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“You know about his death?”
She gave her a look beneath her brow. “It’s a small town, honey. Why do you think we don’t need a local paper? Not much stays quiet around here and when it does, it means it died with someone. Even then somebody else is gonna dig it up sooner or later.”
Teddi spoke up, her head cocked. “So you’re saying you know what’s going on here.” It wasn’t a question or an accusation.
The woman rocked back slowly, the steam in her drink trailing after her. “What is it I’m supposed to know?”
“Something about the deaths of Jackson Grennan and Adam Maller. You’ve got a population of just over two hundred. You must know every person in this town. Do you believe they were just hunting accidents a week apart?” Vera gripped the railing as another gust sent a frigid chill down her spine. That creeping spider sensation skittered across the nape of her neck. Peeking over her shoulder she looked into the forest. Lush, thick, and dark, it bordered the other side of the property. Needle-like pricks pressed into her skin. An animal instinct rose within her, purring.
“What do you see?”
Vera turned back, the woman watching her closely. “Nothing.”
“That’s for the best.”
“What’s there to see?”
“I don’t know anything about the deaths.” She bypassed the question, taking another all-too-calm sip. Frustration bubbled up again, a familiar friend.
“What do you know about Deputy Gunson?” Vera asked.
The woman planted her feet on her pristine porch and stood, grabbing onto the railing as she leaned towards them. Only the dark line of foliage kept them apart.
“You stay away from that man, you hear me? I don’t care who you are or what you do. Stay away from that entire department.” Her command was harsh but also laced with the kind of concern one woman always had for another.
“Why?” The woman’s fingers gripped harder, her bones like spider legs.
“You know anything about Sylen? Our history?”
“Not much,” Vera replied, ignoring another tendril against her neck. Rubbing her shoulder against her jaw, she tried to brush off the creeping feeling. Whoever it was could eavesdrop all they wanted but she wasn’t giving them any more attention.
The woman sat back down with a groan, staring past them towards the woods that beckoned. “This plot of land began as a fur trading post. Mildly successful, until it wasn’t and the local population of trappers, traders, and the like scattered to their next viable option. When the getting was good it was heaving with everyone that could make the trek here. It collapsed due to low pelt counts and higher wages elsewhere, as was known to happen. The land was abandoned and forgotten, a dot swallowed up by the forest. And then came the women.” Pausing for a breath, she went on with a fire in her eyes that latched onto Vera. “In the 1890s, a group of women seeking solace came to what is now Sylen and made it their own. Built their own homes, trapped their food, they supported each other in creating a place that was apart, that was built upon only the rules they set forth for themselves.”
“You’re saying a bunch of women wandered across the wild of northern Colorado and settled Sylen? Was it stolen territory?”
A soft creak came from the chair as she rocked back. “I'm sure it was somewhere along the line. History is long and volatile here, no one is denying that. Too long for too many people most days. But that’s what I’m saying. Ain’t gonna find that in your history books, especially since all the tales of their time were either burned or buried. It was the time of prohibition and mining and white settlement after the gold rush and women wanted to have a say in it all. Some of them were opinionated and outspoken and not everyone liked that. Painfully enough, they’d win their right to vote shortly after they left their homes to settle here.” She snorted sardonically.
“There were seven women in total from various backgrounds: widows, spinsters, forgotten sinners tossed to the wayside. Most of them came together from Denver, wanting to find a way out of the confines of society. Out of oppression and the bindings of their time. It wasn’t like what you ladies know, not at all. There was no freedom to divorce or stay single, no useful education offered to us, or even the full ownership of the babies we pushed out between our thighs. No, we were objects then. More so than nowadays, anyway.
These women banded together and built something unique. Something beautiful. They found the former trading post and turned it into something bigger and better. Homes, a shop or two, a blacksmith, and a healer. Everything was everyone’s. Food, fire, friendship. A matriarchy based on community instead of an iron fist at the end of a man’s far-reaching arm. It was hard living and it was brutal but it was theirs. It was ours. We made our gods from what the land gave us.”
“You come from that line of women,” Teddi said.
Nodding, she went on, softer now. “Yeah, I’m theirs. Only the third generation from inception and I’ll be the end of the line when I go. But what it began as, what my ancestor built with her hands became something else entirely when the men came.” All fondness seeped away from her voice. “Travel was common back then, especially for land once full of furs, gold, and trade, and so they came over the years. One or two men, small groups trading for goods when they came through until some of them decided to stay.” Fire morphed into steel in her eyes. The map of wrinkles at the edges pinched, closing in ranks. “It happened ten years after they settled Sylen. After they built it into a place of prosperity. Small but thriving in the ways that mattered to them. Seven men came and saw what they had made and decided it wasn’t right and it wasn’t proper. So they came in like foxes to a hen house. Chipping away, day by day, at what they built until they ripped it out from under them. They took and they stole and they dug in so hard they couldn’t be ignored.”
“You mean they raped them.” Vera couldn’t hold back the venom in her words. The corruption of what the men had done, the violation of their actions through pure self-righteousness made her clench her fists. It was a brass-knuckled strike to the face.
“Yeah, honey, that’s what they did. Maybe somewhere down the line someone imagined there was good love in some of them, but those first seven men took what wasn’t theirs to have and they stole Sylen right out of the calloused palms of those who built it into a flourishing sanctuary. They took over the trade relationships they built, they took over their homes and their lives and their bodies with babies they didn’t ask to have.”
“So what happened?” Teddi was attentive, yearning for what Vera assumed was her hope for a happy ending. The fire breathing down her own throat told her it had never come, especially not now that brutality and murder were painted across the front steps of every home in their town.
The woman appeared as if the weight was still fresh. As if she needed more than one lifetime to adjust to it. “Some escaped, some stuck it out, some killed themselves after seeing what became of their efforts and their lives. But life went on as it always does in the face of tragedy. Life went on and we went under the thumb we'd escaped for one glorious fleeting moment.”
Vera remembered the photograph in the motel office. The women were solemn and submissive under the heavy hands of the men who stood above them. Their missing smiles weren’t just due to the historically long photography process or societal stoicism… it was fear. It was hatred and it was the look of souls that’d been cleaved down the middle and left tattered and broken.
“I’m telling you that violence and blood are as natural here as the black of our leaves. It’s sewn into our families and stitched into our souls. What’s happening to these men right now? It ain’t nothing new to us. Violence has many faces and many names. Whoever is taking these lives knows that.”
Vera considered the story. A striking tale, for sure, but a believable one too. She knew that her people had been written out of history at every turn or written in at the wrong places where blame was easily laid. She didn’t believe history wrote pure truth and knew it hid more than it shed light on most days. But hearing the reality from someone only three women removed from it, was another thing entirely. It made supposition faulty and history capricious.
