Smoke Through the Pines

by Sarah Goodwin

  “Will you please talk to me?” I said, “You’re making a nervous wreck out of me. What’ve I done?”

  “Nothing, nothing I wasn’t expecting. I just…it’s difficult. How can it not be when I know you want to leave, when I know why?”

  I sighed and drew the blanket tighter around me, feeling small and cold. “I thought you’d want the same. It’s hardly been a good few months…I know you think I ought to stay, that it’s…expected. But, I don’t feel that way.”

  Cecelia sniffed and I watched fresh tears trickle down her reddened face. I supposed she thought me a cold woman, and I wanted to cry. “Cecelia…I know it must’ve been hard, being around me after what happened. I know I haven’t been…as you’d expect, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care.”

  She frowned, wrong footed for the first time. “What do you mean?”

  “I thought it might make you upset, what with you losing your little one, and me…not acting what you’d call ‘grief stricken’. Can I at least explain?”

  “Explain what?”

  “I would’ve come over to the wagon and spoken to you, but, I felt it might upset you more.” I took a breath and tried to control myself. I was so afraid she’d turn from me the moment I let the words out. “I’m not happy about what happened, I know you must understand that. But…losing the baby…for the child’s sake I’m sad, and I wish they’d had a life, a life with me. But for myself…I can’t pretend I’m not relieved that child will be the last I have to bear, the last I raise. I would have done my best to be a good mother but, I knew inside that another child would be hard so soon after Beth and Nora were lost. I realised once it was over that I’d never have to go through that again, because Will is gone, and it made me happy. I’m sorry for that - for not feeling the same grief you must’ve felt. For not grieving that you’d never have the chance to be a mother again.”

  I spoke in a rush, afraid to stop, to look at her face which surely must be aghast at this confession. What mother would say something like that? What woman? When I stopped she only sat, pale and tearstained, watching me with wide open eyes like a dog waiting for a beating.

  “Laura,” she said, so softly I could hardly hear. “Laura, I don’t blame you for that. How could I blame you for feeling anything, when this is my fault? When I did this to you?”

  I looked at her, speechless. I’d had a great deal done to me. I’d been beaten by my Father, by my husband. I’d had child after child pressed on me by Will, even when I said no, even when I fought. I’d been moved around the New World like a mule on a rope, forced into working myself to near death, starving, thirsting and whatever else. But I couldn’t think of a single thing she’d done to me. Each step we’d taken since first we’d met, when she was only James Clappe and I was only a sorry, sad woman waiting to die in childbed. Everything we’d done, had been together.

  I thought of all that, in a moment, and when I opened my mouth, I tried to make all the words come out of me right, to tell her how much I loved her.

  “Cecelia, we came here together. We worked this camp together. I know it’s gotten bad, but there’s badness everywhere. I don’t know what might’ve been had we gone elsewhere but, no one can know that. We make our choices and we go on, and that’s life. You asked me if I wanted to come here, and I chose. And I chose you. I don’t blame you for me losing the little one,” I said. “I’ve lost babies before, and I don’t know what’s the cause of it, whether it’s work or worry or just something that goes wrong inside me, or inside them. I’d never blame you for it, same as I never blamed Will. Only think I hated him for was that when it happened he went off drinking and leaving me.”

  “But I did leave.”

  I waved a hand. “Left and went to do all the work? Left so’s I could have the whole of the warm bed and my children beside me? You have a far way to go if you’re looking to compete with Will at poor husbandry.”

  She laughed, a watery hiccough of mirth. I felt my heart leap to hear that, to know that she wasn’t lost to me. I smiled, and reached out my hand to her. She took it and came to sit beside me on my crate, and with my arm around her she sighed, her head leaning to rest on my shoulder.

  “I love you, Laura,” she said quietly, “I wish with all my heart that, if you’ll let me, I’ll be a better woman to you – the kind you deserve.”

  I squeezed her closer to me, placing a kiss on the top of her head. “I love you too…and between us, you can be my wife, if I can be yours.”

  We may not have been in a church, or before a mealy mouthed priest with hard eyed in-laws staring on at us. I may not have had a ring on my hand, or a twist of fear in my belly – but I saw I as a ceremony well enough.

  Epilogue

  Cecelia

  Fingerlings of green were coming through the tight packed dirt of the road, raising a fresh, clean scent as they were crushed beneath our wagon wheels. The air was cool but soft edged, and the trees whispered with rising sap. The cries and songs of the birds spoke of nothing but joy, no melancholy cursing fell on us from above.

  We’d lived out the remainder of the winter with Leehorn and his camp. Relations were strained after the double murder of Wiconi and Gill; Rachel kept close to our tent and wasn’t so wild and free in her pursuit of men’s knowledge. Leehorn was the exception, and he carried on his tutelage of both Rachel and Tom in all things fishing, hunting and horsemanship. He’d stood on his porch as we left, tugging his forelock in the absence of his greasy fur hat, which now sat upon Tom’s head. We rattled off, leaving Leehorn and the camp behind, cook pots swaying on their hooks beneath us.

  Soon the men would be leaving too, moving on with the work, taking logs down river. All but Gill and Wiconi. Gill was buried without much ceremony, by the men closest to him. Those same men divided up his things to be kept or sold at their will. At least for Wiconi we could reach out to the local Sioux and help to get his body to them for proper care.

  Behind us we left our own small grave, at the edge of the clearing. The first thing we did after snowmelt was to dig it, placing into it the wooden box that Leehorn himself had nailed tightly shut. Inside it was the cheap chamber pot from our tent, the daisies on its china printed forever on my mind. Laura said that she had the feeling her baby had been a boy, so she named him Frank, after my brother, and we buried him beneath a tall pine tree, in the soft, needle-strewn earth.

  Thomas and Rachel carved his name into the pine tree, but we all knew that in time the trees around the clearing would be felled, and the camp itself would move on, leaving empty space behind. There was nothing we could do but stand over the small grave, while Laura held my hand and Thomas read some psalms from their family bible. Pressed between its pages were locks of hair from Beth, from Nora, but not from this last child. Instead, to her small collection of possessions, Laura added a carving Rachel had made from a piece of pine – a gift she had intended for the new baby. A small wooden horse.

  We had in the wagon with us the small amounts of stock that had not sold; dried beans, tobacco and flour. It was mostly empty. Rachel and Thomas had plenty of room in which to stretch out while we drove onwards, and I looked back on them and thought how different they looked. They were still poor, still wearing worn clothes, but they had flesh on them, and their eyes were bright. Rachel’s dark hair shone like a beaver pelt, and Tom’s mouth seemed permanently bent in a slight smile, contented as a house cat. They were a far cry from the near starved and filthy children they had been the previous summer. There was life in them now, and hope.

  Our time in the forest had not been all bad, I could see that now.

  Laura had the reins, and the horses pulled us on obligingly. I glanced at her now and again, taking in the curve of her cheek, the generous softness of her hips and breasts. Bed rest and hefty amounts of camp food had worked as well on her as they had on the children. When the spring sunlight caught her braided hair, the few grey strands were gilded. She sat with her face upturned, looking towards the sky as we rocked
along.

  We had spoken a little about where we wanted to go. Neither one of us had changed our minds about farming; we didn’t yet have the funds to make it worthwhile, even with the money we’d received from Leehorn (which I suspected was more than we were owed). Laura thought we’d perhaps find a good living as stallholders, I’d agreed, remembering my trip to town and the small wagons that had been converted into stores. Perhaps we could sew up woollens as we had done for the men, and sell those? Maybe carry on with the tobacco and whisky as a side-line.

  Laura was taking us, in a sort of roundabout way, towards gold country. There were a great many men there in need of supplies, and she’d said she was only too willing to sell them what they needed to go scratching in the dirt like a bunch of crazy hens. Leaning back on the wagon seat beside her I let the watery sunlight prick my skin with warmth. There was no rush after all. We had money and no pressing business to drive us onwards.

  “I was thinking,” Laura said, after we’d been riding along for a while. “Will always used to say he’d build us a great big fine house, someday, when he had the money. Goddamn thing got bigger each year we were married – started out two floors, must’ve been a castle he had it in mind to build by the end. A castle with clapboard and windows made of glass.”

  “I’ve been to a castle,” I said, “on a trip to Europe my father took us on. Drafty, cold places, all stone and too-tall ceilings.”

  “Did you see a King?” Laura asked, raising her eyebrows in astonishment.

  I laughed. “It wasn’t a king’s castle. At least not anymore. It was a sort of ruin by then. I’ve forgotten who even owned it. I was just walking around it imagining I was a queen.”

  Laura chuckled. “You can dream at least. Anyway, I was thinking about that house he promised me and, well, when we’ve got a bit saved that’s what I’d like to do – build us a house like the one I’ve been dreaming of.”

  “Seven storeys of clapboard?”

  She swatted my leg. “I’d settle for one, maybe with a loft above for sleeping. Clapboard can hang as far as I’m concerned. And we needn’t have glass windows, just nice tight fitted shutters, to keep the drafts at bay in winter.” She seemed to consider for a moment. “It must have a pantry mind, on that I will not budge.”

  I laughed, and could almost see the house in my mind, a stout cabin of neatly chinked logs, wood furnishings burnished by the years and bit of beeswax, a patchwork quilt laid over a real bed, with carved posts. Our bed, in our home.

  “I can help build it,” Rachel piped up, “I watched the men all winter, and I think I could fell a tree if I had an axe. It doesn’t seem that hard.”

  I glanced at Laura and she didn’t seem sure whether to laugh or look worried. At last she seemed to settle on a mixture of the two.

  “Rachel Deene, you will do no such thing,” she admonished.

  “Tom’d help,” Rachel said, pouting.

  Tom nodded. “I would. Though I think you still need practice.”

  I lifted my face to the sun and laughed, and in that moment, I thought only of things we were headed towards, the things our lives together would be made of.

  Thanks for Reading!

  You can catch up with Laura, Cecelia, their family and some new faces in One Nation Afire, to be released later this year.

  Here’s the blurb and you can be kept up-to-date with new releases by following me on twitter @JollySnidge and on Goodreads, where I hope you’ll review this title.

  *

  Death was in Rachel’s life, as surely as an old friend.

  It is 1861 and the civil war looms.

  Ten years since losing two sisters to a disastrous summer on the prairie, since taking the life of her Father at the age of eight, Rachel is faced with the darkest days to yet befall her, as a soldier in the Union army.

  Miles away, near a cattle ranch in Texas, a lone child morns a murdered mother. Half-Osage and Half-Immigrant, the Confederacy becomes the only protection from an America at war with itself.

  In Confederate occupied West Tennessee, Laura and Cecelia are the outsiders. Hiding their secret in a hostile community pales in comparison to wondering if they’ll ever see their children again.

  All must ask themselves, what place will they have in the America to come?

  And will they ever be free?