Night Fires in the Distance

by Sarah Goodwin

  “Oh God, if my Father could see me…if Franklyn…oh Lord, help me.”

  No divine aid came and soon I had to force myself to get up and continue my work.

  I had the walls waist height by the time I started losing daylight. My hands were so ingrained with dirt that I looked like a miner. With no running water anywhere but the far off creek bottoms I went to the Deene well and drew myself up a bucket, which I slopped into my own and took back to my tent. I didn’t ask because that would give the miser a chance to say no. If he wanted me away from his well he’d have to force me. Despite my brazen Clappe-ish strides my heart was in my throat while I drew the water, but the soddie was quiet. Deene must have been away in the fields, or else inside, eating his dinner. My stomach snarled. I would have to cook something.

  Was there no end to it?

  I made a fire on part of the prairie that I’d stripped of sod. Once I’d washed my hands I dug about in the schooner and found the pot and ‘lug pole’ I’d bought in town. Who had named that contraption and what a ‘lug’ was I did not know and frankly did not care to find out.

  Though I’d hardly cooked for myself the whole way from Ohio, only really blackening meat or heating water, the pamphlet gave instructions for cornmeal mush. I boiled water, which took so long as to make me wonder if prairie water was somehow incapable of even that simple application, and sprinkled in cornmeal, stirring and watching it thicken. The resultant mass was edible, but not as good as Laura’s had been. I realised I’d neglected to add salt.

  That night I slept within the low walls of my new home, looking at them in the growing dark, marvelling what I had accomplished and dreading the work that was left to do.

  *

  The novelty of being on my own and working for my bread had been wearing thin even before I reached Indian Territory. Pride had kept me upright and desperation had kept me working on Deene’s field, but building that soddie came close to breaking me. It was the loneliness as much as the work. I think I could have stood it if I’d had someone to laugh with, or to sing, as Laura had at harvest, then I wouldn’t have felt so helpless. Being by myself was a constant reminder that the only person around to take care of me, was me.

  I dwelt more and more on returning to Ohio, but doing so made me think of Charles and I could hardly bear that. I still checked the horizon for horses or a carriage, listened for them at night. The wellspring of my fear was bottomless and some nights I woke in a sweat, drowning in it. The thought of living in his house again, where he held every key and decided my every day for me, was a terrible one. I’d seen no one in those last months but him and our few, silent servants, felt nothing but helpless. Imagining my return to that place terrified me. I knew that if Charles ever had possession of me again he would lock me away and leave me without even a window to the outside world.

  To keep myself sane I began to think of my brother, Franklyn, his memory kept my fears at bay. I could dream of him finding me and taking me back to his house, of him barring the door to Charles and promising to keep me safe. This daydream, though it was paper thin, helped me to face each fresh cut, bruise and aching muscle; it helped me to face the memories of Charles when they came, because in my mind at least, my brother listened to what I had to say about my husband.

  I spoke out loud to him, told him what I suspected he already knew, that I married Charles out of duty. How despite that I’d made myself be a proper wife, managing social events and the house, making arrangements for gifts and cards of condolence and celebration.

  Franklyn would pull faces at that and I told him that he was lucky to have his wife to remember such things for him. He could be so improper at times, arriving at the house unannounced, wearing good trousers with old work shirts and smoking indoors even in mother’s rooms.

  It was his lack of airs that made it easy to be frank with him. I could tell him how I’d hoped until the wedding night that I would grow to love Charles. How in the end I couldn’t feel either love, or womanly affection for him. My only solace was the birth of my dear Charlie, whom I loved with all my heart. Even with my pregnancy over, the restrictions Charles had placed on me; that I was to avoid exerting myself with managing the house or tending to correspondence, were not lifted. I was not permitted to go to town or even to receive or write letters.

  In my eyes at least, Charlie was perfect, whatever others said. Whatever his father said, or the endless parade of doctors that came to look at his motionless legs and tell us what we already knew – that he would never walk, or even crawl. Charles blamed me for that. He said again and again that is was the stress of my infrequent visits to my parents prior to my confinement that had ‘deformed’ our son. I was to be kept inside, to prepare for the next child. Charles was determined that another ‘mistake’ would not occur.

  Franklyn didn’t yet have children, but I knew I wouldn’t have to explain to him that when Charlie died, there was no comfort for me in that house. Charles was indifferent to his death and said often that I was young and would have other, stronger children, if I followed instructions that he brought to me from the doctor, and didn’t repeat my errors.

  Charlie was the strongest child I’d ever seen. There was never a louder cry, a brighter grin. It still made me sick with grief to remember standing in the nursery looking down at Charlie in his cradle, pale and blue under the lamplight.

  I’d denied Charles the possibility of more children, this I couldn’t share with my brother, even on the wide, lonely prairie, but I would tell him how, one night after supper, Charles said he would have me put away in an asylum if I didn’t control my grief. He’d taken the key to the nursery and locked it up. I’d started to flinch when he touched me, to stay in my room rather than share the dining room or parlour with him. He gave orders that no food was to be taken to me upstairs. So I did not eat until I felt I would faint, only then would I sit at table with him. I couldn’t look him in the eye.

  He began to bring the kitchen maid to his bed. I heard them in the hallway, talking. It insulted me, but I was almost relieved. I didn’t want him near me.

  The night I fled, Charles had wronged me beyond what I could endure. I spoke aloud while I worked on stacking the endless chunks of sod; told my brother how Charles had caught me passing a note to the boy that brought our groceries, to be delivered to my family. In it I had written what had happened to Charlie, what was happening to me, and begged them to visit me and not allow themselves to be turned away.

  Charles had dismissed the boy, then thrown the note into the fire and taken away my writing things. He said he would summon the doctor that night, and come morning I would be on my way to the asylum, where I would stay until he believed my wildness was under control. Then he would have me returned to his house.

  It was hard, recounting what happened after that, as my memory of it was so blurred and uneven. I must have been half out of my head, but I did remember taking jewellery from my dresser and a small amount of money. Charles had locked me in my rooms, but he had not considered the door to the servants’ stairs, which was behind a curtain in my parlour.

  I imagined that Franklyn would be the only one to not think me insane when I told of how, standing at the door to the kitchen garden, a voice in me cried out for the final time, ‘What are you doing? Have you taken leave of your senses entirely? Charles was right about you, you are hysterical.’ I swore to him that it was grief and fear for my own future safety, rather than sheer madness that forced me onwards.

  Being alone on the prairie I had no one else and I spoke to my brother for hours on end, just to hear my own voice in the silence. I wasn’t yet lonely enough to hear him answer, but I could see his face clearly and sometimes imagined what he would say to me. How he would have chided me if he’d known I’d boarded a stage early that morning not knowing where it was bound for, only that it was headed west.

  I told him as I stamped down my dirt floor how I’d left the stage in a town I didn’t know the name of. How I’d watched a man, a s
oldier, walk across the dirt road that separated one line of stores from another. How he walked with his head up, eyes taking a full look at the world ahead, looking at the other men before him as they looked back with indifference, or with nods of acknowledgement. How my focus on him was broken when a man tore open a door and threw a naked woman into the street.

  He called her a whore, was shouting about being cheated. She was shouting back, in some language I couldn’t understand. I saw, though I was fearful of staring, that she was an oriental.

  It came to me then, what to do. I knew then that I would disguise myself, as a man. He would laugh at that, I knew. Tell me how only I could come up with a plan so childish, but he’d be all fondness and smiles.

  Sometimes I missed him so much I could hardly see for tears.

  Chapter Eleven

  Cecelia

  Building up the walls took three days of cutting and hefting sod. After that I journeyed to the creek bottoms with my mustangs and brought back a log to split into wood for window and door frames. It took a further two days to cut enough slabs that weren’t crooked or splintered or faulted. I had trouble getting them even, never mind getting them to fit in the windows and door. In the end I hammered them in with the axe handle and none of them came out level. My hands were by then ingrained with black earth and covered in nicks, scrapes and splinters.

  On the sixth day it rained, so I spent a miserable day in my tent, while all around the water rushed into the grass, turned the floor of my house to mud and began to drip through the canvas over my head. All the while a smug thread of smoke came from Laura’s chimney, the light of her lamp glowed in her perfectly square windows.

  While I whittled away at endless pieces of wood I spoke with my brother, anything to block out the sound of the rain. I told him how I’d decided to move on as soon as possible, get further from Charles, who I feared more than anything else. I had yet to put my plan into action and so when I approached a man loading a wagon, it was as a woman. I had no other choice, I’d not yet got up the nerve to make good on my scheme to cut my hair and don men’s clothes. I told him that I needed to get further west to visit my mother, who was very sick. At the time I’d fretted that my telling the lie would somehow make the thing true.

  He’d find it funny that I was worried about something as silly as that, once I told him about everything else I’d been through since leaving Ohio.

  The man said he had a friend who’d be hauling buckets and tools out west in short order. He warned me that it wouldn’t be a comfortable journey. I gave him mother’s maiden name, Miss Clappe. I wanted Franklyn to know how clever I’d been, he was the only one who ever thought I was clever.

  I asked if all the men that were around were going out west and found that most were, looking for gold or farmland. Remembering Franklyn’s laugh I could imagine it issuing form him at the ideas running through my head. After all he’d heard me complain over the rain outside the drawing room window, had tried to interest me in the goings on of the country, in walks, in riding. To him it would seem impossible that I ever thought I could do it; claim land and make a home for myself with my own two hands.

  The journey was indeed, not comfortable. I spent several weeks sleeping in between stacks of buckets and other crude wooden goods. By day I rode on the plank wagon seat until my teeth felt they would shake loose and my bones seemed bruised all over from the rocking and the holes in the road. My traveling companion spoke little and seemed as wary of me as I was of him. In the towns we passed through he laid out his goods and I wandered the streets to stretch my legs and use my dwindling coins to buy food to share that evening. I grew dirty, thin and could not get the stink of horse and smoke out my dress, which by then had been stained all around the hem by mud and ordure.

  One thing I didn’t want was for my brother to think that I’d been alone in a world of terrible people and strange men. The tool merchant, a man named John was, I believe, a good man and there were others of his kind that I met along the way. Not many, granted, but enough. Looking back on it, I know that he probably didn’t believe me when I told him my mother was sickly. I think he helped me anyway, because he could tell I needed him to.

  *

  The rain exhausted me. When it ended I spent days in wet boots, with wet socks and at night I could hardly sleep for discomfort. I continued to speak to Franklyn, out loud now, though I’d been alone for so long that my voice cracked when I tried to speak. I imagined him responding, telling me not to lose hope, but I couldn’t make the words ring true.

  I longed for the sound of another person in the tent, their breathing and movement, their life. For over a week I had felt no one’s touch, not a handshake or a friendly embrace. More and more I found myself with my arms around my own body, seeking comfort.

  The only good thing that came from the storm was drinking water and the knowledge that it would be the last rain I suffered out of doors. It spurred me to make myself the best home I could. When the rain cleared and the stifling heat returned, I started my work again.

  I hammered scraps of wood around the frames to try and make them more level. I’d bought screens in town, and I took them and fitted them into the window frames, putting store-bought shutters on over them. They were all slightly crooked, but I made them fit as well as I could. With the aid of the schooner I was able to climb up high enough to lay poles, harvested from the creek beds, over the top of the house. Onto these I heaped freshly dried grass and covered it with sod. I wouldn’t know if the roof was adequate until it rained again.

  I wanted my brother to see it, to see me.

  Inside, without a door, I lay down on my grass stuffed tick and closed my eyes. Not since I’d opened the kitchen door at Charles’s house and looked out into the misty night had I felt such a sense of numbness and lightheaded fear. With the raising of the house I’d brought home to myself the knowledge that all my money was sunk into land that I couldn’t farm, and a house that I was convinced would collapse in the next strong wind. My eyes stung under their lids, and I felt tears trail down my face. My heart beat in a panic.

  Why, in Lord’s name had I left that morning? Why had I not gone to my brother and at least tried to make him believe me when I told him how afraid I was? He would have seen it my eyes that it was no fancy on my part, and protected me. Even at that moment I could have been in his house with his wonderful wife, being cared for while Franklyn saw to it that I was provided for and free of Charles for good. But instead I’d run away and was, for all the distance between us, still terrified of my husband.

  Now I was lying in the middle of nowhere, in a building hardly fit for cows, with an aching back and dirty, torn nails, and a barn still to build, mustangs to feed, a wash to get on, food to cook, land to prepare. All life’s work stretched out between me and the grave. I was so tired, all I could do was lay there and let the tears run.

  A knock came, and I jerked upright, turning to the doorway, where Laura stood, her hand still raised to the empty doorframe.

  “Sorry,” as she stepped back into the light I saw the consternation on her face, “I only came to see how the inside looked and to help with the hinges.”

  I scrubbed the tears from my cheeks. How much more pride could I lose before I consigned myself to the gutter in sackcloth?

  “I’m glad, I wanted to have a door up by tomorrow night.” I stood up and bid my eyes to stop burning. “Would you show me how to go about making one?”

  She stepped into the shadow of my shuttered hovel and looked around at the stove and the cupboards, and the walls, which I’d been so stupidly proud of only two weeks since, when I’d first raised them off the ground.

  “I wouldn’t mind a sit down, I can make a cup of tea, if you have some. Thomas has the girls, I’d appreciate a rest.”

  I noticed for the first time the sweat patches under her arms, the way wisps of her hair were caught on her damp throat.

  “You’ve worked hard this morning,” I went to the stove and star
ted to pick chips from the bucket beside it. “Please, let me.”

  She sat on one of the boxes that I’d left on the floor to serve as chairs and I could feel her watching me as I struggled to set a fire, filled the kettle and set it to boil. “I take it William isn’t at home.”

  “He’s hunting, hopefully shooting some game since we’re down a side of pork,” she sighed, “I put it in brine but it already rotted through.”

  “Shame,” I said, measuring tea and putting it in the little tin teapot I’d bought for myself.

  “Well, means I can help you today.”

  “That’s true.”

  While the water boiled she made me get out leather strips and a knife. There was a basket of scrap wood from the door and windows and she showed me the method of making holes in the wood, threading the leather in such as a way as to produce a hinge when the wood was secured to the doorframe.

  I made the tea and strained it, pouring out two black cupfuls.

  “You have to be the only man in Indian Territory with a teapot.”

  I flushed. “It was drilled into me that it makes the only tea worth drinking.”

  “That’s true.”

  “I don’t have milk I’m afraid, didn’t think it would survive the trip.”

  “Oh, it’s passable,” she said dryly. “Sometimes I find myself dreaming of fresh milk, still warm, Or sweet butter, cream in my coffee…perhaps one summer William’ll buy a cow. I’d settle for a goat.”

  “I confess, butter making would be beyond me, even with a bowl of cream set by.”

  She smiled a half-smile, “Then you should marry.”

  Her eyes wandered the walls of the soddie, the air around us was warm from the stove and it smelt of parched grass and earth and tea. “I imagine she’ll be happy to have a house already built. Some days I wish William would’ve made the journey alone and been done with all this before we married.”