The Snake River by Win Blevins Read Free Book Online

only child. My mother died of smallpox when I was ten. I got passed around from house to house, and then Reverend Full, Dr. Full’s father, took me in. I moved in when I was thirteen, and Dr. Full was funny about it.”
    She mused on it a moment. “I’ve never quite understood. He didn’t accept me as part of the family. He was the oldest, sixteen, and very much the leader.”
    Flare could well imagine that.
    “I was unruly, I guess, and hoydenish, and…he thought I needed to learn a female’s place.” She grinned. “He still does.”
    She seemed lost in thought for a moment. “Anyway, he insisted the family introduce me as Maggie Jewel, not Maggie Full, and he treated me differently. I asked him once to call me his sister, and he said, ‘Maggie, you are my sister in Christ, but not in the flesh.’
    “That time in my life taught me something great, and even Samuel’s contrariness helped. I went to camp meeting and was saved. My mother taught me to pray but never took me to church. She thought church wasn’t for the poor, the likes of us. When I was saved, I felt God’s presence in my heart for the first time. And when I joined the church, I learned what it means to belong to something larger than yourself, to be part of a community.”
    She brightened. “So it didn’t matter if Samuel treated me like a lost waif. Besides, in less than a year he was gone off, apprenticed to Dr. Chambers. Dr. Chambers was a very fine physician. After that, we saw Dr. Full only on holidays. Then he studied the Gospel. He’s an accomplished man.”
    She smiled in a brittle way at Flare.
    “Miss JOO-wuhl.” It was Annie Lee Full, calling her pot-scrubbing assistant. Mrs. Full never failed to call Miss Jewel to her duty. Seemed to Flare Mrs. Full didn’t see much in life but duty.
    Miss Jewel shrugged helplessly and went off.
    Holy mother of God, but didn’t people spoil it? Bloody people.
    Flare had turned them out in the dark as always and set them on the way before first light and sunrise. The way was unmistakable along the narrow Sweetwater River, and he could leave them to it an hour or so. He told Dr. Full the savages would surely not come after them, but he needed to ride out and check for sign. Which was true enough. He also needed to get clear of human beings for a while.
    How they scratched and clawed at one another! A lad wouldn’t call an adopted child “sister.” Fifteen years gone and her still wanting.
    He remembered as he rode, eyes in the present, mind in the past. His eyes took in all, from long habit, restlessly checking out hilltops, the shadows in coulees, the edges of tree lines, the myriad signs of life of the high plains.
    Flare had never been more right than in running off from home. Nothing for him there. His father owned a printing shop, and there was a living in it. Not enough for five sons, however, and certainly not for the last of them, Michael Devin. So he traded his birthright to his eldest brother for the traditional mess of pottage, in this case a berth to the New World.
    Wasn’t his financial prospects that drove him off, though—rather his prospects in spirit. He’d seen that in his father, God rest his soul.
    Liam O’Flaherty had been a good enough sort of man. Good to his five sons and two daughters, taught them to love above all things song and poetry and Ireland. Taught them to love drink without wanting to, and to love his weakness.
    At the time Flare only knew he had to get out to save his spirit. Not the soul the priests talked about, the spirit. Later he-figured it out.
    Liam O’Flaherty was a trapped man. In his spirit was adventure, as in every man’s spirit. To roam the fine world God gave us, to brave its difficulties, conquer its obstacles, love its maidens. But the only maiden he ever got to love was Flare’s mother, God rest her gaol of a soul.
    They married early. And it was probably early on she learned to keep him bloody well obedient. He went to the shop he