Sarah stared at
her reflection in the mirror. Brown
hair, brown eyes, and today, her black dress.
Nothing too terrible to look at, nothing too special. The mirror itself was large, over three feet
tall with an ornate frame of dark wood.
It was the most elegant thing in the house, out of place in a simple
farmhouse in the Oregon territory. Her
father had brought in over the plains for her mother as a wedding gift, and it
had been presented to Sarah in turn on her wedding day. More than seven years ago.
Out of the corner
of the mirror, Sarah could see the bed.
Most of the time, Sarah preferred not to look at it. The great bed was too large for one person,
and its emptiness only reminded Sarah of her loss.
In the five years
since William had died, Sarah had stopped wearing black, had given all her
energy to keeping her small farm, had learned to live with the ache. But she had never really stopped
mourning. And today she was wearing her
widow's garb again.
Sarah finished
pinning up her hair, put on her bonnet and began to walk to the cemetery. The little township hadn't existed above
three generations, but already the cemetery had seen too many deaths. So had Sarah.
Her single black dress was starting to gray, seeming as tired and
world-weary as she did. She had been to
too many funerals in it, funerals crossing the prairie, funerals on the
frontier as people struggled to make a living.
Friends and family and her father.
Sarah's legs
started to burn halfway up the steep hill.
The location for the cemetery was chosen because no plow could get up
there. Any land that could be farmed
was. The dust stirred up from the
trail. She started to lift her skirts,
but decided not to. Let the dust cling
to her dress and cover the color. She
concentrated on the rhythm of climbing, feeling her muscles work, her heart
beating the blood to her legs. She felt
alive.
Sarah came to the
top slightly out of breath and took a moment to recover before moving on. On the far side of the cemetery were two
markers. William and Henry, her husband
and son. William had not lived to see
his child, and Henry had never known life.
Grass had grown over the plots, long and high.
Sarah cleared a
place and sat down, grateful that no one, especially not Mrs. Whemper, was
around. She would have said it was a
sin, and disrespectful to the dead.
Matilde Whemper said most things were a sin, though somehow she never
seemed to come to gossiping when naming her list of evils. But that was unkind, and Sarah did not come
here to think about Mrs. Whemper.
She knew William
would not mind. If she could talk to
William now, he would probably make of it a joke. William was always laughing at one thing or
another, and she had been forever trying to get him to be serious. Even on his last day in this life, with his
skin badly burned and still coughing from the smoke he had breathed, he tried
to smile as he told her goodbye.
Sarah had been
burned herself, though not as badly. She
was still recovering two months later when her child was born. The labor had nearly killed her, giving birth
to her stillborn baby boy. She named him
Henry like William had wanted, and buried him beside his father.
In the months
following, Sarah had learned to live again, like a child learns to walk. She worked the farm herself, as much as she
could. The neighbors had plagued her to
let it go, but she ignored them. William
had loved this land, had given it so much love that it almost seemed to love
him back. Certainly Sarah felt that the
land loved her. Her farm should have
failed every year of the last five.
Sarah knew she had neither the strength or skill to keep it.
She never told
anyone how the farm seemed to grow crops itself. It would have been dismissed as superstition
or blasphemy. Sarah couldn't see what
was blasphemous about a loving God blessing her when she needed so much help,
but Reverend Phillips tended to believe more in a just God than a loving one.
Sarah gazed at the
headstone, remembering the day of the fire.
“Thank you for
saving my life, my William,” she said at last.
“I know for years I was angry with you for it, for leaving me here when
you went on ahead. But I am grateful
now.”
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