I bury him on a hill.
A peaceful spot beneath the desert sky, the kind of place where he liked to sit as time passed him by alongside his remaining chances. Given the last few days, it’s hard for me not to feel that my father had squandered both, just as it’s hard for me not to feel angry with him as I carry the stones for his grave all the way up from the dry creek bed. The rock pile and the wooden cross serving as perhaps the only real marks he managed to leave on this world.
Maybe he would have better luck in the next one. But then again, maybe not, since I had barely scraped together enough to fetch a coffin. Let alone a priest.
All he has is me, stumbling over his favorite passages from the Bible while I try to stop fresh tears from falling onto the worn pages, try to look away from the violent crimson stains that no amount of scrubbing has been able to lift from the light gray hem of the only dress I have left that can still be considered nice.
Truthfully, the worst part had been the waiting. Standing on that hill until the encroaching chill of night seemed poised to swallow me up. Until all I could rely on was the falling sun and the rising moon to help me on the slow walk back to the house, becoming more and more resigned with each step I took that I would make the journey alone.
I had not expected my mother to come. Not really. Why would she, when she had hardly spoken to my father in life and seemed ready to hold to that in death? Any remaining allotments of compassion she had were already overspent during this last year of barely surviving as Arizona settlers.
Must be a misunderstanding,my father had said when we arrived off the wagon train with all we had left to our name. Dust covered and sun scorched, surveying the dismal future that we’d been promised would make the last seven months on the trail worth it.This can’t be right. The man in Boston, he told me…
The man in Boston had likely seen my father coming from miles away. They always did, which is why the still untamed land beneath my feet is just the most recent of his promises of paradise that turned out to be a mirage, the poster he kept in his pocket of rolling green hills and shimmering lakes drying up faster than the ink could set on his purchase of one hundred acres of barren dirt.
My mother hadn’t even raised her voice. Instead, she simply placed my eight-year-old sisters back in the wagon and took them to town for the day, their long blonde braids swaying with the rock of the departing wagon while I was left behind to make what I could of things.
I’d had more hope then, I think. Despite what I’d learned to expect, I’d still had hope we would be able to make something out here. That all the fractured pieces of my family might finally find a way to knit themselves together with a fresh start.
How fitting, then, that our cornerstone cracked almost as soonas we’d laid it. Right down the center, and so deep that it is visible in the low guiding light of the lantern left in our front window, the deceptively welcoming glow enough to get me over the threshold, though not much farther.
When I walk in, my mother is seated at the kitchen table. Her spotless white dress free of wrinkles and her hair pinned up, as if she had been expected for a luncheon instead of a wake. She glances up from her Bible to acknowledge me only once I’ve stood too long right in front of her, determined not to move until I’ve said my final piece.
“You could’ve at least brought the girls,” I begin, my voice kept soft so as not to wake them where they sleep in their cot in the corner. “I could have—theycould have had a chance to say their goodbyes. He was their father.”
“A distinction he did not deserve,” she responds coolly, eyes already back on her gospel. “They’ve been through enough. I didn’t see any point in upsetting them further.”
“No, of course,” I mutter with an unwise edge to my voice. “Why should any of us be upset at all? You clearly are not.”
“That’s not true.” She calmly turns a page. “I ambeside myselfthat he had the opportunity to drag us out to this godforsaken country in the first place. If only he had met his untimely end sooner.”
I wince. Even for her, the cruelty is sharp, but she offers no apology. Rather, she sighs, her shoulders sagging as she sinks back in her chair. “Don’t ask me to mourn him. I said my goodbyes to the man I believed he was a long while ago. Too long ago to pretend otherwise.”
Not for the first time, I wish I’d known what they had been like back then. Wish that I could have known the versions of them that had loved each other.
That could have loved me differently.
What does she see when she looks at me now?I wonder. Nowthat I am not just a reminder of her dead aspirations but also her dead husband. His green in my eyes instead of her blue. His auburn tint to my hair instead of her golden waves. His freckles across my nose…and his blood on my hands.
As if to hide the evidence of my guilt, I clasp my palms tightly behind my back, my fresh blisters biting as I assure her, “I’m not asking you to mourn him. I’m only asking you to—”
“No,” she replies, standing and setting her book to the side with a snap. “I’ve told you I’m not going to see the law. It’s not necessary.”
“But I’ve already tried going on my own. Perhaps if they saw that he also had a wife and young children, then—”
“Thennothing. Why should they care? This territory is practically lawless. What is done is done. The best thing for us to do is to go on with our lives.” She looks toward the opposite corner of the cabin, her expression temporarily easing, and I follow her gaze to the neatly packed trunks. “No one has been foolish enough to take the land. But I did get some money for the rest of the animals today from the neighboring farms. And we’ll get more in the morning when we sell the horses in town.”
“In the morning?” I feel sick again as she speaks. That same rising sense of panic I’d felt as I watched my father fade away in that street, as I stood up on that hill earlier and thought about what would happen next. “Do we have to leave so soon?”
“Besensible,” my mother insists, her face pinching into a frustrated frown at my clear lack of corresponding enthusiasm. “We cannot stay here. Even if we make it to the fall without someone coming to collect, we will never make it through the winter. I won’t die out here. I won’t let my girls die out here, either.” Her attention shifts away from me as she makes that declaration, back to the still sleeping forms of my sisters. “They deserve better.”
I can’t argue with her. Not convincingly. Not after whathappened. Soon enough, the vultures will begin circling, swooping in to pick off what little meat remains on our bones. I told my father as much myself the day he died. I’d beensoangry with him. I’d walked away from him in that street and then… I can still see the shock on his face. The way he simply crumpled right where he stood before the sound of the shot had even faded. Before I’d been able to get to him. I should never have left him alone.
“Do you think it’s been easy for me? Do you think I enjoy having to always rely oncharity?” My mother spits the word out as if the taste of it is sour, shaking her head at me in censure. “Do you realize how shameful it is? Howsinful? We are lucky that my sister’s husband is gracious enough to take us in at all.”
Luckyis not the word I would use. Although, since my uncle only comes home when no one will have him elsewhere, I doubt he will even notice additional occupants unless he is short on someone to bellow at. Say what people would about my father, but at least what he lacked in dependability, he made up for in other ways. He had been kind. He had believed in things. Believed too much, maybe. In the end.
“We can only impose so much on them for so long. The sooner we can get you married off, the better,” my mother continues. “In Sarah’s last letter, she wrote that she thought she might have found someone. Given your age—and with nothing to offer—it wasn’t easy, Lord knows.” Her upper lip curls slightly as she surveys me head to toe. “We’ll have to hope he will take you before he has time to realize you’re half wild.”