Night Fires in the Distance

by Sarah Goodwin

  “It went out.”

  There was some wood split into stove lengths, I went to make a fire, conscious that she was watching me. Even though no one came to my home, I was still keeping up with my disguise. I had nothing else to wear and somehow it was easier to bear being dirty, cold and musty smelling if I could pretend that I really was James Clappe. To be Cecelia and feel the grease gathering in my hair, see the dirt caked under my nails, did not bear thinking about.

  With the fire starting to catch, I turned and looked at my visitor. I should have guess she would not be allowed to go to town. She was wearing a pair of what must have been Jamison’s trousers, with her own dark wool skirt kilted up over them for warmth. The shapes of her feet were almost indistinguishable in their lumpy brown stockings and she had a blanket wrapped about her, under her shawl. Her coat was also Jamison’s, and I could see that it had been worn to holes at the elbows. All around her strong face hung the curtain of her long, black hair.

  “Jamison went to town with Deene and his family,” she said, after a silence filled only by the crackling of the fire.

  “And you decided to walk ten or so miles in the snow?” Though I’d kept on with my disguise, I’d allowed myself to lose the rhythm of Clappe’s coarser voice and had to work to regain it.

  She was looking about her at the clutter of the soddie. “I knew you’d be here. Is there coffee?”

  I’d never met someone so forward and honestly I didn’t know her from a snow drift, but she had walked through the freezing wind to get to me, so the least I could manage was a pot of coffee. I put it on and sat down opposite her on a packing crate.

  “It’s hard, being out here alone,” she said.

  I nodded. Missy had settled by Martha’s feet and was looking up at her without a trace of suspicion.

  “Jamison doesn’t want me in town. Since they built the church there, he says people’ve been talking.”

  I could imagine. “Towns a fair distance, all of it frozen over, I’m surprised he went himself.”

  “He’s looking to marry,” she said, a frown creasing her heavy hewn brow. “Marry a woman from town and start having children. Children to inherit when he dies.”

  I felt a flash of pity for whichever woman was unlucky enough to end up with Jamison, remembering the whore from town. Would having a whore for a wife be any less sinful than keeping company with a native woman? Well, of course, but only by the narrowest of margins. “Are there any women in town looking for husbands?”

  Martha made a helpless gesture. “How would I know? I haven’t been since we passed through to get here. Maybe someone’s lost a husband, maybe there’s a daughter been orphaned, looking for a man to take care of her. Could be one of the whores he was with when he last went there.”

  I felt myself start and flush. Martha shook her head. “Of course I know. She knows too, Laura, what her husband is like. Jamison and him, they’re cut from the same cloth. Bad, mean stuff.”

  I was saved by the coffee pot, which was rattling on the stove top. When I had my back to her, pouring coffee and spooning in molasses, Martha spoke again.

  “I think mostly Jamison hates women, thinks they only please him because they want his money - which is true.” Her beetle black eyes found mine. “If I had anywhere else to go, I wouldn’t be with him. He talks to me like I’m one of the black women he knew back in Texas. One of the ones he got with child. Like I’m no better than a slave to him. Which is also true.”

  “Why don’t you leave? There has to be somewhere you can-”

  She shook her head. “There’s nowhere. What’s left of my family had to leave here. They’re living on a reservation in the south-east and there’s talk of cutting the land back further. There wasn’t enough food. Then we started to get sick. I was begging for food and coins when a white man knocked me down and stamped on my hand. You see, there are worse men than Jamison.”

  “And better ones.”

  She laughed. “For other women, probably. For me? White men who think I’m dirt, and most of the young men I knew are dead. The ones left drink and sit around because there’s no point in making anything of the poor land that they’re going to take from us anyway, or they rage and want to take us all on the move, on to a war we won’t win. Even you don’t want to be around me.”

  I couldn’t deny that it was so, but I wanted to offer her solace, the kind of empathy that I wanted for in Charles’s house. We were not so different in that respect, we both wanted to be understood, to have our pain acknowledged.

  “I’m sorry things are so hard for you,” I said and meant it.

  She shrugged. “They’re hard for everyone here, different, harder for some, but, hard all the same.” Again she shrewdly eyed the chaos of my larder shelf, the heap of soiled clothes. “I knew you’d struggle come winter, alone, shut up with no one to put things to rights.”

  “I’m sure I’ll learn to manage.” Even as I said it, I knew my heart wasn’t in it. “Truthfully I’ve been wanting to leave ever since the snow came down.”

  “But you won’t get far in it. It was foolish of Jamison to take the horses out and I’ve no doubt he has more experience than you.” She pulled her blanket and shawl closer around her, looked about at the walls and my tangled bed. “I would have thought you’d want to stay, for Laura.”

  My hand jolted the coffee cup. Martha smiled. It was the first time I’d seen her smile fully and the way her face transformed was almost unnatural; her eyes shone and her teeth, white as china, gleamed.

  “I don’t-”

  “You care for her. And she cares for you, I could see it in the way she spoke about you. She thinks you are a rare kind of man, better than her husband. Kinder. Maybe because you’ve never had a woman, or maybe because you come from a better family. Maybe you were just born to be kind.”

  “She doesn’t think well of me, not anymore.”

  “What did you do?” Her frown was like weathered wood.

  “I told a lie. She believed it and then she found out the truth.”

  “Why did you lie to her?”

  “Because I’m…I was in danger. I think I still am. The only way to protect myself was to tell a lie. When she became my friend I should have told her, but I didn’t, and now it’s too late.”

  “She might forgive you.”

  “I don’t expect she will. She’d certainly be right not to.”

  “The lie you told her, is it the same one you’re telling me?”

  I blinked, fear souring my stomach. “What do you -”

  “I watched you, chopping wood that day at the creek. You didn’t move like any man I’ve met. Didn’t talk to me like any man either. You have the thin hands of a woman, barely a whisker under that scarf you wrap over your face.”

  “Does anyone else know? Jamison?”

  She laughed like a tin plate spinning on the floor. “Jamison’s a fool and a pig. People like him, they never look too closely at a man once they know they could beat him. And Laura, I think she wanted James Clappe to be real, so badly, she didn’t want to see what was plain to me.”

  I couldn’t find the words to defend myself, to lie my way out of it. Even if I could have spoken, I knew it was useless. She was right, and she knew it.

  “I won’t tell Jamison, or anyone else.”

  “Why did you tell me, why let me know at all?”

  “Because one day soon, Jamison will force me to leave here, when he has his new wife. I’ll need your help then. And, because if you care about Laura at all, you will stay, and be here for her, because she is a good woman who has no one.”

  I had nothing to say to that, and with her bargain made Martha finished her coffee and bid me goodnight. I bolted and latched the door behind her, wrapping my blanket about myself against a cold that was not entirely due to the snow outside. I did not like the dark, and it was only partly because of the threat of wolves. At night it was always easier to recall the night that had marked the start of my total imprisonment
. The night I’d come upon Charles as he smothered Charlie in his cradle.

  Remembering how I’d slapped at him, uselessly trying to pull him away from Charlie made me angry; at myself and him. I should have done something, gone to Franklyn or the police. I should have been stronger. I hated myself and wished I’d had Martha’s courage to escape with my son before it was too late. I’d told myself Charles was only upset that Charlie was different, that he would learn to accept him and relent in his treatment of me. That I would be allowed outside again once he saw that nothing I had done could have made Charlie the way he was. I hadn’t let myself believe that it was getting worse, hadn’t seen the stubborn hatred in my husband until it was too late.

  The fear I’d felt in his house had paralysed me. That night I’d seen something so terrible I knew no one would believe it. Charles said that if I breathed a word it would be the asylum for me. Never for one moment did I believe he was not capable of it. I tried to be careful, to do as he told me, but my desperation grew and in the end he made good on his threat and summoned his doctor. Had I not fled I would’ve been locked away like a lunatic, with everyone around me believing Charles instead of me.

  Perhaps Franklyn might have taken my part in it before I’d run away, but now who would trust my word? I’d proven myself flighty and hysterical, given to fancy. I had let my fear take me hundreds of miles and months away from Charles, but it had been too late for my son. Far too late.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Laura

  Christmas day dawned, with it came the birdlike twitters of my girls as they searched their stockings. Thomas had a new axe head, flannel underwear and a pair of woollen stockings that I’d made especially thick and warm for him. The girls each had a pair, even Nora. I’d made her little woollen booties.

  Clappe’s mittens were still unfinished. Perhaps I could make something of them for Thomas.

  “Ma, put my hair up!” Rachel launched herself into my lap, brandishing her new ribbons, a gift I’d had put away since last harvest, in case we hadn’t the money for them later on.

  “Ma!” Beth patted my hand, trailing her own ribbons from her little fist.

  “Alright, alright, be patient now, Beth, come here.”

  “That’s not fair,” Rachel whined.

  “I’ll do your hair straight after, it won’t take a moment.”

  While Rachel sat at my feet in a sulk, I brushed Beth’s fine, flaxen hair and curled it around my fingers as best I could. Like me she suffered from poker straight locks. I managed to coax a small bunch of ringlets into existence and tied them neatly with the blue ribbon.

  “Now you.” I waved Rachel to my lap.

  Thomas was by the stove, fixing his axe head to a handle while Will stood over him, telling him to whittle a little more on either side, to make it fit. On the stove I had a venison stew bubbling and afterwards there was to be more Christmas pudding.

  “There,” I said, releasing Rachel so that she could shake her curls out.

  “It’s too tight.”

  “It’ll stay on then, won’t it,” I said.

  “Go sit, you can’t do anything right,” Will sighed, taking the axe head and handle from Thomas’s unresisting fingers. Thomas came to the table and sat down, looking at the fringe of brown paper decorations that hung all along the table’s edge.

  I touched his shoulder lightly. “Why don’t you come play a hand of Patience? You can have the first go.”

  Will glowered from the stove corner as I took out the yellowed playing cards and dealt them into small piles on the table, setting up the game. Rachel and Beth wanted to watch, so I lifted Beth onto a chair and left them to the game while I picked up Nora and held her.

  “Your first Christmas,” I said, watching her eyes, which had turned a darker and darker brown ever since she was born. They looked about constantly, her little mouth pouting and making ‘pop’ sounds in wonder. “You’ve put on a fair bit, I swear you gain a pound every time I pick you up.”

  Looking at her, on the most peaceful day I’d had since Christmas the previous year, I felt my heart, bitter clod of dirt that it was, soften. My eyes blurred as I looked at my beautiful baby girl. Hadn’t I thought she might not make it? Yet here she was, big and bonny and alive.

  I tickled her and she cawed with laughter.

  The touch of William’s hands on my waist startled me. I jumped a little, and half turned to look at him.

  “Getting big now, ain’t she?”

  I nodded, pulling away from him. “We’ll have to add to the house before long.”

  He huffed. “We’ll not be here next year. I’m going to put up a frame house come summer, give it a tile roof and proper puncheon under foot.”

  I doubted it. That floor would get drunk up along with the windows and the shingles and even the sticks of candy he’d promise to the children.

  “You don’t think I can?” he said, and all the eased-openness of my heart clenched shut again. “I can afford that house and I’ll get it for us.”

  “I know you will.”

  “And that Clappe bastard’ll be gone, ruined. I’ll claim that land too, seeing as it’s already worked, and hire me some men to farm it. Maybe get some Indians or, who knows, maybe we’ll be getting slaves up here like Jamison had down in Texas. Get them living in this place and there’s us, on up by the top field with a proper porch and a brass bed in a room with just the two of us.”

  I nodded, but if I were to speak God’s truth, I was praying for him to drink and whore the money away. Spare me a room alone with William Deene. What if he was right? Would Clappe, or whoever she was, be gone by spring? Wouldn’t that make me happy, to have the lying, troubled girl as far from me as possible?

  I found myself wondering how she was coping, alone in that little soddie. In my head I saw the room Will wanted, with painted wood walls and the big brass bed with a down quilt. I felt the ghost of her hand on mine, thought of us tucked away like two spoons in the warm.

  “I need a smoke,” Will said turning from me and fetching his pipe from the pocket of his coat. My heart jumped and my face burned. What was I doing?

  “Ma, come and play with us,” Rachel called.

  “What’s the game?” I shook off my thoughts of Clappe and her little chilblained feet tucked up with mine.

  “Old maid,” Thomas said, shuffling the cards.

  *

  As much as I wanted to forget her, Clappe wouldn’t leave me alone. While we ate our stew and pudding, her face, the startled, scared little face I’d seen that day in the soddie, came back to me. The smudges of sleeplessness under her eyes, her dirty hands marked with blood from splinters. She’d fought off a wolf attack but she’d looked at me in complete terror. Was she still afraid, hiding in her soddie for fear of what I might do, who I might tell?

  Did she think about me as much as I thought about her?

  I wasn’t one to put pity about blindly but just as I felt for Martha, being stuck with Jamison, I felt for her, being alone. After all, there were only our three small homes as far as anyone could see and we had to rely on each other. Hadn’t Will helped Jamison to build his home? And hadn’t Jamison taken Will to town? I wondered, lying in my bed, feeling the cold try and get its fingers under the blankets, if she needed help.

  I didn’t want to think about those other things, of us in a comfortable bed, or sitting inside with a lamp against the darkness, sipping coffee and wrapping presents for the children. Just seeing those pictures of us in my head I suppose anyone would have thought us friends, but it didn’t feel like that inside. Though I’d been without a friend for so long, maybe that’s what it was supposed to feel like, like a marriage. A marriage without fists and being pawed at or feeling alone even next to somebody.

  The next morning, once I’d built up the fire and put cornmeal mush on the table, I wiped my hands on my apron and sat down beside my husband. I knew what I had to do.

  “Will, I was thinking we should maybe offer Jamison so
mething for taking us to town, as he lost his horse.”

  William grunted.

  “Besides, you’re going stir-crazy stuck in here. A little male company would be good for you and for Thomas if you take him along.”

  I knew I’d raised his suspicions, so I let the idea sit and acted like it was nothing to me at all, thought all the time my heart was fluttering. Busying myself with dressing the girls, it wasn’t until I had the last button done up and the last curl tied neatly that he put down his coffee cup.

  “I’ll be going over to Jamison’s then. You want to bring the girls along?”

  “Beth’s still too delicate to go tramping through the snow, that trip to church knocked the wind out of her.” It was an easy excuse for him to swallow, mostly because he didn’t want the girls along and we both knew it.

  “You’ll be staying here then?” he said.

  “I’ve mending to do and anyway I wouldn’t want to leave Beth the whole day.”

  He nodded, and soon he was making preparations to leave. In his thick coat he wrapped his muffler around his neck, slung his rifle over his shoulder and took up the tin lantern to light his way if he returned after nightfall. I could tell Thomas wasn’t keen on going away with his Father, as I slipped a piece of corn cake into his pocket I kissed him on the top of his brown, ruffled head. I kept thinking I could tell them both to wait, that I would go with them, or that they should stay to do some job or other. I almost said it a dozen times, but each time I squeezed my jaw shut.

  “Be sure to tell Martha hello from me,” I said, as William pushed the door open, letting in a dagger of cold air.

  “Keep that fire up.”

  “I’ll be sure to.”

  The door slammed shut against the wind and I heard their footsteps crumping away in the snow.

  My stomach was a snake pit. I could make my excuses to the girls, leave Nora with Rachel and Beth and go across to see Clappe, but I was afraid to. Me, afraid of seeing a woman who wore men’s clothes! Wolves were to be feared, Will’s wrath, wild Indians and even the toothsome cold, but a woman? I pulled myself together. If she’d ever been a friend to me, I owed her this much.