“No, ma’am.” He leaned his head against the seat and settled his hat over his eyes.

  Attention the Honorable Mr. Aubrey Hanna, Esquire.

  (Was he “the Honorable”? Not sure.)

  Although words have passed between us upon the subject of a promise of marriage, as you said you cared for me and wished to procure my utmost happiness, you will understand my wishes in that regard remain the same except for the time of that event which must not be next month as you requested but rather take place on a later date. I have undertaken to complete all preparations to attend the art school to which I was admitted last winter while being confined in town due to the quarantine for influenza when Ma thought I would perish otherwise she would not have approved. I hope you will wait for me to fulfill those intentions since I have prospects of attending college in the city of Wheaton, Illinois, and have entertained said notion for a matter of years—almost two.

  Your very fond and devoted friend,

  Mary P. Prine.

  Reckon I should add a postscript to explain why I didn’t send this in town or tell him in person, because I tried to tell him, actually, only he was more interested in kissing and hugging than explanations, and I swear but twenty renegades would not have got his attention away from that. I read it again. Perhaps it was too grown-up sounding and old-fashioned. He might think Papa wrote it.

  I drew a line under the letter and dashed out,

  Postscript: Mr. Hanna, by no means did a few kisses on a single afternoon pledge me to a lifetime of wifehood when I am yet but seventeen years old. I had only got quite carried away by your attentions and you may’st call me a fast girl if you must but you started it and I was just being polite by not slapping you into kingdom come. I have made up my mind to go to Illinois and that’s that. Yours sincerely and fondly and truly, Mary Pearl.

  Post postscript: We can hitch up when I get back. I’ll write.

  I felt eyes upon me and glared at my brother. “What’re you grinning at?”

  “Wasn’t grinning at all,” Clover said, and yawned.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I carried my grandmother’s memoirs, hidden from my ma and pa and smuggled like molten plans to a revolution, in the bottom of a shabby carpet valise all the way to Wheaton College. It was patched with pieces of saddle leather sewn on with rawhide. Granny Prine had asked me never to share the memoirs until after her passing, so I speculated the only way to obey was to have them with me.

  Just yesterday Clover had promised Ma and Pa that he was real good at reading the train tables, and I had to leave when I did, or I’d miss school. When Ma wasn’t looking, he winked at me. I wasn’t sure why. Ma said he had to be wrong, and a body could get from here to Paris, France, in ten days on a train, and I’d have laughed but for the mood she was in.

  Ezra popped up and said, “Mama, the train don’t run over the ocean,” and got himself sent to his room for that. She was in a state like I’d never seen and scolded us from young to old if we so much as looked sideways at her.

  During endless hours in the Pullman coach, when the sights grew boring and conversation with my brother Clover went to the mechanized pecan shelling machine he kept inventing and reinventing, I drew pictures of home on my sister Rachel’s gift of a sketchbook, trying to record my own memories, which even now seemed grayed and fading as the lead I used. I hoped they had mountains in Illinois like the Rincons and Catalinas here. What was there to draw if you didn’t have mountains?

  Sometimes I practiced drawing things from one of Granny’s stories, pulled from a memory handed down to her at her grandmother’s knees. I drew a girl looking out to the ocean from a castle, and another on a ship. Maybe I’d travel all over the world, painting great paintings and portraits of kings and dukes and great ladies of status. I wanted to be somebody special. Mama was just trying to hold me back. I was going to a place where I would soak the calluses and pecan-shelling brown stain off my hands for good.

  “Clover? I don’t think I’ve practiced my Latin enough. I’ve wasted so much time writing Granny’s memoirs.”

  “Well, it won’t last much longer. Do you need Latin to draw a picture?”

  “Maybe I’ll need it to finish school. What if, what if I could become a lady of letters?”

  “They don’t give degrees to girls.”

  “Maybe they will.”

  “Just don’t break too many hearts, that’s all. And that includes the professors. When I went to the college in Tucson, one of the teachers married a girl from the class.”

  “That’s … that’s diabolical.”

  He just grinned. “I guess she didn’t mind. Didn’t have to take the final exam since they skedaddled before the end of class.”

  * * *

  That night we went to sleep in bunks arranged in the train car, with a curtain for each person. I began to feel lonesome. Scared. Felt like I was about to step off the earth into some awful darkness. Clover slept in the bunk below me, oblivious to my angst. I was a betrothed woman. I was also a girl running away. Naturally, I wanted to marry, but just not this month or next.

  I took the sheaf of Granny’s papers from their wrapping. I didn’t even believe all of it, but I had let her rattle on about our family tree being stocked with brave women doing amazing things, because it was better than being stuck in my room because of Mama’s peevishness. The whole family knew Granny was so old her mind was gone, and she’d always had a notion to sit and look gloomily at all of us, and tell us we acted a fool when it was obvious she didn’t even know what day it was or whether it was Christmas or calving time. It was too dark in the bunk, of course, to read, too close to Clover to give real vent to my crying, and so I sobbed soundlessly—awash with lonesomeness and longing and fear—into a pillow that smelled foreign and faintly sour, crushing Granny’s memories to my bosom.

  I mailed my letters to Elsa and Aubrey the next day when we stopped in Phoenix, telling Aubrey Hanna to wait for me. I was sure he’d already be missing me, and there’d be letters from him awaiting me in Wheaton. Probably get his whiskers a notch out of joint, but I expected boxes of loving letters nonetheless. If the letters begged me to come home, though, I might be swayed. At least I could be near home, near my family. What had possessed me to take off like this? By the second night alone in the bunk, I doubted that Rembrandt and Vermeer could fill the hollow left by the lack of Aubrey’s arms. And then I chided myself. I reckoned I was just homesick. I wanted to leave, but I wanted home to stay as it had always been, before Aubrey Hanna. Did I love him? I barely knew him. But at least he lived in Arizona Territory.

  In the back of the train, two trunks with my name on them rumbled back and forth. They had been packed full of new dresses and books. Ma was determined I should look some combination of stoic matron and innocent child in my leaving home and hearth, and all the outer things were rigidly plain. In the last six days before my departure, a flurry of sewing had taken place in the parlor. She allowed not one flounce, not a line of stitching other than necessary. Lace had been removed. Ruffles straightened. Everything was tight enough to stunt my growth if indeed I might grow another inch in any direction. My new corset was straight as a tree trunk with no room for the natural shape of me. Even the bonnets were severe and drab.

  This was about more than my mother’s Quaker upbringing. This was about my leaving my betrothed in the flower of his passion to go my own way like a froward hussy. Mama told me every intention of her heart without saying a word in the angry regularity of the stitches, every line of thread meticulous, taut, and stern, like lines drawn on a bit of sand over which I must never step.

  I gave up fretting over the ugliness of the clothes. I accepted the stuff thinking of Elsa at the convent wearing hoods and robes. We were both to be shrouded in wool the color of mud for the sin of being young and blooming and independent-minded. I hoped when she read my letter, she would run away and marry Charlie.

  I was leaving for Illinois and I didn’t care what I had to wear to do it. But here, in the curtained sleeper coach, the blisters on my sides and back had seeped through my chemise and blood dotted my bedroll. I peeled loose the corset, feeling the burn of the skin letting go, and slept bare. That night I tossed about, feeling feverish. At daylight Clover woke me with a gentle nudge, but I cried out when he shook my bunk.

  “Get your duds on, Maypole,” he said. “Let’s get some breakfast. We’re stopped for water. Two hours.”

  I felt like an old dishrag. “I don’t like that nickname, Clove. I’m grown up now. First, I’ll walk Duende.”

  “Eat first. You’re looking peaked.”

  I fussed with my clothes in the cell of the Pullman bunk. Finally I said, “Clove, I can’t get this cinch done myself. It’s too warm in here and I’m all thumbs.”

  “Now, Mary Pearl, I can’t do that.”

  “Well, I can’t eat breakfast like this.” I poked my head through the curtains and swung my legs over the edge. “Nobody’s around. Help me down.” Clover set me on the floor and I turned around, showing him my back and holding out the corset strings. “Tug from the top, backwards of a boot.”

  “Mary P, you been wearing this the whole time? Are you telling me girls just get used to it?”

  I knew my chemise had a row of blood spots on the back of it. “The cords rub me raw. But I can’t get the dress closed without it. Mama made it good and tight.”

  “Well, tight anyway. Wouldn’t call this good by any means.” He gave a tug and I whimpered. “I can’t do this,” he said.

  “You’re my brother. You have to help me.”

  “I diapered you when you was a baby. I ain’t gonna do this to you. Wear it loose and put my coat on.”

  I bit my lip to stop its trembling. “All right.”

  “You feeling puny?”

  I nodded. “My toe hurts.”

  He made me take off my stocking and show him. My toes were swollen and misshapen but not overly red. Clover brought me oatmeal from the dining car and a mug of cream to pour on it, then left me alone to go fetch a doctor from town.

  There was something in the air where he’d been that ever so slightly smelled of home. Sunshine and horses. The never-ending orchards of pecans and peaches. Greasewood. I wished I’d brought a sprig of greasewood with me. I fell asleep on his bunk. I woke with a hiccup and opened my eyes to a short man dressed in an old-fashioned top hat peering at my big toe and holding thick spectacles on his nose, holding my foot up to the light by the heel with his other hand. I collected myself and said, “Hello.”

  He spoke with an accent thicker than his eyeglasses. “Well, dear. Your eyes is open.”

  He nodded, shaking my foot toward Clover. “This is how bad a snake is. Not even breaking the skin it infects the nervous system and lymphatic system. But you are going to be well.” He opened a canning jar that smelled of vinegar and whisky and pulled out a strand of brown paper. Doctor Herberger put a salve on my toes, and wrapped my whole foot in layers of the narrow brown paper and vinegar. “Rest today and don’t eat meat for two weeks. Don’t give any proteins for the snake venom to digest.”

  Clover leaned over me, studying my toe, and nodding. “Thanks, Doc,” he said. “And you’ll tell her the other stuff?”

  “What other stuff?” I whispered. My head hurt, and I was afraid I was going to hear something shocking about my person. That thought was followed by a torrent of guilt. Perhaps this doctor could tell this fever was not about a near snakebite but some aftereffect of kissing a grown man in a buggy with no chaperone in sight. While he talked, he powdered my back with Church and Company’s saleratus powder and laid a damp pillowcase over it.

  “This notion of women to wear corsets is bad for the healthy movement of internal organs. You cannot hope to enjoy a healthy life with this mechanical deforming of ribs and squashing of organs. You cannot have a baby wearing this. That husband of yours is right and you listen to him. Do not wear this thing again.” He gave me a wrinkled leaflet entitled Reformation Underwear for Better Living and with a nod and a pat on my cheek, he left.

  “Clover? Are you out there?”

  “Yes, Mary Pearl.”

  I stuck my head out of the curtain. My brother was standing close and all the other folks had gone. “He thinks you are my husband. He was worried I was not going to have any children. I guess I’m all right. How’s Duende?”

  “He’s fine. You’re supposed to rest with all that on until tomorrow.”

  “My back feels better already. Reckon I have been doctored pretty good. Lectured, too.”

  “Well. I didn’t listen.” He looked away.

  “Didn’t matter. He’s just not in favor of wearing corsets. Me, too.”

  “Well. There’s honoring your father and mother and then there’s rigging like you wouldn’t do to an animal. Stand up on your good foot and I’ll lift you back into your own bunk.”

  He tucked up the covers. Even though I was miserably hot, I let him do it because he seemed to take such care with it all. I’d kick them off after he closed the curtain. “Mama doesn’t mean anything bad by it,” I said, although it was the first time I’d let down being angry at her in weeks. She’d called me an adventuress. I felt tears burn at the corners of my eyes when I said, “She’s trying to do what she thinks is right.”

  “I know. But it’s Papa’s word that you can go to school and you ought to give it a run. You’re smart as a whip and in my opinion it’d be a shame for you not to try it. I just wish it wasn’t so far off we can’t see you till Christmas. She’s gotten more peevish over the leaving of each one of us, but I reckon she ain’t as sour at you as you think. It’s mostly because of Esther. Wouldn’t want to be Ezra or Zachary now, would you?”

  The memory of my littlest brothers’ faces, freckled, dirty, and snaggle-toothed, made me smile.

  Clover said, “You’ll come back. She’ll gentle down.”

  I laid my head upon the bag with Granny’s memoirs and looked back at a memory all my own. A week before we left, a three-foot Mojave rattlesnake had sunk its fangs up to its gums in the toe of my right boot. I shook my foot without thinking about the spreading poison, but the hooked teeth pinned him to me. A small rattler can do the same thing to you as the big ones, and then some. Getting him loose might bring worse than I was already in for, so I held on to the noisemaker end and gave him a shave with my skinning knife, close. The head stayed on my boot, eyes glaring angrily at me as I pried the teeth up and out like fish hooks. With my left boot heel I crushed the head into the dust.

  My toe was fine, far as I could see, but kind of red, and maybe there was a scratch that some snake spit had got into, maybe not.

  When I got home Mama kept me in bed all the next day with cold compresses on my feet and head. She asked me again was I sure it was a Mojave, couldn’t it have been a diamondback? I could claim it was a diamondback, but that would have been a lie. A Mojave bite could be a death sentence. Lying there staring at the ceiling boards, I grew all the more certain marrying Aubrey could be put off for a while. That there was something I’d better do, or some kind of notion I had to put to rest before I took up nursing babies and living in town. Much as I still felt drawn to those passionate kisses, it had taken a rattlesnake to make up my mind that life was mine to be lived, not pawned off on the first proposal that came my way. With my toe in a pan of hot, salted vinegar water, I had written two letters to Aubrey that I tossed into the fire before I had written the one that Clover had failed to deliver.

  Due to Clover’s odd planning, we took the Yuma Pacific all the way to Fort Worth, Texas, and then headed north to Kansas City. In St. Louis we had to pack up and transfer everything as we changed trains again to the Chicago, Alton, and St. Louis railroad. It moved slower, stopping more often, to take on and let off passengers. When we stopped one time I bought another sketchbook. Got so tired of my own imagination that I drew the upholstery on the seat in front of us.

  Illinois State was green as an emerald earring I saw once in a store, and full of streams and ponds, thick with trees like I’d never seen except in my imagination. By the time we reached Wheaton, I’d seen more cornfields than I could have ever figured existed in the world. The air smelled of corn. Pollen drifted in swirls on every breeze.

  I’d given up my city clothes and corset, and dressed in my best riding outfit so I could breathe until we got to the school. When my brother tugged Duende to where I waited, I said, “Clove, I thought we were going to rent a wagon to get us from the depot.”

  “Used up the extra cash on the doctor, sis.”

  “Well, use some of my college money here.” I held out my bag.

  “Nah. I’m strong enough, except for what two weeks on a train will take out of you.”

  “String those bags up here, then.”

  By the time we stood on the mowed grass in front of the college, we were both drenched with sweat. Duende stopped and nibbled the cool grass until a horseless carriage with five people in it, all waving and cheering at heaven knows what, drove right by Clove, throwing gravel and dust and sparks. One of the people tossed a scarf or something at us, and that was all it took. My horse reared and snorted, lurched forward with me on him, my bags whipping away onto the grass, and barreled across the lawn before I could get him calmed back to a walk. Clover was a brown speck across the road from where my horse and I were, up on the stone steps to the main hall of Wheaton College.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I sat hours waiting outside the office of a lady wearing a prim shirtwaist. This lady said the dormitories were not yet open for the term. There was no dining room, no staff, and no open doors anywhere for another eight days. Turning her eyes to her paperwork, she said, “Go home and wait until the term starts, dear.”

  I had to stiffen my lips not to cry, and I feared it showed on my face. Clover had already caught the southbound train. I knew if I went back now, I’d never return. I’d be married in two months for the rest of my life. “I came all the way from Arizona Territory. It took near two weeks to get here. I’ll sleep in the barn with my horse and I can work for my keep. I can clean the place and scrape out the stalls. Even cook some. I can’t go home.”