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England was a dead name, and a coal in her mouth. All through the long voyage, Cornelia wrote letters inside her head: fine letters. Words that he might read, trace with his deliberate capable fingers. Words to nourish and to heal. The thought soothed some of the fire kindling her heart and lungs, the ashen lump in the pit of her stomach.
She felt, leaving Eli, as she had felt leaving her son. And Eli was living still—or so she hoped, looking to the glimmering path of the dead, and praying he had not gone on before her. Karariwari, the Chief Star, she whispered out loud in the night. Deer. Rabbit. Wolf Road. Rarukihkiripacki. Morning Star East, Morning Star West.
Except for the stars above she was alone.
England was grey. She went to the estate of Thomas’ parents and left like a shadow, handing out a small portion of her grief. She stood under a high wall and gazed up at the long trailing hands of the willow that reached out to brush her face and wipe away the tears there. Her heart was cracking again.
It had been a mistake, coming back. His shout echoed from the plains and through her very bones.
Cornelia was many things, but she was not one to pass up a lesson made from error, especially her own. This time she sailed from Liverpool to New York, and the city clattered and belched its welcome but she paid it no mind, thinking only of his face.
Nebraska. Flat Water. She passed great lakes on her journey, signaling the way.
She wrote letters and buried them. Under trees spotting her path west. She wrote letters and burnt them into fire-fresh black powder as fine as any dust or river silt and smeared the ash across her cheeks, her throat, across the pale skin of her arms.
In the long night when I find your name on my lips, I whisper this instead. Beloved.
✧✧✧
Cornelia shielded her eyes from the sun. Weeks of riding and she was close, enough to feel the weight of Eli’s footsteps on the ground, if only she knew such things. And to be stuck at the final juncture, at the mercy of an unhelpful and glowering old man. The world, she knew, was far from fair.
“I understand this land adjoining yours belongs to Mister Whipp. You must know him.”
“Distinctive, is he?”
“Pawnee. He has a way about the eyes…” Cornelia began, and then stopped, knowing the stranger could not care about the metal strength of Eli’s eyes: the way, when caught in sunlight, the dark turned molten and ringed with gold. Foolish.
The old man looked at her, sour and pitted as a peach seed. “And what’s he to you?”
“A friend,” she said, simply. “The end of our story remains unfinished.”
“And unfinished it may well remain. He ain’t here.”
A vice squeezed her trapped heart. “What do you mean?”
“What I mean is, the dirt-worshipping bastard ain’t here anymore. They got rules, see. All them Indians got a place to be, and it ain’t here. This land here’s white.”
“Funny.” A ripple ran up her spine, cool and iron. “That’s the one color absent from this tableau. I see browns, greens, yellows, and greys. No white. Not even a cloud in the sky.”
“Well, ma'am, you’ll note there ain’t any red about neither.”
“Isn’t there?” Cornelia remarked, and shot the man in the leg. A look of surprise flattened his face and he went down hollering, blood oozing through his fingers and onto the dirt. It seeped. She noted this with some satisfaction.
“Now, I didn’t aim to do that,” she said, pinching the bridge of her nose. “I came here to buy up your land. I have money, you see, plenty, more than enough to cover your expenses. You could go west, to San Francisco, oh I don’t know, wherever it is you want to go. As long as you leave this place and don’t come back.”
“You shot me!”
“Yes, I know. I’ll pay for that too. The doctor in town can see to it, and I can also see to it that a team packs up your possessions. A wagon can take you wherever you want to go. Unless,” she mused, smoothing the barrel of the pistol, “you’d like a more permanent solution. I’m sure, in the absence of any family, it won’t take long for your land to come up to auction. Do you have family, Mr. Sawyer?”
“Shit, lady.”
The land under him was stained red. The whole country too, down to its very core. Cornelia smiled and shook his hand, and just like that, her palm was stained red too. The glove shone with it. It dried on her fingers, settling into the whorls and lines of her skin, and eventually rusted and fell in flakes to the ground. Where it belonged.
“Now I’ll ask you one more time,” she said. “Where is Eli Whipp?”
✧✧✧
Eli went Nebraska way, as he’d said. Something in his face, maybe, grown hard and sharp since Melmont and all that blood—since watching Cornelia shrink to a small blue dot among the dark blue foothills—so the army settlement officer looked into Eli’s eyes and didn’t argue none. He was given papers. The land was his in name. Dug himself a well, down to the bedrock, and when the water came up it was salty and sulphur-smelling, but that was all right for the tender green shoots that would break ground come summer.
In the southwest corner of the property was a small ramshackle hut, which he used for shelter on the worst of those early nights. A collection of hulking planks, more like. On the floor a single cracked white china plate, glistening like pearl in the handle of a gun. A tooth in a rotted mouth.
He kept the plate. When the house was built he mounted it on the wall, above the door, something pretty in the empty space. He’d never seen himself living under a roof on his own, let alone with anything pretty in it, but some days he imagined her boots on the porch and the high, clear question in her eye as she looked up at the thing and asked, “Now, what’s that for?”
And he’d tell her, just as the house. For you.
✧✧✧
Winter came on hard. His lonely homestead weathered the worst of it well enough, taking on frost like a second skin while Eli settled in to wait. Felt like his whole being was waiting. He’d been biding his time for years, keeping on the narrow, thinking of that house, that land with his name on it. Now it was his and he was still stuck looking at the horizon, imagining her there.
But she was long gone. He’d been further in each direction but he’d never seen the sea; he imagined it gray-green and fathomless, some distant crossing like death from which its travelers never returned.
A slow drumbeat resonated through the ground under his feet from miles around: a death march, a protest, a dance—silent and deep, but he knew it was there. Until one day it stopped for good. An iron taste filled his mouth when he heard the news. Thought of Chalk River, the stench of bodies rising upward on their journey while he sat and watched and did nothing, and he felt sick with himself and with the land and with the stupidity of gripping on to the old way of living when it was already gone. No protection from bullets.
He’d seen the life drain from David Melmont’s eyes but he was still out riding the plains, blood-spattered and grinning—always grinning.
It was a two day ride north through a blizzard. When he arrived in South Dakota an army man paid him to help bury the corpses, which was hard with all the ground frost. The bodies needed chiseling from the ice. Their limbs stuck out stiff and strange, all manner of blood and frozen innards dragging through the snow as he staggered back and forth to the hastily-dug gulch that served as a mass grave, hot with sweat and a steadily mounting rage.
He forced himself to look. These were faces from other massacres. These were his dead. Fifteen years since Chalk River and there was no other end than this; he was fooling himself otherwise, with his land and his piece of paper that was about as much good as a ragged peace flag when the bullets were flying.
When he rode back home he waited again, this time for the snow to melt, and for the horsemen he knew were coming. He could walk their way of thinking same as he could walk that of an injured horse or a hungry coyote. What’s one more dead Indian? they were thinking. He’s all alone. That land ain’t his. Time something was done.
Eli readied himself. It was slow work, cleaning his guns, and he thought of Cornelia; how swift and easy it had been with her at his side. Shame their paths wouldn’t cross again. He’d known this but it felt worse now. Better be canny and quick like the scorpion and twice as sharp.
He painted his face and, afterwards, painted his horse, as he hadn’t done since he was young and had barely earned himself his second name. There was still red under his fingernails when he went out to meet them.
✧✧✧
The old man hadn’t lied, or at least that was what she hoped. Cornelia slowed when she saw the house. It was small, neatly constructed, with a sheltered woodpile and smoke curling from the stack. There were four horses tied outside the barn. One was Eli’s.
Her vision was a little hazy around the edges as she mounted the porch steps, gun in hand, the sores on her hands and breastbone searing white hot knifepoints into her skin, raw and angry, and she supposed that was what she felt. Raw and angry.
The men looked up as she entered, equal parts confusion and untwisting, leered delight.
“Eli Whipp,” she said. One of them made to rise, and she shot him in the chest and then again in the stomach, and he went down. His partners still sat at the table. For a moment they gaped up at her without expression, spatters of blood on their beards and shirts. One, she saw with a spike of rage that struck her between the ribs, had Eli’s woollen blanket unfolded across his shoulders; she turned to him next and shot him in the face.
“Hey,” sputtered the last man. “What d’you think you’re doing?”
“I’m here for Eli,” Cornelia said, simply. “And if I’m too late, then I suppose it’s you I’m here for.”
He swung at her with a knife, knocking the gun from her hands. She grabbed the blade as they struggled together, hitting the floor. A chair clattered onto its back.
He must have made it himself, and he had made more than one. Another jarring pain in her ribs.
The man grabbed at her throat and her chin and she sank her teeth into his fingers, her free hand loosening the knife from under her skirt to where she swung it across his belly.
“Ah,” he huffed. “You bitch.”
The man uprooted his guts and died. Cornelia pulled herself slowly to her feet and glanced at the men where they lay staining the sanded boards.
“Eli,” she said again. She gathered up the red blanket and staggered outside, drawing up water from the well to clean her hands and face. The knife had snagged on her glove and sliced her palm, but not very deep. She removed both gloves and let them drop to the ground like felled birds, black and limp and ruined.
She carefully dabbed the fresh blood from the blanket and held it to her face. It was thick and soft and smelled of clay and musk and green wood. It smelled of Eli.
There were tracks in the field and she followed them south to a patch of bent trees. They had strung him up by his feet from a branch that dipped and bowed in the wind. A few birds took flight. For a moment she thought of their first meeting, the rope tight and creaking, the stranger roped and dangling from the ground; that caged anger in his eyes. This time it shone in hers.
She was afraid to reach out and touch him, but she did. He slowly spun to face her. Blood caked his chin and ran into his nose and eyes, and for a moment she thought he really was dead—and then he made a noise, a forced huff in his chest, and bubble of blood burst on his lips.
“Hold on,” she told him. “I’m going to cut you down.”
The rope was tied around the tree trunk. There was no graceful way to do it, and her palms screamed as she the rope slipped against the raw wounds there, but she managed to lower him to the ground without letting him fall in one go and snap his neck. He tried to sit up and dropped back.
“It’s all right,” Cornelia murmured, propping him in her lap. “There’s no rush. Eli.”
She felt along his chest and legs for wounds and found nothing severe. A bullet had scored a gash in his arm, that was all, along with the bruises on his head. He reached up with his bound hands and took her hand as she stroked his jaw, clasping it in his, and she held it and whispered the words from her letters as some of the unnatural head-rush color drained from his face, beneath the cracked and smudged lines of paint.
“Can't see so good,” he rasped, after a while.
“That’s the part I fear the most.” Cornelia moved his fingers across her cheek, down to her lips. “It’ll come, when it comes. Is it bad?”
“Not so much. You’re here.”
“There. That’s all right then.” She dabbed at his split mouth with the edge of her dress. Things had changed since their first meeting, thanks to him. A knife thrown in the dark. This time she had cut him down herself.
“You went home,” Eli stated, squinting up at her.
“I took the boat. I thought if I could bear it, the distance, that it was something I could live with. But I never went home.”
“Hm.”
“This,” she said, touching the locket around her neck, then the flat of his chest. “And you. I came back for you.”
Cornelia cut the rope binding his hands. It was another stretch of time before he could sit up. She rubbed his legs where the rope had cut into skin.
He winced, then shifted focus. “There’s men up at the house. You should head out.”
“They’re dead.”
“Huh.”
The noise was without inflection, but she could tell an implicit question when it was hanging in the air. “I killed them. Three of them, anyway.”
“There were three left, strung me up.”
“Then it was all of them I killed.”
“And how’d you do that.”
“How you showed me. Like this.” Touching his heart. “And this.” Touching his gut.
She let her hand rest where it was, on the warm breadth of his waistcoat, the buttons digging into her palm with every rise and fall of his belly. Something in his look steadied, like a stag stiffening at the sound of a branch cracking underfoot.
If she knew him less it wouldn’t have struck her. She thought he might be blushing.
Eli carefully turned her hand over in his and studied her palm. He didn’t flinch.
“Don’t,” murmured Cornelia. For a moment it had seemed like he might kiss her bare skin, and she nearly withdrew, but he merely began to wrap the knife wound with a scrap of fabric from his tunic, careful and deliberate as always.
“You took them off,” he said. “How about that. Said there’d be the day.”
“Yes.”
“It hurt?”
She studied his handiwork, and smiled. “The cost of reaching out. I didn’t think it would be painless. It’s the being out in the open that makes me feel…”
“Like running?”
“Like I'm being seen. But you knew.”
“I did.”
“And you didn’t say anything.”
“Time comes for a person to tell a thing, I’ll listen. Ain’t my place to draw lines in someone else’s story.”
“That was my mistake,” Cornelia whispered. “Thinking I had a story of my own—as if my path wasn’t tied with yours from the moment we met. When the stars align, you pay attention. And still, I thought if I could find dignity in the ending of my choice, the memory alone would be enough to keep me through. But it’s never really been my choice, has it?”
“You chose to come back.”
“Yes.”
He kissed her then, as she had imagined he would. Together they made their slow way toward the house, Cornelia taking his weight as he limped stiffly on, and the wind rustled the prairie grass and made the high clouds skim like cresting waves across the flat painted sky.
✧✧✧
Eli went on ahead. Cornelia heard the clatter of the well. She waited, face upturned to the unseen stars, letting the breeze play with her hair and cool her high color. It was good to be alive. Here of all places.
When the sun began its gradual decent to the west and the light turned long and shadowed she made her way toward the barn, and saw him waiting on the path, draped in the blanket, its fine material a robins-breast splash of vibrant red in the setting sun.
It was as if he had pulled an image from one of her dreams. She stepped closer, as did he, wrapping the blanket around them both until they were enveloped in warmth and sheltered from the world. They might have been the only two people living.
His forehead came to rest against hers. He smelled of fresh sulphur water; the dried blood and paint scrubbed from his skin. Their breathing settled. In time with one another and the creatures hidden in the plains still there to draw breath.
“This thing ahead,” she said. “I’d rather face it with you than without you.” She ran her fingers lightly across the bruise on his cheek, wishing she could erase the mark. Indelible as the landscape. “The time I have may not be that long. And it will be difficult.”
He made a soft noise in his throat.
“There’s no doctor. No medicine. No magic. If it’s the short or long road for me, I’ll soon find out.” Cornelia unclasped her locket and laced his fingers around it. “But being here, with you. That’s medicine enough.”
“Long way to come just to say goodbye.” His mouth quirked upward, eyes sharp and bright as their tintype counterpart and infinitely more kind.
“It’s not my intent. Not just yet.”
“Well. That’s that, then.”
“Yes?”
“Reckon so. Rest we’ll get to when it comes.”
“I’d like that very much.”
She kissed his fingers and his cheeks, and the corner of his mouth. He placed a solemn kiss to her forehead and brushed the tears from her eyes, holding her closer than she could remember being held since she was very young, when the world beyond was fresh and exciting and full of unknown promise.
“I left some dead men in your house,” Cornelia said, after a long while. “That wasn’t very considerate of me.”
“Hmm.” Eli let the blanket fall to their shoulders and pondered the sky above, now dotted with a multitude of stars. “We’ll make a fire, then. Deal with that in the morning.”
The stars, attuned to their ways, looked down with a familiar watchful silence. The Wolf Star a pinprick of brightest light. They slept face to face, curled up under the blanket beneath the wide-eyed moon, and barely stirred as a few coyotes picked their way past their makeshift campfire and into the waiting house.
Eli curled his hand in hers. He hummed a song in his chest, low and quiet, but he knew it reached more than his own ears. There would be a time to sing out. And more than the prairie to listen.