She’d been playing the same game ever since. Trying to escape, and when that failed again and again, trying to reason with the world’s most unreasonable people.
“There has to be a better way,” she told herself. “No one can keep a woman prisoner in her own house, not in these modern times. Not here in the United States of America.”
The trouble was, the modern times had never reached Dexter’s Cut, much less Devin’s Hill.
A bitter laugh escaped her to mingle with the sounds of birds, the soughing of the wind in the trees and the distant yapping of those dratted dogs.
Nice dogs, actually—she’d lured one of them up here a few times for something to do. Something to talk to. He’d even allowed her to scratch behind his long ears. But the dog was free and she wasn’t, and so she railed against the dogs, and against her gentle and not so gentle backwoods prison guards.
Devin’s Hill, every wild, wooded acre of it, including the creek and the three-room cabin, was still a prison, no matter how lovely the surroundings in the springtime.
No matter how cold and lonely in the winter.
At least she was finally learning to control her anger and resentment, knowing it only made her poor company for herself. But on a day like this, when spring was more than a promise, she was frustrated beyond bearing. Was she fated to grow into an embittered old woman here all alone?
Scratching idly at a poison ivy blister on her wrist—her first of the season—Eleanor sat on the edge of the porch again, her limbs spread apart in a most unladylike fashion, and tried to think of some means of escape she hadn’t yet tried. She couldn’t think of a single thing. Lacking stimulus, her brain had ceased to function.
Maybe she could bribe them by offering again to hold classes. The last time she’d offered, Miss Lucy, spokes-woman for the clan, had told her the Millers didn’t want her teaching them any of her highfaluting notions. Miss Lucy herself taught any who wanted to learn how to make their letters; their parents taught them whatever else they deemed worthy of knowing. All the rest was the devil’s handiwork. A more narrow-minded lot she had never met.
It explained a whole lot, to Eleanor’s way of thinking.
And now another winter had gone by. Two years since she’d become a bride, five months since she’d become a widow and a prisoner.
It was spring again, and she was so blasted lonesome she could have howled. Beat her fists on the floor, kicked rock walls—anything, if it would have done her a lick of good.
“A lick of good,” she whispered. She was even beginning to talk the way they did—a college educated woman.
Some days, she questioned her own sanity. What if by some miracle she did manage to escape? Where would she go? She had no money, no relatives—she certainly would never beg from her friends—but unless she managed to secure a position immediately, she would have no place to live and no way to support herself.
Here, she at least had a roof over her head and enough to eat.
But if she stayed here she would eventually turn into that other woman. The Elly Nora who went barefoot and talked to herself—who whistled back at birds and carried on conversations with chickens. The Elly Nora who’d been known to stand on a stump and loudly recite poetry to keep her brain from drying up like a rattling gourd.
She was just plain lonesome, dammit. And growing just a wee bit strange in the head.
Fighting a sense of hopelessness, she licked her fingers, greasy from eating fried chicken. “Miss Eleanor, your manners are shocking,” she said dryly. “Simply shocking.”
She shrugged and stared out at the hazy blue ridges in the distance. “Miss Eleanor, you can take your blasted manners and go dance with the devil, for all the good it will do you.”
She shook her head. “Talking to yourself, Eleanor?”
“And who else would I talk to? Oh, I do beg your pardon—to whom would I speak, if not myself?”
Lord, she missed the sound of another human voice. Days went by between the briefest exchanges. After nearly half a year of living alone, she would even have welcomed Devin’s constant carping again.
From the day a few weeks after they were married when he had rushed in all excited, claiming to have struck a tiny new vein of gold, all pretense of being a loving bridegroom had disappeared. Gone was the handsome, charming young man who had come down from the mountain in search of a rich wife. In his place was a taciturn stranger who came up from his precious mine only when hunger and exhaustion drove him above ground. He even…stunk! No time to bathe, he’d claimed. No time to do more than gobble down whatever food she had cooked and look around for something else of value that he could sell in order to buy more equipment.
She would see his measuring eyes light on the slipper chair that had belonged to her mother, or the little desk where she had once graded papers. Then, in a day or so, one of the Millers would roll up to the front door with a wagon, and Devin would apologize so sweetly.
“It’s just an old chair, Elly Nora,” he’d said when the slipper chair had disappeared. “A few more months and I’ll be able to buy you a whole set of chairs and a table to match. We’ll drive right up to the front door of that factory over in Hickory and you can pick out anything you want. If it don’t fit, we’ll build us another house to hold it all,” he promised.
Soon she discovered just how worthless his promises were. Convinced he was only days away from the vein his grandfather had found and then lost, he had worked day and night. Too tired to eat, drink or sleep, he had soon ceased even pretending to be polite to Eleanor.
Eleanor was convinced that his exhaustion had contributed to his death. Hector said he’d miscalculated the length of fuse. For whatever reason, he hadn’t made it out of the drift in time. In a single moment, Eleanor had gone from being a disillusioned bride to being a destitute widow.
They needn’t worry about her marrying an outsider. Having once been married for her tiny savings account, a small house and a few pieces of old furniture, she would wither up and blow away before she considered marrying another man.
Wiping her fingers on a square of gingham that had been torn from one of her old aprons, she stood in the doorway and tossed the chicken bone outside. “You’re welcome, my friends,” she said, knowing that sooner or later some creature would come creeping out of the woods to snatch up the bounty.
In the distance, the dog barked again. Someone was firing a rifle. She’d heard several shouts earlier, but couldn’t tell what they were yelling about. Drinking again, no doubt. Run a few traps, plant a few rows of corn, pan for hours and dig more holes in the ground—that was the daily life of a Miller of Dexter’s Cut. After that, they would take out the jugs of white lightning and celebrate whatever it was such people found to celebrate.
Evidently they were celebrating now. Perhaps someone had actually discovered a few grains of gold, although the noise sounded as if it were coming from higher up on the hill rather than lower down, where most of the panning was done.
Curious, Eleanor sat and watched the shadows lengthen, watched the lightning bugs come out. She listened to the sounds of the dying day, to the bird that always sang just at dusk, whose name she could never remember. To the sound of some small animal thrashing through the underbrush.
Thrashing through the underbrush?
Not her animals. They crept. They clucked and scratched or browsed. They hopped or flew, and a few even slithered. None of them ever thrashed.
Swinging her bare feet, she continued to watch the edge