The letter had been sitting in the top drawer of Adele’s sideboard for eleven weeks. Elizabeth found it by accident on a Tuesday in July, sent to fetch a napkin ring. She read it standing there, the drawer still open, and understood before the second paragraph that a great uncle she had never met had died in a rooming house in Saint Joseph and left her his only traceable possession—the title to a town called Dry Creek. A place the lawyer said the county had stopped acknowledging in 1889.
A place no map showed. A place that, legally, still belonged to her. She folded the letter, slid it into the pocket of her coat, and finished setting the table for supper without a word to anyone. That was how Hettie would have done it.
And from that afternoon on, Elizabeth Fletcher began to do everything that way. Elizabeth had been born in a two-room house on the wrong end of a wheat town called Belle Run. Her father drove freight. Her mother took in mending.
Both were gone before she turned twelve—her father thrown from a wagon on a bad grade outside Junction, her mother following the next winter with a cough no one in that country had money to treat. After that, Elizabeth was passed sideways to her father’s older sister, Adele, a hard, tidy woman who ran a boarding house and treated the child as a line in her ledger rather than a person in her care. Adele fed her, clothed her in dresses left behind by departed lodgers, and put her to work at eight years old scrubbing porches and turning mattresses. She made it plain in a hundred small ways that any softness spent on the girl was softness wasted.
The person who saved Elizabeth from becoming small under that roof was her mother’s mother, a woman named Hettie Fletcher. She lived alone on a quarter section three hours east of Belle Run, and she came in by wagon once a month to collect her granddaughter for what she called visiting. Hettie was seventy-one when Elizabeth was ten. Widowed twice, she had run her own place since her second husband died.
She taught Elizabeth what the boarding house never would. She taught her to read a plat map and a weather sky. To set a snare and dress a rabbit. To mix lye soap in a kettle and pour candles into tin molds.
To keep a ledger in two columns so that no man could later claim she owed what she did not. Most of all, she taught her to look at a broken thing long enough to see whether it was actually broken. Because most of what people threw away, Hettie said, had only been misunderstood. The tin whistle came from Hettie.
It had belonged to her own brother, a boy named Wilford, dead at sixteen of a fever in 1859. Hettie carried it in her apron pocket for more than fifty years, and pressed it into Elizabeth’s palm the winter she turned fifteen. It was a plain thing. Six holes.
A small dent under the second hole where Wilford had once dropped it on a stone. Elizabeth kept it in the inside pocket of her coat from that day forward, closer to her ribs than her hand. Hettie died the spring Elizabeth turned seventeen, of nothing in particular and everything at once, the way patient old women sometimes do. The quarter section was sold at once by cousins Elizabeth had never met, to satisfy debts she had never heard of.
She was given a mourning brooch she did not want and told there was nothing else. She went back to Adele’s boarding house, to the mattresses and the porches. She worked those two years the way Hettie had taught her to work—fully, and without complaint. She saved every coin she was allowed to keep.
By the summer she was nineteen, she had exactly four dollars and sixty cents rolled in a strip of chambray inside her sewing basket, along with the whistle and a small photograph of her mother at eighteen. She did not know that a letter had been mailed from a lawyer’s office in Kansas City, addressed to her by name. She did not know that Adele had signed for it, read the return address, and left it unopened in the drawer. Adele had already decided that whatever it contained would be either nothing or trouble.
Now Elizabeth had read it. And on Saturday afternoon, she walked to the depot and asked the ticket clerk what it would cost to ride the westbound as far as Sagebrush Halt. He told her three dollars and forty cents, one way. That night, she counted her money again by lamp.
Four dollars and sixty cents. She put it back into the chambray strip and tied it with a slipknot Hettie had taught her. On Sunday morning, she came down early with her sewing basket. Inside was everything she owned, folded small.
Two work dresses. One wool skirt. A nightdress. The mourning brooch she had not worn since Hettie’s funeral.
The photograph. The flagged page of knots. The tin whistle. The four dollars and sixty cents.
The deed. The lawyer’s letter. She set the basket by the kitchen door, made the coffee, laid breakfast out on the sideboard the way Adele preferred it. Then she went into the parlor and said she was leaving on the noon train, that she had a place to go, and that she would not be back.
Adele did not look up for a long moment. When she did, she said only that Elizabeth was a fool if she thought any man in Kansas City had left her anything worth the fare, and that the door would not be held open. Elizabeth said she did not require it to be. Adele told her she owed for the last two weeks’ upkeep.
Elizabeth counted out sixty cents onto the table beside the reading lamp, which was what she calculated the two weeks came to at the rate Adele had always named. She picked up the sewing basket and walked out the front door. She was nineteen years old. She had four dollars in her pocket and a whistle in her coat and a deed to a town that did not exist.
She did not cry. She did not look back. The train came in at twelve minutes past noon. She took a seat by the window on the north side, because Hettie had once told her that if you were riding west in summer, you sat on the north side to keep the sun off your face and the dust from settling in your lap.
She watched Belle Run slide backward past the window. The water tower. The grain elevator. The small white church.
The road that ran east toward what had been Hettie’s quarter section and was now someone else’s alfalfa. She did not look for long. By dawn the country had gone from grass to short grass, to something drier and lower and more open, the horizon pulled so far back it looked bent. She reached Sagebrush Halt at a quarter to ten Monday morning and stepped down onto a plank platform in front of a single unpainted building.
The station master, an old man with a sun-cracked neck named Mr. Anninsley, asked where she was headed. “Dry Creek,” she said. He was quiet for a long moment.
He said Dry Creek was fourteen miles north by the old freight cut, and that nobody had asked him about it in seven years. He said there was a windmill at the six-mile mark that still pulled. She thanked him. She filled her canteen at the pump behind the depot and started walking north into the wind.
She saw the first sign of Dry Creek at five o’clock—a leaning post with the bleached remains of a sign board nailed to it, no letters left. Beyond it, the wagon track dipped into a shallow draw, and in the draw she saw the town. Nine standing buildings and the bones of three others laid along a single street, perhaps two hundred paces long. A dry watercourse running behind them.
Cottonwoods still living along it. A broken windmill at the far end with two blades gone. She walked down into it slowly. The buildings were mill pine turned silver by weather.
The doors mostly sagged on one hinge or fallen inward. Glass gone from all but two windows. She counted, as Hettie had taught her, and took stock. A general store with a collapsed rear wall.
A blacksmith’s shed with the forge still standing, the bellows split and hanging like a bat. A livery with its west stalls caved in and the east three sound. A schoolhouse with a shelf on the north wall holding tin cups and a blue enamel pitcher cracked around the lip. And a small frame house at the end of the street where the watercourse came closest.
The house had three rooms. A front room with a hearth and a plank table, its pine wood gone gray. A lean-to kitchen with a collapsed shelf and a crate of rusted nails. And a second room behind the curtain of faded ticking that held a rope bed frame without a mattress and a small pine chest painted green and blistered.
She stood in the middle of the front room and put her hand in her coat pocket and felt the whistle. She said aloud to no one that it would do. Behind the house she found the well. The rope was still on the crank.
The bucket came up clear after the third pull. She carried it inside and began to sweep. She swept for two hours with a broom she made by binding dry sage to a picket she pulled from the fence. She scrubbed the table down to pale wood.
She scrubbed the hearthstone. It was while scrubbing the hearthstone that she noticed the mortar along its front edge was newer than the mortar along its sides. Packed in with a finger rather than a trowel. Set unevenly, as though someone had done it in a hurry, or in the dark.
Hettie had taught her to trust the eye that noticed what did not match. She fetched the poker, wedged its tip into the seam, and worked it back and forth until the mortar crumbled dry. She set her hands under the front edge of the hearthstone and lifted. Beneath the stone was a cavity lined with brick.
In the cavity sat a tin biscuit box painted with faded roses, and beside it, a small oilcloth bundle tied with twine. Inside the oilcloth was a leather pouch. Inside the pouch was money. Gold coin—thirty-two double eagles stacked in two columns of sixteen.
A smaller bag of silver dollars, forty-one of them. Folded beneath the pouch, a bank draft on a Saint Joseph institution for two hundred and twelve dollars. Inside the biscuit tin was a folded letter, written in a careful, sloping hand on four sheets of ruled paper. And beneath the letter, a small tintype of a young woman about Elizabeth’s own age, standing beside an older woman in a bonnet.
And beneath the tintype, a tin whistle, three and a half inches long, hammered, six holes—the twin of the one in Elizabeth’s pocket, down to the dent under the second hole, except that this one was brighter at the mouthpiece and unworn. She unfolded the letter. It began, “To whoever finds this, my name is Iona Fletcher and I lived in this house forty-one years. ”
She read it through once without moving, and then again aloud, in a low voice, as if the empty room deserved to hear it.
Iona Fletcher had come to Dry Creek in 1867 with her husband and a boy of four. The boy died in 1871. The husband in 1884. She kept the house and the small garden and the two milk goats, and served as the town’s letter writer and midwife by turns.
And in the summer of 1888, a company of men came from the east claiming to survey for a rail spur, and instead sank test pits north of the watercourse, and told no one what they found. Within a year, every well in the north half of town began to taste of copper and iron and something bitter behind it. Four children sickened. Two died.
The company paid the county quietly to strike the town from its rolls, so no claim could be brought against the water or the land. The remaining families drifted away. Iona stayed because she was old, and because the south well, fed by the cottonwood draw, still ran clean. She set aside what she could from forty-one years of small work for whoever came after.
She hoped it would be a Fletcher. And she hoped that Fletcher would carry the paper she had folded beneath the tintype to the state archive in Topeka, and set the record straight. Elizabeth found the paper. A page of the county survey, the test pits marked in pencil, and a name and a company written along the margin in Iona’s hand.
She refolded the letter and set it on the table beside the whistle and the tintype and the bank draft. She went out to the porch and looked at the light on the grass and understood that she would not be leaving. She slept that first night on her folded coat on the plank floor with the whistle in her hand. In the morning she began.
She swept the second room and mended the bed frame with rope braided from strips of an old grain sack. She fixed the pine table’s broken leg. She hung the front door back on its hinge. On the fourth day, a man came down the wagon track on a bay horse and stopped at her gate.
His name was Otis Rennert. He was fifty-eight, ran cattle six miles east, and had seen her smoke and ridden over to see who was burning wood in Dry Creek. She told him her name and showed him the deed. He read it slowly.
He said he had known Josiah Fletcher. That Josiah had been a fair man. And that if she meant to stay, he would send his boy over with a wagon of split cottonwood on Saturday. He did.
The boy, Merritt Rennert, sixteen, stacked the wood along the north wall and helped her rehang the front door before he rode home. The following Tuesday, a wagon came from Sagebrush Halt carrying Mrs. Delia Anninsley, the station master’s wife. She brought a sack of cornmeal, a crock of lard, six eggs packed in oats, a bolt of unbleached muslin, and a cast-iron spider for cooking.
She stayed the afternoon and showed Elizabeth how to test the north wells with a copper coin left overnight, and agreed with Iona’s letter that the north water was still bad and would likely stay bad for a lifetime. Before she left, she wrote her name and the date on the inside of the pantry door in pencil, and told Elizabeth to do the same for every person who helped, so the house would keep its own record. A week later, a freighter named William Boy, hauling salt north to the reservation, stopped for water at the south well and stayed two days to help her raise the collapsed rear wall of the general store, refusing pay. In the third week, a widow named Ruth Ambury arrived on foot leading a nanny goat, and said Elizabeth had the look of someone who could use milk.
She stayed to help re-chink the south wall of the house with clay from the watercourse and straw from the livery loft. She came back every second Sunday after that, with cheese and news. Elizabeth wrote to the state archive in Topeka in the fourth week, enclosing a careful copy of Iona’s marked survey, the names from the margin, and a plain letter of her own asking that the striking of Dry Creek in 1889 be examined. A letter came in November acknowledging receipt, stating a clerk had been assigned.
A second came in January, stating that the striking had been found irregular, and that Dry Creek would be restored to the county map at the next revision. Elizabeth folded both letters into the biscuit tin with Iona’s and set it back beneath the floorboard. By autumn, the people who came to Dry Creek knew her name and used it without hesitation. Otis Rennert brought two laying hens and would not take money.
William Boy routed his salt run through Dry Creek once a month, sleeping in the east stalls and paying her twenty cents a night for the hay and a hot supper. Ruth’s goat gave milk enough for cheese. Delia sent word by every wagon of who was asking after the Fletcher girl. Elizabeth began to keep a small book of the town’s history at the pine table in the evenings, writing in the same careful sloping hand she had unconsciously begun to imitate from Iona’s letter.
She recorded the names of the dead children as best she could reconstruct them. And on the first clean page, she wrote the names of the people who had come to help, and the date each had first come. On the inside of the pantry door, the pencil names grew until they reached the hinge. Above the hearth, on two iron nails, Elizabeth hung the two whistles side by side.
Hettie’s on the left, with its worn mouthpiece and its dent under the second hole. Iona’s on the right, still bright and unworn. Between them, the tintype of the young woman standing beside the older woman in the bonnet. And beside that, the photograph of her mother at eighteen.
She passed those four things every morning and touched them with her fingers before she went out. On an evening in early spring, a year almost to the day since she had stepped onto the plank platform at Sagebrush Halt, Elizabeth sat in the rocker and watched the lamplight move on the wall above the hearth. The wind was small that night, the kind Hettie had called a resting wind. The cottonwoods along the watercourse were beginning to show the first pale fur of leaves.
She thought of Adele’s parlor, of the sixty cents counted onto the small table, of the cousins who had sold Hettie’s quarter section, of the letter lying unopened for eleven weeks. She thought of these people without heat, and without wishing them any particular harm. They had looked at her and seen a girl who could be used until she was used up. They had been wrong.
And their wrongness was not a thing that required an answer from her. Now the answer was the house around her. The ledger balanced in two columns on the shelf. The pencil names on the pantry door that had reached the hinge and turned the corner and started down the jamb.
She thought of Hettie, who had taught her to count a place before deciding anything about it. She thought of Iona Fletcher, whom she had never seen, who had set aside what she could from small work in the hope that a Fletcher would come, and who had folded a page of county survey beneath a tintype so the striking of a town from a map would not be the last words spoken about the water or the children. Two women, she thought, who had loved someone they never got to see grow up. And who had between them made her.
Somewhere out past the cottonwoods, a coyote spoke once and was answered. Elizabeth Fletcher was nineteen, and then she was twenty. She had walked out of Belle Run with four dollars in her pocket and a whistle in her coat and a deed to a town that did not exist. She had spent the four dollars on the ticket that carried her to it.
It was the best four dollars she ever spent.
