Abandon

Molly staggered back. “His name?”

“Jack Engler, ma’am.”

Molly flushed, glanced back at Stephen. He came to the door, said, “Harriet, I want you to go downstairs and tell Mr. Engler that Mrs. Engler will send for him momentarily. Hurry now.”

As Harriet ran down the hall, Stephen closed the door.

Molly glanced at her chemise, which was stained and threadbare, a pitiful garment. She whispered, “He can’t see me like this.”

Stephen went to the wardrobe, threw open the doors. The dresses and gowns hadn’t been worn in years; all were mottled with gray dust.

Molly chose a corset, much too small, but Stephen fit her into it as well as he could manage, hooked the two bones in front, and laced up the back. “Which gown?” he said. “I happen to like this blue—”

“Jack detests blue.” She detached a peach-colored evening gown with plentiful ruffles from its hanger.

“A lovely choice, Molly.” He pulled it over her head, helped slide her arms into the sleeves. As he swept the dust off her shoulders, he felt as if he were dressing an oversize child.

Her hands shook.

Stephen steadied them, said, “Don’t be afraid. Your husband is down in the lobby because he loves you. He’s come back for you.”

He sat Molly down at the dressing table. Her hair hadn’t been brushed in a long while—thin, oily, so tangled that he hesitated to run bristles through it. So he picked up the silver brush and slid the smooth backside of it down the length of her coarse black tresses.

Molly’s reflection in the cracked mirror sent back the rubble of a woman, and Stephen prayed she didn’t see herself as he did, that God might cause a beautiful distortion of the image her eyes received.

While he pretended to brush her hair, he considered Jack, wondered where this man lived today, and if he ever thought of the woman he’d deserted, this mad, pathetic creature of obsession, wished Jack could see what he’d done to his bride.

“You’re stunning,” Stephen said.

“I don’t have any rouge.”

He pinched her cheeks. “There. You’re perfect now.”

As Molly beamed, Stephen glimpsed the dignity she’d once possessed. He went to the door, cracked it open, yelled, “Harriet! Mrs. Engler is ready to receive her husband!”

Stephen shut the door. Molly walked over, her chest billowing beneath the shabby gown.

She stood three feet back from the door, Stephen behind her.

They listened to the heavy footsteps thumping up the stairs.

Molly glanced back at Stephen, grinning with all the giddy joy of a new bride, thinking of the first day she’d arrived in advance of her husband, in this fledgling camp called Hope.

And all the things she’d wanted to do, places she’d intended to see, children to bear, tore through her mind like an avalanche.

She’d waited so long.

Now he was coming down the hall, and Molly whispered “Oh Jack” as Stephen thumbed back the hammer, raised the revolver to the back of her head, and waited for the knock at the door.

SIXTY-SIX

In the evening, Stephen went for water, blessed with convenience in this regard, since the hillside behind his home boasted a spring. The cabin’s previous occupant had raised a simple structure over the rock where the water surfaced, so it could be easily accessed in the winter months.

A lantern in one hand, an empty pail in the other, he webbed fifty feet up the trail, past the privy and toward the shed, the moon so bright that he could’ve left the lamp behind.

He stepped under the tin roof and traded the lantern for an ax that hung from a nail in the clapboard.

Ice had amassed around the lip of the flat rock where the water spilled over, and when he’d chipped it clear, he set the pail under the trickle and sat contentedly on a dry rock, blanketed, like all the others in this old tailings pile, with an orange flocculent mass.

He’d always assumed it was algae.

A solitary cabin glowed on the east slope above Abandon, though you couldn’t see inside, since the windows weren’t made of glass, but white cotton cloth soaked in tallow. It was a cramped, one-room, saddle-notched affair with a mud and stone chimney, a little porch out front, and a corrugated metal roof that stayed warm enough with a fire blazing underneath it to keep the snow from sticking. Inside and out, it was a spartan dwelling, severely lacking the touch of a woman.

Stephen pulled two enameled graniteware pots off the fire and hustled them over to the rustic table where Harriet sat waiting for supper. He eased down onto the deacon seat and lifted the top from the larger of the two pots.

Steam bellowed out. The slumgullion simmered.

He spooned a serving of stew into Harriet’s bowl, then sliced her a piece of sourdough bread and lathered on several spoonfuls of wild raspberry preserves. One of his parishioners had left the bread and jar of jam on his doorstep Christmas morning. He dipped Harriet’s tin cup into an earthen vessel he’d bought off a Navajo trader, filled her cup with water, then poured himself some Arbuckle’s from a spouted pot, allowing himself a sip of coffee before ladling the stew into his own bowl.

He blessed the meal. It needed prayer.

The stew was horrendous—so wanting of salt and spice that it held all the complexity of dirty water with chunks of gristly elk meat and potatoes and cabbage bobbing on the oily surface.

But his new guest slurped it down without prejudice and even asked for more.

After supper, Stephen prepared Harriet’s bed on the mattress he’d taken from the McCabes’ shack earlier in the afternoon.

For pajamas, Harriet wore her underclothes, Bessie’s peignoir—too long and bunched up around her feet—and a pair of drafty socks sewn from flour sacks. Stephen made Harriet turn away while he slipped a flannel nightshirt over his union suit.

“Would you like a story before we go to sleep?” he asked.

Harriet stood at the foot of his aspen bedstead, looking at the old newspaper that served as wallpaper, tacked to the logs.

“What would that be like?”

“You’ve never had a bedtime story read to you?”

She shook her head, and Stephen realized it owed to her parents’ illiteracy. He got up from his mattress—just a bunch of burlap stitched together and stuffed with pine boughs—and walked over to the railroad tie mounted to the stone above the fireplace, the shelf serving as mantel and bookshelf.

He chose a scuffed, well-used volume, called Harriet over to her bed before the hearth, and tucked her in under the quilts. She lay between Stephen’s legs with her head in his lap, and he read for ten minutes by firelight from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.