Night Fires in the Distance

by Sarah Goodwin

  The whiskey came in thick glasses, carried by the barman, his soot coloured moustaches dropping with sweat. It was warm in the saloon, a damp, corruptive heat. Jamison paid, and the barman went away without a word.

  “To neighbours,” Jamison said, downing his shot and exhaling in appreciation.

  “To neighbours,” I echoed, gulping my glass and coughing. It was like the stink of creosote, only in my mouth and burning my throat.

  The two men laughed, and William clapped me on the back.

  “Never had a proper drink,” he took his whisky in one swallow, bared his teeth. “Did they not carry this vintage at your father’s club?”

  I glared at him, my eyes still wet. “Another.”

  He smiled nastily, waved for the barman.

  The second shot was worse. As the glasses were refilled continuously, I gained a little control over my facial expression, keeping it blank as the awful liquor burnt a hole in my stomach.

  “Oh she was ugly,” William was saying, as I put my glass down for the tenth or twelfth time, “young though, and she had thighs like risen dough. She worked for my father, cleaned the fireplaces and polished all the brasses. I met her on the cinder path between the house and the river, she let me lay her in the grass and look under her skirts. After, I showed her mine - she said I might as well put it in.”

  Jamison laughed with him, laughter as dark and smutty as a lamp chimney.

  “Mine was a friend of my sisters. I made her come into the cellar with me, in the dark. I put her hand on my prick and she petted it like she would any fine pony.”

  My head felt loose on my neck and my eyes were heavy. The heat of the whisky made my legs and stomach warm, but my hands cold. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to be sick.

  “Clappe? Who was she, your first girl?” Jamison asked.

  I blinked at him.

  “He never has, look at him,” William crowed, “he’d blush to see a woman’s shoulder.”

  “Don’t tease the lad,” Jamison said, nudging William with a wink, “clearly he’s one of those religious types.”

  “I’m no more religious than you,” I found myself saying, my weightless head opening it’s numb mouth and letting the words come. “I had a girl in Indiana.”

  “Oh really, and what did this fine woman look like?” Jamison asked.

  My mouth moved without my consent, spilling words like wine from a cracked jug. “She was fair and good. Soft, though she was a hard worker with arms like thick rope. She came to my tent one night, crept in and begged me to take her with me. She lay with me and she would have come west too, only…” My mind, muddled with the picture of Laura crouched at the mouth of my tent, the stars bright behind her, stumbled. “Only she had a husband and child.”

  Jamison slapped me on the back. “It’s a good story, even if it is a tall one.”

  William said nothing.

  Fortunately, Jamison started looking to the whores in their corner and quickly forgot about his teasing of me.

  “What would you say to some company tonight, eh Will?”

  William followed his gaze and I watched him smirk. “Could be a cold night, wouldn’t want to catch our deaths.”

  Jamison lifted a hand to the women and they came across, hips swishing, swirling their skirts. One was thin and pale haired, her exposed bosom topped with bones that stuck out like antlers under her skin. The other, fat and with threads of white in her dark hair, had fingers short and thick as the pipe she was sucking on.

  “How much?” Jamison asked.

  The women shared a look, and the thin one spoke. “Fifty cents, that’s each go mind.”

  I was appalled. I’d heard on my way west that most saloon girls, though coarse and immodest in many cases, were not generally whores. They enticed men into the establishment and talked them into buying more drinks, as well as entertaining them with songs and dance. This saloon was clearly of the lowest sort. The whore had named a price lower than that of the bitch I’d bought as a second rate guard dog.

  Jamison agreed to her terms, stood unsteadily and ushered them along with us as we left the saloon.

  Our camp was to be on the grass not a hundred feet from where the wagon was secured. Jamison had the blonde and William took the pipe smoking woman. Not wanting to see what they were doing, I went to the wagon and sat on the backboard. Nearby, laid on the damp grass, I could just about see the moonlit shape of William Deene’s buttocks, lifting and falling, luminous as toadstools. His grunts and the woman’s piercing, ‘hiheehiheehiheehi-hi-hi-hunh!’ carried through the air.

  I felt my dog nudge under my arm and patted it gently. I thought of Laura, and wondered if she knew what her husband did when he went to town alone. I wondered, did she care? Or was she just relieved to be left to her sewing and her children, where she could pretend she was a widow.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Laura

  When Jamison brought his woman across to the soddie I felt a sinking in the stomach. She looked right through me when she climbed off the wagon. Will gave me a squeeze and told me to ‘be good’. Then they were gone over to Clappe’s, to take him off to town with them. I was glad Will had extended some neighbourly help to him, even if it was doubtless just to keep us from speaking while he was gone. I felt a little sorry for Clappe at the thought of Will and Jamison making sport of him and his manner.

  Still, once they were gone I was stuck with silent Martha. For all the company she provided I could’ve put a bonnet on a stump.

  Inside, I put Rachel to jarring the coffee I’d been parching. Thomas was fitting a blade to one of William’s axe handles. Beth and Nora were sleeping, which only meant that I was given no excuse to put off teaching Martha to sew.

  “How about some coffee?” I said.

  She nodded and sat down at the table, looking about her with a tight, expressionless face. My heart was in my boots. I’d wanted some female company for as long as I cared to remember, some friendly talk and a smile. It seemed I wouldn’t be getting it, but I determined to get the best of what was on offer. Silent suspicion was a change from silent anger.

  I put on the pot and took out my work basket, fussing with the pieces of cloth I’d already cut for my new dress and the half knitted scarf I was working on. Once the coffee was ready I poured a cup for myself and one for Martha. Sitting opposite her, I saw that her hands were very clean, the nails short and scrubbed. She had the wrinkled fingers of a hard worker.

  “I heard you need some help with sewing,” I said.

  She nodded, and took a bundle of cut out pieces from a sack she’d brought with her.

  I puzzled through the pieces, saw she was in the process of making a shirt, using an old one as a pattern. Some pieces had been stitched, but clumsily, and the stitches were already coming apart.

  “You want finer work on the thin cloth,” I pointed to where it had ripped. “You can’t pull the thread hard, you’ve got to keep it gentle and steady.”

  She was staring at the seam, not blinking. I wondered if she was offended by my ‘lesson’ or she just wished she’d been left by her own fireside in peace. I was quickly getting used to her silence and small expressions, I only hoped she’d get more at ease with me, else it would be a long stay for her.

  “Why don’t you try making a seam on another piece while I unpick this?”

  I took the stitches out carefully, not wanting to cut the thread to pieces and waste it.

  “Ma, can I have some scraps for Pudding?” Rachel asked. Pudding was a ragdoll she was making, in need of drawers and eyes, as well as some hair and an overall wash.

  “Once you’ve put the last of the buttons on your new dress.”

  “But I’ve already sewn them on, you took them off.”

  “That’s because they weren’t put on straight, once they’re sewn on right, you can have a scrap to make Pudding a matching dress.”

  With a huff that put the woes of the rest of the world to shame, Rachel went to fetch her little wor
k box.

  “Little girls, harder to corral than cats,” I remarked.

  Martha’s mouth hitched up, like it wanted to smile but couldn’t remember how. I watched her blunt, fingers as she struggled to sew straight lines of tiny stitches. Two of the fingers on her right hand were crooked, clearly broken once and poorly set. The off shape of her index and middle finger meant that she was forever catching herself with the needle.

  I reached across and took it from her hand. “You can hold it like this,” I showed her, holding the needle between my thumb and my ring finger, “with practice it won’t even feel strange.”

  For the first time her eyes met mine, knowing.

  “I’ve had my share of cuts and scrapes that made it hard to sew, but the work couldn’t wait.”

  She took her hands from mine, holding the needle and making motions with it, practicing a stitch in the air.

  “Was it your husband, giving you ‘cuts and scrapes’?” she said. Her first words to me.

  “No,” I glanced at Rachel and Thomas, both of them lost in their work, still, I lowered my voice. “Did Jamison do that to your hand?”

  She shook her head. “Someone else, a long time ago.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She ducked her head as if it didn’t matter.

  “Is he…kind?” I asked, and even as the words left my mouth I knew I’d stepped over a line.

  Her face didn’t change. She only picked up the pieces of the shirt and tried a stitch with her new grip. “He doesn’t hit me.”

  She sewed, I finished unravelling her earlier work and picked up my knitting. She had a whole sleeve done and I was casting off on the scarf I’d made for Thomas when she spoke again.

  “You and Clappe are stepping out?”

  She’d kept her voice barely a whisper, but I froze, my eyes darting to hers. I’d done nothing but I was already guilty. I knew that. Guilty of wanting.

  “Your husband doesn’t like him,” she continued, “said to Jamison that he acts better than he is. Seemed as though he had reason to be acting jealous.”

  “I’m faithful,” I said shortly.

  She looked at me, into me. “Jamison told me he’d kill me if he caught me making a fool of him. He’s like your husband.”

  My body was cold.

  “I don’t mean to frighten you,” she said, “only, your husband is a suspicious man, and what with you being the only lady that’s been decent to me since I came here, I wouldn’t want you in trouble.”

  My throat was tight, I realised that her rudeness had been a kind of defence against any scorn from me.

  “I’m not a lady,” I said finally, “I’d say we’re just about even.”

  “Barefoot prairie wives,” she said hollowly.

  I nodded.

  “You lost a stitch,” she said, pointing out the mistake I’d made in my distraction.

  “I can fix it.”

  It was hard to be comfortable with her in the house. I knew she was just like me, tied to the fate of the man she was with, but there was a difference to her that made me sad. I knew little about the Indians, only the massacres and skirmishes that reached us as news; scalping, burnt farms, stolen horses, children sold to Mexicans down south. William said she was Osage, which meant nothing to me. Sitting in front of me, wearing a plain calico dress, white bonnet strings bright against her dark skin, was my first Indian. I tried to imagine her in skins, with beads sewn to her clothes and knotted in her hair. It was as hard as imagining a lamppost on the prairie. It seemed wrong to me that she was so far from her people and their ways.

  “Do you miss your family?” I asked, after a while.

  “I haven’t seen them since I was very young.” She bit the end from the thread and picked it from her straight, white teeth. “Do you miss yours?”

  “Not often.” It was true. Only sometimes, when I was half dead with tiredness, feeling my eyes grow wet, knowing there were a hundred things I’d get the sharp edge of Will’s tongue for leaving undone, I felt myself wish for my girlhood. Wishes were hard to hold onto on the prairie, they took to the wind like feathers.

  We worked until she’d pricked her fingers too many times to keep her patience. By then I’d laid aside my finished scarf and boiled up a bean porridge. I woke Beth and gave her a small bowl, which she almost manage to finish. After dinner, Martha made me a gift of a berry pie, which she’d baked specially. I could see in her face the shy pride she took in it, and knew that had I been rude or unkind to her, she would still have presented me with it. I was glad to have earned the kindness fairly.

  While we ate the pie I decided that I liked her.

  As the night began to draw in, my mind turned to what the men were getting up to in town. I dearly hoped that Will would remember to get us a dog before he went to the saloon to lighten his pockets.

  I suppose there are some women who spend their lives wondering if their husband is unfaithful. They might lie awake, alone at night and picture their husbands in the arms of neighbour women, servants, whores. All their lives, wondering, until their husband passed away, or they did, and all that fretting died with them.

  Will had been using whores since before I married him. I knew, because after we were married he used to come home drunk and talkative. He’d climb into bed, smelling of beer and tell me about the woman he’d fucked before coming to bed with me. Back then it had horrified me, I’d often left the bed to go and sit by the fire in the kitchen.

  Gradually he wore away my sensibilities, that, or I’d simply became too tired to give up my bed.

  Since we’d been in Indian Territory he’d had little chance to indulge his habit. I knew though that, when he went to town alone, he took more money with him than he needed and never came back with goods to account for the balance. As soon as he’d put the idea to me, of his going off to town with Jamison, I knew he’d be stopping at the saloon.

  My thinking was - better some whore than me. Let her carry his next child. Let him spend himself elsewhere, even if he spent our money in the process.

  It was Martha who spoke about it first, after Thomas had gone to feed and water the oxen with Rachel. Beth was sleeping and I had Nora at my breast. We hadn’t lit the lamp, the fire from the stove provided some light. I was surprised to find myself smiling.

  “I suppose they’ve got to drinking,” she said, plaiting three lengths of rag with her quick fingers.

  “It’s likely.”

  She shook her head slowly, “Jamison’s one for saloon girls, and for the whores. I wonder that he comes back from town with any money at all.”

  I was poking wicking into candle moulds, so they’d be ready to fill in the morning, my arms a careful circle around Nora. “I wonder that about William too. Though with what we earnt this year, I don’t know what kind of woman would offer more than a handshake for it.”

  “I don’t think I’ve met a man that wouldn’t spend his last cent on a woman.”

  I tipped my head to one side, struggling with the sharp tin where the holes were punched into the mould. “My father wouldn’t. I never knew him to be away from the house overnight unaccompanied. For business he would take Mother along and leave us with his sister.”

  “Perhaps it’s only the men out here,” Martha allowed. She paused, as if considering, and I believe she read my mind, for she said, “Mr Clappe, he doesn’t seem the sort for whores. Is he a drinker?”

  “Not that I’ve seen.”

  “And he has no woman?”

  “No. Though he’s been to town, and he spoke of leaving things in Ohio that he could not replace. Perhaps he had a girl there but couldn’t marry her.” The thought made me ache, the way I’d ached for separated lovers in the stories my aunt had shared with me on the nights she took care of us.

  “He looks like someone who would marry well,” Martha said, “not a working man.”

  “I expect his family were rich, maybe it was a scandal that stopped him.”

  Her eyes were shrewd.
“You’ve thought about it.”

  “There’s little enough to think about out here. Good gossip is hard to come by.” I could feel a flush creeping up my neck.

  “I imagine I’m the source of most of it at the moment.”

  I nodded without thinking, putting aside the mould.

  Martha said nothing else about it. Once the fire’d burnt too low to see by she went behind the screen to change for bed. I settled the children and undressed to my shift. We shared mine and Will’s tick. She smelt like smoke and sweat, gave off a soft heat that warmed the bed.

  “What kind of scandal?” she said, after a while.

  “He has a sister, he said she had a bad husband. Maybe she got into trouble, shamed his family. Maybe he got a girl in trouble himself, though I doubt it, he seems…innocent. Of women at least.”

  She sniffed, thinking. “I suppose he’ll be married before we’re into winter. A long courtship out here is barely ten days.”

  She was right. The shortage of women meant that there was fierce competition for any daughters or widows. I thought of Rachel, sleeping only a few yards away. Would she marry a good man, or would she marry someone like Jamison; a man four times her age with land to work and no patience for her disobedient nature? I thought of her, all grown, marrying James, and tasted jealousy as bitter as a nettle leaf.

  We slept, and I slept very soundly. Martha was good company, quiet and still. For the first time in a long time I let my guard down enough to rest and didn’t wake until the sun was well up. Opening my eyes to the far side of dawn, with the smell of coffee rising from the stove, was the nicest thing I’d woken to in quite some time.

  After breakfast I fed Nora and Martha took Rachel and Beth’s interest by showing them how to turn a long braid of rags into a mat. Thomas and I went outside to feed the oxen.

  I was scattering hay into their feed box when I turned my head and caught him looking at me. It was just a look, in the shadow of the murky barn, but it cut through me. I straightened, dropping the last of the hay.

  “Ma…” he stopped there.

  “Mmm?”

  “Why were you talking about Mr Clappe last night?”