Page 2 of Pretty Savage: Defy

The colony is rotting around them, and beneath the smell of rain and seawater, death lingers in the air, a haunting reminder of all they have lost.

Carr holds out his hands, caked with dirt from graves and blistered from the shovel he used to dig them.

“You know I understand,” he says with his eyes downcast.

That quiets Ruth. It pulls her, just slightly, out of her own grief as she’s reminded that yesterday he buried his own wife, a girl just nineteen years old, with her belly swollen. When Carr and his bride had announced the pregnancy, the entire colony had rejoiced. This would be the first child born on this foreign soil. They had taken it as a sign that God intended them to survive here, to put down roots in this strange wilderness and raise future generations.

Ruth remembers thinking that Carr’s wife was fortunate. To be chosen by him. The thought feels shameful now that mother and unborn child were dead and hope had followed them into the dirt.

Across the room, Tabitha Odell labors at the hearth where a fire sputters. The wooden ladle she uses scrapes loudly along the side of the metal pot that dangles over the flames. She’s making soup, although that seems a generous name for water mixed with whatever wilted plants she could pry from the ground. She places the thin liquid into bowls, dividing it evenly into four, which leaves barely a thimbleful for each of them. After a moment’s thought, she tips her own serving into Carr Ashford’s bowl.

Ann notices but does not protest. She too knows what is at stake. Carr’s a good hunter, quick with the musket. If any of them are to survive what comes next, it will be because he puts food in their bellies. Ann’s always been a practical woman. A trait that faltered after putting her husband and four children into the ground, when she had lain down on top of the graves and had waited for God to take her as well, but Carr had come along then.

He had not offered platitudes or prayer. Hand under her elbow, he hauled her up out of the mud.

“There’s work to do,” he told her.

He directed her to care for the sick while the colony dwindled around them. Mixing herbs. Carrying water. Cooling burning foreheads with damp cloths.

It had given her hands purpose when her heart had none. For a while it had worked, until every patient died and the horror of it all came rushing back.

“It’s not right,” wails Ruth now as a fresh set of tears wets her cheeks. “We did everything the Almighty Lord asked of us. Braved hardships unimaginable. Why would He smite us like this? Why has He forsaken us?”

“No, Ruth.” Carr straightens. At six feet, he’s always been the tallest man in the colony, easy to spot in any crowd. Hunger has hollowed his cheeks and narrowed his frame, but it has not taken the strength from him. Candlelight catches along the sharp line of his jaw and the dark waves of hair that have grown too long during these grueling months.

When the colonists first staggered ashore, seasick and weak-legged, Ruth had found herself searching for him whenever the surf knocked her off balance. During storms, she looked for him among the cottages. During disputes, she watched his face before deciding what she thought herself.

She was not alone in that. Tabitha’s eyes stay fixed on him every time he speaks and when he glances her way, Ann unconsciously straightens her spine.

Not because he holds any official authority over them but because at twenty-two he is young and strong where so many others have been proven weak. Because even through the sickness and hunger and despair, he had risen from his bed every morning and continued.

In a world where nearly everyone they loved was gone, Carr Ashford remains.

“You are mistaken,” he tells them. “God has not abandoned us. He’s chosen us.”

“Chosen us?” asks Ruth. “How can that be? Everyone is dead.”

“Yes, all of the colony,” says Carr. “They came to this wilderness, just like the four of us. Tell me. Did they pray less? Labor less? Sacrifice less?”

Tabitha shakes her head.

“No.”

“No,” Carr agrees. “They were good people.” His voice hitches, grows raspy. “My wife was a good woman, better than I deserved. She would have been a good mother.”

He’s quiet for a minute, his chest heaving like he’s underwater and desperate for air. But he does not drown. He pulls himself back together and faces the three before him.

“The fever did not take the wicked. It took the weak.”

It’s a harsh condemnation of the dead, but the women do not flinch, nor do they look away.

“God has tested us and found us worthy. He’s saved our souls and our bodies so we can forge onward. The tragedies we’ve suffered,” Carr pulls in a shuddering breath, and they know he’s thinking of her, his wife with the golden hair, “have been to prove that we,” he thumps a fist to his chest, “are the strongest of them all.”

The words take on the authority of scripture, ringing through the meeting house like a church bell.

“We were not spared by chance.”

He points toward them one by one.