Longshadow's Woman

“Any man worth his salt would rather be outside in the fresh air than rotting away in jail.” Emma’s husband had died in a Yankee prison. To this day she couldn’t bear to see things penned up if she could possibly help it. “I’m going to poultice you with my special salve, if you’ll hand me that there jar over there on the dresser.”

Carrie happened to know the greasy salve was made of ground mouse dung and butter, with a few herbs mixed in, but if Emma believed in it, then Carrie did, too. An hour later, her arm no longer throbbing quite so fearfully, they sat on the tiny front porch and talked about this and that. Emma never complained, which made Carrie ashamed of all her own complaints.

“I know it’s not right, but sometimes I wish he would forget where he lived and not come home at all,” she said, cradling her hand in her lap. She’d been airing her latest grievance against Darther, who’d refused to give her money to buy a cow because he had a chance to buy into a certain surefire winner.

“Racetrack trash, that’s what he is. I heard all about racetrack trash when I was at Uncle Henry’s. That’s all they ever talked about—who was losing his shirt, and who was winning big, and where the next race was going to be. They weren’t even real races, not the kind where ladies go and wear nice gowns and fancy hats.”

“I don’t know your husband personally, child. I do know he’s not made a single friend in these parts in all the years he’s been here, but there’s bound to be some good in him somewhere, even if he is a Yankee. He had the good sense to marry you, didn’t he?”

Carrie didn’t bother to reply. Emma knew how hopeless things were. She had seen Carrie’s bruises too many times to believe they were all caused by her own carelessness. Besides, they almost always coincided with one of Darther’s infrequent visits home.

“Living alone can be peaceful, I’ll not deny that. Still, I’d give anything in the world to hear my Luther ranting and raving over the fools who’re running our government now, or fussing because I can’t make bread the way his mother used to do. Sometimes even harsh words are better than no words at all.”

Carrie couldn’t think of a thing to say to that. Harsh words were about all she’d heard ever since her Uncle Henry had sent for her, and Mrs. Robinson had put her on the train with a change of clothes in a paper sack and a dollar bill pinned inside her pinafore pocket.

A little while later, pleasantly full from the biscuits she’d baked and brought with her, served with Emma’s wild peach preserves, Carrie hitched Sorry to the cart and set out along the narrow road. There was a shortcut through the woods she took when she was afoot, but today she’d felt like riding. She had actually expected that blasted mule to behave, seeing as how her Kie-oh-way had him trained now. The man didn’t even have to swear at him, he just looked him in the eye before they set out to do a job, and the mule turned sweet as pie.

As if sensing her inattention, Sorry came to an abrupt stop, laid back his ears and brayed. Startled, Carrie nearly dropped the reins. “You stubborn, no-account crazy bastard, you do that again and I’m going to whomp your hide till it’s raw, you hear me? Now, git to movin’!” She cracked the whip in the air, and the mule moved another few steps, then halted again.

The man was a witch. Carrie didn’t know if mules and witches spoke the same language, she only knew that her hand was hurting again from being cut open, drained and poulticed, and then having to drive a contrary mule. What’s more, she was starting to get that crampy feeling in the pit of her belly, which meant drinking a slug of whiskey, which she despised, and going to bed with a hot brick wrapped in a towel.

She finally gave up and let the beast have his head. He knew the way home as well as she did. He also knew he wouldn’t be fed or watered until he got her there. She was in no mood to put up with stubborn animals, four-legged or two-legged. “No wonder Darther calls you Sorry,” she muttered. “You’re the sorriest son of a bitch ever to suck air.”

She was going to have to stop swearing. Emma didn’t like it. Mrs. Robinson would be shocked. All the missionaries would be shocked. Her own parents would have been shocked. Sometimes Carrie even shocked herself, and not always with the words that came out of her mouth.

But dammit, things were different now. If she had to deal with a stubborn mule who knew when she was feeling miserable and went out of his way to aggravate her—with a drunken sot of a husband who cared far more for his horse than he did for his wife, and an Indian prisoner who couldn’t speak the language, she had to make up her own rules.

Bumping over the rutted cart trail at a snail’s pace gave her time to think, time to wonder about things such as whether or not her Indian had a wife waiting for him at home, wherever his home was. Wondering if he had a name. Well, of course he had a name. It was probably one of those heathen-sounding names no white man could wrap his tongue around. She felt guilty for not having asked, and guilt, added to all the rest, made her feel even more miserable. Every now and then, usually when she had her monthly bellyache, she would get to feeling this way. Out of sorts. Weepy for no reason at all.

By the time she pulled into her yard, she was close to tears again. What if she lost her hand? It happened more often than not when a wound refused to heal, and hers had refused for weeks, probably because she kept flexing it and breaking it open again and again.

What was she going to do when her prisoner had to leave? In spite of Darther, she had come so far, encouraged by Emma and by her own dreams. In spite of everything that had happened in the past, she was doing so well, with her own home and a field almost ready for planting come spring.

Not even the familiar sight of her neatly raked yard and her snug little cabin could cheer her as she neared the end of the road. Home. Her first real home in so long, with the water-oaks turning gold and the gum trees turning purple. Emerging into the clearing, she braced herself to do what needed doing before she could rest. The chickens still had to be fed. The mule had to be unhitched, watered, fed, rubbed down and penned up.

Her prisoner would probably want to be fed, too, with whatever she could scratch together for a meal.

He wasn’t outside. He wasn’t in the barn. She knew very well he wasn’t in the house, because she’d warned him the very first day that she’d shoot him if he came messing around.

But since then she’d taken him inside to dress his ankles. Maybe he thought that meant he could come and go at will. “Well, we’ll just see about that,” she muttered, glaring at the chain he used to wear, which was neatly coiled on a nail on the inside of the barn door. “If that damned heathen has run out on me, I’ll shoot his sorry ass,” she swore, feeling tearful and oddly discouraged, considering all they’d accomplished. Here she was so close to getting her field ready so that all she would have to do come spring was spread manure, poke holes in the ground and drop in her seeds, four in each hill. One for the soil, one for the crow, one for the mole and one to grow. Emma had told her everything she would need to know about planting and laying by food for the winter, and curing everything from mites on her chickens to bugs on her vegetables. She had even tried to explain away these monthly miseries, but knowing they would pass didn’t make her feel any better when her belly hurt and her hand hurt and she felt so discouraged she could cry.

Carrie had just hung the harness on a nail inside the barn when she heard a noise overhead in the hayloft. Dust sifted down through the cracks, drifting through the shaft of late afternoon sunlight that slanted in through the wide opening. There wasn’t a single thing in that loft but hay left over from last year and Darther’s store of whiskey.

“Oh, lordy, I don’t need this,” she muttered. Bracing her fists on her hips, she tipped back her head and yelled, “You up there—Kie-o-way, or whatever your blasted name is, you just get yourself down here right this minute, you hear me?”

She felt like crying. She felt like kicking something. Blast it all to blazes, she knew her emotions were all over the road, but she had trusted the man! And then, the minute her back was turned, he’d had to go snooping around until he’d found Darther’s jugs that Liam had toted up there last April when they’d won that big pot and spent every red cent of it on Buffalo City moonshine instead of the fresh cow she’d been begging for.

Since then, every time they came home from a successful trip, the two of them would bring down a few jugs and spend the first night celebrating. She would hear them all the way over to the house, laughing and singing and carrying on—shouting and whoo-hawing at one another. It got so she’d find herself wishing the next time one of them climbed up after another jug he would fall off the edge of the hayloft and break his miserable neck, and then she’d have to go and pray over her own wicked thoughts.

Hearing a rustling sound overhead, she set her foot on the bottom rung of the ladder. It might be rats. Usually they got to the grain and left the hay alone, but maybe they were holing up for the winter.

It wasn’t rats. She’d have seen signs of them, because she watched diligently for such things. Besides, she had two good rat snakes that kept the barn pretty well clear of rodents. Either her prisoner was up there, drunk as a crow in a barrel of mash, or Darther and Liam had come back and chased him off.

Or worse.

Carrie didn’t dare think of what worse might mean, she only knew she had another mess to deal with when all in the world she felt like doing was falling into bed and sleeping her miseries away.

There was no sound coming from Peck’s stall. No saddlebags tossed down on Liam’s cot. Liam’s mare wasn’t out back in the paddock, which meant it couldn’t be Liam and Darther up in the hayloft drinking themselves sick.

Which meant…

Well, shoot. She almost wished Darther had come back home. And that said something about her state of mind that didn’t bear close examination, she told herself as she began to climb the steep, narrow ladder to the loft.

Chapter Four

It was dark as pitch in the hayloft. And dusty. Carrie sneezed, swore, and sneezed again. “All right, you might as well show yourself, I know you’re up here.”

She waited. No response. But of course, if he was sprawled out in a corner, dead drunk, he wouldn’t answer. Couldn’t answer even if by some miracle he was sober enough, as he barely understood plain English. “Speak up, else I’ll go off and leave you here to fall down and break your miserable neck!”

For two beans and a straight pin she would do just that. Save the county the cost of hanging him. Save herself the aggravation of watching him walk behind her plow, with his dark hair shining in the sun, pulled back so that it was neater than her own. With his narrow little behind and his wide shoulders and his hands, so square and steady on the splintered wooden handles.

She should never have peeked that first day at the creek. She had tried so hard not to think about the way he’d looked standing there in the morning sun, strip, stark naked. But the harder she tried not to think about it, the more she thought about it, the image stuck in her mind like a cocklebur in a sheep’s pelt. The only other man she had ever seen naked from head to toe was her husband. It was hard to believe they were the same species.

Evidently, they had something in common after all. Drink.

Disgusted, disappointed and thoroughly out of sorts, Carrie stood there, uncertain of what to do next. She told herself that soon he’d be going back to jail, where they would probably hang him. She couldn’t allow herself to think about him as a man—as a real person. It hurt too much. “Then stay there,” she muttered, turning back to the ladder. “Drink yourself into an early grave. Fall down the ladder and break your fool neck, see if I care!”

“Aah-choo!” The loud sneeze was quickly followed by three more. One hand on the ladder, Carrie froze. Hearing a brief scuffling sound, she squinted in the darkness and saw—or at least thought she saw—something moving in the small pile of hay that had been scraped into a corner to make room for Darther’s jugs of moonshine.

Whispering.

Whispering? He was talking to himself when he couldn’t even spare her so much as a single word?

“Damn your sorry hide, if you can still crawl, then you’d better get yourself down this ladder! If I have to come after you—!” She’d give him one more last chance, and then she was leaving him to his fate. She had run plumb out of patience. And bellyache or not, she had a full day’s work planned for tomorrow. “You listen here, I don’t care how sick you are come morning, you’re going to be out in that field at first light, you hear me? I paid for your services, and I’m damned well going to have them!”