Promises, Promises

 Long thin streamers of clouds hung, draped across the sky as the gentle breeze pulled lightly at their tails and drew them ever so slowly toward the horizon. Slim white lines in a sky so blue that it fairly glowed. And beneath the great blue dome lay the spring prairie, bright green, and flecked with brown stalks of last year’s grass still showing through.

 She turned slowly and realized there was nothing else to see and a fear began to rise. She’d walked only a hundred yards from her doorway, but even this near, the low dugout cabin with the tamped dirt floor and the hard mud walls and the grass covered sod roof was invisible.

 How could she ever survive here, she wondered. But how could she ever leave? Her husband had ridden off to the south ten days ago. And he was three days over due now and that was long enough to mean trouble. He’d be back he had promised her and he had always kept his promises. But she worried about him and prayed for him, and now she was worrying and praying for herself too.

 Raised in the Missouri hill country, this flat Kansas land was as foreign to her as would be the streets of Chicago or New York and the lost feeling in her breast was growing, the hollowness was turning to fear.

 She retraced her steps over the gentle rise and stopped. There was the door to the dugout with the shallow hand dug well nearby. A few paces away lay the plow. their most prized possession as yet unused. Three hens and a rooster scratched in the dirt near the door, these were her only companions, and she hated them for their insolence.

 You can’t talk to a chicken any easier than a door post she thought. But between them they at least had something. Maybe just companionship or a miniature society of their own. She didn’t know what the chickens had but at least they weren’t alone, they had each other. No, only she was alone. Her world had become such a small place in a universe of grass and sky.  

 Finally on the eleventh day the fear crystallized and the thoughts couldn’t be suppressed any longer. And her imagination began to work. There were indians on these plains, and gunmen in the town. There were prairie dog holes that could snap a horse’s leg and rattlers.

There was always fever and disease and there was the law. Any of them could spell doom for her husband. Any of them could sentence her to death by proxy. But he’d be back, he had promised her a new life and he had always kept his promises.

 Coming out here had seemed like a fine idea at the time. The war was over and former Confederates were being hunted like outlaws back in Missouri. Here on the plains, here her husband said, they could start fresh. They would rebuild what they had lost. They would have a home, safe and insulated by time and distance from the past, It would be a whole new world, he had promised her.

But now as she stood on the rise behind the dugout, hopefully scanning the horizon, that insulating blanket of time and space began to suffocate her.

 She looked at the marks scratched on the door post and counted them for what must have been the tenth time that day. Thirteen days since her husband had left. Thirteen days since she had heard any sound except the wind and the chickens. And she looked into the yard before the door. There were two hens now and a rooster scratching and clucking and rooting out the bugs on which they survived. One of the hens hadn’t come in last night to the lean-to coop on the side of the dugout. She didn’t know what had gotten it. It could have been a hawk or a fox, maybe a coyote or a snake. But she knew her world had shrunk again, smaller by a hen than it had been before.

 On the eighteenth day she realized that for sometime now she hadn’t seen even a cloud. She now lived in a world without the color white. She surveyed the plains and saw that the grass had grown and last years dead stems were no longer visible. The loss of the tan streaks on the prairie made the land seem even wider and more featureless than before. She sat down on the doorsill on a bright, clear, warm afternoon and cried until dark.

 Three weeks after her husband had left, two days after the last chicken had disappeared, she tried to remember which direction he had gone, but now her world was shrinking one memory at a time. She tried to picture his face but it wasn’t clear. To remember his voice and realized how foreign even her own sounded now and she sat down to cry again. Only this time there were no tears and the only sound in her world was the wind.

 Six weeks after her husband had left, the two Cheyenne warriors sat their mounts and stared in wonder at the white woman lying in the grass before them. She looked hungry, dirty and lost. Her clothes were stained and torn, ragged and revealing. She slept a troubled sleep, that they could see, but how had she gotten here? Cradled by the tall grass as she was, they had nearly ridden over her before they had seen her.

 There was no trail here that they could see. There were no riders or ranches in this area. No road ran through these hills, no town was within days of this place.

 She woke but didn’t resist when they placed her on a mount behind the smaller warrior. She said nothing when they turned toward their camp.

 Her husband had promised her hadn’t he? A new start, in a different world, and he nearly always kept his promises.