Bridget stepped backwards, not stopping until she bumped into the door. She’d not noticed the horror at first, but now she couldn’t take her eyes from Mae and the shadowy space ringing Mae’s body.
“Go!” Effie shouted at her.
Bridget rushed inside, slammed the door, ran and sank onto the buffalo hide in the corner. Mae knew everyone, but she didn’t know a Kathleen or a Darcy, and Mae had the death space.
From Bridget’s place on the hide, the small brown box Effie had shoved far under the bed—where Rev Jackdaw couldn’t see it—was in full view. Bridget fought the urge; she shouldn’t steal. But her body felt loose inside her skin. She had to make it quiet.
She peeked out the bottom of the window. The older boy, Pete, still stood between the poles of his cart with its red peeling paint. She wanted to run up the slope and stand close to him. She’d tell him his mum had the space. But she wouldn’t tell him Rowan had also had the space and he died.
“The wood belongs to Mr. Deet,” Effie was saying. She’d yet to climb back up the steps.
Bridget ran across the floor, dropped to her stomach and shimmied beneath the bed. Only halfway under she was able to reach far enough to grab the box. It had no lock, only a tiny copper latch.
“You’re a woman, same as me,” Mae said, her voice rising and coming through the walls. “This one . . . if it lives, it’ll need heat over the winter.”
The pain in Mae’s voice increased Bridget’s tension. She opened the box, grabbed a spoon, and shimmied back out.
“Coal ain’t free,” Mae said. “He expects I can get my own wood.”
Effie was on the stairs, each footfall a warning. “It’s Mr. Deet, you understand.”
Where to hide the spoon? Bridget hurried back to the wall where she’d been plastering and pushed the spoon onto a small shelf-like ledge between two logs. A handful of the mud erased the shine, but not the shape. The spoon almost belonged to her. Better and thicker mud and Effie would never find it.
Bridget also knew now where to hide Matron’s silver pen.
Standing far enough back from the window to avoid being seen, Effie watched Mae and how the hem of the ruined dress drug in back as she worked herself up the incline. Why hadn’t any respectable women come from town? Women wearing fine hats and riding in fine buggies and carrying fresh cakes and pies? She was a preacher’s wife. People had watched them ride through Bleaksville the first day, and people talked. Smoke rose from the chimney. Rev. Jackdaw had promised to stop at the mercantile on his way back through to establish her with credit. People knew she was there. Mae Thayer knew.
She lifted her rag from the dirty water, balled it in her hands, and threw it at the glass. “My name is Effie.”
Bridget, as frustrating a child as ever there was, stood at the same wall as before, smearing fistfuls of mud over the same area. Effie sighed. “What are you doing?”
She didn’t immediately look up. When she did, her eyes looked weepy. “We are West, but Mae doesn’t know Mum or Pappy.”
There was no use letting the child’s mind snag on the impossible. “Your parents are dead. Even if they were alive, the West is as big as a world. Nebraska is the West, but the next state is the West too, and the state after that. There’s no way to be found here.”
Bridget reached into her pail, drew up more mud, and squeezed. Brown squished through her fingers. She smashed the clay onto the wall.
“Telling you ‘West’ was lying to you. Same as Rev. Jackdaw lied to me, saying we’d live in Omaha.” She shuddered. “They call us river people.”
Two horses pulling a wagonload of new lumber came around the bend. The driver whoaed the team, and Mae waved her loaf. Had the man been sent to work on the lodge? Perhaps to add a room so that she and Rev. Jackdaw could do their business without Bridget listening ten feet away. Or was the lumber bound for Omaha and the new home Rev. Jackdaw was building for her there?
Wearing a battered leather hat with a large floppy brim, the teamster looped the reins once around the brake and stepped down. Effie took the combs from her hair, ran her hands back through the tangles, and secured the combs again. There wasn’t time to change clothes.
“Go, go,” she whispered at the dull yellow dress and hoped the man didn’t think Mae was a friend.
He started down the slope, the sun striking his face. Broad with dark skin and a grayish braid reaching to the tasseled sash around his waist. An Injun?
“No. God, please, no.” Effie gasped. Her knees went weak and her mind slapped back to Granny’s stories. A house full of chatter and children’s squeals. A door thrown open and the kitchen turned to carnage.
She grabbed the shotgun from its pegs, and swung it toward the door. She’d checked the shells in the chambers a dozen times since being left, but two blasts were little protection. How would they die? Stabbed? Raped? Scalped?
“Bridget, get away from that window. Get behind me!”
“He’s helping Mae climb the hill.”
Without realizing it, Effie had been backing up. Now logs knocked into her shoulder blades. She stretched just enough to see the Injun push one side of its lumber to the right and the other to the left, clearing a small cleft at the very back of the wagon. Mae wiggled into the space. The Injun drew out a bucket and started back down.
“He’s got food,” Bridget said. She had mud not just on her hands and arms, but on the ends of her hair and across a cheek. “There’s potatoes and onions and carrots.”
Effie’s shaking hands were slick with sweat. Would she have the strength to pull the trigger when she needed to? Should she shoot now, try and scare it off ? What if it didn’t run and she was down one shell? Her tongue felt thick, her words half strangled. “Tell it to go away. Tell it I’m shooting.”
Bridget waved through the glass.
“Don’t do that! Get away.”
“Maybe he wants to be nice. E-F-F-I-E.”
“I’m going to shoot,” she yelled. She kept the gun pointed and tried to think. The Injun hadn’t touched the door latch. If it meant harm, wouldn’t it already be inside?
“He’s leaving,” Bridget said. She shrugged and stepped wide of the gun barrel. “Can I get the pail?”
“We aren’t eating that.” Effie’s knees still trembled. She needed to go for help, find the sheriff, and report the Injun. She’d be the first to sound the alarm: an Injun was off the reservation and had marched up to her door.
She waited until the wagon and Pete, trailing behind and dragging his cart, were out of sight before she crossed the room, and laid the gun on the bed. With trembling fingers, she worked at the old buttons on her dress. Mismatched every one of them. Buttons passed down from dress to dress from relatives long dead. She paused over her green; if she showed herself in the silk on the first day, what would she wear to picnics later? She chose a blue, faded but cleaner, and thought of Mae riding in the back of the Injun’s wagon. At eight years old, Mae dreamed of a new dress. A little girl with no idea of the bargain she was making. Was getting in that wagon a choice just as bad?
“I’m going into town.” If she hurried the two miles into Bleaksville, even with the days growing shorter—something like doors closing all around her—she could be back by dark.
“Should I come with you?”
Taking Bridget would mean company on the road and help describing the Injun, but she couldn’t go in her mud-coated dress, and she didn’t own a second. Effie had promised to make her a spare, and until that was done, she didn’t want to give folks more reason to think them river people.
“You find the ox. No, wait a minute.” Earlier, she’d had Bridget find the recipe in Dr. Chase’s book for curing lice. Opening the book to the page, Effie tapped her finger on the recipe. “Read what we need.”
“That’s the wrong recipe. It’s to ‘Color a blonde’.”
“There’s a recipe to make your hair like mine? Right on the same page?” Was it a sign? “You want Rev. Jackdaw to stop calling you R
ooster?”
Bridget answered slow, looking over at the hide and the red scarf with its braid. “Grandma Teegan’s hair was my color, and my hair matches Mum’s.”
Effie swallowed a groan. Every time she thought to do something nice for Bridget there was resistance. “Read both recipes.”
Bridget worked at the words. “Sulfide of pot-tat . . . potassium, distilled water, nitrate of bi-sm-uth . . .” She took a breath. “Rosewater, boric acid, cause-it”—a long pause—“caustic potash. What’s that?”
“I think it makes lye. Ma uses it to make soap.”
Bridget’s voice caught. “Why do you want me to have hair like yours?”
Something in the tiny spray of freckles across Bridget’s nose and the hope in her eyes, made Effie stiffen. Baby Sally.
“So we’ll be like sisters?”
Effie looked to the tub hanging on the wall. She’d had a real sister, once. “Bridget, we just aren’t.”
A gust of wind made several walnuts drop from the tree shrouding the lodge. The strikes on the roof, then the skittering, rolling sounds, and more pings onto one of the narrow landings made Effie start. One more constant and sharp noise she’d never grow accustomed to. She hugged herself; she couldn’t think about Baby Sally right now and the noise was only walnuts. Not Injuns throwing stones or knives or shooting arrows.
“Find the ox, throw that pail of vegetables into the river. That dead braid, too. I won’t warn you again.”
Bridget ran out the door and across the sand. Her thick and bright hair, even with the mud on its ends, bounced after her. She didn’t hesitate or make the sign of the cross before entering the trees, only disappeared into the blood-colored foliage.
Effie closed the door. Bridget wanted to be thought of as a sister. How could I ever do that to Baby Sally?
Bridget hid behind a tree and watched Effie run down the road, grabbing up her skirt with both hands, her elbows swinging, making Bridget smile at the sight of her frightened ankles, her legs pumping, and her hair flying. Effie didn’t want to be her sister, though she was no older than a big sister, and both of them were away from their families and alone together.
With Effie well down the road, Bridget backtracked and returned to the lodge. The single room with its small windows kept the corners hung with shadow. The mud-damp walls where she’d worked held patches of even deeper dark. She checked the wettest spot but saw no trace of her spoon. She needed to hide Grandma Teegan’s braid the same way. Close but safe. The hair couldn’t be buried beneath wall plaster, though. Not buried in mud.
Under the buffalo robe was too obvious and anywhere outside the lodge was too dangerous. Wind and rain would damage it or animals would carry it off. She paced. The floor planks were soft and rotting through in places. Even hiding the braid beneath a board risked it to spring floods and the prowling creatures she heard at night scurrying across silty leaves beneath her.
She needed to hurry. Effie wasn’t brave and might stop and run back. With the next drop of a walnut, Bridget looked up. Rafters. She stacked the two straight-backed chairs onto the table and climbed both. On tiptoes and wobbly legs, she reached for the beam and stretched out the red bundle. It stared at her: bright and eye-catching. She unwrapped the hair nearly as long as her arm, inhaled the scent of Ireland and Grandma Teegan, and stretched it out in the dust.
She had nothing else from her family. They’d never lined up like girls on steps and taken a photo. She didn’t have graves to visit and not even one of the letters Mum sent from America. She laid her palm on the hair again. My last thing.
When she could, she brought the chairs down and spread the red scarf across the table. Effie would like having the color, and she’d believe the braid was gone. Taking up the pail from the Indian, she went out and stood by the river’s edge. Her skirt made a sling to hold the vegetables—another thing she’d hide from Effie. She threw the pail as far as she could—it was rusty and old with splashes of white paint on one side, which would always mark it for Effie. The pail bobbed away in the current.
She hadn’t yet reached the trees when she dropped to her knees, potatoes and onions rolling from her skirt. Without Grandma Teegan’s braid, what was there to hold her up? Since saying good-bye to her, the snug scarf and braid had felt like a grandmother’s hugging arms. Now she was unhugged.
She licked her lips and couldn’t stop; Rev. Jackdaw would cut out her tongue.
The trees beckoned her. She stood. “Nera, Nera.” She’d fight her sadness. She picked up the vegetables and stepped onto the narrow but worn path and into the light-splashed wood. They often ran about the forest, Grandma Teegan’s story went, and no wild creatures existed for them.
The path tunneled beneath high branches and around bur oaks. The meandering route, first established by wandering animals moving amongst the trees, had grown to the width of a wagon. Or the width of an old cart with worn red paint.
At times, an oak was so massive she had to stop, put down her vegetables, and stretch her arms across the trunk. Early fall meant many of the leaves were gone, and those still hanging rustled. Jays chatted in high branches. Mourning doves lobbed their echoing sounds back and forth. Two squirrels scratched up a tree, rounded it like Maypole ribbons, and then peered from the backside to watch her. The woods felt as ancient and alive as the grove she’d often visited with Grandma Teegan. She pulled off her shoes, walked on leaves that crunched under her feet. Effie didn’t want a sister, but Bridget had the river and trees. Being in trees, you climbed, even if your feet never left the ground.
“Trees are wise,” Grandma Teegan had explained. “Their roots listen deep in the ground where the dead talk. Their trunks listen in the middle space where women pass on the stories. And the branches and leaves listen high where the spirits speak.”
What did the trees know about Mum and Pappy? With what part did they know it?
She reached a small clearing where the biggest oak yet had fallen, making the path swing out and around like a cup handle. The tree’s girth reached her chest high. Bleached and smooth, it had lain there for years, but unlike the trees felled at Effie’s Homeplace, this tree was still alive.
She spread her hands slowly out over the trunk. “You are my new best thing.” She considered. “Your name will be Old Mag.” There was so much to tell her. “An Indian came. And a lady . . . but she wasn’t Mum.”
She climbed one end, where ragged roots made a ladder. Wobbly-walking, keeping her arms out for balance, she reached the opposite end where the trunk split into two arms. With the added height and the thinning leaves, she could see the river. Uncle Rowan, if he were still alive, could throw a stone that far and have it splash. She better understood the layout of the wood now. She already knew the trees followed the shape of the road on one side, and now she knew they followed the river’s curves on the other.
Where the trunk split, one arm veered right and the other left. In the space between them, before more branches blocked the end, was a small V-shaped room. A perfect hideout and place to keep her food. She dropped in and lined potatoes, carrots, and onions along one side. All but one potato. As she ate, she raked up leaves with her fingers, threw them over Old Mag’s side, and pulled the few brown weeds. Using a stick, she began a map, drawing a curved line for what she knew of the Missouri River and making X’s to signify the two special trees she’d already discovered, Old Mag and Wilcox, the tree Effie thought of as the crow tree.
Sitting back between her heels, she drew the lodge next, a square with a single jot for a chimney and several lines underneath for its stilt legs. To the left of it, and nearly as close to the water as Wilcox-the-tree, she drew a smaller X for the smaller building Rev. Jackdaw called the skinning shed. And alongside that, just one tiny line for the winter sleigh kept there.
Maps were for safety, for today, for holding now together. Having the map would help keep her new home, the trees, and her safe place between the two arms of Old Mag. She could live at the lodge until Mu
m and Pappy found her.
Labyrinths were for tomorrow, and one day, she’d build one. They helped create the pictures you held in your mind. They went both clockwise and widdershin, and sometimes made you think you were going backwards or getting lost. Grandma Teegan had said getting the two of them to America was a labyrinth with so many widdershin turns she couldn’t bear to look. But she knew to take a step. Then another. She knew if you stayed the course on a labyrinth, you were always going forward. Labyrinths were a way for the ancestors to help too. They walked with you, carried your wished for things in sacks over their shoulders.
Bridget knew she ought to start looking for the ox. The sun was going low in the west—the temperature was dropping, and Effie might already be back. She started to climb out. Two white hairs snagged along Old Mag’s trunk made her stop and drop back in. Was the hair from white wolves? Or from Celtic hounds that carried lost souls into the Other World? Grandma Teegan, Mum? She had to be sure. Digging with her stick and scooping away loose soil, she carved out a fist-sized hole. She lay on her stomach, pressed her ear to the ground over the opening, and knocked beside it.
“Mum? Grandma Teegan?” She listened hard and after a minute smiled. Nothing. Rev. Jackdaw and Effie were wrong. Mum and Pappy weren’t buried in the ground, and neither was Grandma Teegan. If they were, they would hear her and knock back.
Her breath caught. Sound! Knocking! Faint, but all the same, knocking. She pressed her cheek firmer against the rim of the hole, her ear deeper. She held her breath. Her heart kicked in her ears, but she was sure of the sound. A rhythmic knocking: that and that and that. Heavy hits even for their slowness, and the sound growing louder as she listened. Not her parents. She jumped up and looked over the wall of Old Mag’s arm.
Grandma Teegan had kept sheep, and Bridget had seen plenty of cows across village pastures, but she’d never seen an animal as big as the white bulk swaying down the path, and never this close. With each step the beast took, her heart climbed higher in her throat.
River People Page 10