BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 37

1909

NORA

Nora kicks her horse and very shortly she is at full speed, on a beeline for the stage road. Her head swirls. A well-versed rider, her hands work the reins and her legs hold to her mount, her body operates by its own memory while her mind spins, picking up, it seems, random detritus that varies from past conversations to the immediate moment she's just left.

Five miles down the road, her horse coughs hard and shakes its head. Nora realize she's pushing the mare too hard, backs off. She looks behind her, not expecting to be followed but unsure, given the circumstances, that Tillie's husband wouldn't be there, chasing after her. Anything, it now appears, is possible. Before, it wasn't.

No sign of another rider, she slows further, to a trot, the horse responding favorably, loosening its mien. Her own face remains taut, the skin stretched back and her eyes wide as if her head was outside the window of a train. She feels ten years older, broken and hard. If she were the retching kind, she would retch, but stoic as she is she lets the bile inside circle. A sister wife. The whole friendship with Tillie Johnson was her preparing Nora to be a sister wife.

Just like Daniel joked, though now she wonders if he was jesting. "She's grooming you," he warned, half playfully she thought, and she angrily responded that the rumors of the Johnsons being polygamists were just the sour leavings of a wretched pastime. "A scourge of social discourse," she had told him.

She wants to scour the inside of her skull of thought and memory, the way you might scrape a hide of its fascia and fat. She feels not dirty but dirtied, like when the minutes before a hard storm hits and the wind shoves dust and twigs and leaves against you, through you. A hundred things—no, a thousand—pelt her, the cookie recipe, the quilting, the shared gossip, the knowing winks, and worse, far worse, the conjoined prayers, a spiritual awakening, it seemed, now just thorns that break the skin harmlessly and later fester.

She believed her. Believed. And what else of her beliefs is false now? All of it, she imagines, all of them colored, tainted, false, sleights of hand leaving her a fool.

Just as Daniel had intimated. 'Daniel's a good man,' Tillie had said, 'just one who hasn't found the gospel, has yet to find his way.'

She speeds the horse again to canter, then gallop, an aim lodged in her psyche to find Daniel, go to him, apologize, say he was right. He'd have her back.

But she slows again, then stops. The purpose shrinks. He might take her back, but she could never be with him and not feel like a pale imitation of herself, of the person he knew. He would remind her, with every touch and instance, of her stupidity. Daniel might be able to live with that, she could not.The shame would be too great

The horse whinnies, throws its head back as if asking a question. "Go on," Nora says. Purpose returns, just a different one. "Take your time." The gentleness of her voice doesn't hide the firmness of intent beneath it. The light diminishes, there is only a partial moon to replace the sun's offerings and starlight, as she trusts the animal beneath her to bring her home, where she will sleep, perhaps restlessly, and wake as someone else, someone steeled against not just others' falsehoods but her own, her past.

***

"What's up with Nora? Jake, the ditch rider on Lateral Four, throws his head back and to one side, indicating the scene just passed. Her curt response to Jake's mild teasing, something she usually just sidestepped, coupled with a glare, had driven him out of the office.

Jake's question rankles Daniel, who left just before he did. "How would I know," he shrugs. He, like Jake, wonders, but he's learned to cut that wonder short, it was no part of his interest.

Jake snorts. "Not like it's a secret."

Daniel stops walking and eyes him hard.

"Well, it ain't," Jake says, defensively.

"You got that part right. Whatever 'it' is, 'it' ain't," Daniel says, turning away.

"Just figured if she was mad, it'd be you she was mad at." He pauses. "More'n likely."

"Glad you don't do the company's figurin'."

"Guess she's just mad at everyone, then."

"That just might be closer to the matter."

"Course, women don't really need a reason, do they."

Daniel lets that go and mounts his horse.

***

Nora sits at her desk, a generous new oak roll top that McConaughy brought in as a peace offering—an insufficient one, as her short-lived title as acting canal secretary was given to a man, Albert Thompson, who lives in Logan and hasn't set foot in the office for two years. Her duties remain the same, she runs the business, but 'the settlers won't take orders from a woman,' as Robert McConaughy put it, feigning apology. So she smiled—she will smile less from now on, she vows. When requests come in for supplies—no smile. When she needs to show a plot of land that no one else in the company could locate without a map and a series of failed attempts—no smile. Every man that comes in self-flattered by being her boss, pleased with themselves if they've treated her kindly in their minds—no smile.

It's a man's world, and knowing that, she asks herself how she fell for Mormonism's patriarchal blanketing. She doesn't want to think about it, so returns to the accounts ledger. Frederick Sweet wants a rundown on what's owed and what's coming in, the first column a longer list by far. Until the canal is functioning fully, the company can't assess costs to the users, though they've issued bills as if they can, hoping to seine in a few dollars. Very few shareholders took the bait, word getting around quick, though some speculators, owning their claims from a distance and not a part of the communal gossip lines, sent money in.

She can't get away from that image, Walter Johnson's leer coupled with a look of righteousness. The fourth wife, he said she'd be, an honored place in his house, where she'd be taken care of and would no longer have to work. She had looked around at the spare, squalid structure he and Tillie (the other two wives were kept in Logan) lived in along with, by her count, seven children stair-stepping in age from two to twelve. His was some kingly position? Her eyes had gone to the door, she was luckily between it and the Johnsons. Though elements of a learned politeness had tried to break through her instinct to flee, she had said,"I think not," and turned, evading Tillie's grasp with a pace close to a run. She had leapt onto her horse and was gone, though she left her gloves on the Johnson's table with land papers she had brought for them.

Her horse knew better than she did, had started away before she fully controlled the reins and had situated herself astride in the saddle. Looked down upon perhaps by others for not riding side saddle—Tillie Johnson expressed a mild rebuking of her not riding primly—she had been glad to be aboard without worry of falling as the horse galloped toward the old stage road.

At her desk, she shakes the near memory away. Sometime in the near future Tillie would be coming in for a notarized proving-up of her acreage and Nora doesn't want to be anywhere near when she does. Daniel's a notary, so he could take care of it, but she doesn't know how to reconfigure the mess she has made.

© 2025 Ralph Thurston