He looks at Jane and smiles, and it seems to me a seedling of friendship must have been planted between them during my recovery.
“Yes, verily. Now, let’s talk about our plans for getting away from this cursed place.”
We stay in the encampment for two more days before we leave. Even after two whole days of lying abed and drinking a gallon of chicken soup, I am still weak when we begin our trek into the mountains.
Mr. Redfern found a map in and amongst a trunk of Gideon’s effects, as well as a daguerreotype of Gideon and his parents that Jane immediately threw into the wood stove—the girl is ever so superstitious—and by locating the approximate area where we expected Haven to be we mapped out a route along trails.
Like our trip to the encampment, the way is mostly deer track, and we can only travel for a couple of hours before I have to rest. Jane carries four chickens in a cobbled-together cage, their clucking and peeping making clear their feelings on the matter, while Mr. Redfern leads the way, breaking trail in some areas so that we can negotiate the way. It is tough going, and the nights are much cooler than the days. I had thought our trek with the wagon train on the Siskiyou Trail had been difficult, but it pales in comparison to our mountain trek.
But our persistence pays off, and on the sixth day of our trip, just as Jane is beginning to make hints about eating another chicken, we hear the sounds of hammering. The deer track we are on deposits us onto a small road, and there, carved out of the trees and located upon a wide, swift moving creek, is Haven.
It is larger than I imagined, with at least ten solid houses as well as a church and what looks to be a saloon or general store. People go this way and that on their business, and it might seem completely normal excepting that there are a fair number of Negroes.
It looks as near to Heaven as I have ever imagined.
Mr. Redfern turns back to Jane and me. “Well, here we are.”
“Indeed,” I say, leaning against Jane. I am still a bit taxed from the after-effects of Gideon Carr’s injection, and the relief that we have finally reached our destination fairly overwhelms me.
“Why don’t we see if anyone has seen Sue or Juliet?” Jane says. But we do not have to go looking because Sue finds us.
“Jane! Katherine! Sheriff Redfern!” Sue yells from the frame of a house in the midst of being raised. The folks working together get the frame up and in place before she strides over to us. She beams as she gathers both Jane and I up into a massive hug. “You ain’t dead!” she exclaims, releasing us and giving us a huge grin.
“We are not,” I say.
“But we are tired and thirsty and need somewhere to put our poor chickens,” Jane says. Sue’s exuberance has made the chickens flap in the cage. Feathers fly up and around us.
“Those chickens are going to be bald by the time they get to a henhouse,” I mutter, waving away a stray feather that tries to creep up my nose.
“They’ve had a taxing journey,” Jane says. “It ain’t their fault.”
“Well, you two are just in time,” Sue says. She points behind her to the house being raised. “That’s for me and Roy. We’re getting married!”
Jane whoops in delight, and I cannot help but clap my hands with happiness. I might be tired, but we all begin to jump up and down in excitement, which of course just causes the poor chickens no end of grief.
Our celebration is interrupted by a scream splitting the otherwise lovely day, and a woman with lightly burnished golden skin runs toward us, tears streaming down her cheeks. Her hat, a lovely powder-blue confection that matches her day dress perfectly, flies off, and a couple of men rush to retrieve it. She is beautiful, so much so that it is impossible to look anywhere but right at her.
“Jane, my baby, is that you?” the woman wails, now fully into her hysterics. We all freeze in our felicitations because the woman bears an uncanny resemblance to Jane.
Sue smiles and squeezes Jane’s shoulder. “She been waiting for you,” she says, voice hushed.
Jane for her part looks as though she has seen a ghost, her eyes wide and skin gone ashen.
“Momma?” she whispers.
The woman gathers Jane up in her arms even as Jane has frozen, shock making her limbs rigid. Sue and I take a few steps back to give Jane and her momma room. On the other side of Jane, Redfern melts into the gathering crowd. Apparently heartfelt reunions are not his thing.
“Jane, what happened to your arm?” the woman wails, and the question unmoors Jane. She takes a step back, putting space between herself and her mother.
“Is Auntie Aggie here?” Jane asks, hope brightening her eyes. She looks past her mother to a woman that had been walking with her, a couple of small boys holding each of her hands.
“Oh, Jane, I am so sorry. Aggie didn’t survive the trip out west. Her heart, you know. But this is Edith, do you remember her from Rose Hill? And look, these are your brothers, Jane. Are they not the most precious? Robert, that’s my husband, well I’m not quite sure where he’s gotten to. He’s the mayor! I am once again a woman of consequence.”
The woman continues on, telling Jane about her life in Haven, and her long trip from Kentucky to the sea, and then by boat to California. But Jane is not listening. Tears streak down her cheeks, her face twisted with an anguish her momma either cannot or will not acknowledge.
Without warning, Jane drops the cage holding the chickens, the fragile cross-hatching shattering. The chickens fly up a few feet, feathers flying in all directions. Jane’s mother takes a few steps back, and Jane, without a word, turns on her heel and walks back the way we came.
—JANE—
Chapter 49
In Which the End Is Near
My first two weeks in Haven are spent shoring up the town’s defenses and avoiding my momma.
The former is on purpose, the latter is a fortunate happenstance.
Haven needs a strong wall. The mountains provide some protection, but the dead are stalking California now, and it is only a matter of time before they come knocking on Haven’s door. People are arriving every day, brought in by the same advertisement that Jeb and the others from San Francisco saw. It seems to me that making sure any town is safe should be a priority. Even if we can all agree that it ain’t forever. But something is better than nothing, so strong defenses it is.
And so, I get to work with the help of Sue, Katherine, and a few others.
A better wall, a water wheel built off Gideon Carr’s notes from his thrice-cursed but useful notebook, and a series of fortified fences to provide a necessary boundary against shamblers, whenever they arrive.
There’s also a diagram for some sort of battery in the notebook, and while I have no idea what the schematic says—it seems to be written in math, that foulest of all languages—Mr. Stevens is quick to pitch in. We might even learn how to erect an electric fence soon.
As for Mr. Stevens, he’s very helpful and always underfoot, and one night at dinner my mother has the audacity to say, “Jane, I do believe you are being courted.”
“A body has to want to be courted to be courted,” I say, and it puts an end to the conversation right quick.
Suffice it to say, my reunion with my mother is nothing like I’d imagined. Our conversations are full of stop-starts and long pauses. I ask about Auntie Aggie, about how her end came about, and Momma begs off because it’s too painful. Edith ain’t much help. She never knew Auntie Aggie very well, and all she can tell me is that she was buried somewhere alongside the trail on the way from Sacramento. Her heart, like momma said, gave out. And that is that. Sometimes the people we love fiercest leave the world like a whisper.
It’s a blow that I ain’t been expecting. Momma also doesn’t want to hear anything about my trials and tribulations on the way to Haven. Whenever Robert, a fine man with velvety brown skin and a keen mind but perhaps questionable taste in women given how he dotes on my mother, asks about the combat school or my life up to now, Momma gives him a sharp look and declares, “Let’s
not talk of such things at supper.” It’s like there’s no room for my life in her portrait of domesticity. The dead, and all the woes they bring, have no place in her world.
Day by day, my discomfort grows. While everyone else seems to adore Haven—Sue is jumping the broom, Lily attends school and helps Miss Mellie May with her boardinghouse, Tomás teaches all the other kids swears in Spanish, and even Katherine has found some aptitude as a teacher of the defensive arts—I am at a loss. Haven is a sheep’s pen and I am a wolf, lean and hungry and deadly. I do not belong here.
But the hardest thing to accept is that my momma really did forget about me. She’s been building a new life, one of love and warmth, while I’ve been struggling just to survive, to hold on to my humanity. Aside from our first meeting, during which she performed her grief and joy for the whole town, she has seemed more put out by my presence than happy. I find myself helping out where I can with the building of houses and the planting of gardens rather than spending an extra moment with her. The whole situation causes a curious sort of bitterness to rise up, and I tend it like a spring seedling, feeding it my grief.
Not that I don’t love my momma. I do. But I don’t think I like her much as a person.
The old Jane would’ve gone along to get along, but that girl died in Nicodemus, and thank God. It’s been a spell since we’ve been in each other’s presence, and the more time I spend with the woman that birthed me the more I realize that my memory ain’t nothing like the reality. I start to remember all the small hurts inflicted by my mother, all the bad times that greatly outnumbered the good. It doesn’t help a lick that she’s got little ones to chase about. She dotes on Romeo and Tybalt in a way she never could me, and it’s clear that they are well loved even if Edith tends to most of their needs. They will be beautiful boys when they get older. I try to remind myself that the babies are my younger brothers and I shouldn’t envy them but I do.
I don’t fit.
Spending time with my momma and her new husband makes me feel like a dark cloud raining down on her happiness. She loves being the mayor’s wife, and she flits about her duties like a goddess of industry, overseeing the stores and preparations for next winter, immaculately dressed even though Haven is far from any sort of cosmopolitan society. It’s not far from what she did at Rose Hill. Only I suppose without the stress of trying to pass as white.
Meanwhile, I feel as though Haven is smothering me. Or maybe it’s just the staying in one place. When I was on the road my nightmares couldn’t catch me. Here, they come to roost.
Most nights I wake in the middle of sleep, a scream half trapped in my throat as terror stalks me. Or, if I let myself go idle too long, I fall into imagining once more that terrible end that befell the Turners or wondering where Redfern’s other Survivalist towns are, the ones he let slip that one time in conversation. When I asked him he said, “I’m sure they’ve met their end by now, Jane.” But what if they haven’t? What if there is a version of me out there struggling against the weight of hatred and injustice as I once did? What if my time could be better spent out in the world, righting all of the wrongs that I can?
The more time I spend in the idyllic setting of Haven, the more I wonder about such things, until my feet itch to leave.
But Sue is getting married, and while our friendship ain’t what it once was, especially since I am fighting very hard to keep my dark feelings to myself so as not to ruin her impending vows, she is my oldest friend. And I cannot leave before she gets hitched.
May is a whirlwind of activity, and even as I’m helping to stitch Sue a trousseau, which I can still do surprisingly well, even one-handed, I’m thinking about leaving. So much so that one afternoon, a few days before the wedding, Katherine loses her patience with me and snaps her fingers an inch away from my nose.
“Jane, I was asking you if you plan on wearing those trousers of yours to Sue’s wedding or if we should see about cutting down another one of your mother’s dresses. Where are you these days?”
Katherine, Sue, and I are in the sitting room of the rooming house recently built by Miss Mellie May and her brother, Carolina Jones. Salty lies on the rug at our feet, Tomás by his side. Lily has been trying to embroider a hem with tiny daisies for nearly an hour, and every time she pokes herself she swears and Katherine murmurs, “Language, Lily.” Miss May comes in and out with refreshments as we work, and I should be happy. This is everything I thought I wanted.
But I feel like all my insides are made of rusty blades, rubbing together in an awful way. Only, this time, I know why.
Both Sue and Katherine have resided in the boardinghouse since it was completed. I’d intended to move there as well, if for no other reason than to be near the people I cared about. Carolina and his sister had taken over looking after Tomás while I was chasing Gideon Carr, and it was a brilliant fit. They adore the boy more than the sun itself and I didn’t have the heart to break up their happy family, but it was another reason to take a room. Plus, I wanted to live somewhere other than my mother’s house. I had coins enough, and I was a fifth wheel within my family, even with Edith there, but when I’d mentioned it Momma had taken herself to her room and refused to come out until her husband, Robert, had begged me to reconsider.
“Gone. I’m gone,” I say now, in answer to Katherine’s question. When she arches a blond brow all the things that have been rattling around in my head the past few weeks come spilling out, how of all the places I’ve been, this is the first place that just doesn’t seem to need me.
Haven is a great place for folks like Sue, those who want to settle down and get to raising a family. For me, this ain’t where I belong.
I want something more.
I want the purpose I had when we went searching for the Spencers in Baltimore or struggled to escape Summerland. I want the freedom I had when Callie and I made our own way across the continent. I want the sense of justice I felt when I lived by my wits and hunted the men and women who plagued civilized society. Less killing would be nice, I don’t miss that, but if killing is the price of freedom then I’m willing to pay it.
Katherine gives me a long look before putting down her sewing. “You are leaving.”
“Yes,” I say. I don’t tell her anything beyond that. If anyone can understand how I feel, it’s Katherine.
“Not before my wedding, I hope,” Sue says, and for the first time in all the years I’ve known her, there is murder in her eye.
“No,” I say with a smile. “After. I promise. And I will even wear a dress.”
Katherine looks down at her lap, as though that was no longer the question she wanted answered.
“As far as I am concerned you can wear a flour sack as long as you’re there. Katherine is the one pushing to make sure we all look like cream and cocoa,” Sue says.
“This is the first wedding I have ever been to, will you please just let me make us all beautiful?” she wails.
Our answering laughter fills me with light and joy. But I still know, deep in my heart, that it is time to go.
And as everyone else laughs, Katherine is looking only at me.
It is a gorgeous wedding.
Sue and her beau hop the broom and we all cheer. Even Daniel Redfern has managed to make a rare appearance for the celebrations. There’s no proper preacher in Haven (to the town’s credit in my opinion) but Thaddeus Stevens is all too happy to officiate. His voice goes on and on about love and commitment and by the time Sue kisses her blacksmith I’m half asleep.
After the service, as we all make our way to the tables set up for the occasion, Thaddeus Stevens stops me. “Ah, Miss McKeene, might I have a word with you?”
Before I can answer he’s taken my bouquet of wildflowers and handed it off to Katherine while pulling me away from the flow of people. She gives me comically wide eyes, and my belly fills with acid.
Oh Lord.
Mr. Stevens leads me to his house and the workshop behind it where he’s been going through Gideon’s book, try
ing to puzzle some of the more complicated designs. Momma has already declared her intent to have one of the hot-water-making machines installed in her home once Mr. Stevens can fabricate them reliably. I wonder where they’re going to get the required metals for such a thing, but very soon none of that will be my problem.
We enter his workshop, and I’m not quite sure what to expect but I have my pistol strapped to my thigh under my dress in case he gets the wrong idea. But he turns to me not with a ring, which is a relief, but with a metal contraption pieced together out of odds and ends.
“Oh, you made me an arm,” I say, and all the tension melts away.
“Yes, Miss McKeene,” he says, and then he’s falling to one knee and it’s like some kind of nightmare. Only if it were really a dream shamblers would be eating his face and honestly I’m kind of praying for the dead to appear as he begins to speak.
“Miss McKeene, I have admired you since the first day I beheld you, and you bravely shot an outlaw that had stumbled into our humble encampment.”
I do not mention it wasn’t really an outlaw, but a bad man all the same.
“Mr. Stevens—Thaddeus?” I say, and his expression brightens. “I’m going to stop you right there. Whatever you’re about to say next, well, we should pretend it was just you saying how you were so moved by my sad situation that you made me an arm and not any kind of romantic proposal.”
His expression falls but he remains on bended knee. “No?”
“No, sir. See, I’m clearing out tomorrow, back to murdering and the like, you know how it is, and I don’t really have any use for a husband.”
Recognition dawns on his face and he stands. “Ah. But you do have need of an arm.”
“Well, seeing as how you went to the effort and all, it seems like it would be a shame to put it aside to wait for someone else to lose an appendage.”
He smiles and helps me fit it on, showing me how it secures with the leather strap. There’s a kind of hook that moves on a tension wire, and when I flex my upper arm the hook opens and closes. The mechanism is terrifying.
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