate such blatant joy in such bleak circumstances.

  For Mae did take joy in everything. When the sun was out and warm, she would run outside, turn her face to the sky, and say, “Is there anything more wonderful than the feeling of sunshine on your face?” When the first snow of the winter fell, she would run outside and catch snowflakes on her tongue, saying, “Isn’t snow the most beautiful thing on earth?” When she walked through mud, she tried to make a tune with the little sucking noises her boots made; when the wind howled, she tried to match its pitch with her own.

  When she wasn’t extolling the beauty of creation, she was playing the role of pampering mother to Jewell and Kassandra. She mended their worn clothing, created scrumptious dishes from their meager supplies, kept every inch of the house neat and tidy. And for the few men who frequented Jewell’s house, she offered such an enticing balance of exuberance and warmth that hers was the only company sought upstairs.

  “I never seen nothin’ like it in all my days,” Jewell said one night after the last stammering man set down his empty glass, tipped his hat, and beat the trail back to his little place high up the mountain. “These men are actin’ like we ain’t got anything to offer ’em at all. Now, I understand them stayin’ away from me—I’m too much woman for most men to handle, but you, Sadie? You ain’t the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen, but with pickin’s this slim, I can’t see why they wouldn’t want a go with you.”

  “No one can give a compliment quite like you, Jewell,” Kassandra said.

  She picked up a half-empty bottle of whiskey and went behind the mahogany bar built across the shortest length of the room. She took a short swig before putting the bottle on the shelf. The drink was surprisingly good—not the smooth quality available back in San Francisco, but miles above the swill she’d downed in the Mott Street Tavern.

  “Be careful with that stuff,” Jewell said. “I don’t like my girls bein’ drunks.”

  “I think I have moved beyond being one of your ‘girls,’” Kassandra said.

  “I’ll let you know just what you are and what you aren’t. Don’t forget who paid for this place.”

  “I know very well who paid for it. You earned a good portion of it off my back, if you remember.”

  “So you think you oughta be entitled to a cut of what we make here?”

  “There is nothing to cut,” Kassandra said, deciding to pour herself a proper drink. “Ten percent of nothing is still nothing—not that you have ever limited yourself to ten percent.”

  “A woman don’t get where I am by bein’ nice.”

  “Well, right now it looks as if you and I are in the same place.” Kassandra poured a drink for Jewell and slid it down the bar with a panache that old Stymie back in New York would have appreciated. “Plus, I have not seen you taking anything from Mae.”

  “Aw, Mae ain’t brought in enough to make it worth my time. You’d think as cheap as she lets herself go, the guys would be linin’ up at the door.”

  “Maybe they are just good men,” Kassandra said. “There are a few of them out there, you know. They might have wives back home.”

  “I ain’t never known a wife to stop a man before,” Jewell said, downing her drink. “If this was California, those pockets would be empty before the next sunup.”

  “This is not California.”

  “Nope,” Jewell said, sliding her glass back down the bar. “There’ll never be another one like that.”

  efore turning in for the night, Kassandra wrapped Imogene’s tattered shawl around her shoulders for one last trip to the outhouse beyond the piles of lumber that would become Jewell’s one-rooms when the weather turned warm.

  She inhaled sharply at the first blast of air when she opened the door. It was the tail end of her third winter in Silver Peak—spring, really, being nearly April—and she still could not fathom the cold. It felt as if her very bones were exposed to the howling wind and spattering snow. True, she’d be warmer if she’d worn the bearskin, but that was too bulky to maneuver in the outhouse, and she had learned that any temperature hovering near zero could be tolerated for a short time with a minimal wrap. Besides, she had the last few drinks still warm in her belly.

  She bent her head low and kept it down as she scrunched through the snow across the yard to the outhouse. Once finished, she followed the same path back to the kitchen door.

  The snow was falling harder now, steady and with obvious intent. Kassandra paused at the door and looked back at the path of footprints. It wasn’t perfectly straight and direct—in fact, there were all along it a few meandering steps—but it was clear and distinct. The straight and narrow, Kassandra thought, remembering back to Reverend Joseph’s sermons. Always stay on the straight and narrow path, and you will have righteousness. Well, look where this straight and narrow leads.

  She laughed out loud, all alone there in the yard behind Jewell’s house. There’d been nothing straight about her life. No plan, no direction. And narrow? Only insomuch as she was ut
terly alone.

  She looked back and saw that, just in the time she’d hesitated at the door, the path to the outhouse was covered with a dusting of snow—like the sprinkled sugar on the molasses cookies Mae baked whenever they had a fresh load of supplies. In the morning the path would be obliterated. She looked out into the dense darkness of the woods surrounding the little camp clearing and thought—not for the first time—of what it would be like simply to walk into them and disappear. She would leave no trace; her steps would be lost by dawn.

  And who would know? Reverend Joseph probably thought she was dead by now; Mrs. Hartmann would be quick to encourage such a thought.

  And her daughter? Somewhere out there her little girl was five years old, learning to read, writing her name, and Kassandra had no idea what letters the child would use for that purpose.

  She clutched her hands around her stomach and remembered those warm, stuffy mornings, curled under the massive pile of Jewell’s silk bedding, hiding from the daylight. She could hear Jewell’s voice chiding her for slacking in bed, urging her to get up, and meet her own promise of Tomorrow.

  It seemed now that the woods beckoned her. The woman who’d stood alone on the ship’s deck at sea, so sure that God could see her and would direct her path, now stood in a tiny clearing in the middle of a wintered forest, obscured by snow so thick that the stars were lost to her upturned eyes. She put one raw, cold hand on the kitchen door handle and looked back over her shoulder to the waiting woods.

  “Tomorrow,” she said.

  That was when the woods answered back. It was long but not low—the sustained sound of pain. Not an animal; most of the creatures were still dormant. This was a human cry, but the falling snow made it difficult to determine from which direction the cry came.

  “Hello?” Kassandra called to the darkness. “Who’s out there?”

  There was no other sound, and Kassandra began to wonder if the woods and the wind had concocted the cry If so, the memory of it was so strong and clear that she couldn’t simply go to bed. She went inside, grabbed the lantern hanging by the kitchen door, and lit it with a long match. Upstairs, she went first to Mae’s room, then to Jewell’s, shaking both women out of an early sleep to tell them there was something out in the woods, and she was going to investigate.