Chapter 3
A rabbit carcass hung beside the pantry.
Boots, traps, rope, scraps of leather, tin cups, wood shavings, old newspapers, and three days of ordinary male neglect occupied nearly every flat surface.
Cora stood perfectly still.
I waited for horror.
Instead, she took off her gloves.
“Where is your broom?”
I frowned.
“What?”
“Your broom.”
“Behind the door.”
She found it.
Then she pointed to the beaver pelts.
“Those are leaving my kitchen.”
I stared at her.
“Your kitchen?”
“If I’m living here, yes.”
“They’re drying.”
“They can dry outside.”
“Animals will get them.”
“Then hang them beneath the porch roof.”
I had lived in that cabin eight years.
No one had ever ordered me to remove anything from it.
“Woman,” I said slowly, “you have been here less than two minutes.”
“And the pelts have been here at least six hours.”
I nearly laughed.
I did not.
But I carried the pelts outside.
By sunrise the next morning, I barely recognized the place.
Cora cleaned like she was punishing dirt for existing.
The table had been scrubbed until actual wood showed beneath years of grease. The floor was swept. The pans had been scoured. She found food I had forgotten owning and threw away three jars of spoiled preserves.
At one point she held up a blanket between two fingers.
“This needs boiling.”
“No one boils blankets.”
“People who don’t want lice do.”
“I don’t have lice.”
She raised one eyebrow.
I stopped arguing.
That was the beginning of my marriage.
Not with tenderness.
Not with a kiss.
With boiled blankets.
We had been married in the settlement before making the drive home, the preacher looking half frozen and entirely uninterested in whether two strangers understood what they were promising.
Cora had said yes without hesitation.
So had I.
I had believed I was purchasing practicality.
A pair of hands.
Company.
Someone capable of fetching a doctor if my leg ever broke again.
It shames me now to remember how simply I had thought of it.
I had not purchased Cora.
The fifty dollars had purchased a train ticket.
What came through my door belonged entirely to herself.
I learned that before noon.
By then she had rearranged the pantry.
“You put flour beside lamp oil.”
“There was space.”
“There is also space in the outhouse. That doesn’t mean flour belongs there.”
“You always have an opinion?”
“Yes.”
“About everything?”