CHARLOTTE

JS Anthony

This is a work of fiction.  Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.

1

1

Charlotte sat on the wagon seat, her back straight, her chin held high, her hands folded tightly in her lap.  She looked neither right or left, or even ahead.  Her eyes seemed to see nothing, her gaze turned inward.  Her thoughts were gathered deep inside where no harm could come to them.

There was little to see anyway.  The prairie grass extended away to the horizon in every direction, an endless faintly green and golden sea.  If she concentrated, she might notice the wind sweeping through in shifting patterns, stirring the grass in waves.  She might also notice the swarms of insects that rose and fell silently or the hawks soaring overhead.  She chose not to notice any of these things.  If she concentrated on anything, it was that small core at the center of her being, the person who she was, the truth that she would not let go of no matter what.  This was the vow she’d made to herself.  This was the vow she’d keep.

She felt the sun, that couldn’t be helped.  She’d refused to put on a bonnet, though one had been offered to her.  She knew the gesture represented one of so few kindnesses, and that she should at least have been gracious in that regard.  But where in the name of heaven, she wanted to ask someone, did graciousness belong in this world as she now knew it.  The sun was in fact welcome, warming her skin, easing the hurt that still lived in her battered face, hopefully turning away the bruises, suffusing her cheek with rose-colored hues rather than awful black and blue.

Charlotte could also hear without having to listen.  The hawk that had been circling above cried out on its broad downward arc.  The wind vibrated against the arched canvas, making a humming sound in the struts.  The horses’ harnesses jangled and the horses themselves blew and snorted as they walked along in the heat.

Beside her, Charlotte’s father remained silent as well, his thoughts also turned inward.  He held the reins between the fingers of both hands and flipped them now and then, though there was no reason.  Only one pace could be had, and that was ploddingly slow.  Only one direction could be followed, and that was south.

Charlotte’s father, Samuel, was a solid man, well-built and strong, with firm hands and a still handsome but unsmiling face.  He radiated authority even doing nothing, having no intentions of any sort toward anyone.  It was just how he was, the way he carried himself, who he knew himself to be.  So much since the beginning of his life had gone into the creation of his bearing, his calm, his confidence.  No one feared him, not exactly.  But they would not cross him either, or doubt his word.  Charlotte had his same bearing but without the authority that had been bequeathed to him, and her actions as a result had caused him to despair.

They’d traveled for three days.  Charlotte did not know where they were going, though her father did.  As the sun rose higher in the sky, the landscape changed.  The prairie began to undulate.  Gentle rolling hills appeared with forest off in the distance.  To the west, a line of quaking aspens signaled the presence of a river.

Charlotte grew alert, sensing the shift.  As she watched, a track appeared, at first just a faint line in the prairie.  As the weary horses drew closer, the track enlarged into a dusty byway running from east to west, a broad expanse packed down hard by the iron wheels of untold numbers of wagons, the hooves of mules, oxen, horses and trampling herds of livestock.

Her father turned the team of horses onto the track heading west.  Before the river, he guided the wagon into shelter underneath a large spreading elm.  He pulled in the reins and the horses came to a halt, their heads drooping.  Still Samuel sat on the wagon seat, not moving.  He sighed once heavily, wondering why life had to be so difficult, but that was all.

“Where are we?” Charlotte said.  She was numb and at the same time burning inside.

“At the river.”

“I can see that.”

“This is the trail west.”

“West to where?”

Her father sighed again.  Never did he imagine he would be doing such a thing, but it was required.  The forces at work, the situation as it had come to be, dictated that this solution was the only one.  There was no other.  This most dire of cases defied any easy answer, left choices and options by the wayside.  He didn’t believe that his wisdom had failed him.  He was certain he’d succeeded with a plan where before there had been no plan, no hope.  He’d spent some very dark days and nights in preparations.

“West to the desert.”

“And what’s out there?”

“Your uncle.”

“Tobias?”

“Yes.”

“I thought he was banished.”

“He was.”

“Then am I being banished too?”

“Not exactly.”

Charlotte had had enough.  “Are you going to give this to me one sentence at a time and take the rest of the day doing it, or are you finally going to tell me what you have in mind?”

Samuel shook his head.  “Don’t be impertinent.  I’m your father.”

“I’m not afraid of you, you know.”

“I hope I never raised you so that you would be,” he said more gently.  “I hope I gave you everything I had in the way of affection and I know, you know as well, that I never raised a hand to you or kept anything from you.”

“It’s not easy growing up having your father be the First Elder.”

“I understand that.”

“Other people are afraid of you.”

“I’m sorry if that’s true.  I can only be the person I’m required to be.”

Charlotte clenched her hands together even more tightly.  “But we’re not getting anywhere.  Tell me what you have to tell me and be done with it.”

“You’re too bold.  You’ve always been too bold.”

“And look where it’s got me.  But I will say again, and I don’t care whether you believe me or not, it wasn’t my fault.”

“Conner Mathis was a fine man.  An upright citizen, a pillar of the community.  He was of the lineage of a Witness.”

“I don’t mean to upset you right here at what seems like an important moment, but you weren’t married to him, you didn’t have to cook his meals and share his bed.  From where a woman stands, and it could have been anyone, not just me, he was not a pillar of anything.  He was not a good man.”

Samuel got down from the wagon, his troubles showing in the exhausted contours of his face.  “Daughter,” he said.  “I don’t know what to do with you.”

Charlotte fought back her tears.  “Actually, it seems that you do know.  You’re still not telling me everything.”

“Step down from the wagon.”  His voice had become that of the First Elder.  Charlotte gathered her skirts and stepped down.  He set his hands on her shoulders.

“My wild, ungovernable child.  Look at you.”  There were tears in his eyes as well, despite the tone of his voice.  “Your hair.  Your beautiful face.  How did this happen?”  But it was only a question to the universe, not to her.

Charlotte cast her gaze down.  She did not want to make her father cry.

“Tobias and those with him are out in the desert for contemplation’s sake, it’s true, but also to take measure of the country, lay down new beginnings for the time when we’ll need them.  This is where you are to go.  This is where you will live.  And Charlotte…?”

“Yes?”

“There’ll be another husband waiting for you.  Tobias chose this one.  He believes he’s more capable in this regard than I, even if he hardly remembers you.  Do you want to know the name?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry if you so strongly feel the terrible burden of being my child, but it’s how you came into the world and you can’t put that aside.   There’s responsibility to it that may not always be wanted but also, if you’d stop ever for just one moment to consider, rare privilege.”

Charlotte could recite this argument word for word.  She’d heard it a thousand times before.  “It doesn’t sound like you’re coming with me.”

“I am not.”

“What if I get killed or kidnapped?  Where is this wonderful plan of yours then?”

Her father spoke with enforced patience.  “They were going to put you on trial.  When they had found you guilty, they were going to hang you.  It wouldn’t have mattered that you were my child.  The tribunal would speak and their word would be law.  They’d already commissioned the gallows.”

“Those men always hated me.”  She knew the people on the tribunal and despised all of them, along with the three fearful women who had held her down and cut off her hair as punishment even before the facts were established.  They could have waited at least that long, because there were facts.  But her crime made them shudder.

“I doubt that’s true, but we’re getting sidetracked.”  Samuel gripped her shoulders more tightly.  “You won’t be going alone, so for once, listen to me.  You are not to move from this spot.  You are to stay camped here, not a mile away, or fifty yards, or down by the river.  Right here.  Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“In a matter of days, a wagon train will come by.  The man leading it is Ellis Gray.  He has a great deal of experience and I trust him.”

“Experience in what?  Widows by their own hand?”

“Please, we can’t speak of that anymore.  Let me finish.  You’ll be under his protection until you reach Fort Randall.  There you will wait again until Tobias comes for you.  I doubt you’ve felt any reason to take an interest in the wagon as of yet, but it holds all you’ll need for the journey and more, I made sure of that.”  He had done the cooking, tended to all the chores while Charlotte stared into the distance, still stunned and barely able to breathe.

“My clothes?”

“Everything.  Food, cooking utensils, bedding, your linens and flatware, anything else of a personal nature that I could discover and pack up.  An amount of silver coin is hidden under the floorboards, be careful with it.  There are documents pertaining to your membership in the Family.  I’ve given you almost all the guns.  I’m leaving you the team and the mare.”

“You’re leaving the horses, but you’re also leaving me.”

“They were going to hang you.  Your fate would be a lesson to the others.”  Samuel closed his eyes, thinking about how close they’d come.

Charlotte wouldn’t be there to watch him grow old.  Maybe she would never see him again.  He’d done an acceptable job of raising her under the circumstances, which were at all times difficult, though he never complained.

“You’ve put a great deal of faith in me that I’ll be able to do this,” she said.

“I’ve told you, there was no other choice.  I had to get you away from there.  If I ride hard, I’ll be back among them with time yet to try and smooth the turbulent waters.  Yes, I have faith in you.  You were old enough to remember the Second Migration, what we did to survive.  And Lord knows I would fear for anyone who came up against you.”

“Father.”

“Well I would.  But now, immediately, we must say goodbye.”  Samuel pulled his child to him and held her hard.  Then he let her go.  “You will be in my thoughts every minute of every day.”

Swiftly, he untied the second horse from behind the wagon and mounted.

“You are always my daughter,” he said, his voice breaking.  He turned his horse away and galloped off.  Charlotte stood and watched until the small spot that had been him became indistinguishable from the prairie grass.  She was numb again.  Her mouth was dry from tangled up nerves and fear, her heart beating wildly.  She waited to cry but no tears came.

2

2

Except for the wind stirring the leaves of the elm, there was no sound.  Charlotte stayed rooted in one place, for how long she couldn’t tell.  Shock didn’t begin to convey her state of mind anymore.  When you’ve shot and killed your husband, she thought, it’s surely something more than shock and whatever it is, it won’t be leaving for a while.  Gradually she became aware of the silence and her place in it.  She was alone, one person in a vast landscape under a huge cloudless sky.  With time, she began to hear again.  The horses stamped and blew.  The three of them were now under her care.  She could stand here all day hoping her father would come back or she could do something about the horses.

She undid the harnesses and turned the team loose to graze.  The grass here by the river was rich and green.  They shook their coats and seemed to relax, glad to be free of the traces.  She knew she had to get in the wagon before she unhitched the mare, though getting in the wagon was the last thing she wanted to do.

Charlotte gently nudged the mare aside, climbed up on the back and stuck her head in beneath the taut white canopy.  Her eyes grew wide, her mouth dropped open.  Samuel was the most orderly of men.  Everything in his daily existence had a place and a reason for being.  The inside of the wagon looked like a tornado had gone through.  Charlotte realized then how quickly he had moved, how much of the time allotted he had spent on this endeavor, how frightened and sad he must have been.  She would sort it all out, the clothes from the pots and pans, the blankets from the sacks of food, the folded up tent canvas from the amazing clutter of overturned books, hairbrushes, boots, a velvet coat she hadn’t worn in years.

Keep going, she told herself.  Don’t think about this now.  What she wanted most were the pickets, which she found with only a minimum amount of digging, and the guns within easy reach, carefully placed together on one side.  Thank you, she said silently.  If it had to be like this, thank you.

After checking that the rifle was loaded, she leaned it barrel down under the front seat of the wagon.  She untied the mare and picketed her so that she could graze, but not far.  Later she would lead them all down to the river and let them drink.

In this way, in the great silence, Charlotte kept herself busy, in motion with tasks to perform.  She did remember the Second Migration, when the Family had been run out of town because they were suspect, different, carried odd beliefs about which there were too many rumors to put down.  Though she had never seen a reason to put the rumors down.  The Family’s beliefs were odd and she was always in the middle of the conversation, her father being who he was, the First Elder, the fountainhead of those beliefs.  It was then, on that long journey, being in charge of her father’s wagon, that she had learned to manage, cope, improvise, find ways to make do with what they had.

As the afternoon faded, she found herself exhausted.  If she let go for even one fraction of a second, she knew she would break down, but the energy needed to hold on was becoming unbearable.  Eat, she told herself.  It was an answer, gave her something else to do.

She cleared a circle, outlined it with rocks, laid a fire with the wood she’d gathered and settled in for a meal of bacon and corncakes, sitting in the grass with her tin plate and fork, trying not to fall apart into a thousand pieces.  At dusk, she took the horses down to the river and filled a bucket of water for herself.  Swallows swooped overhead, seining insects from the air.  The river was unlovely, broad and slow, easy to ford, she supposed, but not promising for fish.

A question arose: keep the fire going or let it die?  Charlotte chose to let it die.   She picketed the horses closer in, washed up with water from the bucket, then cleaned the tin plate and put it aside.  She prayed the wolves wouldn’t come because she had no defense.  If it was an entire pack, she would never be able to shoot them all.

The night sky was filled with billions of stars.  She’d seen these same stars so often from farther north, where the Family lived out in the nowhere, where her father would lie again alone in his narrow bed in his sturdy house.  Holding that thought dear, she made up her own bed among the gnarled roots of the elm, using the mare’s saddle as a pillow with the old coat folded over it.  Wrapped up in a blanket, her hand on one of the Colt revolvers, with the rifle beside her, she turned, hid her face in the soft velvet and cried until there were no tears left.

3

3

Charlotte woke with the sun.  The horses were still there, the Colt, the rifle, the wagon.  No one had stolen anything from her in the night and the wolves hadn’t come.  Unfortunately, she was still in the same place, alone, an unrepentant criminal facing a decidedly unpleasant future, stopped in other people’s tracks in the middle of God knows where.  Getting up required more exertion that she’d expected.  She knew from experience however that structure aided living on the trail, routines repeated over and over, staying with whatever could possibly be familiar, in this way keeping down the anxiety, the inevitable fear.

Breakfast was familiar because she made it so, bacon and corn cakes.  The horses were released from their pickets and hobbled so that they could wander farther afield without running off.  The interior of the wagon loomed, a mountain of a task and every step of it tied to her father’s face, his hands, his well-meaning though sometimes misplaced goodness.  But it needed to be done if any of the contents were to be of use to her, and certainly he had had her well being in mind with every item that he so hastily chose.

Charlotte spent the morning stacking and rearranging, bringing order to the chaos.  Despite the obvious implications of her predicament, she smiled without meaning to at the objects she found.  There was coffee and she didn’t drink coffee, but could it be offered as a trade to those for whom it was a precious and scarce commodity?  A boot hook, but none of the boots requiring it.  Drawers, camisoles, shifts, petticoats, now she pitied him.  He was not the kind to be voluntarily rummaging through women’s undergarments.  All her dresses and skirts, every shawl she owned, her hand mirror and lilac soap.  She stopped, one hand over her mouth, not knowing whether to laugh or cry.  Here were her bone and tortoiseshell hair clips, obviously swept in a pile off the dresser in what had been the bedroom of her married life.  These for the thick tresses of auburn hair which now stuck out from her head in minute, grievously butchered lengths immune to the aid of any hair clip ever devised.

There were lotions, medicinal herbs, a saw, a shovel, an extra wheel and axle, lengths of rope and chain, wagon grease, flints, a hatchet and hunting knife, a mallet and wooden pins, dried apples, six tins of oysters, a single piece of sheet music out of the thousands that were the Family’s most prized and strictly guarded possessions, the translations of which only her father could undertake.  She sat down in the wagon bed and held the parchment to her heart, her eyes welling up with tears.  He could only have been thinking one thing when he’d included it, that he loved her beyond all reason, she was his only child, and here was the last protection left that he had to offer her.

How could she have done this to him?  In her mind, it was not even a question.  She could repeat that night, play it over and over again and it would still come out exactly the same.  Conner Mathis was a big man with a loud voice and the smallest, weakest, most pathetic and cowardly person inside that she had ever known.  He was a false front, a broad-shouldered square-jawed prop with nothing behind it.  That he had taken in all of the Elders, even the First Elder, who was supposed to be the wisest and most discerning of them all, made her want to be sick.

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