She paged through the dailies while breakfast cooked. She read about the riot, the army coming in, the mayor whisked out of the city, barely alive after being hung from a light pole. There was a photo on the front page of the World-Herald of rioters mugging with the charred remains of Will Brown. She bent close to the print and studied the faces to see if anyone she knew was in the lynch mob. Maybe she searched for his face, to see if that was why Jake Strauss was at her door at sunrise, distraught, smoky and exhausted, his face waxen and cinder specked, lately born from the riot. She let him in. Took him by the hand and pulled through the door and held him.
It rained that morning. A quiet but heavy rain, no wind. She waited while Jake slept and thought about what happened. She watched the coffee boil up brown in its pot. The smell didn’t wash out of the air for a long time despite the rain. She sat there smelling the smoke from the courthouse turn stale and hoped a cool wind would rush along the river to sweep the damning air away. She looked out the windows. Kids snuck from door to door to sell postcards of the hanging.
She’d led him to the bathtub after he was inside. She sat on the tub edge and plugged the drain. She drew fresh water and stood to let him hug his chest to her thighs, his head to her womb. She undressed him. She tossed his jacket out the doorway and unbuttoned his shirt, pulled off his smoky clothes, held his hand as he stepped into the water. She soaked a cloth to wet his arms and neck. She poured powder in the water and swirled with her hands to make it bubble. A sleeve of her nightgown soaked to the elbow.
It calmed him to lie in the bathtub, in the steam, his body weightless underwater. She lifted his foot and washed the backs of his legs. She savored him. They didn’t need to say anything. It was fine if his eyes shuttered and closed, if his breathing slowed.
He pulled her to the water when she washed his chest, like asking, one hand on her wrist, the other on her elbow. She went behind the divider to undress, naked when she returned to slip into the water with him. The wake her body made spilled over the sides to the floor.
He took her face between his hands and kissed her. Her face cradled. His fingers brushing her skin. He caressed the pouch of her chin before they kissed again.
He was falling asleep in the water. His eyes closed, holding to her as he slid on the porcelain. She said they should get out of the bath. They did. She said they should dry off and go to bed, and they did. They moved to the bed and swept off the covers. She laid in the curve of his body, letting him hold her. He buried his nose in her hair and breathed it.
She read about the lynching in the newspaper and knew she had to leave. She couldn’t live in this city. She had to get far away from any place where people knew her.
She came to wake him when the food was ready. Watched him in that big bed that nearly took up the whole room. Evie knew he was pretending to sleep. She watched from the doorway until he rolled over and looked back at her.
“Spell it out for me,” she said. “Tell me where we’ll go. What we’ll do once we get there. Is it San Francisco? Is that where we’re going? I’m going to have a shop there. What will you do? Will you lay bricks? Will you dig?”
He tried to keep his mouth shut and be happier for it. The way he pinched his lips tight and rolled away and closed his eyes again, like he could take back being awake. But she was on the bed next to him. There was breakfast. She would listen. She said, “Tell me.” There was nothing else he could do.
Within the month Evie and Jake were off on a train headed west. She worked night and day to arrange things. She packed up what she had—the wire dummy, the cutting table, all her tools and the bolts of cloth, the jewels and sequins and feathers, the half-finished garments that would have to find an owner in another city, every penny of money she’d saved—and she figured out what they could do somewhere besides Omaha.
They found a small city out west called Beaufort. There were jobs for Jake. Farmwork around the countryside. They’d meant to go all the way to San Francisco, but on the train he heard about the unions there, the IWW, and that scared him off. He just wanted to farm some. It didn’t have to be his own farm, and was probably better if it wasn’t. The biggest farms he ever saw were in California. However much help he could provide was good enough for an orange grove owner, or the overseer of a spinach-green valley, they could always use more. Jake a day laborer; Evie with a shop in town at the back of a little house, a two-story with a fence and a matching carriage garage, where the car was parked, once they bought a car. Jake collected garden tools in there. Forks and hoes and hand clippers and a five-tine cultivator and a machete. He kept a garden behind the house. Strung lines for green beans and tomatoes and chili peppers, pimentos, poblanos, and most of what they ate came from that garden. He learned to cook what grew here and was good to eat.
A quiet kind of life. Even though Jake was still young, and would be young for a long time yet, he felt like they’d earned this, Evie and him, after everything they’d gone through to get here.
And even though Evie sometimes could agree with Jake, that maybe they’d earned a quiet life, there always remained what they saw happen in Omaha when they lived there, so Evie knew they deserved nothing. Nobody did. As far as Evie was concerned, it was shameful to live like they did in Beaufort. Happy. Smiling to strangers on the walkway. Making friends. Shameful. To make money. Her own money. To design and sew and have customers with the means to pay cash for the extravagant things they wanted. That kind of quietness of mind, that kind of life, had a way of erasing a black mark from a person. After all those years Evie knew about this. Evie felt bad. She was embarrassed. It changed a person to see how things really were. Made her feel different about herself.
Every once in a while she’d get to talking to a black person—on a side street in Beaufort or at the back door of her nice house, painted lime green, with a second story where the nursery was, her shop in the parlor—and it would come up how Evie was from Omaha. “Oh, missus. I heard about there.”
She felt disgraced. That they could just do that to a person, in Omaha, and lots of other places. That some rowdy boys could start trouble outside the courthouse anytime they wanted and nothing could put a stop to it, because a man with no power was the target, a man who couldn’t escape how he was marked. His body broken from working stockyards. His skin. It was easy to see why Will Brown had been picked out by the police, by the mob. Knowing all this made Evie sick, even if she never let this show in her face. She was ashamed. Even if she didn’t say so, it was a disgrace on them all.