The only manmade structures in sight were wood-framed buildings housing a livery stable and a blacksmith shop, these to the left, while a general store with a square false front stood to the right. The general store was called Sorenson’s Dry Goods. The afternoon air shone hot and bright, sun spangling the dust stirred up by our passage along the street; two men sat on a wooden bench beneath an awning stretching from the storefront and there was an exchange of greetings. Horses were tethered to hitching rails along the street.
“Our homestead is around the lake, but minutes away,” Lorie explained.
I could only nod in response, too overcome as the wagon approached Flicker Trail, the path that forked at the beach and curved east and west around the lake. It seemed impossible that Shore Leave would not appear within the next mile on the eastern bank; I couldn’t fathom its nonexistence. Surely Mom and Grandma would be standing on the porch to welcome me home. The lake lapped a reedy shore inhabited by high-stepping white herons; rather than the wide, sandy expanse I remembered, the beach was a shallow strip of small granite stones. Boats dotted the blue surface, tranquil beneath the July sun. I’d never heard such a variety of birdsong in all my life.
How incredible that I’m seeing this.
Flickertail Lake, glimmering like cerulean satin, upon whose banks I had sunbathed for countless summer hours, in whose water I had splashed and dove, floated and tubed and skinny-dipped with my sisters and our friends.
Full circle, I thought, agony replaced by a sudden, unnatural calm.
It seemed right that I would die in this lake.
Soon I’ll be with Marshall and our baby.
At the fork we parted ways with Boyd, Rebecca, and Edward, whose homestead, White Oaks, lay to the west, the very same acreage upon which Mathias’s family would one day build their family business, where my sister and Mathias lived with their children in the homesteader’s cabin. I could picture it all so perfectly, my family in the twenty-first century. The womenfolk had remained at the forefront of my thoughts as we traveled north from St. Paul but I supposed that only made sense; their faces and voices were vividly alive in my memory because I would never see them again, at least not in life.
Please, let them be safe in their twenty-first century lives.
Let them be happy.
At all costs I shut out the sharp, intrusive voice that pleaded with me to listen, that warned I was making a terrible mistake.
Don’t do this, Ruthann.
The Rawleys are gone. You know what that means.
Fallon is still out there, he’s still a threat.
Not to me, not after tonight.
Exhaustion weighted my limbs; I had slept as though drugged in the hotel room last night, grateful that no one other than Axton knew I had lost my pregnancy. We’d told everyone that I was widowed; they were all well acquainted with the Rawley family in Iowa and believed Marshall had been a cousin to Miles, as close to the truth as I dared venture. The conversation at yesterday’s dinner in the hotel dining room had swayed between sorrow over Edward Tilson’s lost son and anger over the Yancy family causing yet more destruction in their lives. I recalled listening to Cole and Miles speak of the Yancys in Howardsville, the very night Patricia and I first met. It seemed more than a hundred years had passed since then.
A dizzying sense of disorientation settled over me yesterday as everyone crowded in a haphazard fashion around a large table in the dining room; exactly like the two families I had loved best in my old life, my own and the Rawleys, these people spoke and interacted with the ease of longtime companionship and abiding love. They were my family, to a certain extent, my Davis ancestors, flush with life and vitality and color. It was surreal to catch fleeting glimpses of Mom or Aunt Jilly in Lorie’s expressions, to watch the animation in Sawyer’s remaining eye as he spoke; golden-hazel, with a darker ring surrounding the iris, the exact same eyes I beheld when I looked in a mirror.
If Axton is Sawyer’s nephew, like they believe, then Ax and I are related after all.
I thought of the words he’d spoken at the depot.
It would mean I still have kin, Ruthie, imagine that.
“Who in the goddamn hell would believe what we had to say in defense of Spicer? Compared to the Yancys, we’re nobodies. Poor farmers from a remote corner of Minnesota. And former Rebs, to boot! I told Malcolm there wasn’t a thing he could do for Spicer but he’s stubborn as hell, always has been. He won’t let a friend down and I admire him for it, I do.” Boyd’s energy seemed almost visible in the air around him, unable to be contained. I figured him to be in his middle thirties, roughly ten years older than Malcolm, a huge man bristling with muscle and black curly hair. A thick mustache obscured his upper lip and he was tanner than saddle leather; it was his eyes that reminded me most of Malcolm, pecan-brown and deep with feeling.
“It destroys me to know my boy was only a few hundred miles from me when he was kilt,” Edward Tilson said. “He was the last of my boys. If I wasn’t so damn old and frail, I’d have ridden south with Malcolm and young Axton.”
The last of my boys…
Lorie and Rebecca sat to either side of the elderly physician; Edward was Rebecca’s uncle and lived in her and Boyd’s home. Lorie leaned her head on his arm, tears in her eyes; he bent his elbow to rest a hand on her cheek.
“I am goddamn sorry, Edward,” Boyd reached across the tabletop to grip the older man’s hand. “Goddamn sorry.”
“As we all are.” Sawyer spoke quietly, wide shoulders lifting with a deep sigh.
“We shall bury Blythe in the apple grove,” Rebecca decided.
