Smoke Through the Pines

by Sarah Goodwin

  Smoke Through the Pines

  By Sarah Goodwin

  © 2017 Sarah Goodwin. All rights reserved.

  Cover Illustration: Bo Moore (bomoore.net)

  Chapter One

  Laura

  For the first few days, I thought of nothing but what I’d left behind.

  Cecelia, riding on the wagon seat behind me, tried to contain her joy; it saddened me to see her smother it so, yet I was glad too. I could not have dealt with my own grief in the face of her freedom and happiness. She kept her delight to herself, and though her cheeks were pink as buds with it, she kept her face plain and her hopes in her heart.

  I checked on Rachel and Tom in the rear of the wagon so often that my neck began to crick from always turning back. Always when I looked at them my eyes would tear up. Not just at their wasted and dirty condition, but at the space around them. Beth and Nora were still in my heart, but the wagon was empty of them. They existed only in my memory.

  We drove until the cracked brown of the dirt became grass again. Until there were no more grasshoppers. By that time the fodder we had from town was gone, and the oxen, already starved enough before, were weakened to the end of their usefulness. We were almost out of water for ourselves and the beasts, and it was with relief that I stopped us near a creek.

  Tom and Rachel climbed out of the wagon with legs like those of new-born colts. While Cecelia picketed the oxen to graze I went to my children. Tom sat on the grass, petting the patch of mean strands as though it were a puppy. His eyes were large and dark as a skull’s. Rachel stood at the rear of the wagon, looking back the way we had come. Her body was stiff as a dog’s when it’s scenting a storm. I was worried and disturbed by them in equal measure. Something about their grief made my mouth taste of copper. No child should’ve seen what they had, their Pa and sister’s bodies, the oxen and the dog’s flesh rotting in the sun, and more grasshoppers than there were letters in the Bible.

  I hadn’t been able to protect them from any of it.

  Cecelia touched my shoulder and I turned to find her looking at me in askance. Her face was newly burnt by the sun, over the browning it had already received over the past weeks. Like myself and the children she was carved out by starvation too, and dirty. Her lips were chapped as mine felt, from the lack of water. I wanted nothing more than to fling myself into her arms and weep.

  Instead I started unpacking our scant bits of food.

  “You rest, I’ll do it,” Cecelia said.

  I wanted so badly to lay myself down on the grass and feel it cooling me, the soft wind soothing my bruised and beaten heart. But that kind of thing was for girls in pictures, and I had two children I would never fail again.

  I shook my head.

  She pressed her hands to my shoulders gently, but firmly. “I’ll fetch out the food. You can tend the fire while it cooks.”

  She was gone before I could argue.

  I went to Tom’s side and hunkered down in the grass. “Do you still feel sickly?” I asked, heaving the words out of me like a bucket from a well.

  He shook his head. “I think it was just drinking too much all at once.”

  I stoked his hair. “Good. Well, you’ll take it slow with dinner.”

  “Yes Ma,” he looked after Cecelia, “should I go look out some wood for a fire?”

  I shook my head. “No, stay and rest, I’ll see to it.”

  I got up and went to Rachel, but seeing her face made me stay back. She had the look of someone staring down a hated ghost, part fear, part rage. Fear of what was easy to imagine, but her anger took me by surprise. Had she some kind of witchcraft in her blood, the whole prairie behind us would have burst into flame under her scowl.

  I left without a word and went to gather wood, if there was some to be found, dry grass if not. Shame choked me. Tom I could talk to, if not comfort well. He was as simple to read, to understand as a printed recipe card. Rachel was a challenge I did not have the strength for. Trying to offer comfort, without angering her further, driving her away, or bringing her rage on me, was a task I could not begin to reason out. I felt guilty as hell for not trying, but I was exhausted, by it all. It was all I could do to keep myself sane, and put food in my children’s mouths. Words, comfort, would have to come later.

  Try as I might I couldn’t find the words for Cecelia. Guilt and grief stopped my mouth up whenever she was near. I wanted only to be comforted by her, but couldn’t stand the pain that even thinking of such a thing brought me.

  That night, as on those before, I slept in the wagon with my children. Cecelia slept outside. There was a rope tied to the top of the wagon, and pegged to the ground, with a canvas hung over it to make a fair tent.

  I laid with my eyes shut, listening to my children breathe. I had one hand on my shrunken belly, waiting for any sign that my child was still with me. When I slept at all, I dreamt that morning had come and Tom or Rachel, sometimes both, had met their end while I slept selfishly beside them. That was how it had been every night since leaving the house behind us.

  *

  We hadn’t spoken about where we were headed. I had no plans, aside from to keep going north until the sun no longer bit at us, and the ground lost its flatness. I wanted to be where there were trees and rivers, where there were hills and shade and rain. As far from Indian Territory as we could go.

  Cecelia had not asked me. She hadn’t spoken much since we left her brother, and her husband behind us. I felt her need to speak, to get all that we had felt and all that had happened out between us, like some kind of picnic, and go over it, bit by bit, until it was all arranged and sorted out. I couldn’t bear it. I wasn’t one for talking about things. Talking, wishing, dreaming, it all did about as much good, no matter what you called it. Doing something I could understand. So I drove us on.

  It couldn’t last.

  One night, I would guess two weeks or so since we lit out from town (what use did I have for days, then?) Cecelia waited until the children were tired and had gone to bed. She set the coffee pot on the fire to boil, and sighed.

  “I think we should discuss our options.”

  I almost laughed. She sounded like a clerk, or a parson.

  “We can’t keep on as we are,” she said, when I said nothing, “we have money but we must save it as long as we can and not waste it on travelling with no destination in mind. We will need it to buy land, and I fear the oxen are almost played out.”

  I wanted to speak but my body was so heavy. Silence was so much easier than talking. Even breathing felt like too much sometimes. It had gotten so I dreaded waking and hated the very idea of being upright on the wagon seat. I wanted to sleep. To sleep and not to dream.

  Cecelia sighed. Her face was pinched up and sorrowful. She looked so young with her shorn hair straggling out as it grew, her arms bare in an old shift. Her skin was covered in deep brown freckles, like ink spots. She had one of the old blankets over her legs against the evening chill, and the breeze raised gooseflesh on her skin.

  “I know, what it is like, to lose a child,” she said softly, “though I can’t imagine the pain of the last few weeks. I know you fought, hard, against the drought, the grasshoppers, disease…you fought so hard and I know it must have taken everything. And now you have been given a moment to lay down your arms and retreat. It’s on you now, the aftermath. I know that. So, if you can’t talk to me, if you can’t tell me where you want to go, can you trust me, to take us somewhere safe? Will you let me drive the oxen and enquire in the next town, to find our way?”

  Could I? I wanted to talk to her. I knew that if I could open my mouth and let some of the poison out of my chest, it would weigh less. It would be easier to carry. But my mouth might as well as have be
en glued shut. My throat was stuffed up with prairie dust and tears. I couldn’t loosen it, not for her. With wet eyes I nodded.

  Cecelia nodded back and pressed a cup of coffee on me. I took it and drank it down, letting the hot bitterness ease the blockade in my throat. A hundred more such peace offerings and perhaps it would wash away.

  Chapter Two

  Cecelia

  Next morning I took up the reins and guided the exhausted oxen onwards. It was fortunate indeed that by late evening we came to the boundaries of a small town. It was no more than a rudimentary coaching inn, a few houses and a store, but it represented a respite from the long days of wandering, trapped in our own thoughts.

  Putting fears of destitution aside for one evening, I had our wagon and oxen looked after and made enquiries after a room. We were dressed in the cleanest clothes we had, though they had been creased by storage and were ill fitting after our near starvation. I paid in advance for two days’ stay, and held my chin up under the glare of the woman serving us.

  We were shown into an upstairs room under the eaves, with a bed, a wash stand, a rug and nothing else. With blankets brought from the wagon I made up a bed for myself on the floor. Laura and the children stood in the room as though spellbound by the luxury of painted walls, and a floor that did not buck to the rhythm of the wagon’s wheels.

  I went downstairs and bargained with the hatchet-faced landlady for a tub and hot water to be brought up. I also handed off our sack of soiled clothes for laundering. She passed these off to a young, shoeless girl with a moue of disgust.

  “Is there food to be had?” I asked.

  “Dinner was served hours ago,” she fairly snarled, her throat roughened by the quantity of pipe smoke lingering between the bar and the back room.

  I placed coins on the desk before her. “Could you arrange for something cold to be prepared and sent up? Cheese and ham, or bread and butter?”

  A gleam came to her hateful eyes and she snatched up the coins, pocketing them with unseemly relish. “I’ll send up the girl.”

  I was too tired to push further for a description of the food she intended to provide. I went back up the dark and creaking stairs, squinting in the gloom, which the few smutty lamps did little to alleviate.

  In the room I removed my boots and sat down on the edge of the bed.

  “They’re bringing up food and a tub of hot water.”

  Laura nodded.

  “Why are we stopping?” Rachel asked. “Are we staying here?”

  “No, we’ve just stopped to rest a while,” I said, “and to have a bath and a good meal.”

  Rachel was sitting on the ledge of the one dirty window, the glass fogged with steam from cooking the dinner that had since been done away with. From the smell that lingered in the room, cabbage had been a major component.

  “They’ve got our clothes,” Rachel observed, looking through a patch of glass that she’d wiped clear. I supposed that in the yard below was the wash tub.

  “They’re cleaning them.”

  “They should burn them. They’re so dirty and awful,” Rachel said quietly. “Then we can get new ones.”

  I was almost glad to see a trace of the stubbornness and pride that Laura had described in her daughter.

  “Well we shall have to see about buying a few things when we get where we’re going.”

  “Where’s that?” Asked Tom.

  I sighed. “I don’t know yet. But tomorrow, while you rest and keep your Ma company, I’ll go about town and find some news as to where there’s good land for a good price. Then we’ll go onwards and build you a new house.”

  “Another mud house?” Tom asked.

  “Maybe a soddie, or a log cabin, maybe a frame house. It depends where we end up.”

  “A farm?” Rachel asked, turning to look at me with her dark eyes.

  “A farm would be a good living, don’t you think?”

  She sniffed. “Our farm got eaten up by those bugs, what if the new one does as well?”

  I had no answer for her, but was saved by a tap on the door. The shoeless girl from downstairs came in, dragging a tin tub with her. She deposited it on the rug without a word, and pattered off to fetch the first of several cans of hot water.

  Through all the furore of the tub being filled, Laura stayed silent and still. I had brought up a valise of oddments from the wagon; soap and underclothes, candles and other domestic trifles. Rachel took the first wash and made the most of the hot water, scrubbing herself several shades paler with the harsh brown soap. I lathered her hair and used the wash jug to rinse it clean. Tom took his dunking quickly, so as to leave heat in the water for us.

  It would have been practical to climb into the warmish water with Laura. Knee to knee we could have shared the tub like sisters, though it would have been cramped. Instead I turned my back while she disrobed, and busied myself with laying out a shift for her to sleep in. Behind me I could hear the light splashing of the water, the rasp of the soap on a rough cloth. It brought a blush to my cheeks to think that she was naked in the same room as me, that I could turn and look at her in such a state. I was almost dizzy with want to do so.

  “Rachel, please wash your mother’s hair,” I said.

  She did it without complaint, and I was relieved that she had not already lost the fragile acceptance of me she’d shown back on the prairie.

  Once Laura was out of the tub I took my turn in the lukewarm water, by then stained a murky brown with travel dust and scummed with soap. It was still the best bath I had been in for some time. Since fleeing Ohio I had not had the opportunity to bathe completely in warm water. My last full submergence had been many months ago, in a cold creek. I was not accustomed to being naked in front of a room of people, a maid had been my only companion in my baths at home, and I had not cared for her as I did Laura. I bathed quickly and leapt from the water into the single damp piece of cloth we’d been provided for drying.

  In my shift I felt much more myself, and incredibly tired. A knock on the door brought the barefooted girl and a boy a few years older, with a crooked nose and a pinched face just like his mother’s downstairs. The girl set down a plate covered with a clean but stained cloth, and the two of them struggled with the tub, slopping the cold water about as they left.

  “Will you comb my hair out Ma?” Rachel asked, wooden comb in hand.

  “Tom, can you set us a picnic on the floor?” I asked, eying Laura’s stooped shoulders. “Rachel, come here and I’ll comb your hair.”

  She came reluctantly, with a sideways glance at her mother, but she settled at my feet while I sat on the creaking bed. I ran the comb through her hair and worked carefully through the knots without pulling, through it was a task I suspected had been neglected for a while. When I was done Rachel yawned and took her comb back without a word, but I felt less of her catlike disinterest aimed at me.

  Tom had laid one of our blankets on the floor and uncovered the dish, using the cloth as a platter to spread out the food. There was bread, stale as it was, a small crock of dripping, three apples, a bit of cheese that wouldn’t have satisfied a mouse, a bowl of cabbage water soup and a fair sized piece of cornbread. I assumed this was the leftovers from dinner. Still, as we had been travelling on nothing but hurriedly made cornmeal or stewed beans, it was a welcome change.

  I divided up the food, taking a lesser portion to ensure the children and Laura had enough to sustain them. I was worried about Laura particularly; she had told me she was expecting a child, and I fretted that she was still so small from hunger. It was impossible to say if the baby still lived within her, but I would do all I could to protect them both.

  While the children peered from the window at the wash copper below and watched the comings and goings of the inn residents into the yard, I looked to Laura. She had eaten her meal quickly enough but still looked so tired and strained.

  “Tom, Rachel, can you please go down to the outhouse? It’s time you were ready for bed.”

  Ra
chel seemed set to argue, but Tom got up and she followed, as if afraid to lose sight of him. When they were gone I returned the blanket to my bed on the floor and then went and fussed with the bed, checking its sheets for damp and bedbugs, finding none, I turned down the sheets and moved the single lamp to the floor beside my blankets.

  Laura lifted her hand to her hair, which she had let loose of its braid for her bath, and which hung down to her waist. Soaked by the water, its light brown had darkened. She touched its tangles.

  “Shall I comb out your hair too?”

  “Yes please.” Her voice was so small, like the peep of a mouse.

  I plucked up the comb from the bed and combed her hair through, stroking it with one hand as I laid it flat with the wooden teeth of the comb. I lifted the locks to keep them from the nape of her neck as I worked, brushing the warm down at the base of her scalp. She sighed, and I peered around to see that she had closed her eyes. I combed longer than was necessary to get the work done, but when I’d finished her hair lay as glossy as a foal.

  “There, you look years younger without all that dust,” I said. “I never knew your hair was so long.”

  She didn’t reply, but her shoulders remained loose and her eyes closed. Hesitantly, not wishing to lose the fragile peace that my spell with the comb had wrought, I put my arms around her waist and rested my cheek against her cool shoulder. The breath I let out trembled with nerves. I thought to myself, furiously, like a prayer, please do not pull away from me.

  She did not.

  I felt her hand close over mine and she leant back against me. It was only for a moment before the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs disturbed us and I pulled away and got to my feet. Tom and Rachel returned and kicked off their shoes. I made my own trip downstairs to the outhouse in the dark and then returned to our little room. The lamp was out, but through the uncurtained window came enough moonlight to see the forms of Thomas, Rachel and Laura in the bed.

  As I closed the door behind me, Laura tipped her head up and whispered, “Goodnight.”