One Came Home (23 page)

Living with uncertainty is like having a rock in your shoe. If you can’t remove the rock, you have to figure out how to walk despite it. There is simply no other choice.

I kept busy. Busy helped. Every morning I started early in the store—restocking, sweeping off the porch whether it needed it or not, and straightening displays. When the store opened, I took on tasks that used to be done by Agatha and Grandfather Bolte: I advised customers. I completed the sale by taking money and counting back change. At the end of the day, I gathered up the receipts and went upstairs to record them in the account books on Grandfather Bolte’s desk.

I liked it too. “She’s got a knack,” said Aunt Cleo to Ma repeatedly (and in my hearing). Another time Aunt Cleo said
that sales ran in the family, and I’d inherited the tendency. I understood what she meant. I felt almost clairvoyant. Sometimes I knew what people wanted or needed before they knew themselves. I certainly liked devising schemes to sell this or that item: I formulated plans. I tweaked wordings on signs and made sure everything looked like a picture postcard from the plate glass window. And despite the circumstances, I felt a kind of congruity with the world and my place in it when the store thrummed like a beehive with Aunt Cleo, Ma, and me each doing our part.

Still, we all wondered about Agatha. At different times, Ma, Aunt Cleo, and the sheriff all asked to see the ribbon again. Mr. Olmstead came by to make me repeat what the Dog Hollow stationmaster had said. I did not offer theories, and no one asked. For the first time, I started to understand what it must have been like for Ma as she wondered about Pa all those years.

I imagine we all came up with ways to deal with the uncertainty. I did two things. First, I wrote letters. I wrote a letter to “The Harrisons, parents of Morgy Harrison, Dog Hollow, Wisconsin.” I wrote a letter to “Mrs. Garrow on the bluff, Dog Hollow, Wisconsin” and enclosed a piece of the blue-green ribbon. Then I wrote a letter to the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The address read: “The Department That Educates Young Ladies in the Sciences.” It was an unlikely address, but I had to try. “If you see her, tell her to write us. We are longing for a word.”

Second, I arose one morning while it was still dark, saddled Long Ears, and rode to the bluffs.

Agatha had not come home, so I found a wide rock that overlooked the Wisconsin River and spoke about her loudly into the wind. I told her story. I told my story. I apologized.

Agatha had not come home, so I told the air, the sky, the horizon (and, I suppose, Long Ears) what Agatha looked like when, parasol in hand, she spun under pigeons: spring set free, a dance of heaven and earth, mankind and creation enjoying each other’s company.

Agatha had not come home, so I stood at the edge of that bluff, pulled up a dandelion gone white with seeds, and blew those seeds into the wind. I watched them sail off, tottering, turning, and gradually descending to the river below.

And I swear I saw a single blue feather in the wind.

I watched it and remembered shooting those gin bottles after Agatha’s funeral. Feathers had flown up with every shattering. I had wondered about the difference between feathers and leaves, and now my thoughts came back to me. It was too true: Agatha had been carried away, beyond my reach, like some sort of feather. Me? I’d had my flight and was back at home. I found I did not mind.

I could have gone on, but Long Ears nudged in to check my pockets for sugar, found none there, and tipped me over.

I pushed his muzzle off me, stood up, and noticed the perfection of the day—not a cloud in the sky, not a breeze. And there was that mule with the ears that stuck out like hands on a clock, eyeing me.

I love it when he waits like that. Long Ears knows it.

I smiled at him, then looked again out over the edge of the bluff.

Yes, I’d said what I needed to say.

Long Ears stamped.

I turned to him, and laughed for the first time that day. “What about an apple? Would that do?”

On July 24, 1871, Ma shuffled through the mail (like she did). She squinted at the return address on a letter. A small sound—her tongue clicking—escaped her lips. The letter slipped from her hand.

I watched it slice through the air like a feather and I
knew
.

I
knew
before it hit the ground and skidded across the pine floor.

Aunt Cleo hurried to pick it up. I watched Aunt Cleo’s face open up like the letter O.

Ma set the rest of the mail down and grabbed the letter from Aunt Cleo’s hand. Aunt Cleo shooed a customer out of the store and flipped the
OPEN
sign to
CLOSED
. Ma ripped the envelope off the letter. A newspaper clipping flapped to the
ground. I picked up the clipping, and ran behind Ma to read over her shoulder.

We read the letter together:

I unfolded the newspaper clipping and saw the headline: “Girl Sharpshooter Brings Down Counterfeiters.” The sketch beneath it was also familiar, but it never ceased to cool my blood. Below perfectly fine pigtails wasn’t a head but a chunk of meat gone bad in the sun. I touched my cheek reflexively.

Aunt Cleo snatched the clipping out of my hands. “You
never
looked like
that
.”

We continued to read the letter:

“Heedless girl,” said Aunt Cleo.

“She doesn’t know the half of it,” said Ma.

I stood slack-jawed. Then I rammed my knee hard into the counter. “I hate her. She deceived us,” I said.

The store went quiet as a hairpin. I looked up and saw their wide eyes staring at me. I read concern—for
me
.

Even after all I’d done—leaving and making my family sick with worry.

After
all that, Ma, Aunt Cleo, the sheriff, Mr. Olmstead, our neighbors, all of Placid had taken me back in a most unreserved way.

Wouldn’t I do the same for Agatha?

I saw the letter held between Ma’s index finger and thumb. I reached for it. I spread it flat on the counter. Agatha’s handwriting. Those loopy letter e’s. I put my finger on the inked letters and pressed against the lines, feeling every indent as if it were braille.

I
wanted
my sister. I
loved
my sister.

I did it then—I forgave her …

… and burst out laughing (confusing Ma and Aunt Cleo to no end). I laughed at the irony: Agatha and I had both started in Placid and ended in Dog Hollow. Yet who would say we’d had the same journey? It was as if I had walked, tilling the earth for troubles, and Agatha had bypassed it all by flying overhead.

Agatha was alive.

Ma reached out for Aunt Cleo and me. With our arms around each other, we smiled until it hurt.

Pause a moment. Feel the air surround that moment. Push against it, and find that it truly exists. Blow on it, and see how the tiny barbs snag the wind and lift. Watch it fly.

Feather by feather, she
had
made her way.

You’d think 1871 would have finished with me. This was not the case. There are still a few wonders I need to relay before I end my story. The year 1871 seemed determined to remake me, and it did. In the end, 1871 remade
all
of us.

As letters went back and forth, 1871 established itself firmly as a year we’d never be able to forget. Already we’d experienced the largest pigeon nesting within recorded memory, and now in August talk was all about lack of rain. People complained of low water levels in their wells, and of slogging pails of water to their gardens. When had it last rained? I remembered big drops the day I’d negotiated with Billy McCabe for a horse. But after that, everything went bone-dry.

Of course, everyone in my family (including myself) was happily preoccupied with Agatha. We scribbled out missives and eagerly awaited replies. Ma and the sheriff made plans for a November honeymoon to Madison. At Agatha’s request, they invited Mr. Olmstead to join them.