Night Fires in the Distance Read online

  Night Fires in the Distance

  By

  Sarah Goodwin

  © 2016 Sarah Goodwin. All rights reserved.

  Cover Illustration: Bo Moore (bomoore.net)

  Prologue

  Laura

  I threw another dress on the fire and watched the flames take it. Black smoke rose up from the wet fabric and the smell of burnt cotton mixed with those of urine and blood.

  I scooped a stained bed sheet from the pile at my feet and threw it on the fire. There were grasshoppers caught in the cotton, and I watched them burn. All around me the ground crawled with them. Some jumped stupidly into the flames, some were crushed under my boots, the rest just scavenged for anything not yet eaten.

  The smoke made my eyes run. I wiped my face with my hands, picked up the rest of the clothes and fed the fire. I’d always worried about our fires and the long grasses of the prairie. A prairie fire was the definition of hell – nowhere to go, flames all around and acres eaten up in a minute. But now, there was no grass, summer had baked the earth bare. No corn, wheat, beans, nothing green anywhere. Just the dust blowing across the ground and the brown bodies of the grasshoppers. This was hell.

  I heard, over the whirring sound of the insects, one of my daughters crying. They were all hungry, like I was.

  I stamped over the grasshoppers, away from the fire. The rifle was just inside the soddie door and I took it and the patch box. Before I closed the door on my family to keep the insects out, I wondered if it would not be better to shoot them now. Spare them the end that was coming, slow as it was.

  It was getting hard to think. No water. No sleep. The grasshoppers weren’t leaving. The rain wasn’t coming. It was only for them that I’d kept on. I could give my own life up but I had to fight for theirs. It was all I knew how to do.

  With the rifle in my hands I went around the fire and towards the barn, where the oxen lowed hungrily. At least today I could feed my family. Even if it meant fighting the grasshoppers for every bit of the ox meat.

  Outside the barn I looked up, as I had for so many days, but there still wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

  Chapter One

  Laura

  By the summer James arrived I hadn’t seen a tree in two years.

  Sometimes I tried to remember what a tree sounded like. I could see the damn thing – the trunk, the branches, the roots. I could feel it. But I couldn’t remember the sound of leaves moving in the wind or the way rain sounded on them in a storm. You wouldn’t think that was something a person could forget, but somehow I could never fix it right in my head.

  There were no trees on the western prairie. Practically the only things we had out there were grass and sky.

  I was sitting in the shade of the house, my back to the sod wall, peeling early potatoes. The dry grass on the sod prickled against my neck and the sun beat down on me. I wasn’t fit for most work, being only a few weeks from having my seventh child, though of the previous six, only three were still living; Rachel was taking care of my youngest Beth, and their brother Thomas was out with their father.

  I filled the iron kettle with water and the potatoes, then hung it over the bare circle of ground where I made our fires. I’d twisted up some hunks of prairie grass and dried them out in the sun as kindling. To keep the fire going I stacked up buffalo chips, they smelled no worse than horse dung and burnt clean, cleaner than coal.

  The potato skins were destined for the pig, along with our other scraps. Our winter side of bacon was already forming nicely within its hairy hide. While the hog ate I scratched its back with a stick, watched the flies scatter as its skin twitched.

  In the soddie I wiped the paring knife with a cloth and put it away. I wiped my forehead with my hand. Though the two windows let in some of the hot air that baked the ground outside, the thick turf walls and roof oozed damp and cool into the room.

  The girls were on the corn husk tick, where they slept, by the far wall. Beth looked ready to start fussing. Rachel had given up on trying to entertain her, she didn’t have her brother’s patience. Rachel was very like her father, quick to anger and slow to let go of a grudge.

  Beth stumbled off of the tick and crossed the room, little fists out, clasping. I steadied her as she clung to my skirts.

  “Ma, I’m hungry.”

  “You’ll get your supper soon, if you let go of me so I can get on with making it. Why don’t you play with your sister?”

  She tugged at my skirt, starting to cry. I knew there’d be no shaking her off. I poured some of the water out of the heavy bucket into a jug, covered it with a cloth. Rachel picked up her sewing with her face turned from the door. I petted Beth’s hair but she only clung tighter, like she knew I had an idea to pull her from my skirts like a burr.

  “Take your sister please, Rachel. I’ve supper to look after.”

  Rachel’s face was a black blur of pure temper. She had her father’s dark hair and muddy complexion, somehow she always looked dirty, angry and uncared for. I had my eye on her, but she didn’t move.

  “Now, Rachel,” my voice was sharp, my back aching. Why couldn’t I have just one obedient daughter?

  “Yes Ma,” her voice was sullen, but she put down her sewing and came to take Beth, who struggled until Rachel pinched her fat little leg. I pretended not to see. Beth popped her thumb into her mouth and sucked.

  I went back into the heat to tend supper. Rachel carried Beth out and set her on the grass while she spread a blanket and set out plates and utensils for everyone.

  Supper was salt-risen bread and potato hash. Back in England I’d made such fine loaves with my mother and sisters, plaited, golden loaves shaped like ears of corn or baskets of fish. There’s only one kind of loaf you can make with that salt-risen dough – brick shaped.

  I filled the coffee pot and put it on the fire, stirred the hash and cut up the bread. What I’d have given for a cup of cold water, a piece of my mother’s light, white loaf, and a bit of butter.

  Will, his dark hair thick with sweat, came around the ox shed with Thomas, carrying his scythe. They’d been cutting and shocking the corn, getting the harvest in.

  “Pa!” Beth called out and Rachel ran out to meet them, passing Thomas by to hug her father.

  Thomas looked the most like me, with my mulch brown hair, the same freckles and turn to his nose. He sat down right away on the edge of the blanket. He may have been the eldest at ten, but I ached to see him so worn down and tired. He looked up at me, his mouth twisting upwards in a small smile.

  Will cut his eyes in Thomas’s direction. “Go wash up.”

  Thomas got to his feet slowly and went into the soddie to wash his hands and face for dinner.

  “You shouldn’t boss him so, he’s tired.”

  “And I suppose I’m not?” Will raised his thick, dark, eyebrows and unwound Rachel’s arms from his waist. “I’ve done the larger share of work.”

  “He’s only a boy.”

  “I was helping my father at six years,” Will turned from me to the fire, “is that coffee ready?”

  I poured a cup, still wanting to argue. He took it from me and sat down, hands unwashed. Thomas came back with wet shirt cuffs and I handed out bread.

  The sun was going down, the light still yellow, but with shadow creeping in behind the ox shed and the sty. The grass kept up a steady beat against the wind. Only the girls had energy to speak and one look from their father reduced them to bowed heads and silence. It was like eating with a damn bear, not knowing when you were about to get your head ripped off.

  After dinner was finished I scraped the plates and wiped them clean. As darkness came down on the prairie, we took up the blanket, put out our fire and went inside. Willia
m drew the bar on the door.

  I herded the girls behind the canvas that was draped across one corner and helped them into their nightgowns.

  “Ma, when will Pa be going to town?” Rachel asked.

  “Soon, when the harvest is done.” The thought of that harvest tallying up against our long list of needs put a snake in my belly, coiled tight. For a second I couldn’t breathe.

  “And will he buy us candy?”

  “If you’re good, and mind me. You may even have new shoes for when the snow comes.”

  Rachel smiled and I wondered if she remembered England, where we’d always had shoes for winter and the market had been only just over the hill, rather than a full day’s journey away in a town Will never took us along to.

  William settled in one chair, I in another and we shared the last of the coffee while the children drifted off to sleep. To anyone peaking in the window-and who was there to do that this far into Indian Territory? - we might have looked happy, content with our lot.

  I wanted to scream.

  With the children I had to lie to about candy and better things to come. With Will there was just silence or meanness. If there’d been any hiding place on the prairie I would have gone to it and screamed until there was no air in me. I would have screamed ‘damn’ and ‘hell’ until my throat bled, instead of keeping all those curses inside.

  “Looks like we’re doing alright, as far as time’s concerned,” Will said after a long silence. “Tomorrow we can finish up on the corn, get that wheat in. I should be clear to get to town end of next week, pick up bottling supplies, trade for the rest.”

  “Good,” I was thinking of all the salting and pickling and preserving to come, of another winter living on cornbread and chokecherry jam. “When I made the bread for dinner, I noticed we were low on cornmeal and we’ve used the last of the molasses.”

  “I’ll take care of it, but you could stand to make things stretch further.”

  I lowered my eyes. “I just worry about the baby.’ I touched my belly. ‘It needs fresh greens, a bit of meat. Make sure it’s born strong.”

  “You’ll have it, at the end of the harvest.”

  “I think it might come soon. Is there a woman in town, someone to help when the baby arrives?”

  A frown drew in between his brows, “Not much in town but the store and a few houses, mostly men setting up for their wives to come join them. Unless you want a whore to play midwife for you.”

  “I thought you might know some decent women.”

  He snorted. “I don’t think I’ve ever met a decent woman.”

  I looked away, took my sewing from its bag under the table. I could hardly see it in the feeble light of the lamp.

  “It’s just, this one will be my first away from the help of women,” I said, hoping he’d soften at seeing me afraid.

  “Well, you had that doctor in Ohio with Beth and he was no use. Barely earned his fee,” he scratched the coarse hair on his jaw. “Besides, you have Rachel.”

  “She’s only eight. What does she know about birthing, aside from what she’s seen of barn cats? There’s things I don’t know.”

  “You’ll be alright,” Will said, draining his cup of sugarless coffee. “It’s what women do, isn’t it?”

  I bowed my head over my sewing. It was what women did, but Lord, how many times in our months of travelling across the country had we met men with wagons full of children and a sack of old dresses? Men with wedding rings around their necks on strings? How many small stones had we passed on the trail? How many trees notched and carved with names, Flora, Susan, Martha, Patience?

  I looked at my children, at Rachel and Beth, and Thomas sleeping in a ball. What would become of them, if I died? I couldn’t imagine William coping. They’d be parcelled off to settler families while he found himself a new wife, or took off with a saloon girl and left them to grub someone else’s farm for charity.

  My sewing shook so hard I couldn’t make a stitch. I knew I mustn’t die. For their sakes.

  We only had a short period of lamp light, the kerosene was too dear. I put on my nightgown and got into bed, and Will took off his trousers and laid them by the bed. He got in with his shirt on and left the rifle in easy reach.

  Will turned out the lamp and settled under the quilt with me. It was the quilt I’d stitched myself, during our courtship. If I looked hard at it, in the right light, I could still find the patch I’d sewn on with the wrong colour thread when my patience was wearing thin.

  The darkness was total without the lamp. The windows were shuttered, but even if they’d been open there were no lights on the prairie. No other soddies or dugouts had been built nearby and we had no neighbours yet. The night was cold, I kept as close to Will as the baby would allow. A wolf howled, and a handful of cries rose up in response. I kept my eyes closed and thought of the rifle.

  Chapter Two

  Laura

  The next day I was up with the sun. My back ached badly, and my stomach was a mess of cramps. Luckily there was leftover bread for breakfast; only thing I had to make was the coffee. The blackened pot stood in the flames and I rubbed my belly and back, looking over at the edge of the prairie where the sun was showing like a heated flatiron.

  Will and Thomas left for the fields. Will had the rifle slung across his back. I hated being alone in the house without a weapon. There were too many dangers to count in Indian Territory, far from the reach of law and a day’s travel from town – the closest trading post. It would take only one passing Indian or lowdown trapper to leave me in the dirt with my children, the house a bonfire around us. Only a week before Will’d seen Indians riding their horses south, plain as day. We were living in a tinderbox of animals and savages.

  Still, work wouldn’t wait for the rifle’s return. We were in need of more fuel so I took the girls with me to collect chips on the prairie

  I should have known, really, that it didn’t matter whose hands were on the rifle. I was carrying danger inside me. A settler I could beg for mercy, Indians might take tobacco or supplies for our lives – but I couldn’t bargain with the baby in me. If it came awkward, or made me bleed too much, I’d be subject to a worse end than an Indian could give me.

  On the wide plain a brisk wind tried to steal my shawl, it whistled and moaned and tossed the grass to and fro. The line of the prairie was unbroken in all directions, none of it still. It was maddening to see miles in every direction with nothing to hold your eye. For a moment I thought I saw a narrow blot on the edge of the world, a man or woman against the empty sky. Then it was gone.

  I kept the girls close while we picked up the large, dried out buffalo chips. The pail I’d brought filled quickly. It was a good thing too, as the cramps in my belly were getting sharper and more familiar. I rubbed at my stomach, tried to ignore it. I’d had the trick labour before, this had to be the same thing. It was too soon.

  “Ma!” Rachel said, pointing into the long, brittle grass. A snake lay only about a foot from her. I snatched at her shoulder, pulling her further back. My eyes went to Beth, but she was behind us, away from the snake.

  “What is it?” Rachel asked.

  “Rat snake,” I picked up the pail and continued shooing her away. It wasn’t a dangerous snake, but my God, I would never be used to seeing the things in the grass, long and black with their flickering tongues and unblinking eyes.

  The open plain was working on my nerves. I took the girls back to the soddie. The pail I put by the hearth circle, gasping as a new pain cut through me.

  While Rachel took up her dusting and Beth played with her cleaning rag by the supply crate, I went to the table to lean and catch a breath. The chairs were just too uncomfortable, I seemed to be all bulk and bone in the wrong places. Lying down on a tick of course was out of the question, it was hard enough to get up from it once a day.

  I gasped, gripped the edge of the table, bit my lip as the pain came, stronger. It wasn’t time but it was happening anyway. I put my hand on my be
lly, trying to still the squeezing cramps. Panic hit me, I needed my mother, a neighbour, a friend. Someone, anyone to help me. What was done for babies that came early? What if it was backwards like Thomas’d been?

  “Ma?”

  “Damnit, not now,” I couldn’t feel my mouth move, I was too scared. “Please not now.”

  Another slice of pain cut me in two, my nails bit the table top.

  Beth tugged my skirt and I whimpered, reaching out to push her away. She wouldn’t let go.

  “Ma!”

  I twisted and saw Rachel, frozen by the back wall, rag in hand.

  “Rachel…” I held out my hand, “help me to bed.”

  She came forward slowly, her eyes very wide, and took my hand. “What’s wrong?”

  “The baby’s coming, early,” I tugged Beth’s hand from my skirt, harder than I meant to, managed to get to the bed with Rachel helping me. My heart wouldn’t slow down, I kept remembering the stories I’d been told each time I’d borne a healthy child – the stories of backwards births, bleeding that could not be stopped, babies that stuck fast in their mothers and had to be pulled out. Who would do that for me?

  Beth started to grizzle, low at first, but getting louder every moment she was ignored. I gulped air, tried to think. I couldn’t send Rachel after Will, out on the prairie where anything might be lurking. I fisted the tick’s scratchy material as another wave of pain crested, drew tight, and left me.

  I gritted my teeth. I had borne three healthy children, though each time I’d been scared and hurting, though each time I’d faced troubles, I had come through it. Even the ones that filed to thrive, I had survived. I would not die. I would not beg. I would not allow myself to be afraid.

  You’ll die alone, fighting until you can’t anymore. You’ll die begging for mercy, for forgiveness, something in my head whispered. I couldn’t force the fear out any more than I could stop the labour that was tearing through me like a rabid dog.

  “Rachel, stand at the door and call for your father. Loud as you can. Please.”