Voices

Some women pray. I didn’t.

I started hearing voices. It wasn't voices like they show in the movies, right before people start giving in and going crazy. No one actually spoke to me at all. Instead, I found myself reciting names while scraping and sanding on the old house I lived in, names of the women I'd found in books at the library, names from journals and records of births and deaths, names of the women who'd walked and birthed and buried their babies in the prairie's dirt, on the trail that still passed through my town. I recited their names like others count their blessings or count their beads, one by one with reverence. It got to be a thing. It got to be such a thing that I wanted my children to hurry up and leave in the morning so I could have some quiet time to count.


I went to the Pioneer cemetery, looking for the graves of the women whose names I was spending so much time reciting. I found Bertha Mason, the sister of the man who'd built my house, surrounded by her relatives. Bertha had died back east while attending college, died one night when she answered the door to her jealous boyfriend’s gun. Her family had her body brought back home.

I closed my eyes and felt the train, winding up the hillside and down the other side to Huntington. I smelled it, that old train, and felt the wind bite and howl at my long skirt, muddy and worn at the hem, and the pressure on my feet from the shoes, pinching and not yielding to the frozen ground. I recognized the solemness and the reverence of those around me, the men ashamed and the women scared, and the coffin, of course, black and draped like they need to be, with Bertha's body inside, another human body with a bullet hole in the head.