Prairie Love

"If you shave an ounce off that belly hide, Donnelly, the first cedar log your team drags down the slip will snap the trace like twine." Nellie Scott did not look up from her scraping iron, though the smell of wet hemlock bark and neat's-foot oil told her exactly where the head blacksmith stood in the dim, sawdust-strewn mouth of the harness room. The salt wind off Hood Canal rattled the corrugated tin roofing above them, driving a fine, misting spray through the gaps where the cedar shakes had warped during the September blow. It was October of eighteen-eighty-four in Port Gamble, a town where the sound of the steam-driven band saws never truly died, vibrating even through the floorboards of the low-slung harness shop that clung to the pilings near the company wharf. Nellie’s thumbs were gray with tallow and salt, her apron stiffened …

"The salt will eat the brass before the vane turns twice," Louis said, without looking up from the leather washer he was paring with a small bone-handled knife. Opal did not answer him at once; she was kneeling in the damp fern-fronds by the creek mouth, smoothing a sheet of gray blotting paper over a damp maidenhair sample so the delicate veins would not curl as they dried. The tide was pushing cold Puget Sound water up the brackish mud-run, lifting the skiff against its cedar painter with a hollow, rhythmic *clonk* that matched the heavy throb of the steam sawmill across the narrow channel. Neither of them had mentioned the pump since Tuesday, when the wagon axle had snapped four miles up the logging track and left the heavy galvanized casing half-unloaded in the stinging nettles. "Brass is soft," she said finally, her voice …

The ink on the indenture release was three days dry when Clara Doyle walked into the stone-cutting yard with a brass-bound grammar book under her arm and a pair of shears tucked into her apron string. She had not come to teach the stone-cutters their declensions, though the town council had paid her twenty dollars for three months of primary instruction that nobody attended. She had come because her uncle’s estate had dissolved into three salt-glazed jars of copper coin and a claim on five hundred yards of gravel bar where the creek bottom pinched between the granite ribs of the Wasatch. Robert Porter was sitting on an upturned grease keg, greasing a heavy linchpin with mutton tallow. He did not look up when her boots crunched on the stone chips, but he knew the sound of a London-lasted heel from the flat-soled cowhide worn …

A grease-stained cipher book of credit and claim. The unyielding proof that brought a fractured past into the light. The iron rim of the ore-bucket scraped the frozen shale with a sound that set Genevieve Vance’s teeth on edge. The wind sweeping across the Nebraska sod flats carried the bitter edge of an early November frost, icing the ruts where wagon wheels had torn through the prairie grass weeks before. She was shivering beneath a thin wool shawl, her fingers raw from hauling gravel through the coarse rocker box that her late husband had left behind. Beside her in the claim shack, her two younger siblings, Toby and Clara, huddled near the sputtering iron stove, their breath pluming white in the drafty room. Genevieve did not have time to dwell on the cold. She dropped another shovel-head of heavy placer gravel into the hopper, her …

The venom was already tasting like old copper in the back of my throat, thick and cold, when the stranger appeared out of the shimmering Wyoming heat holding a warm loaf of bread like a loaded weapon. My name is Jonathan Whitfield, and by the thirty-first year of my life, God had taken my wife, left me with four wailing babes under three years old, and finally decided to finish me off with a diamondback's teeth beneath the porch steps. The pain wasn't just a sting; it was fire with opinions, climbing my arm, taking root in my shoulder, and asking sharp, unanswerable questions about my heart. Five miles to the nearest neighbor, who was gone to Cheyenne. Fifteen to the doctor in town. If I died on this sun-baked dirt, the chickens would eat their own eggs, the milk cows would low themselves dry, …