Page 147 of The Widow and the Wanted

“It’s the truth.” I step forward. “So what move you fixin’ to make?”

Goldie looks at me then. Not like a woman studying an outlaw. Like a card player counting what’s left in my hand.

“I have not decided.”

My blood goes cold.

Okee makes a sound low in his throat. “You cannot mean to hand us over.”

“I mean to keep my house standing.”

Pearl lingers near the door, face pale beneath all that powder. She’s got one hand pressed to her stomach like she might be sick. The voices grow louder. Men’s voices. Women too. Some angry. Some praying. Some just wanting to be close to the madness.

I drag both hands through my hair.

Christ on a cracker.

They’re going to tear us limb from limb.

We should have run. Why didn’t we run?

I know why before the thought finishes. Because if we ran, what becomes of Lula?

Everett has her. Somewhere close by now, if his notice weren’t a bluff. Sundown. Exchange. Us for her. That’s not the bargain he laid out in the paper, dressed in righteous ink and Christian duty. But with Lula gone, it’s clear that this ain’t just about our surrender. It’s a noose, sure as anything, but it’s the only rope leading back to her.

If we can just live long enough. If we can put hands on Lula again and run for whatever hell comes after.

Then the noise outside changes. A ripple moves through the street, the way wind moves through grass before rain.

Pearl turns toward the hall. “I think he’s here.”

Goldie closes a ledger on her desk. Big, black, worn at the corners, fat with names and numbers and whatever else a woman like Goldie Eld writes down when men think they are speaking in private.

She lifts it like a Bible.

“Well,” she says. “Let us greet our Christian neighbors.”

The Gemini has a balcony over the front porch, a narrow, iron-railed thing built more for looks than use. I noticed it the first time we came in, though not for any practical reason. Two painted columns frame the doors beneath it. Gas lamps hang in a row, glass chimneys shivering in the damp. A woman could stand up there in a bright dress and call men inside without dirtying her slippers.

Goldie Eld steps onto it like she was born above a crowd.

Me and Okee follow only as far as the shadow behind the upstairs doors. Pearl stays near the curtain with a pistol tucked in one hand.

Below, Fort Gibson has come to watch us die.

Men crowd the street, shoulder to shoulder. Laborers in muddy boots, mule drivers, gamblers, preachers, drunks, women in shawls, girls from the Gemini pressed behind parlor curtains and peeking through cracks. Somebody has brought a lantern pole. Somebody else a hymn book.

A cluster of women near the left side of the porch sing, low and shaking, “Nearer, my God, to Thee…” Their voices drift up.

A man shouts over them, “Bring out the killers!”

Another answers, “Let Verdigris be answered for!”

Then more shouting.

“Where’s the girl?”

“Where’s Lula Clay?”