I bit my lip. I couldn’t explain what had happened. I could hardly explain it to myself. I only knew that, in the span of a half hour, I’d gone from falling into Daniel Long’s arms to shooting him down and getting a well-deserved cut in return.
Whatever we’d had, whatever we might have had, was done: irrevocably severed.
“I can’t marry Mr. Long.” I pulled away from Gideon’s clasp and dropped my head in my hands.
PART TWO
CHAPTER TWELVE
On the first of March, the day of our departure, Gid and I, with the help of the family, packed the supplies so early that the sky hadn’t yet acknowledged morning. Behind the trees, stars pinned up a darkness that was one shade lighter than the black branches. Wood smoke wafted through the brittle air, while sporadic exchanges—in voices kept low, as if someone were sleeping, as if someone were dying—encircled the ox sled.
Lanterns traveled across the yard like roving moons. By their glow, I was allowed windows of gilded clarity: Papa’s somber face as he tightened the canvas covering, a wet gleam on my mother’s cheek, Betsy comforting Mama with a pat on the hand, Gideon and Luke’s muttered exchange in front of the yoke of oxen, Matthew’s approach as he led the cow by its rope, and Grace, uncertain and peering around in wonder.
I understood the littlest one’s feelings. Outside was different. The hour of activity, usually an hour of rest that passed unnoticed, made this most familiar place, our very own yard, strikingly foreign.
The spaniel Papa gave Gid and me as a parting present raised her head, gazed across the inky yard, and barked once before resettling on my boots, warming my feet more thoroughly than a down-filled pillow.
Leaning into the sled, Betsy inspected the contents of the basket Mama had packed, then demanded over her shoulder, “Did you have to give them all the cakes?”
“Don’t be so greedy.” My mother nudged her aside and reached across my lap to tuck in the loose corner of the blanket. “You wearing your flannel longies, dear?”
The question tugged up a corner of my mouth. Only a mother got away with asking about a person’s undergarments. “Yes, Mama.”
“Where’d you stow the tonic?” She felt my forehead. I had been sick, maybe sicker than I’d ever been, but the fever had disappeared after the first three days of my cold. Regardless, for the last six weeks she had continued to prod my brow as if convinced I was teetering toward a relapse.
“Under the seat.” I’d tucked it there between our dinner and a jug of cider. I didn’t want to have to search in the crammed back for the supplies I would be needing soon. Gid had his new vehicle organized just so. He’d purchased it along with the oxen. Though essentially nothing more than a canvas-tented farm wagon, it sported storage chests that fitted snugly inside the box, and its runners, secured to the chain-locked wheels, could be easily removed after winter passed. The vehicle would serve him well year-round.
Grace pitched herself half into the sled to pet the silky head of the dog. “Good girl,” she murmured. “Sweet doggie.” My sister gazed hopefully at me. “Will you keep her name, Harry?”
“Fancy Gloves? Certainly. It’s an excellent name.” One that Gideon happened to despise. I smiled slightly, remembering his grumbled “I can live with Gloves, but I’m dropping the Fancy.”
I called the pet Fancy for short, just to tease him.
Mama was pulling my coat sleeves over my red mittens. “I can see your wrists,” she muttered. “Do you want the frostbite? There.” She patted my arm. “You ate the onion I toasted for your breakfast?”
I grimaced. “Most of it.” Some of it, anyway, and washed down with plenty of coffee.
“And you have the almanac handy?”
I nodded. The almanac was her parting gift to me. It would provide the exact information on the sun, moon, and tides to let us set our clock. It’d give us the brightest nights to plan our most difficult stretches of travel. It’d tell us when to plant the above-and belowground crops.
In Mama’s mind, the almanac was a talisman. With every turn of the moon and shift of the stars articulated in the pages, it would aid and protect us.
“I added peppermint tea to the caddy to help with Gideon’s indigestion.”
Gid’s bellyache was all nerves, but I merely said, “I’ll fix it for him nightly.”
She rattled off a few more directions, fretted about the packed supplies, then finally sighed, “So you have everything you need?”
“Everything.” Even a few items no one knew about, not even Gideon. I hadn’t spent my convalescence simply sitting around doing nothing. I’d been wily, concocting a plan and executing it furtively enough that not even watchful Betsy knew about it.
My mother nodded, her whole face creased in a severe frown, like she was concentrating on not crying. After a moment she said in a near whisper, “You can always come home.”
My gaze drifted in the direction of our closest neighbor’s land, still steeped in darkness except for the start of morning rimming the east. Along the black backs of the mountains, dawn was just a scant redness, as thin as a fresh wound the second before the blood flows.
Not once had I talked to Daniel Long since that catastrophic day in January, mostly because I’d been bedridden and so sick (and, yes, humbled, humiliated, and intent on hiding) that I’d missed meeting and social gatherings. I hadn’t helped make up the party that saw off the three Weldses. Except for Gideon, none of the Winters had. Though I won the award for being the sickest, we’d all shared some degree of the cold and thought it best not to give our ailment to the pending pioneers. By the time I’d recovered, Daniel had departed to visit his relatives up north. He still hadn’t returned. I wasn’t sure if he even knew I was leaving.
Now I felt his absence, in the last minutes of hugs and kisses, tears and reminders. I would have liked to have said good-bye to him. To apologize. Things remained terribly undone between us, like an unfinished seam, with loose threads dangling everywhere.
Gid and I set out across the packed snow, our bells jingling through the gray air. How incongruous the cheerful music sounded. So at odds with our sadness, our shuddering breaths, our wept good-byes.
*
“I’m bored.”
Gideon touched the air with his whip. The sled lurched forward. He flashed me a warning glance. “Don’t say that. You’ll invite bad luck.”
Balancing on my lap, the dog licked my neck.
I liked our new pet. Her eyes, the prettiest girl eyes I’d ever seen, gazed at me worshipfully. I rewarded her adoration with a stroke down her back. She whined in pleasure. “Everyone should appreciate me as much as you do, Fancy.”
My brother snorted.
“So, Gid, tell me: Where are the gorges we need to circle? The avalanches we have to outpace? The peculiar species of bear that doesn’t sleep through the winter but preys year-round on unsuspecting travelers?”
“If we slide into a ditch, I’m blaming you.”
“That’s extremely unlikely.” On this first day, civilization still favored us, and though the roads we followed might have troubled our trip if this had been springtime, the year’s ample snowfall had filled the ruts. Plus, the snow wardens of New England clearly revered their jobs. They’d made recent use of their giant rollers to pack and grade the snow, not only along the main stretches but even under the newfangled covers we encountered over two of the bridges. In short, we moved at a spanking pace. “At this rate, we’ll make it to the Genesee Valley by nightfall.”
Gideon laughed. “Not quite.”
For a while, we slid along in companionable silence. The sky, the shade of pristine blue only a winter day can deliver, permitted a bold sun to cull diamonds out of the snow-carpeted fields. Icicles fringed hemlock boughs, and every so often a wind triggered a silent explosion of snow in a tree, spewing loose a weighty cloud of white from a top branch. The accumulation’s plunge caused the lower limbs’ snow to follow suit.