Bronwyn Williams - Longshadow's Woman

Jonah had learned long ago to lock away all emotion. He could not afford to think of the woman as anything more than a means of escape. A means of eventually clearing his name so that he could return to his land and his horses. She made it difficult, however, first by treating him with such disdain he wanted to shake her until her teeth flew in all directions—then by treating him not only with kindness, but with sympathy. It was enough to undermine his determination.

He told himself she was crazy. For all she knew he could be a murderer, yet she had brought him into her house and tortured him with her careless kindness. She had stared at his naked body that first day. She knew well that he was a man. She had scrubbed his wounds with her lye soap and mopped them with turpentine until his eyes watered with the pain. She had shared her food and water with him, sat beside him to share a patch of shade, yet she considered him less than an animal. A wolf caught in a trap. Not only deaf, but stupid.

The woman was crazy.

Together the next morning they set fire to the pile of stumps, some of which were dry, a few still damp from the earth. When flames whipped through the heap and spread to the bigger stumps in the middle, they turned to one another with a look of shared triumph. Then, almost as if they were embarrassed, Jonah began gathering dead branches to toss on the fire, and Carrie began stepping off the length and breadth of the clearing for perhaps the hundredth time. The ground was hard, baked dry by weeks without rain. Scrubby vegetation had flourished once the tall trees had been cut down, allowing the sun to reach the ground. Those would have to be cleared next. Even as they worked, they both watched the burn pile carefully to see that the flames didn’t spread. When a finger of flames spilled out and began creeping through the dry grass, they both rushed to beat it out with tote sacks wet from the nearby creek.

With the fire once more under control, they stared at each other, sweaty, sooty, and triumphant. And there it was again. That shimmering awareness that made the world go utterly silent for one endless moment.

Silently, Jonah called himself a fool for staying as long as he had. He had meant to slip away at the first opportunity, but here he still was. Now, in exchange for food, a clean place to sleep and the occasional smile when the woman forgot herself, he was going to have to follow that damned plow and turn the earth so that she could plant her corn. He had not meant to linger so long.

She didn’t even know how he was called. The sheriff had called him Kie-oh-way. He had heard him call her Adams. Miss or Mrs. Adams? There was no man in her bed or at her table, but a man’s coat and shirt hung from a hook on the wall. Perhaps she had once had a man and he had died. Or perhaps he had thrown her away, as a Kiowa did if one of his wives displeased him. He could easily see how this woman could displease a man.

Yet he could also see how she might please a man….

“Now this,” Carrie informed him the next morning, “is what we call a plow.”

“It is also what I call a plow,” he wanted to say, but held his tongue. It had angered him at first when she forgot he was only an ignorant savage and spoke to him as if he were slightly more intelligent than her mule. Now it amused him.

Using pantomime to illustrate her words, she said, “What I aim to do is harness it to Sorry so that he can do the pulling, the way he did with the stumps.” Placing the worn straps over her own shoulders, she mimicked pulling the plow. “But you’ll have to steady it, else it’ll skitter over the top of the ground and fall over. I’d do it myself, but the thing’s got two handles and I’ve only got one good hand.”

He was curious about that. Her hand was still bundled up in a grimy rag, reeking of the turpentine she had used on his ankle that had burned down to the bone. She held it against her breasts now and then, as if it pained her. More than likely what pained her was holding that damned Springfield, which she insisted on carrying with her into the field, even though they both knew he could have easily escaped many times.

“I don’t reckon you know what the devil I’m saying, but I was ever one for talking, and you’re all I’ve got to talk to.” She pointed to the rusty plow. “Plow. Now, you try saying it. Plow.”

It was all he could not to laugh, but soberly, he repeated the word. “Plow.”

“Oh, that’s real good! We’ll have you talking in no time, you see if we don’t.” Her smile was as warm and encouraging as a pat on the head, as if he’d just retrieved the stick she had thrown.

So he followed her into the field, appreciating the way she walked in spite of his irritation, amused at the way she squared her hat on her head, then lifted it to fork her flyaway hair from her eyes. It was a man’s straw hat, ugly, but useful for one with skin so fair it reddened each day from the sun and faded by nightfall, leaving behind light brown speckles. She began each day with the sleeves of her dress covering her arms, but before the day was half over, she would turn up the sleeves and unfasten the buttons at her throat.

Gazing past the mule’s bony haunches, Jonah watched the way she moved, fascinated at how much a man could learn about a woman from the way she walked, the way she bent to chop at a stubborn shrub. Buoyed by hope and determination, she strode into the field each morning like a warrior riding into battle. Although he had to admit there was nothing at all warrior-like in the movement of her hips or the way her bosoms bounced under the thin covering of calico.

By the end of each day she drooped like a flower that had been plucked and cast aside. Plodding in from the field, it was all she could do to keep the rifle from dragging on the ground. He would have offered to carry it for her, but he suspected she might misunderstand his motives.

Irritating woman. Were all white women so contrary, or was it only this one small individual? The women of St. Augustine who had taught him to read and write had not affected him this way.

The problem, Jonah told himself, was not this particular woman. He would have reacted the same way toward any woman between the ages of fifteen and fifty, having been without the comfort of a woman’s body for so long. His blood still grew heated when he thought of the way he had dropped his clothes before her, standing ankle-deep in her creek. He had done it out of anger, out of resentment, wanting to shock her, to frighten her.

Instead, he had been the one who was affected. He’d had to turn away quickly and lower himself into the water.

Steering the white man’s plow, he told himself that evening, was not as bad as he’d feared. He understood the mule. The mule understood him. They worked well together. As for the woman, that was another matter. She walked beside him every step of the way, from one end of the clearing to the other, sometimes moving ahead to chop down a bush, or falling behind to crumble a handful of freshly turned earth in her hand. They would stop at the far end, drink from the jar of water she’d left there in the shade, then set out again.

“This is the first time I’ve tried planting a cash crop,” she confided. “Corn—well, everybody needs corn. Last year I had to buy corn. There’s still some left in the crib, but it’s old and buggy, and I have to grind it, and the grinder’s gone to blazes. It’s good enough for Sorry and the chickens, but with a decent harvest, I can take my corn to the mill and get it ground, and pay the miller with part of the crop. That’s the way we do it,” she said gravely, as if imparting a valuable tenet of her white man’s wisdom.

Jonah reminded himself of his promise to Lieutenant Pratt, that he would help the first white person in need he encountered. The Adams woman needed help all right. She was weak, injured and alone, yet no one came to her aid. There were houses within a few miles of her cabin, yet no one visited. She had mentioned a friend, but the friend had not come to help her plow her field. It was becoming increasingly obvious that she was an outcast. Jonah knew what it felt like to be an outcast.