OF ALL THE STORIES your gran never told me, the one I wished for hardest was that of how she and your grandfather met. To this day I do not know it, but I know I will not allow you to grow up guessing at who your father might be.
When I was a girl of about thirteen, I ran away from St. Louis, not on account of any wrong my kin had done but rather my own wandering feet. I thought my destiny lay down the river where the steamboats and their passengers disappeared. I grew tired of looking into the faces of men whose names I did not know, who carried on with their work without knowing I was looking at them so. I grew tired of wondering if my father was among them, and knowing he and I would never recognize each other even if we did pass each other by in the street. So one day I gathered the money I had earned cleaning the bar at the roadhouse and I stole away on the first ship I met headed south.
Even now, I cannot tell you what I expected to find there. Texas is a long ways from Missouri, and in those days it was much as I was—seeking independence yet headed towards statehood. What happened on that journey is a story you can find in my own diary, when you are old enough to feel an itch in your soles yourself, but I will tell you now I was run away for a good four months before forces greater than I brought me home again.
My carriage and my willingness to make eye contact gave strangers the impression I was older than my age, and though it was not my intention to put down roots out there on the borderlands, I found myself inclined to stay awhile when I saw men of all shades walking the streets. On the way south I had passed a group of Waco Indian travelers, with whom I traded without incident. Once there, a half-Mexican man offered me a job in his cantina. All I had to do was ask for it. The rules were a little looser in Texas, and I felt less alien when I was among others to whom the sun was kind.
So it came to pass that at the age of fourteen I was working as a barmaid in a cantina on the north side of the Brazos River, my skin dark brown and my hair shimmering red from the sun bleaching it. On weekends, I filled mugs and poured whiskey, but during the week, on slow nights, the vaqueros and gamblers would invite me over to play a hand or two. At first they meant it as a joke, but as time passed I proved myself capable of holding my own against men with scarred faces and gold-capped teeth. The nutmeg I sprinkled on the deck when it was my turn to deal appeared like dirt in the dusty light.
Like I did most of my girlhood lessons, I learned to play cards from watching my older cousins and the roadhouse patrons. Liquor has a way of making men act in a way they would never in their right mind. It eats away at the part of them capable of concerning itself with civility. Monsters are not always real, my dear, save the ones that started out as men.
I am not sure if the drunk who called me a witch the day I met your father started out mean and grew meaner with time. He may well have come out of the womb the way he came into the cantina. Some folks just have meanness in their bones.
The day was slow and sultry. With the cantina empty as it was, I had taken up a place at the brag table. We were having ourselves a pleasant game with low stakes and more laughter than luck when a soldier with the United States Army swatted open the swinging doors and stepped inside. His belt was heavy with weaponry and his spurs chimed with the cadence of his pace. The owner’s son, Chimalli, was tending bar that day, and though none of us were paying any mind, we all heard the stranger say to the young man, “Oye, varlet! Whiskey, rápido.”
As I had my back to the door, I had to turn in my chair to see the soldier. I found him even more ugly than his speech hinted he would be.
The man ordered a beer and a whiskey. We returned to our game, myself and three of the cantina’s regulars, only to find ourselves interrupted by the stranger.
“Deal me in,” he said, dragging a chair to the table.
“We are not finished with the hand yet,” said a German prospector. I found him well-spoken and polite, even when he was so inebriated he forgot how to speak either English or Spanish.
“You are now,” said the stranger.
The German looked at the freedman to my left, who looked to the mestizo at my right, who looked at me. I shrugged, and the men grumbled a bit as we all laid down our hands and the German collected his winnings.
Now, your momma was never one for cheating. Your gran would not abide our use of magick to finish chores or avoid studying for our lessons, and we girls had learned early that the elders frowned upon magick that would break natural laws. As far as I was concerned, even my blind great-aunt Jeanne would be able to tell this brute had not had the same schooling. He was accustomed to acting however he wished because of his size. The scar running from his hairline over his eye socket and ending in the hollow of his cheek was testament to the fact someone had once tried to teach him a lesson and failed.
He sat himself down between the German and the mestizo, and though they made the room for him, it was for their own benefit rather than his.
Though I cannot recall with sharp detail how the first hand played out, I can recall the freedman won and the brute called him greasy, or else something to that effect. It was an effort for the rest of us not to laugh at the soldier, who grew more inebriated as the game went on but was holding it well enough. The freedman won the second hand as well, for which the rest of us would have rejoiced were it not for the uninvited player at the table.
“You mangy half-breed,” the brute called him after draining his glass.
I was drawing a breath to speak when the mestizo and I locked eyes. In his I saw an admonition, and I understood this would run its course. Same as any other storm, all we could do was wait it out. So I held my tongue as the brute stood from the table to fetch another drink.
The rest of us continued slowly drinking our own beers. As the freedman shuffled the deck and started dealing out the hand, the brute wiped a line of foam from the whiskers on his top lip and sneered.
“What’s taking you so long?” he asked. “They not teach you how to count on the plantation?”
Though the freedman paused in his dealing to fix the brute with a hard stare, he held his tongue. Gone was the friendliness of the banter, the lightness with which we teased each other from time to time. This man had no lightness in his heart.
The freedman won the hand he’d dealt, and the brute slammed a hand the size of a shank onto the tabletop. As I drew a breath the mestizo would have silenced, that hand left the table and shot out to grab the freedman by the forearm. Though he tugged, the freedman was unsuccessful in slipping the brute’s grip. We had all seen the faded rope burns around both wrists, but the sight shocked the soldier.
“You a runaway?”
The freedman narrowed his eyes.
“What is this word?” the German asked.
“He means,” the freedman said with an edge to his tone, “a runaway slave.”
“Well, ain’t you?” the soldier asked.
“No. I ain’t.”
I could not abide the brute’s insults. This rotten-mouthed drunkard was allowed his malice because he was not sat at a table with men of violence, and I thought of a boy I had once known who terrorized a schoolyard for the same reason. He could get away with it, and so he had kept at it.
To snip a lock of his hair or infuse one of his personal effects with perfume would be too obvious, and so I had to improvise. I drew not on a practiced spell but rather one I had been concocting since he first insulted the German. In my mind, I had unleashed it after he insulted the mestizo, and that crack at the freedman was the spark I needed. I needed no spark to cheat at cards, but this was not about cheating, or cards.
As if summoned, another United States Army soldier stepped in out of the dust and the cloudless afternoon and stood a moment in the doorway. Your father would later attest to knowing I was the one he was looking for before he even stepped in from outside. Still, he spoke to the owner’s son behind the bar before he did anything else. Though I was aware of him, I paid him no mind. Not even after Chimalli picked me out of a crowd of dusty, weathered men and said, “Yep, that’d be her over there.”
It must have been then that the commanding officer entered. My attention was on the brute refusing to release the freedman’s wrist. The freedman had himself braced against the table with his opposite hand, just as the brute had used his unoccupied one to slip from his boot a knife. Its edge glinted in the dusty light, and I began to murmur under my breath.
Helios, ire
Burn like fire
Five times I spoke the incantation below my breath. The handle grew too warm for the brute to hold, whereupon he buried the blade in the tabletop and stood with a roar. While the others had missed it, he had heard my chant. His eyes moved between his hand and my face.
“You’re a goddamned WITCH,” he said.
Where we were, the law was no good. The men at the table were grimy, their nails black from gunpowder and dirt and blood, their mouths kept clean by corn whiskey, and I had been listening to them tell stories for months by the time the army sent a couple of their men out to collect me. All three were on their feet and reaching for their own weapons in the time it took the newcomer to confirm he had found me. While the brute would come back to his senses, his pounding headache and blank memory offering him penance and absolution both, I would not be there to witness the reunion.
The newly arrived soldier was tall and young, with hair the color of copper and an earnest face I could tell was used to smiling, though there was no call for smiling at the moment we met. He walked right up to the brute, called him Mitchell, said he ought to put the knife away before he hurt himself.
“Lieutenant’s on his way,” he added. “If you’re gonna be a drunk, do it at the bar.”
To all of our surprise, the brute did as he was told and stalked off.
Once he had gone, the red-haired soldier turned to me and asked, “Miss, is your name Lilian MacPherson?”
I asked, “¿Estoy detenida?”
He laughed like I had told a joke and said, “You ain’t under arrest. You are coming with us, though.”
I told him I had to finish my hand first.
“Looks like you oughta fold that hand anyway,” he said.
“She’s cheating!” the brute yelled from the bar.
The freedman and the mestizo both groaned and began grousing to each other, while the German took off his hat and downed his beer.
Now that we were interrupted, I saw no point in doing anything other than what I did, which was roll my eyes and fold my hand and leave the cantina with the soldiers. Behind me, the brute continued to holler about witchery. I do not know what happened to him after I left, but I have no doubt the three gamblers and the bartender were able to dispatch him.
“I can take care of myself, you know,” I said.
“No, actually,” said the red-haired soldier’s commanding officer, a taller and sturdier man who looked as if he had just stepped out of whatever academy produces men like him. “You can’t. Matter of fact, we ought to have you arrested for assaulting a soldier.”
The soldiers marched me not to the county jail but straight to the stagecoach station. Once we were aboard, they sat across from me talking and telling each other jokes, and I passed the early leg of the journey staring out the window and ignoring the both of them.
“You got good timing,” the red-haired soldier said when dusk fell. I looked away from the landscape to find his fellow asleep beside him. I did not ask him what he meant, but he told me anyway. “A year or two earlier, Bird’s Fort would’ve been abandoned. There’d be nothing out here but Comanche braves.”
I held to my silence. We looked each other in the eye for a moment, I with my jaw set and he seeming far older than the nineteen or so years he was truly, and then he shook his head. Some time would pass before I would ask him what he had been thinking, then. At the time I just looked away, watching the wilds disappear and the next city bleed into its space.
“I never heard anyone called a witch before,” he said.
I shrugged.
“Mighty powerful word to name a woman in public.”
I shrugged again.
“Folks name what they don’t understand as the work of the devil,” I said. “Imagine the same goes for people that don’t look like what they’re used to.” I paused and added, “Or maybe he just didn’t like losing to a girl.”
“I saw the three you were holding,” he said. “If his were worse than that, I can see why he’d be sore.”
We were ten days overland, at the time the longest ten days of my life, before we arrived at the roadhouse. What conversation passed during that time was often between the two soldiers, the older of the two inclined to speak of me as if I were not present and I to ignore him. Though the red-haired soldier attempted to make conversation between stageline stops, he abandoned the effort by the third day.
On the tenth day, the soldiers confirmed the address with the stagecoach driver and delivered me direct to the front porch. I felt a stab of guilt when your gran came into sight, for she was not your gran then but only my momma, and my momma was standing out on the porch like she was expecting us.
My momma, whose skirt I had held tight to when I was still learning how to walk, who stood straight and unflinching with her aunts and her sisters in a circle formed of salt and sweat and whispered incantations when they thought the children were in bed. Whose words I would never interrupt, whose circle I would never break, because I thought I knew what it was to respect her. Whose corner of the Grand Library lay beneath a fine layer of dust, not because she was untidy but because it allowed her to track which books my heedless fingers had eased from the shelves. She wore a shawl around her thin shoulders, only the wind moving the hem on her dress and the ends of her hair. I would have preferred a cold reception to the pain I saw in her eyes.
I did not think she would embrace me in front of those soldiers, those men she did not know, but she did. She took me by the elbows and looked me up and down and then she wrapped me up in her arms like I was a child she had thought lost at the market. Nothing else in the world but me and her now that I was back.
Of course I squirmed against her. Not only were the soldiers standing right there looking but the door opened and out came my cousins Eva and Charlotte. They were not giggling at my embarrassment. They were giggling at the two men brung me home. Ma did thank them for returning me, and they did tip their hats when she invited them in for supper. They had to be getting back, though goat’s head stew did sound lovely.
When my mother released me, I turned towards the soldiers and, though I drew a breath to speak, could think of nothing I wanted to say to either of them. The red-haired soldier met my gaze, and he gave me a lopsided smile I had no way of knowing would become familiar to me as the years went on.
And once they were nothing more than memory for the wind to take away, I told my mother I was sorry.
It was not a word any of us girls ever used much. My eldest cousin, Agnes, said it more than the rest of us combined, but she never meant it. I’m not sure I meant it, myself. This was my home and this was where my kin were, and though my momma loved me something fierce, I would not have left if my sense of belonging had been strong enough to overcome my sense of longing.
“Don’t you dare apologize,” my momma said. “The next time you go, you won’t return. No sense saying you’re sorry if you’re going to do it again anyway.”
The war in Mexico began in the spring of 1846, and so soon as it began, it took to chewing up soldiers fast as the army could send them, spitting them back out again. We saw it in the ones who returned, the permanent sunburns on their faces and hands, the faraway fixation in their eyes, on some unending horizon we girls could not see ourselves as we wiped down the tables and fetched them their beers. Ours was not a house of ill repute, as the God-fearing folks call them. My cousins and I did not sell our bodies to the men who passed through, though Agnes was fond of romancing men she fancied if they planned on staying in town for a spell.
I was not adventurous in the way Agnes was, at least not as far as my body was concerned. While she worked spells to make herself more attractive to a certain kind of man, I crushed aloe leaves and coated my hands and skin with their juice to protect me from just that kind of man.
Something about the anger in my bones, the lack of interest or attraction in my eyes when I looked straight into theirs, seemed to some men a challenge. It was not meant as such. The ones with half a brain in their skull flinched away from me when our eyes met, and that was just the way I preferred it.
“For not liking men, you sure spend enough time with them,” said Eva from her place at the dressing table, where she brushed her hair. I was sitting on the edge of my bed, working the aloe juice into my cuticles.
“It ain’t that I don’t like men,” I said. “I don’t like drunks, or fools.”
“That why you’re always playing cards with them?”
“If they ain’t got enough sense not to play cards with a teenaged girl, who am I to tell them to go somewhere else? Train tickets are expensive.”
“Cousin,” she said with a laugh, “you are incorrigible.”
“Besides,” I said, “I like tall men, who are kind, and have eyes blue like soldiers’ uniforms.”
“Oh,” said Eva, “you mean that man brought you home that time you ran away.”
“No!” I said, which only made her laugh harder.
As retribution, I twirled my pointer finger in the air one, two, three times and then flexed all my fingers, as I would to toss powder at her. Her hairbrush caught in her mane, and her yelp of surprise followed me out of the room.
“Tangling my hair don’t mean I’m wrong!”
Later that night I came in from a late venture hoping I could creep uninterrupted past the saloon to the second floor. From my room I had a view of the courtyard garden we tended throughout the day. On nights I felt my wanderlust too strong for sleep, I would sit up on the window seat staring out at the flowers planted among the milk thistle and ginger and aconite, and think of their petals soaking up the moonlight, and I would feel a kinship with them. If they pulled up their roots, they would die.
My thoughts were on my view of the garden as I climbed the stairs, but even so, Agnes’s voice stopped my feet before I had time to process the words, protests against a man with a rough voice and rougher hands. I stopped halfway up the stairwell, then turned and hurried back into the corridor, lit by oil lamps and moonlight.
The man, who I had never seen before, had my older cousin against the wall, unable to move and unwilling to invoke magick to free herself. I was not. I was then several years on from the age I was when I first hexed Danny Chesterfield in the schoolyard, and I was twice as strong both in body and in spirit. When I grabbed the man by the shoulders and pushed him away from Agnes, I did so not with my hands but with the power of my mind. Fire is the element with which I have always felt a certain sort of kinship, but Fire would choke and die without Air, and it was Air that allowed me to knock the man back several steps. His shoulders hit the wall, hard, and gave me his attention. Whiskey had soured his breath and I could not tell whether the distance in his eyes was the fault of drink or the war. They widened, once, when he realized but for my cousin and I he was alone in the corridor. He did not notice when I plucked his wallet from his belt. He did notice when I snarled at him to get off of Agnes and get the hell out of the inn.
In spite of Agnes imploring me to let him be since he was going without any more fuss, I returned to the room I shared with her sister to retrieve a book of matches and a bottle of perfume. Luck or some other trickster must have been on my side, for Eva was not in our room at the time. Shushing Agnes on my way out the door, I followed the brute into the street. There I sprayed the wallet with the scent and intoned a spell whose words I will not record here, as it is one you will have to learn yourself. I ought to have done so indoors, or at least in the shadow where none would see me, but I did not. There are far too many oughts and shoulds in this story. They have no business in your spells. Look forward, my dear, not behind.
I was able to follow along after the brute and, cloaked by the spell whose intonation I have not recorded, walk right up to his door without alerting anyone to my presence. Or so I thought.
I left the wallet in front of his door and returned home to the inn, and the spell worked its way with him. Overnight his hips grew wide and his breasts full, his hair long and his skin soft. He walked with a lightness in his step he could not control, and his voice was soft, his moods given to sea changes. I skipped breakfast the next morning to crowd the window in childless Aunt Griselda’s room, and was laughing into the palm of my hand when a shadow cut across the floor behind me.
“What have you done?” Eva asked.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“My perfume bottle’s gone,” she said, her tone grim. “I know you done something, Lily; I can feel it in the air. Last night I dreamed they were burning you. What’ve you done?”
“Take it easy,” I said as I climbed down from the window seat. “I ain’t done nothing that can’t be undone.”
“That’s of no concern to them,” she said. “You know how easy men scare. You may as well have turned him into a goat.”
“Do you know that one?” I asked. “Would you teach me?”
Eva rolled her eyes and did not answer, knowing well when I was gnashing my teeth.
By the next evening the brute had fingered me as the one who hexed him, and all of the men who had seen me disappear on the street had had time to work themselves into a posse. The tavern downstairs was full as ever, weary travelers and riverboat conductors looking to stand still for a few hours keeping the taps running and the aunties bustling, but it was like my cousin had said—my hex had left a stain in the air.
I succeeded in my task of keeping distance between myself and my mother, and though I did not see her the rest of the day, I did feel the prickling of magick that was the grandmothers and the eldest cousins casting a protective circle around the property. No one with ill intent in their hearts could cross the threshold of the place, but none of my kin thought to ward the house against my leaving.
I stepped out of the inn just before sundown, intending to go on about my evening in spite of what was gathering outside, and in doing so found a group of ten men waiting for me, with more stopping what they were doing to see what would happen. Those ten were armed with ropes and torches they intended to light, not for brilliance but for burning.
Your gran had seen me leave the house, and set down the glass she was filling to rush out after me, to fling wide the doors leading to the inn’s front porch and step between me and the posse. I still do not know whether what happened next came by coincidence or by some Work of my cousins seeking to keep me safe. But at that moment, with everything else going down, an army company rode into town on their horses. They were on their way to the Mexican front and like as not intending to stop at the barracks just outside of town for the night. Instead of rest, they found a group of men looking to string up a witch.
The posse was in no state to take on a company of soldiers, and while the others dismounted, a soldier with a corporal medic’s insignia rode up to me and held out his arm. I was preparing to run when I looked up from the hand to glimpse the face. His cap hid his red hair, but I recognized the eyes in an instant. It was the soldier who had escorted me back from Texas a few years earlier. He had earned some stripes since the last time I saw him, but unlike the other noncommissioned officers, he did not wear a sword.
“Why am I not surprised?” he asked, with a lopsided grin that I answered with a scowl. He held out his hand more firmly and said, “I’m trying to help you, come on now.”
So I grabbed Corporal Callahan’s forearm and, rather than allow him to haul me into the saddle behind him, used him as a ballast.
I was dressed for an evening of cleaning up slopped beer and climbing cellar stairs to fetch more gin, not for riding horses, and I was quite certain the animal would buck me if afforded the opportunity. Once I was astride the saddle, I latched my arms around the corporal’s waist so tight I heard the wind shoot out of him.
“Easy,” he said, and started the horse to trotting. “I ain’t gonna let you fall.”
“The hell with you,” I said. “I ain’t gonna let me fall.”
Aside from squeezing through crowds of gamblers and drunks, or the rare embrace I tolerated from an uncle or a male cousin, I had never been so close to a man before either. To be frank, they were stranger to me than horses were. Upon inhaling, I found the corporal did not reek of tobacco or whiskey, as I was expecting. Nor was I transported by his nearness or his scent. Whatever stories Agnes had been telling us younger girls about being around men were just that—stories.
“Where in the hell are you taking me?” I asked.
“You got a mouth on you,” he said.
“Where? Tell me.”
“We’re gonna ride around for a bit and then double back. Lieutenant Ness has got a way with people. I’m sure the mob’ll be long gone by the time we get there.”
“Well, bully for Lieutenant Ness,” I said.
This too made the corporal laugh, which caused a curious flush to blossom in my chest and find its way into my cheeks. I had no interest in charming or impressing this gentleman, but something beyond my control occurred when I heard him smile. All I knew was I wanted this ride to end so I could return to the inn and accept the punishment awaiting me.
So I kicked his boots out of the stirrups and replaced them with my own. In the moment I had earned by startling him, I sent his boot and the spur attached to it into the horse’s flank. As the animal began to canter, the man who would become your father asked me whether I wanted to hold the reins too.
I loosed an unladylike snort but gave no other reply. To our left was the Mississippi River, to the right the bloodied western sky. I was growing accustomed to the quiet of the evening when the corporal spoke again.
“You know, this is the second time I’ve saved you after someone called you a witch and said they were going to kill you.”
“You call that saving?” I asked. “I’d been just fine without you.”
“Is that so? And what’s your pa think of all this trouble you keep getting into?”
“How should I know? I never knew him. Got this far without his help and don’t need yours, neither.”
“Well, you got ample kin from what I’ve seen.”
“What do you know about it?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
I could not see his face, but I knew his smirk was gone.
“That why you joined the army?” I asked.
“I wanted to save people, and the army needed medics. I make it through the war, I get to be a doctor.” I heard his grin return. “Besides, coal mining ain’t in my blood.”
“Too bad. Your face would look better with soot on it.”
He laughed, and though I would have denied it at the time, so did I.
“Why’d you want to be a doctor?” I asked.
He held his tongue a moment, and I let him.
“Surmise it’s my own way of getting back at Death for taking my kin. Even the score, or something.”
We rode in silence, the angry, fatherless witch and the kinless corporal with an account to settle with the Reaper. As I look on you now, I realize that was the moment I first began to pine for your father.
By the time we finished the circuit around the waterfront, the corporal’s brothers in arms had cleared the front porch and the street of both lynchers and bystanders, and the only folks left outside were a tall man wearing the single-bar insignia of a second lieutenant and your gran, eyeing us like she knew what was coming. Maybe she did. She waited for me to dismount before she thanked the lieutenant and the corporal kindly, and she waited for them to trot off to reconvene with their men before she took me by the arm and marched me into the Library. I would have preferred one of Aunt Griselda’s tongue lashings compared to your gran’s punishment, but I learned.
The next morning, I and my cousin Charlotte were sat in the courtyard garden while the rest of the household cleaned up after breakfast. My task was to restore a fallow section of garden. I was to do this not with my hands but with my Will. Charlotte was sat crafting a chain from the daisies she grew by passing her bare palm over the grass beside her. Aside from the occasional rustling of the breeze through the trees, her humming was the only sound in the yard. I was unable to convince even a blade of grass to emerge from the dirt and fixing to give up when the both of us heard the jangling of spurs from within the house.
My cousin kept working at her chain, but I dusted off my hands and found my feet, holding my shoulders square so as to seem taller than my due. Even with the heels on my boots, I was the shortest of my kin. Stood before a man full grown, I aimed to carry myself like a woman.
“We are bound for Fort Smith,” said Corporal Callahan, and he kept his hat in his hands though we were out of doors and the sun was beginning to overtake the eastern sky. “I wanted to make sure you ain’t found more trouble since I last saw you.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” I asked.
“Not at all,” he said. “In fact, I hope if ever our paths cross again, it is to wave and say hello, and if you and I decide to stop and chat awhile, I will find it a pleasant change of both pace and peril.”
Though I had no desire to fall for him, I desired less that this man would think his absence affected me. So I stuck out my right hand and did not react when the false certainty in the gesture provoked him to smile and clasp palms.
“Farewell, Corporal,” I said, giving his hand several firm shakes.
“See ya around, Miss MacPherson,” he said.
He let himself back inside the house, and I returned to my place in the dead patch of garden. No sooner had I smoothed my skirts and breathed in deep the smell of nothingness, the garden dirt needing blood and bone to live, than Charlotte laughed at something the flowers were whispering to her.
“You’re gonna marry him,” she said.
“The hell I am,” I said.
“Look,” she said, and held up the necklace she had been weaving as I conversed with the army doctor.
“What am I looking at?” I asked.
“These two right here,” she said, and pointed to a knot in the necklace. “They tied themselves together.”
“You sure that don’t mean you and Thomas Hume are gonna run off and have a bunch of babies?”
“Thomas Hume is afraid of me,” she said. “That one ain’t afraid of you.”
That was not enough to convince me of anything, not at the time, but my heart must have been yearning towards lighter things. As I passed my palm over the dead patch of earth, the dry gray dirt churned and rippled. When it settled again, it was rich and dark and good. It did not turn to dust when I sank my fingers into it. I pulled them out again, and the damp soil clung to my skin, and from out of the holes grew wildflowers.
Your father sent me a telegraph upon his arrival in New Orleans. It read:
Bound for Veracruz. First time aboard ship. Think you would like it in N.O. Stay out of trouble. Matthew.
Sensing he had little else to lift his spirits, I began to write letters to him. I did not write often, and I did not write much. From where I sat in my dry, quiet bedroom, this soldier had traveled farther and freer than I ever had. He was where my thoughts went when I allowed them to wander during lessons and meals.
Months passed before I received a proper letter in the post from the army doctor. He answered the questions I had posed in my own correspondences, and asked a few of his own. I resisted the notion of allowing him anything other than distant friendship, though of course my cousins found the affair romantic and needled me for details soon as a new letter arrived, dusty and battered. Naming the sensation was impossible at the time, but my cousins kept on with their needling, and it occurred to me that I, in my seventeen years of life, had never felt understood until I began corresponding with your father.
As that occurrence came to me, so did its companion—that each span of time between letters might be the final silence, that I would never know if he had died because so far as the army was concerned, I was nothing to him.
One morning, I took a long walk out of the city and into the quarry fields that lay west of the Missouri River to search for a rare stone. Looking back, I could have spoken to my mother of my need and asked for her assistance. But admitting to her I feared for the safety of a man I only truly knew through correspondence would have meant admitting it to myself. So I went alone.
The books in the Library named quartz as a stone of protection, one that would serve best as a talisman rather than a spell. Different colors were meant for different purposes. Rose for protection during pregnancy and childbirth, smoky for protection against ill will, blue for protection against fear. Though I will admit to being a brash girl who let her hot blood drive her more often than her head, in this instance I was not seeking to punish another for what they had done to me or mine. I was seeking to keep from danger the man who would be your father. I needed amethyst.
Dusk did not come until late in the evening, but just before it did come and steal away the light with it, I found glinting far off along an unused trail a suggestion of what I needed. I knelt in the dirt and began to brush away the sand with my fingers. The amethyst’s edges were worn down by salt and storms and time, and I sat back on my haunches to consider its utility. The leather cord I had chosen wrapped around the stone as if they were both of them incomplete until this moment, and it was long enough that when I tied it around my neck, the stone lay flat against my breastbone.
Once it was done, I secreted the charm beneath my dress. I knew the spell would work if I kept my thoughts on the corporal until I removed the charm. Though I allowed myself to feel foolish for a few seconds before beginning the long walk back to town, after that moment of reproach, I thought only of the man to whom I would mail the necklace in the morning.
Thirteen days after the United States of America claimed victory over the United Mexican States, Eva and Charlotte chased me into the bedroom and onto my bed, testing the limits of the aging frame as they laughed and jostled.
“How am I supposed to read it with your elbow in my face?” I asked Eva.
“Open it, open it!” Charlotte said.
“I’m trying!” I said.
Once I had the letter free and open in my hands, I held my breath for not knowing what it would say. I was prepared for bad news, to learn the army was moving him to the desert, to the ocean, someplace I would never see him again. Or worse, that he was going to one of the big cities back east, engaged to be married to a coal baron’s daughter rather than squander his time on the half-breed daughter of a roadhouse matron.
Eva squealed and clung to my arm as I read aloud what he wrote.
It is with great relief that I write to inform you of the 6th Infantry’s orders to return north to Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, so soon as we break camp in the morning. Though I will very much miss the sun, the sand, and the occasional scorpion nesting in my boot, we are coming home. The war is over. I have every confidence you and I will meet again in St. Louis, and feel it is not too much to hope I will not have to compete with an inebriate or posse for your attention this time.
Yours, Matthew J. Callahan
I had spent hours in the Library seeking spells that would force the days to proceed more quickly, or quell the ache in my chest when I thought of him. Speaking with my cousins did nothing but confirm my suspicions: that his red hair meant he would be fierce and loyal; that his pulling me onto his horse was the most romantic act ever recorded in the history of the MacPherson women; that my talisman had protected him from the perils across the Rio Grande.
Our mothers sensed mischief, they having been teenaged girls themselves once, but it was not until the last letter telling of the soldiers’ return to Missouri that your gran called me into the tavern before we opened the doors for business. She handed me a clean rag and put me to work drying champagne flutes while she studied me.
“I’m not,” I said.
“It’s a man.”
“It’s not.”
“Dear heart,” your gran said, “I’m old, not blind. I’ve read your cups, and even if I hadn’t, it’s all over your face. You think you’re in love.”
As I write to you now, my dear, I wonder what she would have said if I had asked her what she saw when she read my cups. I suppose she would have lied, or at least kept what she had seen to herself. Divination is a power I have not studied as have some of my kin, but those who have devoted their studies to its mastery can appreciate the burden foreknowledge places on them.
Nothing she could have told me would have changed what happened. I was too stubborn to do anything but what I was fated to do. Your gran knew that. She knew me better than anyone, at least before your father came along.