The Day Beth Leather Shot the Moon, As Told by Rosemary Bonebreak Read online

  The Day Beth Leather Shot the Moon, As Told by Rosemary Bonebreak

  Sarah McGill

  Late Cretaceous

  September 1, 2018 Volume 8 No 11

  The Day Beth Leather Shot the Moon, As Told by Rosemary Bonebreak

  By Sarah McGill

  On April 19, 1893, a Monday, Beth Leather shot the moon.

  The moon came down like a medicine cabinet. It came down with broken hinges and the bottles spilling miracle tonic. The corks popped out and the cherry cough syrup sloshed into the laudanum and only the thick-glass bottoms were left unbroken. When the moon came down, the salt flats went dark.

  In 1886, Beth Leather lassoed the Milky Way and rode its width from Minnesota to California. Upon arriving in California, she and her horse Sunny Jim were hired as traveling librarians.

  First time Beth came to White Horn, I was sitting on the post box eating bell peppers out of my apron. Beth came up the road looking at the horizon like it was forever. I think she would have ridden out where the salt crust was thin and sent Sunny Jim right into the deep mud if Darleen hadn’t run off the porch, bare-feet kicking up salt, raw with it, and grabbed hold of her reins.

  “Uh-uh,” she said, “I’m not setting no horse’s leg today. Half the kids in town got scarlet fever and they’re sick as rats. What you doing out here without a map? Did the government send you? What’s in your bags? Why’re they so big?”

  Sometimes I wished it’d been me. But only at night, after I’d finished a book and I was closing up, alone but for the smell of lemon cough drops and hydrogen peroxide.

  For seven years, Beth Leather rode into town every April with cow-leather boots and a felt hat sporting yellow flowers and her saddlebags full of romance chapbooks. Used to be I watched her from the window, packing salt into tin boxes with my thumb. I’d watch my sister pull thickets of hair up with a resin pulp comb and saunter onto the salt flats like she wasn’t mad in love with Beth. Beth always had a book for her, patched with Christmas cards and horse glue gone yellow.

  I could hear them talking, with the window cracked. “How’s the trip?” my sister said.

  Beth patted Sunny Jim’s neck. “Ah, peach. Went left at Sartin-Down and took a bison trail through the zodiacs. It was so hot up there, the chickens were laying hard-boiled eggs. All anyone could cook was solar flares because everything else burned to the bottom of the pan. So I thought to myself I’d go up north a tick for a block of ice.” Beth rubbed her chin and winked at Darleen. “Problem is, Great Bear didn’t like me cutting his ice.”

  “How’d you get it, Beth?” It was the only time I got to hear my older sister sound like the littlest girl, with silk bows down her back and jam on her face.

  “Well,” Beth drawled it out long, like she wasn’t going to tell. She folded her hands over her chaps, leather stains on her palms and knuckles scarred like cauliflower. I used to imagine her smelling like pages, before I knew she smelled like gun oil. “Great Bear, he’s snarling, stretching his jaw so wide I hear his jaw popping. Looks like he’s got a mind to swallow me down. ‘Hold on, Mister Bear,’ I said. ‘You can’t eat me. I’m bitter as wormwood and salty as the sea. But if you let me go, I’ll eat a jar of honey and comb my hair with molasses and then I’ll be sweet as a honeybee hive.’ He thought that sounded pretty fine, so I came back down to the bison trail with my ice in my bag. I rather think he’s still waiting.”

  Darleen grinned, her book held careful as dandelion seeds between her hands. “One of these days you’re gonna end up like Stingy Jack, Beth Leather; lost between here and there with nothing but a Jack-o’-lantern.”

  Beth stayed two weeks, sitting on an old schoolroom writing desk out front of her shack, taking back last year’s books and loaning out new ones. She had a whole page for just us—Nevada on the right, White Horn on the left, and the library address in the middle. She wrote names and book titles with a fountain pen and it came out ugly because of the shakes in her hands. She didn’t like us looking at her poor writing, but we still gathered around the page like it was magic.

  I never thought it’d be me greeting Beth Leather, holding up my hands for the slim novel and the salt burning my heels.

  In 1888, Beth Leather was one week late on her route on account of a starry girl who took her riding down a lute string road between the North Star and the Southern Cross.

  Beth and Darleen fought a lot. They fought about anything; if violets or geraniums suited the kitchen table, how come Darleen wouldn’t fix up fennel tea for Beth’s headaches, why Beth arrived this year on a Wednesday instead of a Tuesday. The year Beth came late and left early, the fights would have put a tornado to shame.

  “Ought we go riding or something?” Darleen said. “You’re not getting a better day for it and you’re leaving tomorrow.”

  “You can’t ride so well, Darleen.”

  I watched them through the door, spooning opium through funnels into the glass bottles lined down the counter. Beth leaned on the kitchen table, sorting through maps and star charts. She was leaving a day before my birthday this year. I’d be eighteen.

  “Well you can’t hardly do something as simple as making tea.”

  “You make enough tea for the both of us,” Beth said.

  Darleen stood behind, her arms crossed and her shoulders up. “Then we’ll go slow. Sunny Jim’s an old horse.”

  “Sunny Jim’s the finest horse you’ll ever seen, Darleen. Not every horse has the iron-cap knees needed to jump far enough to get to the sky.”

  “It’s all about that damn horse.”

  The maps scattered on the floor when Beth turned, her lip slipped straight and angry. But she only hooked one arm around Darleen’s neck and closed her eyes. Darleen curse into Beth’s collar until her shoulders shook.

  At the end of April, Darleen put on button-up boots and my straw hat with the bluebird on the band and walked seven miles to church rather than wish Beth good-bye. The next year, Beth pretended she’d not brought Darleen a book and only gave it to her after four days of sore eyes and enough yelling that Pa came to Beth’s shack turning his hat round and round in his hands and offering to mediate a discussion between the two over breakfast.

  But I’d still find them in the evening perched precariously on the roof of Beth’s shack with Darleen’s book spread across their laps and Beth’s arms tight around Darleen’s waist. Darleen read aloud very slowly so she’d not read more than a chapter by the time Beth left. I wondered sometimes if I could stitch them to the fabric of the sky, suspended so just their toes touched the gabled roof. Then they’d stop fighting.

  Instead I maintained the roof beams, year to year, so it wouldn’t fall in. It’s a wonder that house lasted as long as it did; though in the end it was swept away during an autumn flood in 1893.

  Beth used to eat dinner at our house. I’d see her come in as I swept up the front room, locked up the cabinets, and put away the surgical knives. It was a good thing Beth lived out west because noplace else would have enough space. She had a way of being big as a bison, filling up so much space there didn’t seem room for a pat of butter. It made me shy and I didn’t consider myself shy. But when she came in, I took longer cleaning up, too nervous to go in and sit at the kitchen table, smelling her onion sweat over the steamed cauliflower.

  Ma and Pa didn’t notice Beth knocking knees with Darleen under the table. They probably thought it was just Beth being so big, moving like she was on horseback and no one for ten miles. Besides, Pa’d never have a suspicious or evil thought about anyone who liked his pumpkin soup. But sometimes Beth bump
ed me too and my heart went into my mouth.

  Darleen never helped Beth pack up. She hated it. After she stormed off when I asked about it, I ran to the shack so fast I near broke my neck just to spend a half hour alone with Beth.

  Beth laughed the first time I came to her door, panting and my ankles all over salt, “I was expecting someone else.” Said it the second and third time, too. Then just said, “Afternoon.”

  I packed all the returned books so they were snug, like medicine bottles wrapped in paper for long travel. I’d started thinking I understood Beth, looking for the vestigial blue between the storm clouds like the sky could cure her headaches as good as any medicine. It was uncharitable, but I thought I knew her better than Darleen, on account of noticing things like that.

  “Us two should go riding some time. As thanks for helping me pack up.” Beth rubbed her knuckles where they swelled in the heat.

  “To go on one of your adventures?”

  “Mayhap.” Beth smiled. I smiled back because I wanted that bad as anything and I was afraid she’d never take me.

  She didn’t that year.

  Darleen watched Beth go from the road, a kerchief mangled against her chest. Beth wasn’t one for looking back, though she always waved. White Horn got quiet when she left, Sunny Jim’s hoof prints left like torn pages before the wind whipped them away.

  “I’ve got soup for daughters,” Ma’d say the next week when us two went moody and slow.

  Darleen spent the whole year fixing Beth Leather up in her head as a high-flying adventurer with as much charm as a horseshoe nailed above a door, more tall tale than skin and bones. Sitting on the post box, I watched her stuff herself with stories: Beth the Wanderer, wearing the Milky Way on her hat brim, birds black as black swinging off her saddle; Beth the Flirt, sweet as cherries, who always swept Darleen up when she came back and kissed her neck where it was hidden by butterscotch hair.

  I wondered if that was why she loved Beth. Not because she knew where Beth was when she left White Horn or had been on a single adventure with her even once. Just because she’d made that Beth from the stories the real thing. I thought about telling Darleen she was fooling herself, but I figured Darleen wouldn’t appreciate it. Every year she thrilled to the high heavens at seeing her darling appear on the salt road. But Beth never was quite what Darleen had made her to be. No wonder they fought so much.

  And then Darleen told Beth she didn’t want to have anything to do with her anymore. She sat on the porch swing with her arms crossed and said, “I don’t love you, Beth Leather.” Kept her eye on Beth until Beth went down the steps and walked away over the salt. Darleen never borrowed a book again. Her hands stopped smelling like inked paperbacks and went back to smelling like poppies and acetylsalicylic acid.

  In 1890, I stood on the only street into town with a pickleweed bouquet, waiting for Beth Leather to come up the road with four dozen paperbacks in her bags.

  She flicked back her hat when she saw me and her smile was so big it nearly knocked me over. “You’re too chipper, Rose. What am I going to do with you?”

  In 1890, it rained so hard the Milky Way ran backwards. Beth Leather got washed out of the sky, hooting and hollering all the way down.

  It seemed like Beth rode into town already telling stories, the gab spilling behind her like hoof prints. Darleen was right when she told me Beth always was talking about going to the sky, which was so perfect it hurt, filled up as it was with white bison and cinnamon trees and velveteen rabbits mashing up moon cakes. If she wasn’t chasing a reindeer under the Sky Nail, she was eating dried olives and sheep cheese with Capricorn, who she affectionately called old sea-goat. Sometimes it seemed like she didn’t know how to talk about anything else.

  But we liked those stories. Because every year the basin flooded and we sat on the beds with our feet up while the floor turned to mud and the salt marsh snails crawled up the doors. We told each other the salt was bad. Pink in the spring, blue in the winter, and made half of sand. It was accepted wisdom that there wasn’t a sorrier sight in the world than the children selling salt to travelers who came rattling by in their black carriages, the wheel rims eaten up by our very own salty road.

  I went riding on Sunny Jim for the first time in 1890.

  We went out in the dark, Ma calling behind me not to fall into the lake. It was her way of saying ‘good evening.’ I held my knees so tight around Sunny Jim’s belly that in an hour I was shaking. He fidgeted like a rabbit and even though it didn’t look it, his hooves came down so hard my coccyx seemed to bounce into my spine. He had such strange gait about him, I kept thinking he was going to jump. Beth led him around, her head against his, murmuring into his cheekbone. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, on account of how hard I was concentrating on not falling off. I’d be mortified if I fell off in front of Beth.

  We rode west out of town, where the bottle stoppers bloomed yellow against the foothills. Went so far it got dark and the little lamps in the windows were just small orange stars fallen to the ground. “This what it’s like in the sky?” I asked, trying not to shift even though I felt small and awkward in the saddle, marked with Beth’s fingers and smelling like eucalyptus.

  She looked around and rubbed my knee with her knuckles. I went all jittery. “A little. The air’s sweeter, like a whole cup of sugar in lemonade. And when the wind blows, oh it blows. Once it was so strong, it took me to the other side of the world and then back again. And there’s always some news going on. Always something happening.” She pulled the heel of her hand in a circle against her swollen knuckles. I started thinking about scraping out an egg membrane for her to eat so her joints wouldn’t be so red. “It’s the sort of place you don’t want to come back from.”

  “I’d like to see it.”

  Maybe she nodded, or maybe her head was just bouncing with her walk. It was hard to tell.

  “Too bad you can’t stay longer in White Horn.”

  She kept on just the same and I still couldn’t tell if she was nodding or just tilting her chin in to whisper something to Sunny Jim. I bit my tongue so I didn’t say anything else foolish.

  When I couldn’t hold on any longer, Beth held up her arms. “Don’t worry, Sunny Jim won’t let you come down bad.” She caught me when I snagged my foot in the stirrup. “Hold on, hold on.” She chuckled as I gripped her neck, her arm tight around my waist while she untangled my ankle and set me down gentle.

  It took us an hour getting back and I couldn’t stop sighing, I was so happy.

  I spent the April of 1891 flighty and jittery as a wet cat.

  “Calm down, Rosie, there isn’t a thing to be so excited for,” Darleen said.

  I thought she was being jealous, all frowning and hunched with her belt cinched too tight over her waist. That day I just wanted to be bright and pink as a rose, colorful and shining as Mars next to the moon. I’d even worn the only dress I had with some pink in it.

  “You’ll tell me about the constellations, won’t you? I’ll be so embarrassed if I don’t know them when she comes.” My teeth chittered and I had to sit my chin down into my hands and my elbows down on the windowsill to keep from my shivering.

  “She won’t even bring it up. How much can you talk about in two weeks? I spend more time with the cows.” She humphed and hawed and I heard her cursing out in the garden, but that night she taught me about the constellations anyway.

  “She really been to all of them?” I asked.

  Darleen settled back in her porch seat, sagging like she’d fall asleep. “You know the North Star, right? That one’s important. Can’t go anywhere without it up there or you’ll be lost as soon as you arrive.”

  She said it like it was something she knew, and not something she’d been told. But I wasn’t going to be mean about it. I just wanted Beth to come so we could sit together on her roof and she’d tell me stories.

  Beth came late in the day that year. It was already dark when I saw her, my whole body heavy with waiting. I t
ried to smile, even though I’d expected her hours ago. She came down with a thump beside me and put a hand on my shoulder.

  “Evening, Rose.”

  That was all she said before she went off to her shack and went to bed.

  I understood. She was tired.

  We didn’t go riding that year. She’d had some fever that winter and sometimes she was dizzy in the morning. I hated hearing about it. I hated thinking about her lying up in bed all day, Sunny Jim wandering aimlessly around the yard, eating rotten apples off the ground and nickering at the sky.

  “Beth, you couldn’t have been that sick.”

  “Sure was.” She leaned up against the shack, the sun coming down so bright it seemed like even the salt would dry up.

  I thought I probably should have scooched over so our hips were touching, but I just stayed still, my hands balled up in my lap. “Then you ought to have come out here. We’ve got feverfew.”

  She smiled and rubbed the back of my shoulder. “They’ve got doctors elsewhere too, you know.”

  “Couldn’t you have gone up and found some miracle cure in the Milky Way? Moon poppy milk or something?”

  “That’s not the sort of thing the sky goes into. Not a lot of sick people that side of the horizon.”

  I looked down at my fingernails full of sand and wished I’d been there to fix her up. “You weren’t really that sick, right? I can’t imagine you sick.”

  Beth shrugged and pulled her brim down over her eyes. “Guess then maybe I wasn’t.”

  “Didn’t you do something interesting on the way here this year? You haven’t told a lot of stories.”

  “Stayed on the ground this year. Admired the roses. Put together a few books too.” She flicked closed the book in my lap with her thumb. “I made up that one I gave you, you know.”

  “Thank you, it’s very nice.” It was nice, a whole lot of recipes pasted together. I guess it just wasn’t what I was expecting.