Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History (56 page)

They overnighted in a derelict hotel. One empty entranceway, one empty parlor, ten empty bedrooms. Adelaide had expected to find a few strips of cloth, a broken chair or two, but everything had all been sold, stolen, or withered away. Like fools, no one had brought lamps or matches in their travel bags. The supplies were sealed up tight in the boxes buried in Mr. Olsen’s wagon. Late night hardly seemed like the time to scavenge their resources and besides they were all exhausted. The wagon had tossed and crashed the whole way and each of them, even the children, limped as they moved inside. The darkness outside became worse indoors. Not even the stars in here to guide them. To Adelaide every room felt fathomless and she felt truly alone.

Suddenly it was too much. Adelaide fled out into the wind. Her only companion here in the wild country was that steamer trunk, and wasn’t that funny? She reached the wagon and crouched behind it. The wagon, even when weighed down with hundreds of pounds of baggage, rattled as easily as an infant’s toy.

She would have to go back inside, impossible to spend a night in the open. Still she didn’t think she could go back in, couldn’t sleep, without some sense of protection. She had no gun. She had brought something else, though.

Adelaide climbed up into the wagon and produced keys from the inner pocket of her heavy skirt. She unlocked two of the padlocks on her trunk then hesitated at the third.

“Know what happened at this hotel? Before the town shut up for good?”

Mr. Olsen appeared beside the wagon. She dropped her keys, they
thunked
on the floorboards. Her fingers clawed for them in the dark.

“Man named Vardner got hanged right on the front porch,” Mr. Olsen said. “He rustled cattle and got caught. Thieving is serious business around here. Understand me?”

Adelaide looked up at him. “But I wasn’t trying to…”

Mr. Olsen nodded though his eyes showed he wasn’t listening. “You climb on down now. Get inside and get to sleep.”

“I lost my keys,” she said.

He gestured for her to move and she did.

“I’ll find them in the morning. If you dropped them like you say.”

Adelaide Henry walked inside the hotel, crossing the threshold where a man had been hanged. She crossed the parlor and climbed the stairs. She found the door to the Mudges room, closed, and patted along the wall until she found the next open door. Inside she unfurled a flannel blanket she’d kept in her travel bag. She folded the blanket over to double the nominal comfort.

In the morning Mr. Olsen rapped at her door lightly.

Once Adelaide rose and opened the door he stood there smiling. “Found ‘em.”

Her ring of three keys sat in his palm. She snatched them up. “I told you,” she said.

He dipped his chin. “Never should have doubted you.”

After she dressed, Mr. Olsen met her at the wagon with a bowl of beans and a wooden spoon. She ate quickly even though the beans were hot enough to scald. Mr. Olsen watched her.

“Out here you’ll be earning your hunger every day.”

“How long have you been awake?”

“Me?” he asked with feigned nonchalance. “Hours already. Had to let the horses out to graze. Had to find your keys. Then there’s the Mudges. They’re gone.”

Adelaide stopped chewing. “Gone where?”

“Went ahead, my guess. Wagons come through most days. If there’s space drivers’ll always give a ride.”

“To five people?”

“Does seem like a lot. But anyone would have sympathy for a mother and four blind children. They left all their things so I’m bound to bring it to them. After I get you to your claim I’ll keep on.”

Adelaide nodded, ate more beans, but tasted nothing.
The Mudges are gone.
She wanted to scramble over Mr. Olsen’s shoulders and check her steamer trunk.
The Mudges are gone
.

A mother and four children.

She decided to believe that they’d gone ahead or even turned back, gone home. Either option was better than the third. She was able to maintain this fantasy until they struck camp and Mr. Olsen helped her back into the wagon. She almost didn’t want to check the steamer trunk, but knew she must.

The third padlock had come off. She found all that remained of it: a portion of the curved shank. It had been stretched until it snapped.

And now the Mudges were gone.

She tested the steamer trunk and felt the familiar weight inside. Wherever it had gone, whatever it had done, it had returned. Mr. Olsen tried to make conversation on the second day of the journey, but Adelaide couldn’t bring herself to speak.

When they passed through a small township Adelaide bought a replacement padlock.

The first Sunday after Adelaide took possession of her Montana cabin, she heard the snort of horses. She’d been working in the wicker rocker, stitching the holes that had developed in her gloves from digging up soft coal for the stove. Now she moved to the stove and began a fire. She brought down the teakettle and filled it with water from a jug. Tea for a neighbor, that was just polite. The nearest homesteader, a woman named Grace Price, had come to visit three days ago with her five-year-old boy, Stan. It had felt more like an inspection than a friendly chat. If Grace and Stan were back, then Adelaide must’ve passed the exam.

But when she went to answer the door she found two men standing there.

Two cowboys.

Each one rangy as fence wire, their cheeks and foreheads a brownish red from years of outdoor work. Their fingertips all stained brown. Both wore denim overalls and boots. The cuffs of the overalls were threadbare, the soles of the boots worn thin. The man at the door had a clean face and the one behind him, a little older, wore a beard. When she opened the door they removed their hats.

“We don’t mean to surprise you,” said the clean-faced cowboy. He smiled and his teeth were small, stained. The one behind him nodded gently. “But we heard you were out here all on your own.”

Grace had been talking, it seemed.

“You make me sound like big news,” Adelaide said, laughing..

The man with the beard gave a short laugh. “Ma’am, you are this week’s headline.”

The teakettle blew on the stove.

“You were sitting down for tea,” said the younger man, hinting disappointment.

“I was expecting Grace and Stan,” Adelaide said.

Adelaide stepped back inside to get the kettle off the stove. She shut the door on both men because her bed was right there, unmade. She didn’t want them to see it. She set the kettle on a stove plate to cool. When she opened the door again the bearded man was already walking toward the horses.

“You’re leaving?” Adelaide asked.

The younger man said, “We came to see if you were free.”

The bearded man returned, leading not two horses but three. All of them saddled.

“We hoped.” He paused. “
I
hope you’ll come out for a ride.”

Matteus Kirby – who insisted on being called Matthew, a proper U.S. name – took her out for a wonderful afternoon. His uncle, Finn, rode a few lengths behind the whole time. She’d thought of them as cowboys but the men worked on threshing crews. Matthew’s uncle operated the straw-burning steam engine, and Matthew worked as a separator man.

In the next weeks Adelaide was visited by other men like Matthew and Finn. Word spread about the new “lone woman.” Adelaide had come out to Montana for the seclusion, but her seclusion quickly ended. Most men asked her to come on a ride, bringing a saddled horse for her. They might take her to a ranch, where they lived and worked, and she’d spend the evening eating dinner and making conversation. She realized they were all just profoundly lonely, and grateful for her time. She enjoyed the time with them, too. They were often a better option than reading one of her novels all over again. Adelaide spent fewer evenings penned up inside her cabin, watching the locks rattle on her steamer trunk, listening to the wind howling outside the shack and something else howling within.

She enjoyed the company of nearly all the men, but Matthew was special. One evening he invited her to a dance nearby. She agreed to go because Finn was bringing Grace Price and Stan. It felt, in a way, like a grand family outing.

Because of the cold and a layer of newly fallen snow, the dance was held in a granary. The place was actually smaller than the home on the property, a two-story palace with four bedrooms, but the granary had been cleared out so it made a better dance floor. A corral sat on the property as well, with nine horses, and a large barn. Adelaide understood this family had done well. The husband and wife had each filed for a homestead so between them they’d proved up on 640 acres. Matthew joked that he could file for a plot alongside Adelaide’s and they could amass a property that was just as impressive. Adelaide laughed along but she guessed Matthew was sincere.

They all wore their rough clothes for the ride. Adelaide and Grace kept their dresses for the dance in bags on the backs of their horses.

Musicians had been brought in to play;a woman on the piano and her husband on the fiddle, a guitarist came down from the mountains for the night, and there were rumors a man was on his way with a horn. They’d put cornmeal on the granary floor and by the time Adelaide, Grace, and the boys arrived people were dancing. Adelaide and Grace changed in the main house and returned to dance with their dates, while Stan ran off to bop around with the other kids. This dance would go all night. When the children got tired they’d sleep in the main house, girls on the second floor and boys on the first.

Adelaide shared many dances with Matthew. Sometimes she and Grace traded and Adelaide enjoyed herself with Matthew’s soft-spoken uncle. She always addressed him as Mr. Kirby. He, in turn, only asked questions about “Mrs. Price.”

But most of Adelaide’s time was spent alongside Grace. No one could dance for that many hours. Every little while the men would go off to yap with other men and the women would be free to make conversation. Grace brought Adelaide around to meet all the women who’d come. These were her closest neighbors and almost all of them were “lone women,” even if only on paper. Some, like Adelaide, had been lured out by Mattie T. Cramer’s “Success of a ‘Lone’ Woman” – Adelaide was unsurprised to hear it had been reprinted in newspapers around the country – and the women now referred to its many exaggerations with mingled humor and chagrin.

It was in this way – with Grace leading her around like a protective older sister – that Adelaide came to shake hands with a very pale, sharp angled woman and immediately lost her breath.

“Mrs. Mudge?” Adelaide asked.

The woman, who’d only been paying the faintest attention during the greeting, tensed for an instant. No one else would have noticed, but Adelaide held the woman’s hand, and for that instant, the grip tightened like a bite.

“This is Rose Morrison,” Grace corrected.

The woman’s grip loosened then her hand fell. She watched Adelaide carefully but turned on a tight smile. “That’s right. Rose Morrison.”

“She’s even newer to the territory than you.”

Adelaide nodded. “Well then, welcome to Montana.”

“Aren’t you kind,” said Mrs. Morrison.

No doubt about it though, this was Mrs. Mudge.

Why do this? Why pretend to be someone else? Did it matter? Adelaide had come out here to keep her secret, locked up tightly in that steamer trunk, so maybe Mrs. Mudge had her reasons, too. Adelaide told herself to share a pleasant farewell and turn away. Say no more. But she couldn’t stop herself.

“You left those boys all alone?” Adelaide asked. “How will they manage?”

Grace held Adelaide by the elbow, a grip to snap wood beams. “Mrs. Morrison is a widow. She and her husband never had children.”

Now Adelaide laughed. Actually laughed at what Grace said. Grace let her arm go. Adelaide realized how cruel, or insane, she must look. Mrs. Mudge watched in silence.

“I must have been thinking of someone else entirely,” Adelaide said.

This seemed to calm Grace, who nodded awkwardly.

Mrs. Mudge said, “That’s quite all right.”

“I mean really,” Adelaide said. “I must have been
blind
.”

Mrs. Mudge, or Morrison, gave a tight-lipped glare then walked off.

Adelaide, like all the other women who stayed the night, was invited to sleep in the main house. The bedrooms filled fast so Adelaide and Grace slept in chairs in the parlor.

In the morning Matthew Kirby woke Adelaide up. He leaned over her. She reached out and touched his face and he seemed to glow under the tenderness. While dancing, he’d told her he was all of 23. She was 31. When he helped her up, led her out of the house, she felt relieved he hadn’t tried to kiss her last night. She wondered if he, too, understood that they were never going to go steady. Was it the age difference? Partly. But even more, there was a way he seemed so naïve, or maybe just cut off from some of the world’s ugliness. He’d seen enough hard times; she didn’t doubt that. He had a life of labor to look forward to, and hardly any money, more than likely. But all night she’d been trying to imagine the moment when she would bring him to her home and lead him to the steamer trunk, take off the padlocks, and show him the thing inside. He was too straightforward, too rational a man to bend in the face of something so impossible. He would break or he’d break it, and for Adelaide Henry neither outcome would do.

Now, in the morning light, Matthew led her back to the granary, already swept clean. Men were hauling equipment back inside. Grace and Stan were on their horse and Finn, looking still half asleep, led it by the reins. Matthew brought Adelaide to her horse and helped her up. He pulled the reins of her horse and led it forward.

They’d gone a quarter mile before Adelaide realized Matthew and Finn weren’t leading them to the other two horses.

“Horses gone missing,” Matthew said when she asked. The words came out weary and she realized he and his uncle must’ve been up hours already searching.

“Well, you’re not going to walk our horses all the way back, are you?”

“Weren’t sure how you’d feel about riding with me.”

“I don’t want to see you drop dead from exhaustion, Matthew.”