Chapter One
Dear Daddy,
It’s spring again, the year 1865. I never realized how alive this place was when you were still here. You and Walter working the horses and Mama yelling at Earl to help do whatever it was he was supposed to be doing. I couldn’t wait to open my eyes in the morning so I could breathe in the scent of horse sweat, leather and breakfast. I can still hear Mama singing to herself in the kitchen. And Earl’s laugh, and the nickering of the horses like they were laughing back at him.
The morning you and Walter left with that string of geldings, headed toward Memphis, everything changed.
Ellis stopped writing. She reached out and ran her fingers along the spines of the small leather-bound notebooks lined up on her desk. Welded horseshoe bookends held them upright. All those years ago her mother had given her the first diary for her birthday. Every time she filled one, some celebratory event caused another to appear; another birthday, extra chores accomplished, good marks in school. And ever since, Ellis wrote. Doing chores or wandering the woods of Western Tennessee, she would soak up the details that would later flow through her fingers to her pen. Like the constancy of the river, a force, strong and natural, settled her at the desk, dipped her pen, and put it to paper. Her mother would tell Ellis to write down her feelings. She would never ask to see what her daughter had written. She had wanted Ellis to write freely and “get it out on paper” so she could then get on with daily life. When her mother passed, Ellis thought she’d never be able to write again. She would sit for hours at this desk in her upstairs bedroom, staring at a blank page. All she could think of was trying to get in touch with her father or find her brothers. And so, though she had nowhere to send them, she wrote letters. Perhaps someday there would be an address.
The house was too quiet, though it echoed the normal aches and pains of a wooden building. The pine stairs creaked and moaned under nothing but their own weight, reminding her of her twin brother, Earl’s, footsteps as he would sneak into his room, across the hall from hers, after not showing up for dinner. The wind groaned like a twister coming through but it was only a small zephyr at worst, or an early spring breeze. Loneliness amplified.
Her bedroom window faced north, with a view of the back corrals. For a few days now, long before sunrise, an unnatural glow illuminated the horizon. And today, a shift in the wind, a distant pounding. Maybe it was just the blood beating in her head, but she got up from the chair at her desk and walked to the open window. April usually promised warmer weather and new growth, but today’s breeze smelled like the ending of a story, not the beginning. She breathed in. The air, stark and barren, did not promise spring. The teeming life that once surrounded the homestead just wasn’t there anymore. War does that.
Her father and older brother, Walter, had been excited when they were first made aware of what everyone thought would be a short dispute far to the east. Ellis had heard her father talking to the other men at the Society of Friends hall. Some were upset about what they were hearing, but her father reckoned selling horses to the troops would enable him to expand the homestead, finally building the ranch he wanted. And somehow he thought it would be an occupation neces- sary enough to the war effort that it might exempt him and his sons from the battlefield. Her father was no coward, but killing another man was wrong and this wasn’t his fight. That’s what he’d said. He did not hold slaves, and the community in which they lived would not allow it. But he’d traveled south and brought back stories of thousand-acre plantations that couldn’t be run without them.
On the promise of a sunny summer day in 1863 he and Walter left with a string of saddle horses to be sold to the army. They said they’d be back for her birthday. She was about to turn thirteen then. That was two years ago.
Ellis returned to her desk and started to write again, ... Mama tried...she stopped, turned to look out the window, then looked back at the paper and the ink stains on her fingers where she held the pen. Weariness slowed her hand and she leaned forward, resting her head on crossed arms.
Days before the soldiers showed up Ellis had tried running the horses off into the woods, where they couldn’t be found, but the well-trained equines just startled, ran around the pasture and came back. She had watched her father make deals since she was old enough to walk and ride, but she wished her brother were here to help. Most of the neighbors had started to clear out well before Earl left, her friend Prissy and her folks holding out the longest. Many headed west to the Mississippi and then north. But Mama insisted they wait for Daddy. And then Mama got sick.
At first she’d just talk to herself or to Daddy as if he were standing beside her. One night Ellis woke to a voice coming from the corral, Mama trying to rope a horse that wasn’t there. And then the night it rained so hard, Mama out in the garden in her nightgown, digging potatoes. Earl had helped Ellis get her dried off and back into bed. When Ellis returned to her mother’s room with tea, Earl was holding the worn paper of Daddy’s letter. A letter written at least a year ago, before the war crept so far west. She saw a sadness on her brother’s face she hadn’t seen before. Mama had read the letter once to them, but they knew she kept it in her pocket to read over and over. Earl had tried to hide his emotions from Ellis, but the next day he was gone. He left a cryptic note about finding Daddy and Walter, but Ellis knew he hadn’t a clue where they might be, or where to start looking.
Mama stopped getting out of bed. She wouldn’t eat much. She would ask Ellis to read to her until she fell asleep.
Ellis didn’t think Earl would have gotten too far when he left. He never did have any patience, could barely sit still for a meal, always moving. But neither one of them had been farther from home than the river, by themselves. Earl had been gone a month, now. Or was it longer.
Time had become ghostly, just dark and light. Ellis remembered she had been washing up in the kitchen when she heard the horses stir. The morning had been quiet; the kind of quiet like before the sky turned black, ushering a storm. The cavalry riding up the road was a small group, only five of them. But she was pretty sure there were more coming. The color blue barely clung to their faded, dusty uniforms. They flew no flag. It wasn’t that they were Union soldiers, but that they were soldiers at all that unnerved Ellis. Only months before, the community had felt safe; uninvolved with the trauma of a war they thought wasn’t theirs. But a troop had swept through the village a week before Earl left. Her brother had said he’d heard they wiped out the Hopkins’ place. Took all but a couple of laying hens. Took two horses, their milk cow and calf. Then more news of more raids. Neighbors emigrating.
As the soldiers rode up to the front gate, Ellis stood in the doorway. Her father’s shotgun leaned against the inside wall, sparking a memory of Earl teaching her to shoot. Her mother and father had argued about their daughter handling a gun. But her father wanted all of his children to be able to provide for themselves. He had taught Earl well and knew Earl had shared those skills with his sister.
The leader, a sergeant by his uniform, dismounted and walked up to the house while the other men remained on their horses. “Miss.” The sergeant tipped his hat.
Ellis nodded.
“Your Pa around?” he asked.
Ellis hesitated, realizing how much more protected she felt when he had been around. “No,” she answered.
She thought she saw a hint of a smile bloom on the sergeant’s face and then fade away. He squinted, as if looking at her more closely, then glanced back at the others. He stepped back to better survey the house. “Your Ma?”
Ellis had buried her mother two days before, but she wasn’t about to tell him that. She couldn’t fight off these soldiers. She wondered what her father would do.
“I know you’re here to take the horses. We don’t want you to take them but you’re going to anyway, aren’t you.” She struggled to keep her voice strong; emit the confidence she’d witnessed when her father sold horses.
“Yes, ma’am. But it’s not like you might’ve heard. We pay good money for stock.”
“We’ve got good stock.” Ellis felt a pull in her gut, her face burned, but she planted her feet. This same feeling overcame her every time a horse left their property. She knew her father was in the business of selling horses, but she became attached to each one. Always shedding a tear when they left.
One of the other soldiers rode over to the pen and opened the gate. The horses just stood there. The sergeant moved toward Ellis. She grabbed the shotgun, trained it on him and had it cocked before he took two steps.
“Easy there, girl, I’m not gonna hurt you. Don’t have the time.” He smirked and checked over his shoulder. Just outside the picket fence, soldiers slumped on tired horses. One had a hand on his sidearm. The sergeant waved him off. “But we pay for what we take. Here.” He handed Ellis a folded piece of paper. She kept the shotgun pointed at the soldier, but tucked it under her arm. She reached out to take the payment with her other hand, glanced at it, moving the paper with her thumb. Inside were a few Union bills. She wasn’t sure how much, but they both knew it didn’t matter. She uncocked the shotgun and lowered it. The sergeant watched her and she met his eyes.
She thought he’d probably been a handsome boy once. He looked like Tommy, a school friend whose family had left at the beginning of the conflict, and wondered if time and war had ravaged his innocence, as well. She wondered who was winning this war. Or if a war could be won.
“You’ll take good care of them,” Ellis ordered more than asked. She couldn’t look at the horses. Her breath labored. In her mind she was running to them, fighting off the soldiers, pulling the trigger.
The sergeant stiffened and then looked back at the others again, lifted his chin and chuckled. “Sure, sure we will. You don’t have to worry.” He backed away, mounted his horse, and joined the ragged troop to surround the small herd and drive them south.
Now Ellis watched the horses go. They moved along with little agitation, the herd keeping itself together, following other horses. These were the older ones and the ones who had been too young to take before. She knew them each by name, by their face and leg markings, who in the herd they were attached to. The old gelding, Tucker, the first horse her father let her ride, was swaybacked now. Billie was just green broke.
They kicked up dust and memories of her father. She heard his voice. She, Earl, Walter and her father had moved a herd for a rancher once, an overnight drive. Earl mostly grumbled about going. Walter had told him how hard the work was. Long days in the saddle. Ellis’s mother didn’t think her daughter should go, didn’t think it proper for a girl, but the twins were turning twelve and never got much for their birthdays. Ellis made it clear the drive was all she wanted. When she came down to breakfast that morning her mother put two packages on the table, one in front of Ellis and one in front of Earl. The siblings looked at each other and smiled uncomfortably at their mother. They both knew it was another diary, but opened their packages feigning surprise. Ellis’s package also contained a new pencil. She looked up at her mother.
“Can’t be taking ink on a trail drive,” her mother had said.
On the trail, Ellis had asked her father why the horses stayed with them. She was warmed by these horseback conversations as her father loaded a pipe, lit it, and smoked as they rode. They were out in the open, she had said, the horses could have run off anywhere, but they stayed together.
“Because horses are herd animals,” he said with a smile. “That’s what they do.”
“But sometimes we have to ride out by ourselves. They don’t need the herd then,” she questioned.
“Well, now,” he’d said, sweet smoke drifting from his lips, “sometimes they do and it’ll be hard to get them away from the herd. But if you ride well enough, well, you become their herd and all they want to do is be with you.”
“Like when we’re working them in the round corral? When they hook-on and follow you like their mama?”
“Yep, just like that.” His eyes would sparkle as he looked at his daughter, before he’d tap his pipe clean on his leather chaps, tuck it into his pocket and lope off to circle the herd before making camp.
The young mare named Billie was her father’s pride and joy. She was fiery and sturdy built. She was pretty, too. A blood bay with clear black points, she’d dapple in the summer. Of course her father, Thomas Cady, cared more about bloodlines and soundness than color or esthetic appeal. When Billie was just a yearling, she’d taken to following Ellis around. Her father put a stop to it because he didn’t want the young horse getting spoiled. Once he started training the horse for riding, she took a little longer on a few lessons than he had hoped. But it was because she was smart, not just stubborn. The one thing that consistently proved problematic with Billie was that she hated being tied. You could leave her untied and just drop the reins and she’d stay there all day if you didn’t move her. But tie her to a hitching post and she’d find it in her to leave, every time.
Ellis’s guilt at letting the horses go was only overshadowed by her relief that the soldiers left without hurting her or burning the house and barn. She’d pointed a gun at a man, but could she have pulled the trigger? They had looked spent, yet pleased with themselves. Maybe this war was coming to an end like she’d heard. But there was a sorrow or something in that soldier’s eyes when he handed her the money. There were words he wasn’t saying.
What remained after the soldiers left with the horses, was an emptiness Ellis had never known. Hope faded. Her mother had kept hope alive until it denied her. And then she was gone, too.
Ellis woke slowly, her forehead numb where it rested on the desk, her ink-stained fingers slipping from the pen. A slight breeze blew the worn curtains on the window. A soft light moved the darkness. In the pastures the gentle wind would be bending the grasses in waves. The waves on the river—Ellis stiffened, more fully awake as worry shadowed her thoughts. The river might be too high to cross now. She should have left sooner. When Prissy’s family and the Carters took the riverboat up to St. Louis, they wanted to take Ellis with them. But Ellis wouldn’t leave. She still had the horses then and expected Earl would be coming back. She had to be here when he returned. She listened, hearing nothing. Then a breeze stirred the silence—carried a soft nickering.
Ellis stood up so quickly that the chair fell back. She stumbled to the window, her bare feet hardly feeling the floorboards. Billie! The mare grazed idly on the resurgent lawn. In that second at the window Ellis felt the warmth of the horse beneath her, smelled her nervous sweat, and heard each word her father had taught her about educating horses and why this young mare was so special to what was to become the Cady brand. She remembered that morning in the barn, before the war took hold, her father had grasped the filly’s halter and held Ellis’s young hand, declaring, “Here is our genesis.”
Ellis stepped into her brother’s trousers and tucked in her father’s nightshirt. As she quickly descended the stairs, scenes from the past filled her head as they did every morning. Daddy working the horses with Walter and Earl. Mama fixing breakfast. A fog hanging in the woods, cooling the morning, promising a warm day. She shook her head and didn’t bother pulling on her boots before she ran out the front door and up to the grazing horse.
Ellis didn’t know if the soldiers would take the time to come back for one horse, but she took Billie’s return as a sign and thought now was as good a time as any to go. Something stirred her blood. She wouldn’t wait any longer. She had to find Earl.
She saddled Billie and packed an extra shirt, some hardtack and dried beef in her saddlebags. She stuffed the money the soldier had paid her in her pants pocket and then thought better of it and put that in the saddlebags along with the few shotgun cartridges she had. Earl had taught her how to make a snare for rabbits and how to fish with just a line and a hook. She added those supplies, and her diary and pencils, before buckling and draping the bags over the back of the saddle. She rolled the old shotgun up in her bedroll and secured it over the bags with the leather saddle strings. When she was done, she stood next to her horse and then looked back at the house. She tied Billie to the hitching post and ran inside and up to her room. She had been wearing her brother’s clothes since he left. Somehow it kept him near. She changed out of the nightshirt, holding it up to her face, and hesitating before folding it and placing it on her bed. It still held the scent of her father’s pipe tobacco. She donned her trail clothes over her brother’s shirt—a wool vest and canvas duster, a yellow neckerchief—and grabbed an extra pair of woolen socks.
She looked around her room, memorizing the scene; the desk, its oil lamp, years of diaries and books read and reread, her bed covered by the quilt the Friends made for her mother when she was pregnant with the twins, the side table next to the bed that her father had hewn from river driftwood, its small drawer lined with letters never sent. She retrieved an envelope from the table, backed out of the room and stepped across the hall to Earl’s room. Narrow beds stood against opposite walls. Walter’s was made up as if waiting for his return. Earl’s looked as if he’d just been there tossing and turning. Ellis straightened Earl’s bedding and placed the envelope on his pillow.
Dear Earl,
I’m writing you this letter in case you come back and I’m gone. Used to be everything seemed to last forever and now it seems most folks make different arrangements. I wish you wouldn’t have run off like that. It’s bad enough Daddy and Walter left us. Well, I hate to say it, but I didn’t mind Walter leaving so much. I know he was my brother, too, but he didn’t always act like it. Mama’s gone. There was no one around to help with the burying. I did the best I could.
It’s been weeks now since the soldiers took the horses. That happening after Mama died about did me in. But Billie came back and I wonder if somehow Mama had something to do with it.
I’m setting out to find you. I don’t intend on dying along the way, but if I do, I want you to know you did everything you could to teach me how to take care of myself. I know Mama didn’t like it much, you teaching me how to hunt and fish and use a knife, but I think she grew to appreciate it after you all left.
Your loving sister, Ellis
As an afterthought, she lifted the foot of Earl’s mattress and smiled at what she found there. Earl had called it a Bowie knife. He had another knife that Daddy had given him, but he had found this one in the river when he and Ellis were cooling off on a sweltering summer Sunday. He made up stories about it, said maybe it belonged to a Pony Express rider, said it was their secret and kept it hidden. Ellis held it in both hands and ran her thumbs over the tooled leather sheath. She looped it on her belt and left the room.
Walking past her mother’s bedroom door at the top of the stairs, she paused. Though she had kept the door open, she hadn’t entered the room since removing her mother’s body. She stepped inside one last time. As tears came to her eyes she noticed an envelope on the floor. She remembered every word of the note inside. She picked it up and put it in her pocket.
Just before she reached the front door Ellis caught her reflection in the mirror. Daddy always said she looked like her mother. Ellis just thought she looked like Earl and since her mother’s death, more so. She took off her hat, wound her shoulder-length hair up and put her hat back on, pushing errant locks under it. She smiled at herself and then scowled. She’d have to remember not to smile, but then it probably wouldn’t be that difficult.
Outside, Billie had pulled loose from the hitching post and was grazing calmly on a patch of grass. Ellis picked up a rein and walked the horse around the side of the house to her mother’s grave. It had taken her two days to dig the grave, carry the body from the house and fill in the hole again. But she didn’t really remember much about doing it. She took the envelope out of her pocket, remembering the last time she had placed it on her mother’s pillow and, this time, placed it by the grave marker under a large rock.
Dear Mama,
I’m writing you this letter in case you wake up when I’m not here and wonder where I am. I went to get the doctor to come help you. I heard he’s at the meeting hall, helping folks. I’m taking Billie because she’s faster than any of the other horses. I know you don’t really like me riding her, but don’t worry I’ve ridden her before. Earl was teaching me without you knowing. Sorry, but I’m telling you now. I’m worried about you, Mama. I’ll be back by supper and hope you’ll feel like eating something then. I’ll read to you from Wuthering Heights.
Back soon,
Ellis
The breeze stilled as the sun rose higher through the cottonwoods. Ellis mounted her horse and looked back one last time at her mother’s resting place. Billie pranced anxiously.
She hadn’t been able to find the doctor.
“Sorry, Mama.”
