Disappearing Every Day
Prologue: Unseen
Most of her life, her very survival had depended on her ability to blend into the background, to go unseen. She'd avoided her father's temper that way, had learned how the darkness of a corner could swallow a small soul. She'd learned how to do everything silently, even cry into her pillow at night as she heard her father fly into one of his rages. Usually, she escaped notice by him. Did as her Mama told her and walked quiet. When she failed, she suffered, and redoubled her efforts to disappear. Cruelty was a hell of a teacher. She learned fast, although it was a lesson her life experience had made her repeat on more than one occasion.
After her mother died, she'd avoided the sometimes sharp discipline of the nuns by keeping her head down, doing her work, and saying little. She learned to fight, but to do it unseen. When you were invisible, you could come and go as you pleased, do as you pleased. And she needed a lot of space around her. To think, to breathe. When people pushed too close, she felt crowded, felt like there wasn't enough air. By the time she was thirteen, it nearly smothered her to be under anyone's scrutiny for more than a passing glance.
She'd almost died the winter after she slipped away from the orphanage for lack of being seen; a waif of a child on the verge of starvation. It was her weariness that made her careless, so Wicks had found her huddled down in the straw at his horse's feet when he came to fetch the animal from the livery stable in St. Joe. She later learned he'd been looking for another girl who was trying to disappear that night. She'd been grateful to him, once upon a time, before she learned the cost of being indebted to a man.
She kept her head down, worked hard, and asked for nothing more than the roof over her head and the meager portions of food left over after the ladies had their fill. Charlotte had been the only one of the ladies who showed her any kindness, and it was more than she was used to. Charlotte reminded her of her Mama. Charlotte had a way of making her feel like things might be all right, even though the woman had wanted so badly for her to move on before something bad happened. She had nowhere to go, and she had loved Charlotte. She hadn't understood the need to run. With Charlotte looking after her, she had felt safe enough that she had ignored the danger closing in on her. She had been foolish. Overconfident in her invisibility.
She paid the price for her mistake. Paid dearly. For over a year, she'd avoided Wicks' eye, avoided the customers' notice. Started to breathe more easily. Got comfortable. Forgot to hide in the shadows.
Charlotte had relented one evening and let her try on one of the fancy dresses the ladies wore downstairs for the customers. All she had was a dingy homespun dress in pale pink and she so admired the soft fabrics in such bold colors, the finely-made lace details. She'd never seen anything so grand as what the ladies wore every day with bored indifference. In her eyes, they were all so beautiful, especially Charlotte. She wondered if anyone would ever think of her that way. With troubled eyes, Charlotte helped her into a lovely deep emerald dress, warning her she could only wear it for a minute. Charlotte piled her hair high and regal on her head and tried to smile back at her delight. It had been her birthday and the only thing she could think of to ask for.
The dress was too big, and she'd had to hold it up, but looking in the mirror, she hadn't minded how it had showed off the delicate bones of her shoulders, the small rise of breast, how the color had brought out the gold in her eyes and the copper tones in her long hair. With her hair up, she thought she might look like a woman, someday, instead of the urchin she looked like most of the time, and for a moment, she'd taken some pride in herself.
She'd been there, in the light, when Wicks came into Charlotte's room unannounced. There was something in his eyes when he studied her that let her know she'd been really and truly seen. Charlotte had lost all the color in her face, but as for herself, she still she hadn't known exactly what it would mean for her. Not really. Later that night, when he'd come to her, she'd only known enough to be terrified when his heavy footfall paused outside her door.
The next day, she was truly an older soul. Charlotte put her on a stage with a small bag of her few possessions and an old handbag with a little money. She'd been numb as the stage rocked to life and left Charlotte behind in the dust with tears in her eyes. She'd hugged her arms tight around herself and her pink dress, and she had tried hard to blend into the upholstery. That had not stopped a kindly older man from trying to engage her in conversation, but her teeth were chattering too hard to respond and he'd left her alone with a cautious and maybe pitying gaze. She remembered little else about the ride other than her misery and how the jolting, jarring coach had been agony to her battered body.
In St. Louis, she'd spent some of the precious money Charlotte had given her for a room in a run-down hotel. Had asked for a bath. Had cried great, gasping sobs in the steaming water as she tried to scrub her skin clean of his touch. Had wondered if she'd always hurt as much as she did now, wondered if the shattering pain and lingering ache he'd caused by his rough entry was permanent or life-threatening and if she was going to die alone in a city she didn't know. She couldn't ask a doctor, couldn't ask anyone. If someone saw her, then they might tell Wicks, and he could find her again, have her again.
Wicks had threatened he would have her again, which was the only thing that would have made her leave Charlotte. Promised he would break her to be one of his girls, told her he'd make a fortune on her because she was young and pretty and innocent, though she hadn't felt any of those things when he was done with her, and didn't think she ever would again.
It was that thought that drove her out of the tub to stand before the mirror. For a long while she stood looking at herself. He hadn't left any marks on her face, but her body was a study in purple bruises. He'd left bite marks on her neck and chest and it infuriated her. The imprint of his fingers reminded her of his unwelcome touch and she trembled at the memory of it.
Tears touched her eyes when she met her own gaze in the mirror. She'd fought him. But she'd lost. All the things that had worked to stop the boys who pestered her at the orphanage from time to time had no effect on him. He was a big man and she guessed she wasn't the first woman to try to kick him between the legs or claw him in the eyes. She knew now why the girls had walked by him quickly, eyes down and with purpose, as if they had somewhere else to be right then. She felt defeated and alone and hopeless and terrified, and wondered if it would be better to die. She couldn't though. Not with her brother and sister waiting on her, and not with the promises she'd made to her Mama.
The mirror was streaked and dirty, and the room was dark. There was a long crack down the middle of the glass, reflecting her solemn face back to her in two halves, slightly off-kilter in the flickering light of the single lantern in the room.
"By God, that's enough," she'd said to her reflection. Then, methodically, she raised the old pocket knife Charlotte had put in the handbag as a meager means of self-defense. With her other hand she grasped a handful of hair. In moments, auburn strands drifted down to rest about her bare feet like dying leaves in the Fall.
She drifted. Never stayed in one place too long. Moved on the second she thought she might have been recognized for what she was.
Her father, in his compound, had kept horses. Fine, fast horses suited for getting away from the law. No one had minded, or noticed, the time she spent in the stables when she was young. She had a fine hand with horses; she recognized that they responded to her quiet nature. They demanded nothing of her. Horses were her respite, and she recognized, the key to rejecting the future Wicks had opened for her.
She worked on ranches, she worked on farms. She fine-tuned her skills with horses and riding, and she took pride in her ability with them and on them. When she saw a sign looking for young boys to ride across the country, a sign that said orphans were preferred, she gathered her courage and walked in to convince the man behind the counter that she could do the job. She had to do the job. To be alone on a horse, away from towns and brothels and other people was about as perfect an existence as she could imagine.
She was baffled when it turned out the clerk in the Russell, Majors, and Wadell office needed no convincing. Instead, he barely glanced at her, thrust some money and a Bible in her hands, and told her to report to Sweetwater Station in two weeks. She pocketed the money, tossed the Bible into the back of an empty wagon, and made her way West.
Every damn thing ached. Muscles she hadn't known about screamed to her of their existence. It seemed too much exertion to turn over and seek a more comfortable position on the somewhat lumpy bunk. She'd chosen a bed in the corner furthest from the fireplace, had taken the one on top, feeling less exposed in the high shadows.
The quiet boy with the fine paint horse had chosen the bunk beneath her. He seemed a good sort, judging from the way he cared for his horse, and she had learned that standard in estimating a man's kindness was better than most others. Something about him made her think he didn't like being the focus of attention any more than she did.
She had been living as a boy for a year. When their task master and torturer, Teaspoon Hunter, had asked her a few days back if she was too puny to do the work, she'd let her skills speak for her. He had met her eyes with some new level of respect and relented, moving down the line. She'd finally dared to breathe and said little since then.
Teaspoon trained them hard, and without mercy, but she thought his methods probably had more to do with his understanding of the land and it's challenges than any meanness...though in her more painful moments she considered revising her opinion of him to something less generous.
It was close quarters for her in the bunkhouse and she had been terrified those first nights. Tired as she was, she still slept little. She'd bound her breasts flat to her chest and never took off the binding, not even during the night. She'd cut her hair closer, bought glasses that served no purpose other than to hide her eyes. At night though, the glasses and hat came off, and she worried, though experience had taught her people seemed to see what they meant to see and little else.
Besides, she thought surely the boys were much too exhausted to see her for what she was, and even if they had noticed, she thought that maybe they weren't the sort to trouble her in that way. Still, she didn't trust her own judgment in that area and she just couldn't afford to be wrong. One of them scared her plenty, with his quick-silver temper, ivory-handled colt, and penchant for trouble, but the more she watched him with Emma, the more she thought that he was more bark than bite. Still, she kept a wide berth around the one named Jimmy.
Being in such close proximity to so many young men at night had brought to mind memories of the brothel and Wicks. It was the sound of their snores, their restless shifting, their smell, the sometimes off color remarks they made about women they'd seen or known, or wished they'd known.
Every night for the first several nights she'd slept in the bunkhouse, she'd sat straight up in bed with a gasp from a dead sleep, with her chest heaving and her eyes burning with blinding tears, hands clenched in fists to ward off the specter of the man who'd made her less than she was. It had taken her a moment to orient herself, to let her eyes pass over the boys, their chests rising and falling peacefully, before she recognized she was a thousand or more miles away, and safe from Wicks.
On the fourth night when she sat up and gasped, she saw the quiet Indian called Buck watching her from across the room in the dim firelight. There was something like sympathy in his eyes as he quickly averted them from her, as if he knew she would be mortified to acknowledge what had just happened. The next day he'd been his usual unobtrusive and oddly soothing self around her, and he'd never asked for an explanation, never said a word that she knew of to anyone else about her nightmares.
She preserved her secret all of two weeks on the job before she'd been shot on her third run and Kid had found her, had despite her panic and protests tried to tend the wound she'd suffered. He had seen the bindings around her breasts, had been shocked speechless. And she had watched him to see what he would do with his knowledge and waited for the life she so wanted to go up in flames.
He'd been adamant that the work was too dangerous for a girl, he'd told her she should do something else, had pressed his lips in a thin line of disapproval when she told him she'd proven herself, but when the time came to tell the others, inexplicably he'd kept her secret for her.
His warmth and his concern scared her as much as it pleased her, and bewildered her plenty. After hiding for more than a year, she was already exhausted and there had been a part of her relieved that someone in the world knew her for what she was, that she might drop her guard for just a minute and breathe around him. Kid was the first man in her life that had taken any care with her.
When she'd gone to save her brother and sister from their father, the boys had found out her secret too. By then, she'd been so attached to all of them, to the job she did, to Teaspoon and Emma that it had broken her heart to think of going. It had never occurred to her that they might stand with her, just as she had for them, until Hickok, rash and loud Hickok, had gently vowed to fight anyone who doubted her ability to do the job. No longer in hiding, or fear of discovery, they'd become her friends, they had become her brothers. They had reminded her that she had value as a person, as a woman even. They had filled an emptiness in her that she hadn't known was there. She thought of Wicks less and less often, could not grieve overly much for her father-her father who didn't recognize what she was and never would have-because they were her family now as he had never been.
Emma had no idea what it had cost her to come down the stairs and face them as Louise for the first time, dressed in a pink dress that she hadn't been quite sure why she'd bought or how she felt about what had happened when she'd worn it. She'd called to mind how vulnerable she had felt standing under Wicks' gaze in the oversized whore's gown and what had come after. Her legs had trembled as they carried her into the path of the boys' stares.
In their eyes had been appreciation, admiration, and affection. No contempt, nothing untowards, nothing that made her afraid. And it was these boys she had learned to love that had made her realize it was finally safe to come back out into the light, because there wasn't one of them who would not beat back the shadows for her if she found she wasn't strong enough to do so.
And so it was that Lou McCloud started putting bits and pieces of Louise back together again under the watchful and protective eyes of Kid, Jimmy, Buck, Ike, Cody and eventually Noah.
But her life's rhythm had a pattern, and standing in the open for her had always had consequences.
To be continued…
This is my first new TYR fiction in over a decade...if I said I had it figured out exactly where it was going, it would be a lie, but I never really knew where any of my other stories were going before they got there either. I'm about five chapters in...feel like it will go another five chapters at least. I've been thinking a lot about Lou and her past, and somehow the prologue came to me as more of a character analysis before the actual story picks up. When I started posting old fiction here, I had zero intention of writing any new stories, just posting my old ones to keep track of them. Then the series came back on Starz. And I had a relapse. Seems chronic this time around.
I got the idea for this piece while listening to one of my absolute favorite songs, "Top of the World," written by Patty Griffin, particularly these lyrics:
There's a whole lot of singing that's never gonna be heard
Disappearing everyday without so much as a word somehow
Think I broke the wings off that little song bird
She's never gonna fly to the top of the world right now