CHAPTER 1
I Can't Believe This
I never thought I'd die like this.
There's a bucketful of ways I could go. Snake bite. Thrown by Goldie. Shot by a cowboy. Trampled by a steer. Freeze to death. Drown in the river. Come down sick. Maybe an Indian attack, but this is already 1889 and I think the fight has been beat out of them.
I never thought I'd be hanging here at the end of a rope.
Not strung up like a side of beef. Not twisting and bucking and bumping into my Jimmy as he hangs by his own rope. His sad eyes begging forgiveness, like this was his fault.
Not lynched in a lonely canyon in Wyoming Territory on a pretty Saturday afternoon when I should be getting supper ready.
I'm still not believing it. This can't be happening. This can't be the end already. I know they'll come to their senses and cut us down. They have to!
No, I am not going to die like this. Not after I just turned twenty-nine.
I'm going to die proper. An old lady, tucked under a quilt in bed with my people all around me. Jimmy's wrinkled hand holding mine. Years and years of happy memories. My feet tired from all the dancing I did.
I intend to have a full life. I've worked hard for it. I've risked so much for it. I have too many plans. All my dreams!
I'm going to have children.
I'm going to be a happy grandma.
I'm going to reveal I'm Jimmy's wife.
I'm going to prove up my claim.
I'm going to become a citizen.
I'm going to celebrate when we're finally a state.
I'm going to see Gene grow up.
I'm going to dance at the fandango.
I haven't even been to the Opera House yet. I saved the beautiful hair comb Jimmy gave me, and a woman can't have something so dear and never get to wear it.
I will die listening to my cattle bellowin', like they had a complaint, which is the way a cow always sounds. I will die with the feel of their wirehair hides. I will die smelling their musty scent that town folks can't stand. I will die satisfied, because to me that is the sound and feel and smell of freedom.
When I die, our Homestead Certificates will be proudly framed on the living room wall, telling the world this land is ours and we worked five long, hard years to earn it.
Ma and Pa will be buried back in Kansas by the time I die. I'll fill in Ma's Bible with their dates, just like I've done with all our losses over my lifetime. Oh God, I can't die before my Ma. She already lost seven children. It would kill her to lose me, too.
They say that when you die, your life flashes before you in an instant, but I had it going into the future instead. I thought about all those things the seconds after that man finally got a rope around my neck.
And that's when it got through my thick skull: Ella Watson, you might really die out here today.
Oh, my God, I'm being strangled by a cowboy's rope!
If I had ever imagined this, the rope would come from some deranged bandito or dirty lowlife—someone who'd take my life like he was stealin' eggs from the henhouse. Who could imagine it would be these men?
That man sat at my roadhouse dinner table braggin' about my pies. That one got his mail from Jimmy every week. That one had me sign a petition for a new county. That one praised my sturdy corral.
Now here they are, these pillars of the community—liquored up, hootin'—pretending they're going to let me and Jimmy die. They're trying to scare us—alright, I'm scared. And mad. And more than done with this nonsense.
Sure, they're cattlemen and we're homesteaders and that's like oil and water. But somebody has to stand up to them. My Jimmy and me are standuppers.
But now it's getting us killed!
If they think I'll go peaceful-like, they're getting the surprise of their lives. I'm kicking and swirling and jumping and screaming like the Texas Rangers will hear me and ride in any minute.
I'm kicking so hard, I just kicked off the beautiful beaded moccasins I got this morning—they went flying, and now my feet are in their stockings and I'm kicking still.
"This is what cattle rustlers get in Wyoming Territory."
Just heard those words, but this isn't about rustling. We all know what's really going on here. And any second now, somebody is going to get his head on straight and put an end to this.
I'm certain we'll be saved.
By the end of this day, I'll be back in my kitchen. I'm making an extra special supper tonight. You bet I am! I've got to make up for all the pain and suffering we've been through this afternoon.
My Jimmy deserves a great big, juicy steak. I've got fresh peas from the garden and I'll stew them in real cream. I'll make his favorite pie. Rhubarb.
I'm going to eat like a pig until I bust my skirt button. I deserve it.
It's not every day a woman has to fight off a lynch mob that doesn't have the sense God gave a goose.
No, I didn't live this life to end up lynched by a vigilante mob.
So STOP IT, RIGHT NOW!
CHAPTER 2
They First Called Me Franny
I took to the henhouse like I was a fox.
Even when my legs were chubby little stumps that waddled more than walked, I headed for the henhouse whenever I had a chance.
They called me Franny, just like my mother before me and my grandmother before that. If you went back to Ireland, you'd find people who'd tell you that great-great-great-Grandma had carried the family's favorite nickname, too.
"Franny, Franny, Franny, answer Mother, ELLEN LIDDY. Where. Are. You?" I loved the sound of my mother's voice, even when she was yelling. But I was busy with the hens and the eggs and when you're still in diapers, you can't focus on more than one thing at a time. Ma found me in the chicken coop, and I was surprised she was crying. So I held up the speckled egg as a present, but my pudgy fingers held too tight and before I knew it, yellow yolk and slimy white squished through my fingers. That, of course made me cry, and Ma's cry turned into a laugh.
"Oh, wee one, you'll be the death of me yet." She kissed me all over my face.
From then on, Ma said she knew to always check the henhouse first when she couldn't find me. So of course, that's where Uncle Andrew came looking the day my parents went off to get married.
"Your Ma said I'd find you here." He gathered me up in his lumberjack arms. My little arms couldn't even reach around his thick neck, but I loved being held by my Uncle Andrew. He was my first special friend. I was the only baby in the house and I got all his attention. I just loved that he was mine. And it was that way the seventeen years I lived in Canada.
Eventually, I'd piece it together—I had to figure it out myself because nobody wanted to tell me. I'd hear little things here and there. A snide comment or a sentence that was supposed to be secret. One day, I was about ten, it finally started to make sense.
What telling there was came from Uncle Andrew. Usually with hesitation, usually with a positive spin on everything. But he never could deny me anything. So over the years, I coaxed the secrets out of him. He always made me promise not to tell my Ma, and he didn't have to worry, because this wasn't the kind of news you want to confront your Ma with.
My birth was a family scandal. I can just imagine my Grandma wailing and my Grandpa swearing and my uncles threatening revenge when it turned out that my fifteen-year-old Ma was "in the family way" without a wedding band on her hand. It wasn't even a good Irish boy, but the Scottish farmer down the way. Boy, that really made it awful. I don't know why my Irish grandparents couldn't stand Scottish people—or why my Scottish father's people detested the Irish. Uncle Andrew said it went back to the Old Country.
"I've never had much use for that kind of hatred," Andrew told me one day when we were out in the field and nobody could hear him telling me family secrets. "Your Pa wanted to marry Frances right away, you got to know that. Yes, he did. But his Pa wouldn't hear of it. He threatened to disown Thomas and ban him from the family. I thought your Pa would ... well, it's a terrible thing to lose your family, so they didn't get married right away." It was the only time I ever heard disappointment in my uncle's voice when he talked about my father.
"I was the logical one to take Frances in while she waited for you to be born." He answered the first part of my question. "It wouldn't look right for her to stay with Da and Ma, not being in the family way," was the answer to part two. "I already had my small farm, the one you first remember. Frances and I have always been real close, and I wouldn't let anything hurt her."
"So she was hiding at your place?" My uncle winced and said I shouldn't think of it that way. It was just best. But I knew I was right.
"Remember the day I found you in the henhouse and we spent the whole day, just us?" Of course, I remembered it. Because at the end of the day, my Ma and Pa came riding up in a carriage and they hugged me for a very long time. "That's the day they went off and got married. And your Pa was real proud to take his family home to his house that night."
I cried when I had to leave Uncle Andrew. But the new house had a nice crib Pa said he made for me, and a stone fireplace where I could play and always be warm, and that's where we lived for the next few years.
"I love Uncle Andrew," I announced one day when Ma was sewing and I was playing with my doll.
"So do I. He's my special big brother."
I'd never have a big brother, and I felt cheated. When I got older and asked questions every day, I asked Ma why Uncle Andrew was so special.
The stories she told me only made me yearn even more for a big brother of my own. I wondered if I'd ever find anyone who'd take care of me like Andrew took care of my Ma.
"It was Andrew who took the blame when I set the barn on fire," Mother confided. "He still carries the scars on his arms. Da whipped him good for the fire, and I cried all the time, knowing it should be me. But he told me to stay quiet, and he took all the blame on himself. I was about eleven then, and he was fifteen, and I knew right then that I could count on him for anything."
Almighty! To have somebody take blame for you. I had no idea how that felt.
"But even the fire wasn't as big as how he saved me when I was thirteen." Ma lowered her voice and leaned toward me to share a secret that only women should know. "I got my first time of the month when I was in school. I didn't know that I'd leaked through my dress, but Andrew saw it and he pulled me out of school, carefully walking behind me so no one could see. I would have died if anyone had seen my soiled dress. I was even embarrassed that Andrew knew, but he said to me 'that's what a big brother is for.' I was so grateful to him."
I cringed at the shame of bleeding through your dress, but my Uncle Andrew grew even higher in my esteem for knowing how painful that would have been for Ma.
"And he was the first one to know Pa, wasn't he?" I could see my question bothered Ma.
"Yes he was," was all she wanted to say about it.
But Andrew told me how he saw them talking together at the Mercantile one day when they'd gone into town for supplies. "Oh, the way your Pa looked at your Ma. They say sometime there's love at first sight, and this was one of those times." Then Andrew saw Pa's buggy down by the stream near the home place, and he added it up real quick.
"Did you like my Pa?" I asked Andrew.
"Oh sure. I liked him right off. But I knew they'd have problems, this Irish and Scot thing, you know. I just didn't know it would get that bad. I told her, 'Himself will never permit it, and I hear Old Man Watson is a hardass,' but of course, they were in love and none of that mattered to them. I thought it might help that we aren't even Catholic, but it didn't. The only thing your grandfathers had in common was that they hated the British even more than they hated each other. But that didn't do your folks one bit of good."
"So you tried to talk them out of it?" I wasn't sure how I felt about that.
"Franny, remember this. When you come from people who have nothing but each other, family means everything. That's what held people together in the Old Country, where nobody had anything because the Queen and her lords owned all the land. Our people could only rent, we couldn't call any land our own. So when the Queen offered free land in Canada for homesteaders, everyone jumped at the chance—well, everyone who could afford the fare over on the ship. It took years to save up. And sometimes families were split up because there wasn't enough to cover the fares for everyone. I bet every family in this county has folks back home still waiting to come over. So the importance of family becomes even more important when you've gone to a new country to start over. You see how all your uncles have farms around Da and Ma's. Well, your Pa's people are like that, too. People want to stay with their own. That's why me and Molly are right here, close to the home place."
"Molly is an Irish girl, isn't she?"
My uncle nodded. "I wouldn't have married anyone but an Irish lass."
I could see why. But I also knew I had two parents from different backgrounds and they loved each other and they loved us kids, and I wouldn't want to trade either one of them.
I never, ever knew my Grandpa Watson. Or Grandma Watson, either. I didn't know my Pa's brothers and sisters. I didn't know my cousins on his side. Those people wanted nothing to do with me or my parents, and I guess as far as they were concerned, we didn't exist. It was the opposite with my Ma's people. I loved my Grandpa and Grandma Close. There were lots of cousins and uncles and aunts.
I don't know much about Scottish people, but Irish people are a lot of fun. They love to dance and sing and play jokes on each other. They love big suppers and delicious food. They like to sit around the table and talk. They treat their children like gold.
That's how I felt growing up. I never told anybody I knew the secret. And I never once, in all my years, felt that anybody ever treated me different because my birth had been a scandal.
My Uncle Andrew was my special friend—"'Tiss me, woman," he'd croon as he gathered me up in his arms for a kiss.
But Grandma Close was the most precious to me.
Grandma was the best chicken-killer in all of Canada.
She wasn't a very big woman, either in height or weight, but she could swing an ax like she was a lumberman. With such grace and ease, it could have been an Irish jig.
I have lots of other fond memories of my mother's mother. She always cut her bread against her titty. And she never cut herself, either. She was a sort-of-singer. She sort-of remembered the melody. She sort-of remembered the lyrics. When it became hopeless, she'd just hum like she was singing the right words to the right tune. And while everyone else laughed at her, I thought it was wonderful that you could go through life singing your own song.
But mostly I remember how Grandma Close killed a chicken.
First, of course, she had to catch a chicken. Now, chickens are pretty dumb—not as dumb as turkeys, but close cousins—and Grandma was convinced a hen could tell if you'd walked into the coop to pick her eggs or to pick her for your Sunday dinner. And if you had the chopping block on your mind, she'd run around that coop like she was already a chicken with her head cut off.
Grandma could snatch a chicken quicker than you could blink, and she just ignored the squawking and jerking as she carried it out of the hen house feet first. As she walked to the chopping block marked with dark stains, she picked up the ax with her free hand. And then in a move that could have been set to music, she flung that hen's head down on the block while she swung the ax in an arc that cut it clean off.
She'd throw the chicken on the lawn. It always amazed me how that headless hen kept jumping around, spraying blood everywhere.
"Stand back, Franny," she'd yell so I wouldn't get all bloody.
She never knew, but I had no interest in touching a headless chicken that didn't know it was dead.
Grandma got a big pot of water on the boil, and after that chicken finally gave up, she grabbed it and dunked it into the scalding water. She swished it around so the feathers got all soaked. Wet feathers have a smell of their own. Nothing in the world smells like it. I could be blindfolded in a cave somewhere and I'd know if someone was scalding a chicken. Anybody who's ever smelled it knows what I mean. Anybody who hasn't, can't imagine.
Grandma Close's hands had to be like iron because chicken feathers straight from the pot are very hot, but she hardly waited before plucking those feathers. She'd leave a few on to cool off so I could pluck too, but really my job came after all the big white feathers were off and I picked out the pinfeathers.
"Be very careful, Franny, because nobody wants a pinfeather in their fried chicken."
"I'll be careful, Grandma."
She always double-checked that I hadn't missed any.
Since then, I have always killed my chickens exactly like she did. And I never cleaned a single chicken in my life without remembering that precious woman.
