The Misadventures of Maude March Page 19

  Marion carried everything out to the porch, but Maude would not accept his help in loading the horse. He asked, “You girls have supplies enough to take you the distance?”

  “We will shoot something if we run short of all else,” Maude said in a cool tone. “It is only a few days away now.”

  “That's true,” Marion said. “But the weather could go bad on you again, anything could…”

  If he meant to say, anything could happen, he thought better of it. So far there wasn't much that hadn't happened, and still Maude and I trudged on. We must have been something of a surprise to him. We were a surprise to me.

  He gave up trying to talk to Maude. To me, he said, “That was good shooting, Sallie.”

  “It was pure accident,” I told him. “I'm lucky it was Willie I hit and not somebody I'd feel more sorry about.”

  “You don't need to feel sorry, accident or no. That boy would've killed somebody before the week was out.”

  “You didn't look eager to kill him when Mr. Newcomb suggested it,” I said, feeling a little put out about this myself. “You said he was only a boy and a rowdy.”

  “He was just a boy. I was wrong about the rowdy part,” Marion said. “I saw that this morning. I can be wrong, now and again. Especially when the suggestion to be some other way is coming from somebody who doesn't care to bite the bullet his ownself.”

  “Enough talk,” Maude said, and threw a leg over the horse. “Give her a hand up so we can get out of where we aren't wanted.”

  “I wish I was riding out with you,” Marion said.

  Maude did not reply to this. She gigged the horse and we were off.

  “We are getting a late start on the day,” Maude said. “I plan to ride till dark.”

  “You won't get any argument from me,” I said.

  “We have only a little cheese and ham left,” Maude said, “and the last of the corn bread is dry and hard. But I didn't care to take anything more from Ben, even if he had offered.”

  “If you shoot something, I'll skin it,” I promised, thinking the time was not right to mention that Marion had seen to this. Maude would be more reasonable when her belly was empty.

  My belly was already thinking ahead, though. When the necessity came to hunt something up, I was hoping for a rabbit. If Maude shot it, it would be my job to clean it, and chicken feathers could be hard work.

  This is how we began what we hoped would be the last leg of our journey. We enjoyed the unusual warmth of the day, and when it passed into a chilly evening, we had a fire. “Someone might notice the fire,” I said, even as I sidled up to warm my hands.

  “Let them notice,” she said. Something in Maude had shifted; she was no longer on the run. I thought maybe I should be; I had killed a man, however accidentally, and I was made a little nervous by this change in Maude.

  “We'll tell them where we're headed, and let them know we're willing to sleep in their barn if they'd rather,” she added in a tone to bolster me.

  This new boldness suited Maude very well, and I decided not to argue against it. No one noticed our fire, in any case, and it did us good to have it. Given the choice between going cold and going hungry, I would choose to go hungry every time.

  As things turned out, and some would call it very goodluck, our greatest adventure during the next several days was eating a prairie dog for the first time. I suppose with the right kind of cooking, a prairie dog could make a good meal. For roasting them over an open fire until they are half charred, I cannot speak enthusiastically.

  AWEEK LATER, WE WERE TIRED OF THE ENDLESSNESS OF the prairie. From all the accounts I'd ever read, we were traveling only the edge of a broad grassland more persistent than Iowa and even Missouri for grass. One that had no trees at all and took weeks to cross. I could not stomach the idea. Missouri had more than enough grass for me.

  “Doesn't it seem funny to you that we never see anything but grass and sky?” I complained to Maude. “Don't you wish we would see a homestead? Don't you wish we might come across a wagon train and join up with some other travelers? Don't you wish—”

  “Oh, be quiet,” Maude scolded. “Isn't it enough for you that nobody is bothering us? That we're making steady progress toward Independence?”

  Maybe we were making steady progress, but it didn't feel like it. It seemed we were forever wading through a sea of grass that might just about be forded when the wind would change direction and another sea would wash in.

  Trees came few and far between out here. To find a stand of three to five of them was so rare as to make me want to setup camp, no matter the time of day. It was nearly as good as coming across a dressed bird.

  And yet it became so much what we expected to see that when we saw something different the very next day, it was a little alarming. It didn't help that it was a cemetery of some size. Many a row of wooden markers, some crosses, and a few stones of a golden color that felt restful to the eyes. It was civilization.

  But still, it didn't feel like much of a welcome.

  “What do you think it means?” I asked Maude.

  “Independence can't be far away,” she said. But I could see the sight had unsettled her too. I wished we had come upon something else as our first sign of civilization, that was all.

  “I hope there are a few people left standing,” I replied as we passed the cemetery.

  There were more than a few. We came upon a well-traveled road and followed it. Over an hour's time, a good many people passed us riding out.

  Each time someone got a good look at us, I worried they would recognize Maude. What good were a few layers of dirt when your face had been splashed across the front page? When you were known far and wide as Mad Maude? But no one did any other than raise a hand in greeting, and some did not go that far.

  When we could see the town in the distance, a pale cloud of dust seemed to hover over it. It spread out a good deal more than Cedar Rapids or even Des Moines. Its color seemed from a distance to be a fairly uniform gray. People out here did not take great care to whitewash, it looked to me.

  We rode into town at about two o'clock, with Maudecongratulating herself on having a couple of hours of bright daylight left in which to find Uncle Arlen.

  “Maybe we ought to find a place to stay first,” I said.

  “If we find Uncle Arlen, we'll have a place to stay,” she said.

  Her confidence had returned but mine had found a hole somewhere to hide in. Partly it was the memory of Des Moines that bothered me. But the other worry was simply the size of Independence.

  I didn't like the look of it from the get-go. The streets were wide but still so busy with carriages, coaches, and riders moving much too fast, it didn't look safe to enter into the rush of it all. If we got brushed off our horse, we would be trampled or run over in a moment.

  “It's just such a change from seeing nobody,” Maude said when I stood reluctant. “You'll get used to it in a few minutes, you'll see.”

  We had to shoulder our way into the flow of horses and riders. The boardwalk looked worse to me. Crowded, and people acted like they didn't even see each other, just used their elbows to hurry on past. It made me glad I was on a horse, more polite.

  I had never seen so many people together in one place before, not even in church on Christmas morning. We hadn't gone far before I was ready to turn and hightail it out of there. “Let's come back later,” I said to Maude. “We can use the breather to get used to the idea of it all.”

  “Settle down, Sallie,” Maude told me. “You are evermore the kind of person who strives for something and once it iswithin reach, changes her mind. But I am not changing mine, and you are stuck behind me on this horse.”

  The buildings were, for the most part, the unrelenting gray color they had looked to be from the distance. But every so often we saw a fancy hotel that, while it was largely still gray, sported red or orange trim about the doors and windows.

  There were saloons aplenty, and these were by far the most appealing
buildings, some of them dressed up like doll-houses, the likes of which could only come from a girl's imagination. The wood trim was sometimes carved in curlicues and the painted words were drawn very prettily. Occasionally the doors were painted in bright colors.

  The best of these dollhouses caused us to stop and look for a time. It was a place dressed up in shades of lavender and made the mouth water for wanting to sleep there. But when I said so, Maude only made a snorting noise much like the horse was given to.

  Here and there about the town were men, and even a couple of women, standing bravely in the crush of the streets, selling things to eat. We stopped beside these people pretty often, tasting their wares. When it was bread stuff, we bought only one and shared. When it was a piece of meat or potatoes, Maude said we should each have one of our own.

  At first I went on worrying that someone would recognize Maude, but when one blacksmith or vendor after another did not, I let go of this worry. Either we were too dirty to be recognizable in any fashion, or nobody cared to wonder why she might have looked familiar.

  We went from livery stable to livery stable, and none of them belonged to Arlen Waters. No one knew who he was. We began to realize we might just as well go looking for a needle in a haystack. There were so many streets in this city and nearly that many stables. It was a terrible discouragement.

  “We don't even know for sure that's what he did when he got here either,” Maude said. It was by then well past dark.

  Maude was right, and I had no useful argument to give her. I had gotten used to feeling like a sardine packed tight in a can, but I had grown tired and low-spirited.

  “He might have gone on, the way he wrote he planned to,” Maude said wearily. “He might be somewhere else, doing something else. He might be dead. That letter could have been his last.”

  She was getting low too. I wanted to lift her spirits, but I was more of the mind that says misery loves company at just that moment. “I know we talked about how we might not find Uncle Arlen,” I said, “but somehow I thought sure we would.”

  “Let's find a room to sleep,” Maude said as we came to the next livery we had been told of. “We'll ask for Uncle Arlen at this place, but let's board the horse too.”

  We knew it would be necessary to pay for the horse's keep. Independence was some larger than Des Moines, and the back doors stood only a few feet from another back door. There were no sheds fitted to sleep a horse. It was a good thing Ben Chaplin gave us the horse to get rid of us, or we would not have had the money for boarding it.

  Before we went in, I said, “We ought to ask if we couldn't sleep in the loft.”

  Maude considered this, then said, “No, I think we shouldlook for a bootmaker or the like and ask to sleep on the shop floor. That's more to my liking.”

  “If we're going to spend money anyway, we might go to a hotel and take a bath,” I said. We had passed many hotels.

  “They aren't likely to let us into a hotel, the way you look,” she said.

  Which made me grin. I didn't know if she'd washed her face even once since climbing onto Cleomie's mule. I had not.

  IN THE END, IT WAS NOT A BOOTMAKER'S SHOP BUT A hatmaker's that had a light burning in the back. Since we were carrying our blankets and the saddlebags, we couldn't be too picky. “Lily's Box,” the fancy lettering painted on the window read.

  Lily opened her door only a crack, since it was past closing time, and Maude offered her twenty cents for a night on the floor. Lily impressed me in the way Aunt Ruthie could. Not with Aunt Ruthie's spare form and stern manner, but with the lot of hair she had tumbling over her shoulders and the full figure she covered with a silky robe. There was something to be said for a woman who made an impression.

  “Are you boys or girls?” Lily asked after a long, doubtful look.

  “Girls,” Maude admitted. “We thought we'd be safer this way.”

  “I imagine you are,” Lily said, and let us in. “You can have a bath if you want,” she said. “I can draw the curtain and get into bed so you'll be private.”

  I could make out a row of pretty feathered hats on wire stands as we crossed her shop. She led us to a large room, outfitted with a comfortable reading chair, a big iron bed, and a corner that served as a kitchen. Waist-high bookcases ran around two of the walls and were filled with books of all description, but I did not see any dimers.

  “Why don't you sleep upstairs, if you don't mind me asking?” Maude said when we had put the pots of water on to boil.

  “Hat glue smells to high heaven,” Lily answered. “Best if I work upstairs and live down here where I sell the hats. Less mess, less odor to live with. Have you girls eaten?”

  “We have, thank you for asking,” I said. “It's good of you to let us have a bath.” Maude used to be the one to say these things, but she sat on the floor to wait for the water, and had grown quiet.

  “I'll leave you girls to your bath,” Lily said, seeing Maude's interest was not in conversation. “Douse the light when you're done.”

  Lily had no sooner drawn the curtain than I reached for a newspaper left lying on a footstool. “What do you find?” Maude said after I had paused to read.

  “Nothing,” I said. “A receipt for pumpkin pie that reads very tasty. Tastily.”

  “You're reading recipes?” she said in a disbelieving tone.

  “If they'd been kind enough to draw a picture, I might have tried chewing paper,” I said truthfully. “There are many things about the civilized life that I miss.”

  Maude snatched the paper away from me. I watchedover her shoulder as she looked through pages of local news. With each page turned and no awful discovery made, my heart lifted.

  But then, on page seven, there it was:

  BULLETS IN THE AIR

  Mad Maude Gets Her Man

  A dispatch was received by the Des Moines County Sheriff's office that the same Maude March who is wanted in that city for horse thievery and robbing a bank is known to have killed her first man. That it was Willie “Golly” Griffith—

  “The water's going to get cold,” Lily said from behind her curtain.

  Maude put a finger to her lips and set the paper aside. We weren't going to talk just then. This was fine with me. But I could tell she was in quite a state. Maude cannot hide her moods from me.

  There was to be only one wash of hot water. Together we stepped into the washtub, having agreed that we should both have a moment to enjoy clean water before the dirt washed off.

  We soaped our hair and dunked it, also hoping to make the best use of clean water. After that we scrubbed our skin, doing each other's backs. There was so much dirtin the water we did not sit until it cooled but got out to feel clean.

  In only a few minutes we had put our undershirts back on and were determined to sleep in only those, since the stove had put out a good deal of heat. Because we could hear Lily snoring lightly, we felt we could reread the article and talk a little.

  “It's on page seven, Maude,” I said in a whisper. “A lot of people wouldn't read that far through.” We were crouched in front of the woodstove, reading by firelight.

  —That it was Willie “Golly” Griffith, a man wanted for wounding another man when a poker game did not go his way, makes no difference to the law. Dead is dead. That Mad Maude is, in fact, not much more than a girl, and grief-stricken over the shooting death of her beloved aunt, makes no difference either. She is wanted for murder. Perhaps her sad experience has turned her mind forever, because after shooting her victim, she was heard to cold-bloodedly refer to him as “a sack of dirt.” She had earlier hoped to poison the man, another eyewitness tells this reporter. The evidence would seem to say the girl has become a hardened criminal. Maude March is now being pursued through Missouri and Arkansas as she tries to make the Texas border. If the Indians don't get her, the law will.

  Maude slapped the paper down angrily again. “They're saying I'm crazy.”

  “They didn't run a picture,” I said, ticking off the
good points, “you didn't make the front page, and even the print is smaller.”

  “I hope you don't think that makes it all right,” Maude said. “Did I shoot that boy, Sallie, did I?”

  “No, I did,” I said, and seeing the look on her face, quickly added, “By accident, like. I mean to say, it was the gun I was holding that went off.”

  “Don't ever tell anyone that,” she said. “Not even if they catch me and hang me.”

  I snatched the paper away and stuffed it into the open woodstove. “I don't know why you even want to read these things,” I told her. “You're only making yourself sick over it. You never even used to read anything but the wanteds, did you?”

  “I never expected to be a headline before,” she said.

  “Maude, don't talk like that, will you? About them hanging you? It gives me a bellyache.”

  “All right, then, I won't say another word about it.”

  I shut the stove door quietly and slid down into my blanket. I said, “They think you're headed for Texas. That's not so bad.”

  After a time, Maude said, “You may be right.”

  “About what?” I was nearly asleep and dreaming off and on of sitting in a schoolroom. Funny how that used to seem like the start of a nightmare, but now I found it right comforting. If Maude answered, I didn't hear her.

  IN THE MORNING, LILY PUT A LOAF OF BREAD ON THE table and began to slice it, saying, “I'm going to give you girls a piece of advice. I know you aren't asking for advice, and if you don't want to hear it, I guess you won't listen.”

  “We'll listen,” Maude said, made meek by Lily's manner, which was suddenly easily as rough as Aunt Ruthie's.

  “Don't take this stuff of the newspapers to heart,” Lily said.

  Maude rose from her chair so fast it fell over. Myself, I was too shocked to move.

  “Sit right back down there,” Lily said, setting her bread knife aside. She took up the butter knife and started to fix herself something to eat, her manner as offhand as if she had shared breakfast with hardened criminals before. “The first thing you're going to learn about people out here is they are practically all of them living down something. If it isn't a reputation, it's a failure of some kind. Usually it's the men, of course, not young girls, but they come out here for a fresh start.”