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They Banished a Widow Into the Wyoming Cold—Weeks Later She Came Back Stronger

by Bien Tap Vien•

The oak bar dropped into its iron bracket with a sound like a gavel final and irreversible, and Eleanor Voss did not flinch. She had promised herself that much. Whatever happened on the other side of that gate, she would not give Coal Water Creek the satisfaction of watching her break. The December wind came off the Wyoming high plains like something with a grudge, slicing through the wool of her coat as though the fabric were gauze, and she felt it first in her fingers, then in the bones behind her eyes.

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Beside her, Agnes drew her shawl tight with both hands, the knuckles gone white, and made a sound low in her throat that was not quite a saw and not quite a sigh, but something that lived in the country between the two. The faces on the other side of the gate were people Eleanor had known for 4 years. Thomas Briggs, who had come to her the previous February with a fever that had turned his urine the color of rust, and she had brewed him a tea of yarrow and bone set, and sat with him through two nights until the fever broke.

He stood now with his arms folded across his chest, his expression arranged into something that resembled righteousness, but could not quite conceal the unease moving underneath it. Dorothea Crane, whose daughter Eleanor had helped deliver on a Tuesday afternoon when the actual midwife was 12 miles away at another birth, stood with her eyes fixed somewhere above Eleanor’s left shoulder as though the horizon held something of particular interest.

The Harmon boys, 17 and 19, stood together near the fence post with the particular stillness of young men who had been told what to think and were working hard at thinking it. Eleanor looked at each of them in turn, not with anger, not yet, with the same methodical attention she had given to every problem that had presented itself to her since she was 12 years old and found herself in a canvas field hospital outside Chickamauga, Georgia, holding a lamp while a surgeon worked, and telling herself that what she was seeing was

information, not catastrophe. Information you could use. Catastrophe used you. She had learned the difference young, and she had never unlearned it. The single sack at her feet contained one loaf of bread baked two days ago, and already going stiff, a small wheel of hard cheese the color of old bone, and a flint and steel wrapped in a square of oilcloth.

She had been allowed to gather these things herself from the house while two of Silas Holt’s deacons stood in the doorway watching her with a self-conscious gravity of men performing an official function. While their attention moved between each other and the room at large, Eleanor had pressed a small cloth-covered book into the bottom of the sack beneath the food, and then moving into the kitchen on the pretense of filling a waterskin, she had taken the short-handled garden spade from beside the back door, and worked it

down along her leg inside her coat, with the blade resting cold against her hip and the [clears throat] handle tucked under her arm. Neither deacon noticed. She had counted on the fact that men assigned to watch a woman pack her own execution did not expect her to be thinking three steps ahead.

Agnes had been allowed nothing but what she was wearing. Reverend Silas Holt stood on the steps of the church at the far end of the square, his hands clasped at the small of his back, his face arranged in an expression of sorrowful authority that Eleanor had spent the last several months learning to read the way a tracker reads disturbed earth.

The sorrow was real in its way. He genuinely regretted that this had become necessary. He would have preferred that Eleanor had been more cooperative, more frightened, more willing to sell the land quietly and move on to some other town where she would be someone else’s inconvenience. Her stubbornness had cost him time and political effort, and he was the sort of man who experienced wasted effort as a personal affront.

The land in question was 160 acres in the river bottom east of town, where the soil ran dark and deep, and the well Daniel had sunk in the summer of 1875 reached water at 22 ft, which in that part of Wyoming was as close to miraculous as hydrology got. Daniel had chosen a location with the same precision he brought to everything.

Reading the lay of the land the way other men read scripture, understanding the language of subtle depressions and the direction of root growth, and the particular way certain grasses distributed themselves along underground moisture. He had explained his reasoning to Eleanor as he worked, not because he needed her to understand it, but because explaining things out loud was how he organized his own thinking, and she had listened the way she always listened, which was completely.

Which was with the part of her mind that filed things away under the heading of things that may be useful later. Silas had begun making inquiries about the land 3 weeks after Daniel’s burial. He had approached it obliquely at first through intermediaries, through casual remarks about the difficulty of a woman managing property alone, through gentle suggestions that the church might offer fair compensation, and that the proceeds would allow Eleanor and her mother to live comfortably in town.

When Eleanor declined twice, the approach changed. It became less an offer and more a pressure, and then less a pressure and more a warning, and then less a warning and more a campaign. The harvest had been poor that autumn, not catastrophically so, but poor enough that people were worried, and worried people are generous with their suspicions.

Silas had the gift of knowing which suspicions to feed. She had heard the whispers before she had been able to trace them back to their source. The strange lights seen near the Voss property on moonless nights. The milk cow of a neighbor that had dried up the week after Eleanor had brought the woman a poultice for her husband’s infected knee.

The blight on Henderson’s cornfield, which happened to share a fence line with Eleanor’s eastern pasture. Each thing was small. Together they accumulated the way snow accumulates quietly and without drama until one morning you wake up and the fence posts have disappeared. Eleanor had not been surprised when the deacons came to her door.

She had understood for at least two weeks that it was coming. What she had not fully anticipated was Agnes’ face when they told her the way her mother had seemed to collapse inward without moving the way 68 years of hard-built composure had simply given way like a bank undermined by spring flooding. Eleanor had reached for her hand underneath the kitchen table and Agnes had gripped it so hard that Eleanor’s knuckles ached and neither of them had said anything because there was nothing to say that would make the deacons leave any sooner. Now Agnes’ grip was on the

shawl instead of her daughter’s hand and Eleanor allowed herself one sweeping glance across the assembled faces for the one she was actually looking for. Clara Whitmore stood at the left edge of the crowd slightly apart from the crane women, her eyes directed at the packed dirt of the square directly in front of her boots.

Eleanor had known Clara since the spring of 1875, had helped her through a miscarriage the following winter with a discretion Clara had never had to ask for because Eleanor had understood without being asked. Clara knew the truth about Eleanor. Clara knew exactly what Eleanor was and what she was not and Clara was staring at the ground with the focused intensity of a person who was working very hard at not looking at something.

Eleanor felt the specific cold of that, not the wind’s cold, which was simple and physical and could be managed, a different cold one that started behind the sternum and radiated outward. She held it for exactly the count of three, then filed it under the heading of things to be examined later when there was time, and turned her attention to what was directly in front of her.

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