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Abigail wakes up and, for a second, she forgets where she is.
She hates waking up like this, but here’s the thing. You grow up living fast, you live ready to run at any minute… That kind of fear gets in your bones. You don’t even think it’s fear, you believe it’s just life. Abigail still wakes up from familiar nightmares with her heart pounding, seized with the instinct to grab her child and disappear into the night. Some habits are hard to break.
She rubs her eyes. Already the dreams are fading. That’s a good thing, she supposes. The dreams always come back anyway. Sadie snores softly beside her, safe and sound like everyone else in this house, and Abigail rests her hand on Sadie’s back, gently so as not to wake her. She breathes in time to match her. Sadie is warm under her palm, and Abigail waits for her own heartbeat to slow.
Abigail tries to go back to sleep, spending a few minutes tossing and turning, trying to get comfortable before reluctantly accepting that sleep has, for the time being, escaped her. She curses quietly, then slips out of bed and pads to the bedroom door. She hesitates, then shuffles back to the bedside to kiss Sadie on the crown of her head. The woman doesn’t notice even a little bit. Sadie Adler sleeps like the dead these days, and Abigail’s heart aches with love and relief for it.
Abigail slips out and closes the bedroom door behind her. It’s a waning moon tonight, and there’s just enough light streaming through the window for her to see the outline of things in the living room. Such fine things, thanks to the Geddes. This is a fine life, she reminds herself. A good life, and one she is eager to be proud of.
There’s a chill in the air, so she takes John’s coat from where he draped it over the back of a chair and puts it on. It smells like him and also like the stables, but everything here does now. She shuffles towards Jack’s bedroom and sees lantern light under the crack of the door. How many times have they told the boy to put the books away and go to bed? Oh, they can recite the reasons by rote now. A growing boy needs his sleep. A son needs to help his family with chores the next morning. Because we say so.
But she is not looking to scold her boy. Outside Jack’s door, Abigail shifts her weight and the floorboards creak. She hears Rufus make a sound halfway between a bark and a growl, and Jack shushes him.
“It’s okay, boy,” she hears Jack whisper on the other side of the door. “It’s okay. Here. Good boy.”
For all that they try to tell Jack that the dog sleeps outside, she is secretly glad to see Jack’s defiance of it. Jack is a quiet child, and some might call him sullen when they think she’s not listening, but the dog brings out the gentleness in him in a way nothing else has. The boy needs to be reminded to do his chores and come to the table for meals, but he remembers on his own to make sure the dog is fed and happy and wants for nothing.
Abigail ends up on the porch, as she always does on sleepless nights. The rolling plains stretch out in all directions, and the night sky carries the stars from one horizon to the next. She is comforted by the feeling of being able to see anything that’s coming. If danger approaches, she should be able to see it from Beecher’s Hope.
“Abigail.”
John slouches on the bench next to the window, smoking a cigarette. He’s in his long johns, Javier’s coat, and no shoes, looking about as ridiculous as that sounds.
“Hey, you,” Abigail replies, and takes a seat next to him.
“What’s got you up at this hour?”
“Bad dreams.” She sighs. “Old dreams. You?”
“Javier snores.”
Abigail snorts a laugh, which makes John laugh, and then they’re both laughing in the middle of the night. When John offers her the cigarette, Abigail takes it between her fingers without a word. They share the cigarette, and then another one after that. There’s nothing else that needs to be said.
*
The next morning, Abigail is bleary-eyed and trying to cook breakfast when she hears Uncle in the next room ask, “What’s that smell?”
Sadie rushes into the kitchen. “Lord almighty, you trying to burn the house down?”
“I got it,” Abigail means to say, but doesn’t even get the chance as Sadie bumps her away from the stove and takes the wooden spoon from her hand in one smooth movement.
“Open the window, would you, honey?” Sadie says as she scrapes the pan. “Jesus Christ, you’re supposed to smoke sausages, not people.”
“Excuse me for trying to feed you people,” Abigail says, stepping towards the windows.
If you were to say to someone, ‘That Abigail, she sure hates cooking breakfast,’ it would be a hell of an understatement. First of all, every time she’s cooking it, she’d rather be asleep. This soon after she wakes up, she is not ready to cook more than one thing at a time and make sure none of it burns. Second of all, everyone’s going to complain about it anyway. Well, Jack doesn't complain, but he leaves food on his plate and somehow that's worse than Uncle over-explaining just how soggy the vegetables are. Third of all, there is no number three. The first two are enough to drive her off the edge on bad days. She’s no good at cooking and she knows it. But she wants to be good.
The door to the dining room creaks open and Uncle pokes his head in. “What’s going on in here?”
“Nothing!” Abigail snaps.
“Get outta here, Uncle!” Sadie yells at the same time.
“All right, all right! Goddamn…”
The door swings close again.
Abigail doesn’t know how Pearson did it. Actually, she does. He actually enjoyed cooking, the masochistic old coot. It never used to bother her that she can’t cook, but then again, she used to sleep under the stars, out in the woods, in abandoned buildings - anywhere they could find. She used to rob and swindle with impunity, and helped her friends do the same. She doesn’t want to be that person anymore. Abigail wants to be a good woman in a warm house with a family around her that she takes good care of. She’s wanted it for years, and now that she has it, she worries about messing it all up. What if all she's good at is robbing and swindling?
And lord, she can use more sleep.
“Some of this we can eat,” Sadie murmurs, poking at the contents of the pan, “but some of it, eh. Maybe Rufus will have an appetite for it, but I don’t rightly think any living thing should be eating that much coal. Abigail, fetch me that plate, honey.”
She goes to the cupboard, muttering, “Well, can’t have me poisoning my own son’s dog.”
Sadie looks up at her tone. She can tell. Sadie can always tell. She takes the pan off the heat and sighs deeply, and oh, Abigail hates the sound of that sigh. Sadie don’t mean nothing by it, as Abigail knows by now, but it always makes Abigail feel like a child about to be coddled or scolded, and she’s not sure which would be worse. To her mortification, she feels the pinpricks of tears in her eyes.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” Sadie asks.
“Nothing,” Abigail lies.
Others would leave it be. Others would take her answer at face value. They would take the dismissal as an opportunity to be dismissed, but Sadie is the kind of person who looks a problem dead-on and refuses to be swayed by the cues of societal courtesies. Nothing is as important as fixing a problem before it gets worse.
“Don’t look like nothing,” Sadie says. She takes the plate from Abigail and sets it on the counter, then cups Abigail’s face in her hands. “Hey.” Then, looking unsure if that’s where hands are supposed to go when you’re comforting a lady, Sadie pulls Abigail into a hug instead. “Hey, now. It’s just bacon.”
The hug is stiff on both sides. Sadie is making a concerted effort at affection, a habit she had abandoned during her outlawing months and is clumsily trying to pick back up. It doesn’t come naturally, but maybe they just need practice. When Abigail asked with some concern why she was trying so hard, attuned as she is to Sadie’s discomfort and levels of distress, Sadie replied that she doesn’t want to be afraid anymore.
“I want to take care of you better than that,” Sadie said.
Abigail was so touched, she didn’t know what to say, so she just kissed her instead. Abigail already knew that Sadie was full of fire and passion, but it took her breath away when Sadie returned the kiss with a slow softness that belied a more vulnerable side hitherto unseen. It was tentative, and graceless, and it was just fine. They can both start from here.
“It’s just bacon, silly girl,” Sadie says now, softly into Abigail’s hair. “Now I like bacon as much as the next person, but it ain’t worth this.”
Abigail tries not to relax into the hug because that would mean admitting defeat. “Oh, it’s all right. I just… I just didn’t get no sleep last night, I’m tired, I… I can’t cook a simple breakfast for folks in the morning. And, and-”
“Hey,” Sadie says.
Abigail mutters, “I don’t wanna be making this fuss.”
“You ain’t making no fuss,” Sadie insists. “But if you don’t let me help you out, missy, then we ain’t eating breakfast and you know Uncle will be yammering about it all day. All right? Why you crying?”
Abigail steps away. “I just told you why! And I’m not crying anymore. It was only a little bit.” She wipes the remaining tears furiously from her eyes.
Sadie sighs again and rubs her forehead, a tell of suppressed frustration. “Okay, listen. Why don’t you go put your feet up. Let me handle breakfast.”
Abigail wants to protest, but knows it would only be out of ceremony and pride. She is actually relieved to have this taken out of her hands. At least it’s just her and Sadie and Uncle this morning. And Rufus, if you count him. Javier and John made plans to take Jack out fishing, though judging from her findings last night, Javier will be the only one alert enough to catch anything. She did notice that the bread, some apples, and the rest of the jerky was gone, taken as provisions, and she ruefully thinks she should’ve prepared that very same breakfast instead.
“Go on, I said,” Sadie orders, but there is a gentle tone in her voice, and Abigail lets herself be shepherded out of the kitchen. “I’ll call you when the grub’s ready.”
For a few seconds, Abigail just stands in the living room, the anxiety not quite flushed out of her yet. There’s no one else in the house, but the sounds of Sadie cooking infuse a kind of warmth, a sort of comfort. Left with nothing to do, Abigail drifts outside once more. She used to like waking with the sun, years ago. Now she is a slower creature. Now she walks on land she can call her own, cool breeze on her face, warm shawl around her shoulders. The morning mist has burned off, but it’s still early enough that the air feels crisp and sharp. Abigail breathes it all in.
They all left behind some of their old habits when they took up their new lives. They left behind pieces of themselves - some for better, some for worse. Some, just different. The first time Sadie commandeered the kitchen was last Christmas, putting them all to work to make the spread. It surprised them all. Everyone still remembered the awful rows she would get into with Pearson. During the meal, Javier asked, around a mouthful of pork and potatoes, “Why ain’t you ever cooked for us like this before?”
“Spite,” Sadie replied, all matter of fact. “Wasn’t gonna give Pearson the satisfaction.”
God have mercy on them that thinks they can tell Sadie Adler what to do, but apparently if left to her own devices, the woman is as skilled with a skillet as she is with a pistol. Of course she had to be, she said to them over dessert. She and Jake lived in the middle of nowhere; they had to be good at everything. Ain’t no one else around to help.
It was a wonderful Christmas. Charles and Arthur made it down, just as they promised, and Mary-Beth from Saint Denis, and even Trelawney from parts unknown. Tilly sent her regrets in a letter, what with the second baby keeping her occupied. Pearson was busy with his store, and Swanson with his new congregation. Javier believes there’s more of the old gang out there, blowing in the wind. The end of Dutch’s Boys had been chaotic, necessarily absolute. When the smoke cleared, it was unclear who went which way, because everyone was just running as fast as they could. The first priority was survival, or at least freedom, which to them was the same thing. Abigail knows that John quietly fears the worst for the others, but Javier remains optimistic and believes that… that - oh, she doesn’t even know. That any minute now Karen is going to show up on horseback with that big old smirk of hers, ready to give them hell.
In Abigail’s heart of hearts, she believes that too.
She walks past the gazebo to the campfire where they all still gathered from time to time. It would feel like old times then. All it takes is Javier starting to strum his guitar. Sometimes it’s Uncle starting in on another dirty song and Abigail tries to cover Jack’s ears with her hands then, but Jack would only slip away and start singing along at the top of his lungs, just to show them all he can. She supposes she can’t shelter him from everything.
Abigail sits on the log across from the fire, or where the fire would be if it were burning. She is reminded of what Sadie said some time ago, when it was just the two of them out here one night, counting the stars. She said, “You know, things could have turned out different. Pinkertons could have caught us. The O’Driscolls could have shot us. Murfree Brood could’ve ate us. But look at us.”
Still here, Abigail thinks to herself as she feels the peace of the land begin to settle within herself. Still here.
*
Unsurprisingly, breakfast is delicious. Rufus is in agreement, wagging his tail next to the table and waiting for scraps. By the end of it, Abigail doesn’t feel quite so tired as she did before. Between the meal, and Sadie beside her, and Uncle’s friendly patter, she’s got enough spring in her step to start the day’s chores.
After Sadie bullies Uncle into washing the dishes - a rare feat - she puts on her hat, and smiles at Abigail. “Where to first? The barn, maybe?”
It is, Abigail reflects, so nice to have Sadie around. Sadie comes and goes more than the rest of them. It makes Abigail jealous sometimes, because Javier has become a fixture at Beecher’s Hope and John never has to wander far to find him. It’s not a jealousy borne of regret, however. It was surprisingly easy to make the decision with John to separate. They were civil, if awkward, and sweet with the thought of freedom on the horizon. It was a relief to decide that John and Javier will have that bedroom, and she and Sadie will have this bedroom. Most of all, it’s easy for her and John to be happy for each other, because that means they can be happy for themselves.
This ranch is hard work, but with the people she loves working it beside her, it is satisfying labor. Still, Abigail can’t help feeling a little apprehensive when, at the end of a long afternoon, Sadie says, “Tell you what. Let me deal with this last hay bale. You head on back. I’m gonna wash up, then we’ll cook dinner together. You and me. Oh, don’t give me that look.”
“I don’t wanna be dragging down the atmosphere,” Abigail says.
Sadie snorts and gives Abigail an affectionate push. “You just follow my lead. Pretend I’m Pearson.”
“I’m not sure if that makes it better or worse.”
The days are longer this year, and the gold is only just starting to get into the sky. The men will be coming home soon from their fishing trip. If they’ve caught anything, she’ll leave it in their hands to smoke or roast it themselves. She will be busy with other plans. Abigail can hear Uncle’s voice carry on the wind from the other side of the house, chores forgotten and playing some game with Rufus. He complains about that dog, but none of them believe it anymore.
Abigail starts walking back to the house. She’s got another day in her, aching deliciously in her bones. The thought of dinner is beginning to make her mouth water.
Later, back in the house, Sadie is single-minded, a woman possessed. She insists on gathering all the ingredients first for easy reach, and Abigail thinks to herself aha, good idea. That will help with the food not burning while one is off looking for the turnips or whatnot. Sadie goes in with a knife on the side of beef and talks as she works. Or rather, complains about Pearson as she works.
“Didn’t even trim the fat,” Sadie grumbles. “Tosses everything in there, gristle and cartilage and all. I saw him. Did he think no one saw? Hey, is this the only kitchen knife you got?”
Abigail doesn’t even have to answer. Sadie just takes out her hunting knife and continues. Abigail doesn’t bother hiding her amusement. Sadie sounds so much like Grimshaw, it makes her heart ache a little bit. Everyone complained about Grimshaw, but she helped keep them alive and they all became a little bit like her in the end.
Sadie works on trimming a stubborn piece of gristle, saying, “He cooks quantity over quality. He was feeding sailors, then he was feeding outlaws. He had to cook a lot, and he had to cook fast. And to that purpose, he did his job. But I tell you what, Abigail. We don’t have to live like that no more. C’mere.” Abigail looks up from the vegetables she’s rinsing, and Sadie uses the knife to gesture to her to come closer. “You see this? This part and this part? You wanna cut all that off. This part? Feed it to the dog. This part? Save it. Toss it in the pan before it gets hot so the fat melts, then fry your onions in it. Where’re your onions?”
“Ain’t cut them yet.”
“So get cutting.”
Abigail cuts the onions with Sadie’s occasional instructions. (“Cut off the hairy bits on the end.” “Pearson didn’t do that.” “Listen, there’s reasons I never went back for seconds.”) At the same time, Abigail watches and tries to learn.
“Cut the onions smaller,” Sadie says, starting to slice the beef into smaller pieces.
Abigail wonders if this is what it’s like to grow up in a house with family within arm’s reach, learning from each other, doing things together. If so, she reckons she likes it very much. Abigail would like Jack to have this, at least. At last.
There is a familiar whine. The women look up from their work, and Rufus is sitting on the kitchen floor, tail wagging furiously as he looks up at them with a happy, hopeful expression.
“Hey, you rascal,” Sadie says. She tosses him a piece of gristle, which Rufus fails to catch. He eats it off the floor.
Rufus stays with them in the kitchen, enjoying bits of gristle and pets on the head as the women continue their dinner preparations. Abigail has to admit, she was reluctant the first time Jack asked her about keeping Rufus. Another mouth to feed? Didn’t seem like a good idea. But in the end, Rufus won her over. He isn’t really a hunting dog, and is only a slightly better guard dog, but he is second to none when it comes to that begging face. Now he’s won everyone over, and is never wanting for a scratch behind the ears.
“Oh Sadie,” Abigail says, as the beef and the vegetables and the herbs begin to come together. How does she do that? How did Sadie put it all in the pot and stir it a few times and it doesn’t smell like garbage? Abigail watched it happen and it still confounds her. “It smells wonderful.”
Sadie smiles. “Ain’t done yet.”
“I wish…” Abigail sighs, chopping the parsley. She feels her cheeks heat up. “I wish… I wish I were more like you. You can do anything.”
“I don’t know about that…”
“Well, I do. You’re good with the horses. You’re good with my boy. He likes you, you know. I think he used to be frightened of you, but he got so excited when you got him those books from Saint Denis.”
“Oh, good,” Sadie replies. She lifts the wooden spoon to her lips to taste, then adds more salt. “I’m no good at knowing which books are the good ones.”
Abigail smiles. “I think Jack would beg to differ!”
“Ah,” is all Sadie says in response, but there is the pink of pride on her cheeks. And that, Abigail thinks, is what really wins her over in the end. That Sadie is happy to make Jack happy, that just about sends Abigail over the moon.
“You even get Uncle to do his chores!” Abigail goes on, getting into the spirit of things. “You went out hunting last week and caught those rabbits? Then you cooked it yourself!”
Sadie says nothing for a few seconds, just stirring, just stirring, then she clears her throat. “Abigail, listen. Like I said, it was just me and Jake up in the mountains. We had to know how to do everything.” She taps the wooden spoon on the side of the pot, then balances it across the top. Sadie turns and looks Abigail in the eyes. “But it’s not just you down here. You hear me? You don’t gotta do everything yourself. Because you don’t gotta be alone. We ain’t…” Sadie takes a deep breath, and when she lets it out, it’s a little shaky, and there’s a sheen of wonderment in her voice. “We ain’t alone no more.”
Abigail takes Sadie’s hands in hers.
The pot is simmering when Abigail emerges breathless and mussed from their kiss. One of Sadie’s hands is in her hair, the other on her waist, and Abigail is cupping Sadie’s face with both hands, wishing this moment could stretch forever.
“Sadie Adler,” Abigail says softly - an affirmation and a promise. A joy.
“Abigail Roberts,” Sadie replies, looking dazed but happy.
“Are all your cooking classes going to be like this?”
Sadie laughs against Abigail’s neck. On the floor, still sitting like a good boy, Rufus barks as if in cheerful echo.
“I hope so,” Sadie says. “Come on, you stir this now. We’ll show everyone.”
Abigail pets Rufus’s head and scratches him behind the ears, and then she takes the wooden spoon.
Still here, Abigail thinks to herself as she feels the peace of this life settling within herself. Still here.