“Mama,” Esther sang. “Guess who I saw riding up the road.” Her good eye held a tell-tale sparkle.

“Stop, you,” Jane replied. To cover her discomfort, she took up her towel and whipped it lightly toward her daughter.

Esther laughed—a girl’s giggle with a woman’s knowing. She’d refused braids that morning and the strong springtime winds rushing into Iowa had knotted her hair. She plucked her best embroidered eyepatch and a brown bonnet from the hook by the door, then actually smoothed her hands down her workday skirt before rushing outside, presumably to meet the man—Mr. Isaiah Hall—in nothing more wicked than bare feet and best intentions.

Jane forced her hands to fold the towel and place it neatly on the table. “Oh, Morris,” she whispered. “Tell me what to do.” But for the past year, Morris had been fully mum on what he wanted from her.

“Mr. Hall,” Jane heard Esther say from up the path. His response was an amiable mumble.

Jane glanced out the window. The new growth of grass had no height or tassels to hide his figure. He tipped his hat to her daughter and rounded the fencepost.

Jane took in a steading breath. At least she had bread baking.

“Good morning, Mrs. Riley.” Like a yard of linen, his voice was raspy and soft, altered by spending his early years inhaling the smoke that bellowed from his company’s engines.

“Mr. Hall, you’ve come again.” The third time in two weeks. “I think my daughter is getting ideas.”

“She’s of that age.” His whiskers twitched over a slight smile.

At the sight of it, Jane’s heart spun on its heel. She pretended her blush was all business and accounting, then made a point of adjusting the black armband she’d worn faithfully since her husband passed away—a year ago last week. He was taken on a May Day stricken with snow. The bad weather had melted away by the time the gravediggers struck ground, and the first anniversary of his death was so warm they could visit his stone without underwoolens or even a wrap.

Every time she touched the armband, she remembered the shirt she’d ripped it from. Morris’ best, dyed black, along with the rest of their clothes. She’d husked the walnuts herself, her hands blackened with the soot of their hulls for weeks. The staining hid the scabs—blisters from the tree’s toxins, cuts from where the slivery spines of the nuts sliced away at her fingers.

Mr. Hall’s gaze fell on the armband as well. “Morris Riley was the best of men,” he said.

Jane had nothing to add to that. She could refute it of course. Morris was a talented farmer—good at knowing the land and the farm hands that worked it for him—but as a husband, he’d often been unkind. He couldn’t hide his disappointment in Esther’s scarred face or his wife’s failure to bear more children. She suspected he’d seen the inside of a brothel or two. He’d gone with Mr. Hall—this very man here—to Iowa City to lobby for statehood, and returned to his marriage bed demanding new things of her.

The memory of those curious weeks sent a spike of yearning into Jane’s womb, for despite his inconsistencies, that renewed attention made her feel cherished and in love all over again. Pleasing him became akin to a purpose.

She focused on the wood grain of her large porridge spoon which she’d unconsciously placed next to the folded towel. Just moments earlier she’d been washing it; it seemed but moments before that when Morris had whittled it from a fallen branch. She let the sight of it bring her back to the present.

“As a colleague,” Mr. Hall was saying. “I was disappointed at losing his valuable common sense. We could have used him at the last convention. But as a friend—” 

Here, he paused and sighed. “As a friend, I was deeply saddened—”

“Is that why you’re here? Checking on an old friend’s widow?” Her voice sounded more petulant than she intended, but she made no apology. Morris had been gone a full four seasons, and only now she received sympathy from Mr. Hall.

“Yes,” he said, drawing the word out slightly. The note of caution in it was explicit, as carefully placed as a metaphor in the patriotic documents he dabbled with at the state’s constitutional conventions. If he experienced any grief at all, he would have assuaged it out there in the world, making toasts and busying himself with politics.

All the while, Jane had been here, slowly waiting for the black walnut staining to fade on her hands. She’d made fresh clothes for her and Esther over the winter, smarting at the price of fabric, wishing she hadn’t been so far gone with grief that she’d permanently stained all of their clothes. Ah well, Esther was growing out of hers anyway.

Jane debated how she would coerce him into admitting the terms of the social contract he was pursuing. She wanted to hear him admit that he coveted the Riley farm—from the peach orchard to the hog pen. That he needed to call himself a property owner, not just a railroad businessman. She wanted to hear him say that he needed a wife, not for her beauty but for her ability as a hostess, so that when he ran for senator or governor or who-could-say, he had all the trappings of a gentleman.

Oh, yes, Jane was not the ignorant girl Morris had discovered at an Ohioan crossroads between her daddy’s farm and the local fishing hollow. And yet, that lovelorn young woman still existed. Inexplicably, a part of her wanted the trappings of a romance. She wanted to hear Mr. Hall whisper love poems in that shush-shush steam engine of a voice.

Mr. Hall’s gaze flicked over to the window where the top of a bonnet dropped out of sight. Esther was listening.

“I brought you this,” he said, presenting her with a small sack tied off with a purple ribbon. She smelled the contents as soon as he brought the bag out of his pocket.

“Coffee?” It was the scent of all the riches torn from the earth—smelted, riveted, re-fashioned, and tamed for the likes of men like him. She could already see herself placing the sack in her cupboard next to the packet of white sugar he’d brought last time. She already looked forward to his next gift, the one after and the one after that until his offer became something intangible but permanent.

And yet, she didn’t reach for it.

Finally, he took her hands, placed them under the bag, and cupped his around hers. She held her breath. The weight of the beans sat balanced between them, so that she dared not pull away.

Perhaps because she still hadn’t moved, he tried to bring her toward him. She stiffened, he relented.

“You are a guest,” she said. “Let me make you a cup.”

While the water boiled, Mr. Hall took up the grinder. The coffee grounds were as black as those grief-leaking walnuts but released an aroma far sweeter.

Jane removed the bread from the oven. Esther whirled through to claim a buttered slice. Her daughter had brought a small basket of early strawberries, some of them just barely flushing pink, like dawn over the fields.

The man settled himself, perhaps already picturing this house as his own. He beckoned to Esther. “Here, child.”

She stood next to him obediently, as if her every hope was to be his friend.

He gestured to his eye, then hers. “Let me see.”

Her mouth turned down, but she checked the frown and removed the eyepatch. He did not react—did not shrink back horrified or touch the puckered scars that dotted the skin around her clouded eye. Jane didn’t expect him to, but tried not to be upset about his level of scrutiny.

“What happened?”

“Spray of embers flew up,” Esther said, making it sound fantastical, magical even.

“Same thing happened to a boiler man I knew,” Mr. Hall said.

“Did he get married?” Esther asked.

He raised his eyebrows. “Married? Of course he did! They say he was the handsomest devil on the B&O line.”

Esther smiled, and Mr. Hall’s face softened. While he sipped the coffee, the girl chattered about her chores, their neighbor’s hound, and her favorite Sunday school verse. He listened, patient and attentive, until Jane sent her daughter back outside to look for riper berries. As much as Esther deserved a father that didn’t cringe at the sight of her face, Jane hesitated to endear herself to the pair of them.

When Esther’s whistle blended into bird song, Jane said, “After Morris died, I was wondering if we should go back or forward. Back east, or forward—out west.”

“Neither,” Mr. Hall said emphatically. “You stay. Iowa is a state now. You’re an Iowan.”

An Iowan. That’s what they called the natives that lived here, and they’d gone west. Been forced to go, she corrected herself. She shook her head at the thought.

Statehood comes with its freedoms, Morris once told her when she asked him why he kept leaving her to pursue an agreement with Congress. It stands to reason the men making the laws would consider their own rules freedom. What would he say about widowhood, about her estatehood, with its mix of liberty and limitations?

“You’ll hate it back east now,” Isaiah Hall continued, “all set in their ways, and out west…? Well, we don’t even have track laid beyond Iowa City.”

“But you will,” she said. They had train engines lined up in Davenport, ready to go as far as Council Bluffs and beyond the Missouri River.

“This is your land, this is Esther’s home.” 

He said Esther’s name with feeling, and Jane wondered at the possibility that he’d grown attached to the girl in the span of a dozen days and a peck of words. The thought made her heartbeat quicken as if in an unexpected panic. She looked for her daughter out the window, but Esther had left them alone this time—the child selectively obedient, as always. In her place Jane focused on a strand of bearded irises, full-skirted now that they’d finally opened.

“It is home, yes, but…” Estatehood comes with its own freedoms.

“But?” he prompted her.

Jane picked her words carefully. “But I could sell this land just as easily.”

She forced her hands to stay clasped in her lap, forced her eyes to keep looking into the bright sunshine. “What I’m saying, Mr. Hall, is that you don’t have to seduce me. I’ll sell the farm to you.”

“Mrs. Jane Riley.” She could hear the smile in his voice, and she broke her stare to look at him again. He offered her a laugh. “Morris was softer than you by a mile.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure.” Her voice caught like a hangnail on the last word. Tears came asudden. “I’m just stale bread, grown hard over time.”

The laughter in his eyes disappeared, and the tears in hers fell. She dabbed at them, and recovered, but he remained silent, his face distant. Maybe he did miss his friend and, like Jane, had spent days reliving the nights passed in Morris’ company. A cold breeze—a whisper of the past winter—pushed its way through the window. It had the effect of shaking him out of his remembrances.

Mr. Hall stood and came to stand before her. “All the money I have,” he said, “all the money I would use to buy this place from you, I’m saving it.”

At this, he took Jane’s hands again and encouraged her to stand. “I’m saving it for when I’ve done my duty in convincing you that you’re worth—” He leaned in and lowered his voice. “Seducing.”

This time, her blush was as brutal as a sunburn; it threatened to lay her out entirely.

“I’m saving that money because you deserve a wedding dress as blue as your eyes, with your daughter in one to match. And when I’m done outfitting you ladies, we will use that money to buy another sow or more chickens or any number of mundane improvements you care to come up with as mistress of this farm.”

“You’re saving that money for the men of Iowa, for convincing them to choose you,” she challenged.

“I will convince them.” He was certain. His face betrayed no naked ambition or latent anger at what needed to be done. He was merely certain. “And you will convince their wives. And Esther will convince their children.”

“Mr. Hall—” She could only whisper.

“Call me Iza.” This time when he pulled her into an embrace, she let him.

Where Morris had been a fence rail, Iza was as broad as the pufferbellies he’d brought to Iowa. When Jane leaned her cheek against his chest, she found it warm like the side of her most beloved dairy cow. All winter, her tears had rolled down the side of that milcher. Iza Hall’s waistcoat soaked up the remnants of them nicely.

“Jane.” Her name on his lips had the weight of prophecy. “What will you tell the other women?”

In the distance the new calf lowed, loud and insistent, like a train whistle across the yard clamoring for goods to fill the bellies of its boxcars. She wouldn’t lie to them about the freedoms of statehood, for she knew Iowa was just another mouth to feed. Perhaps she’d tell these women nothing. She would hold their stained hands and embrace their scarred children.

– Rebecca Halsey

Author’s Note: This story is set in Iowa in the 1840s, when the United States was expanding Westward and continuing the displacement of many indigenous populations. While this is a narrowly focused story describing one white woman’s experience, it’s worth mentioning that the setting is the traditional home of Báxoje Máyaⁿ (Ioway), oθaakiiwaki‧hina‧ki (Sauk), Meškwahki·aša·hina (Fox), Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo), and Jíwere–Ñút’achi Máyaⁿ (Otoe-Missouria) native peoples at the very least. Iowa joined the U.S. as a non-slave state in 1846, its statehood contingent on Florida joining as a slave state at the same time in order to maintain a sordid balance of political power in antebellum America.