Dust of Lies

Chapter Two - Emma

    Viva’s comment about washing my face stung my pride. I would take no chances this morning.  I studied my features carefully in the mirror.  Oval face – a plus. High cheek bones- another plus.  Large brown eyes – my best feature.  Straight brown hair – average. Thin lips – not so much.  My Cherokee lineage was clearly stamped on my person. I liked my Indian features but somewhere along the way the dark skin I envied was replace by a fair complexion. I don’t even tan well. Predictably enough, this inventory was much like every other one I had taken. I am the total opposite of Kindra. I managed to supress my insecurities and set out for the Barber courthouse.





      Barber was too small to have a courthouse with any records of consequence … and Booneville would be little better, so I decided  to revisit Viva, hoping she would be up to more stories. I was in luck. She seemed to have a rekindled interest in Ora, and I appeared to be her newfound partner. It took little or no encouragement to get Viva to pick up where she’d left off yesterday. “Ora was much like her mother,” Viva said, settling back more comfortably into her chair, “and she seemed to be going through what her mother had, too. Emma’s first husband was Samuel Price,” she said. “They had two little girls. Pneumonia took him when the girls were little.”





    “That must have been difficult for his wife,” I said, imagining the woman with her two small children, feeling the fear throughout the husband’s illness, the panic once he died.”





    “Not much else for a widow to do back then than to remarry,” she responded, her voice matter-of-fact. “If memory serves, Ben's first wife was called Cornelia. She paused, thinking. “Uh-huh. Rachel Cornelia Hooper. I think she and Ben had six children.”





    Wow, I thought, imagining Emma. Two little girls of her own … and six stepchildren. I wasn’t the only woman struggling with the ghost of a first wife.





    Unaware of my thoughts, Viva was still seeing the past; she had even closed her eyes as though the better to remember. “When Emma married Ben after Cornelia died, she wasn’t that much older than his oldest children, poor lamb. And you can bet that they gave her a hard time—and don’t you know, that Ben, he was no better. He was downright mean to her. Ora told me that one day he was telling her he’d give up his whole family to have Cornelia back.”





    I imagined how I’d feel if my husband ever said that, to me, about Kindra. The sharp pain I was feeling was nothing beside what Ora must have felt when her husband said it to her.





      Viva had opened her eyes and was watching me. “I wish I could judge him a little more kindly, but I can’t,” she said. “You know how I lost my husband in a freak accident on the Mississippi River back in ‘59. I was heartbroken, but I had to move on. You don't forget someone you love. You don't love them any less, but most people find there is room in their heart to love someone again—and life goes on.” She paused. “In hindsight, I think I was right about Ben. There really wasn’t any room in his heart to love another.”





    We sat for a moment in silence as she collected her thoughts, and I wondered if she wasn’t sending me a message. If life went on, why were Kindra’s pictures still on the mantelpiece?





    Viva sighed. “I didn't mean to get off on that subject,” she said. “What I’m trying to say, don’t you know, is that Ben was old, probably not thinking right and just talking. But that’s no excuse to be so mean and hateful.” Viva shifted restlessly. She had been sitting too long. I extended my hand to help out of her chair but she brushed it aside and struggled to her feet alone. Need her independence? Or just reminded of first wives? My eyes were stinging with tears. Were they for Emma or were they for me?





    Viva tottered into the bathroom. A few minutes later I heard the toilet flushing and then she shuffled back into the living room and eased back into her chair. “Now, where were we?” she asked. “Oh, yes, we were talking about Ben and Emma.”





    I nodded. “So what happened to them?”





    “Well,” she said, “that second marriage for both Ben and Emma was purely one of convenience, really quite common in that time and place. I think Ben was like a lot of men then. He expected to be head of the house and waited on, and I think Emma's work never ended.” She paused, and I thought I might be seeing tears in her eyes. “She was only fifty-two when she died. She was out milking the in the barn … just didn't come in. When they went out to check on her, she was dead.”





    I didn’t know what to say. After a moment, Viva continued. “Oddly enough, Ora showed me the report that was attached to her death certificate. She’d been vomiting bloody stuff all that morning, don’t you know, sicker than a dog. I’ve often wondered, when there were at least two able-bodied men in the house, why weren't they out there milking?”





    Viva stopped talking and leaned back in her chair, closing her eyes. I wasn’t sure if she was ready to sleep or collecting her thoughts.Even though she was meandering a little, I didn’t want to interrupt Viva’s account of Emma’s life. In the few years I’d known Viva, we had never had a truly personal conversation. It had taken someone else’s story to open the dam and allow all the words to come flooding out.


Viva started talking again, her head against the back of the chair and her eyes closed.





    “They didn’t even know each other when they got married, can you imagine that? After Cornelia died, Ben decided he needed a woman to raise his six children. Pure and simple. He went to the local drugstore where men with time on their hands would play checkers and drink their coffee. Ben told them he needed a wife. Someone mentioned this young widow with two small girls. Maybe she was interested in a man. Ben climbed in his buckboard and rode the seven miles to the Price place with one goal in mind—to get a wife.”





    “And apparently he did,” I commented.





    “He did,” she agreed, still not opening her eyes. “She needed a husband and someone to provide for her children. She didn’t have a lot of options.”





    “Poor Emma,” I said without thinking.





    “Poor Emma’s children,” Viva said, opening her eyes and sitting up straight. “Ben Townsend was a cold, bible-thumping fool who felt little for anyone after Cornelia. Ora couldn’t wait to leave when she got older, and I think that was why she married Ezra so young.”





    “But she was just going from one angry man to another, wasn’t she?”


“Was she?” She smiled. “Your poem, there—I think the person you need to find out about is Cowboy.” She made the word sound like a proper noun.





    “What cowboy?”





    “Not what cowboy, my dear. Cowboy was a who. He was Ora’s second husband, and he’s the key to your little mystery. See what you can find out about him. And, Kay?”





    “Yes?”





    “Don’t share any of this with anyone. If you do, doors will shut. I know that only too well.”





    “You have to give me something more to go on,” I said. “I need to know his real name if you want me to research him. Who was Cowboy?”





    She smiled.





      “Cowboy’s real name was Jesse Cole James, son of Jesse Woodson James and Emma Anders.”





    When I left Viva, I had the sense that I was about to embark on one of the most interesting journeys of my life. My mother-in-law, I reflected fancifully, was like a squirrel—one that had gathered nuts for the last eighty years about Ora’s life and now was wanting them cracked all at one time.





    And I was, apparently, the nutcracker.





I relished the idea of solving a mystery, and Viva was an intriguing co-conspirator in the quest to solve the poem’s riddle. Age might have robbed her of the physical ability to pursue the puzzle, but her mind was quite lucid. If she believed that this Cowboy would lead to the answer, then I was on board.