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Flash Fiction: September 30
The Wolf Ranch is getting a pig delivered tonight.
While it might not seem like a significant event, dinner hinges upon it. Through a series of fortunate circumstances, the Hub and I drove 16 hours from northern Idaho to northern Nevada to pick up a truck and attend our niece’s wedding. This is the first family celebration we have attended since a Mills reunion in 2004, and the first time I’ve been back since 2008 when I had to cut short our vacation for an emergency surgery. I’ve waited for a dinner like this for years. A family dinner.
In 1988 I fled Nevada and my own family of origin. It’s taken years to feel settled enough to visit where my estranged family also resides. Generations of abuse, and I broke the cycle. Now that my children are grown, I no longer feel panicked over their security and welfare. What was most precious to me to protect also required my husband to sacrifice his own roots, healthy roots. It’s a bit of a wonder to return here and not feel anxious. And I’m enjoying the company of Todd’s family.
I feel unburdened and grateful that his family is my family.
Tomorrow the Hub’s mama, M-1, turns 76. I’m writing from her sunny sitting room with its pitched roof, white walls and sheer drapes of sea foam green. Five picture windows open up to the vast desert view of Lahontan Valley, cradled within the towering purple mountains of the Stillwater and Camel Back ranges. The Hub, his father and our oldest daughter were all born in the same hospital. Seven generations of Mills are buried in the sand beneath cottonwood trees in the county cemetery. From where I write, I can see the dairy farm that the Hub’s father built, the irrigation ditches his family helped institute for agriculture, hear the cows lowing and smell the sharp tang of silage and dusty desert air.
It’s different from my own roots, but familiar. Gardens tended to supply meals, cattle raised for meat in the freezer, the joy over getting a pig (bacon!), fruit watered for pies and jams, grains grown to mill and bake into bread. This is why I still grow things in the dirt and insist on knowing where my meat comes from in Idaho. A born buckaroo, after all, has country roots.
Today we picked raspberries at the Wolf Ranch. Wolf Mom, the Hub’s youngest sister, is a feisty Nevada rancher with a soft-spoken buckaroo husband and two vivacious daughters who grew up raising cattle in the most difficult buckaroo regions to ranch. Ranching in northern Nevada is not for the faint at heart. Basin and Range country is high mountain desert where the valleys are at the elevation of our mountains in northern Idaho. The Nevada mountain ranges have more 10,000 and 12,000 foot peaks than any other state in the union. The weather is hot by day, frigid by night and dominated by dryness. Cattle range hundreds of miles.
They’re industrious, these buckaroos, and they love their horses and cattle, calling them “the girls” or “my boy.”
Wolf Mom often gets asked if the Wolf Ranch raises wolves — it’s their last name, but she’s witty enough to point to her daughters and say, “Yup! And there’s my two cubs.” She serves on numerous agriculture boards and fights politics that have little concern for American agriculture, let alone the unique growing conditions of a place most people think of as Las Vegas. Buckaroos are the last of the “real” cowboys, pushing cattle across vast frontiers and living off the land. Wolf Mom’s home sits in a beautiful old grove of cottonwood trees on a bend of the Carson River as it winds its way through sand dunes and sage to dump in the Carson Sink. It’s a landlocked river that is the heart of agriculture in northern Nevada.
Raspberries grow in three thick rows that dwarf my humble canes back home in Idaho. M-1, Wolf Mom and I chatter over the hum of bees, careful not to disturb great orbs of spiders. We wear picking buckets Wolf-Mom makes out of large yogurt containers and baling twine. The Hub and Sis, his oldest sister who I claim as my own, are the only two Mills of their generation to leave Nevada and live elsewhere. Sis made the apron I wear as I gently tug ripe raspberries from the prickly canes. I feel connect to her and the plucky females in the family. You don’t sustain yourself in a region like this without being hearty and having heart.
In the time I’ve reflected on this incredible moment, this presence in a place I didn’t think I’d be both physically and intellectually today, I’ve learned that the pig is not on his way to the Wolf Ranch. Dinner is at the Mills homestead. M-1 rolls her eyes, laughs and returns to bustle in the kitchen, jamming berries, baking bread and preparing spaghetti for the 14 of us that will gather here tonight in this very sitting room, filled with tables for playing pinochle, sharing meals and allowing a corner for the return of the prodigal son and his wife.
Or maybe I’m the prodigal daughter returning to the family that has nurtured me well beyond my own.
In a week filled with unexpected blessings, several more relate to my writing journey. M-1 has a twin sister, M-2 and she has been my dedicated patron, encouraging, reading and getting me off to LA, believing I will publish my manuscripts. She arrives tomorrow from Arizona to celebrate her shared birthday. I get to see her! Today, after picking berries, M-1 took me to where she volunteers as a book binder — the county library. I got the full tour and serendipitously met the director. I asked for her insight on book distribution (a huge concern of mine if I don’t go the traditional route), and turns out she used to be a book buyer and knows the industry. Her advice was in perfect timing and I will use it to make decisions after I go home. She also encouraged me to work with my own local library.
This week, our prompt takes on returning to a place of origin. Sometimes, it’s not our own, just like this is not my own roots, but is my husband’s. Still, it is a return. Think of immigrants or pioneers of old. They may never return, but often their descendants return to search for homeland roots, for connection. Sometimes, we visit a new place and feel at home, grateful for what it has to offer — a better life. No matter the circumstance, think of a return.
September 30, 2015 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story about a return to home. What does it mean to return? Is it to reconnect, discover or let go? It can be a town, house, farm, castle or ruins. It can be a country or family, one of origin or one adopted. What does the return impart?
Respond by October 6, 2015 to be included in the weekly compilation. Rules are here. All writers are welcome!
I’ve often wondered at how Sarah Shull felt when she returned home to North Carolina in her later age. She escaped shunning only to return to a family that still harbored ill-feelings toward her. Many believed she had Cobb’s gold — a myth that still surrounds both of them. Logically, if she had had wealth, Sarah would have never returned “home.” She died in misery, nearly a century old. She is buried next to her and Cobb’s daughter who died at 16 months. It’s her homecoming that I’m exploring in flash this week.
***
Sarah Visits the Cemetery by Charli Mills
The family cemetery remained on the hill. Father’s grave next to Mother’s. White stone spoke their ages. The place itself spoke of Father’s ambition to prosper. Shulls Mill. At one time the name affixed firmly to Father’s store and grain mill with its wooden paddles dipping into Watauga River. Surrounded by tree stumps, a scattering of clapboard houses and a paper mill belching smoke below the hill spoke of the town’s ambition.
The other grave. White, weedy and alone from the rest, it belonged to her baby. An old woman now and she still felt like an erring daughter.
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Coffee for WriMos: Day 20
Relax. Breathe. You’ve got this!
I don’t know about you, but I need a massage. I type one-handed so my right shoulder is starting to burn with marathon writing sprees. I’ve surpassed 33,000 words so I feel like I deserve something relaxing.
Without losing momentum I turned to something horsey since horses have a role in my novel. So I’m sharing a relaxing horse moment with you:
While you write, be sure to take breathing breaks. Stand up, swing your arms overhead, hands to the sky. Breath deep, pushing out your belly so your lungs can fill. Hold…1…2…3…4…5…exhale, swing arms down. Do this four more times and your brain will feel revived, your body oxygenated.
Thought for Day 20:
“You have to relax, write what you write. It sounds easy but it’s really, really hard. One of the things it took me longest to learn was to trust the writing process.” ~Diane Setterfield
Word Count: 1,766
Excerpt From Rock Creek:
Allen stood as tall as Cob and had white streaks starting at his temples. He nodded. “More sensible plan than that of digging holes for elusive metals. Come on up to the house.” He spoke softly to the man with the pitchfork before motioning to Cob and Sarah to follow him.
Sarah stared at the great white columns that held up the front of the house. It reminded her of an illustration she had seen of Washington’s Great White House in the nation’s capitol. She suddenly felt grimy so close to such gleaming whiteness.
Inside Sarah saw polished and gilded furniture, colorful carpets, crystal hurricane lamps mounted on painted walls among portraits and grand scenes of hunting and horses. A negro dressed in finer clothes than Sarah had seen on a person greeted Allen who again, spoke softly. The man walked swiftly away. Sarah had never seen a negro before, though she once heard of bounty hunters passing through Watauga in search of an escapee.
“We’ll prepare you rooms for the night. Separate rooms.” Allen leveled a stare at Sarah that said he knew she wasn’t Mrs. McCanles. She flushed.
“Sarah’s my accountant. She’s going to help me get my business started.” How Cob managed to look as innocent as a newborn babe, she had no idea.
Allen raised one eyebrow and directed his gray-eyed stare at her. “Accountant? And what ledger system do you prefer, Miss Sarah?”
“Nothing complicated. A simple cost management system will do.”
Allen smiled. “Really? And where did you learn accounting?”
“My father. His grandfather was German and taught him a ledger method from that country which differs slightly from what British companies follow. I maintained the cost management of his store.”
“Ah, Father. We have guests from Appalachia passing through. Family. Celia’s boy, David.”
Moses Alexander was once tall, but now his shoulders and back stooped and he walked stiffly, the way Sarah felt some mornings when she woke up cold and aching from the thin ticking of her mattress. His hair was white as the pillars of the porch and his eyes were glazed yet still gray. “Celia,” he said, nodding but not sure he could recall.
“David’s daughter, Father.”
“David’s daughter. The one who married that school teacher from North Carolina?”
Allen cast a sideways glance at Cob. “The very one.”
“Ah, such a pity. Such pretty girls and they both ran off to the highlands.”
“Watauga, Father.”
“Damned highlanders, stealing pretty girls. Louisa? Is Louisa well?”
Cob stood with the bundles at his boots and Sarah fancied he looked every bit of a Robbie Burns hero with his thick black hair and keen brown eyes beneath his broad-brimmed hat set askew and linen scarf wrapped about his neck. “Aunt Louisa is quite well. Her son James Wood will be joining my brother and me out west in our business venture.”
“Business, eh? And who is this mountain filly? Not your wife, I suppose.” He turned his glassy gray eyes on Sarah.
“Miss Sarah is David’s accountant.”
“Accountant! Is that what they’re called these days? Well, not bad for an accountant.” Sarah didn’t like the way Moses was summing her up.
The negro returned and Allen announced that they would be shown to their rooms and that dinner would be served in an hour. The door to Sarah’s room was across the hall from Cob’s. He winked at her before he went in and said, “Don’t worry. Alexander blood is thick. Endure what you must tonight, but tomorrow we’ll be leaving on fine Kentucky horse flesh or my mother will will whip up Grandfather Alexander into a furry that will rain down on Uncle Moses’s head like hail.”
Sarah smiled, but worried about what it was she might have to endure. When she walked into her room, she realized that it was as large as her entire cabin. The bed was so tall that it had steps and was draped in thick tapestry with mauve blossoms on burgundy, swirled with white vines and green leaves as dark as pine needles. The walls were striped with gold and cream with burgundy curtains at the windows that rose taller than her. Paintings of horses on green grass and one of a magnolia tree hung in gilded frames on the walls. Two rose-colored chairs sat facing a crackling fire in a marble fireplace. What heaven did she just walk into?
A woman’s voice chuckled from behind her. “Your bumpkin eyes don’t know where to set do they, girl?”
Sarah turned around to face a woman no taller than she with a massive bosom and a plain dress with a crisp white apron. Her black hair coiled in tight curls beneath a red headscarf and her skin was golden-brown. Her eyes were a light gray. “Hello. Are you one of the Alexanders? I’m Sarah.”
The woman had a booming laugh that could rival one of Cob’s rumblers. “I belong to the Alexanders, girl. I’m Bessie and I run this household. Let’s get you fixed up. We only have an hour and your dishevelment could frighten the Holy Spirit out of a reverend’s mother.”
In an hour, Bessie had transformed Sarah into a fairybook queen. While she bathed Sarah, coiffed her hair and dressed her in a cast-off from Allen’s youngest daughter who was away at boarding school in Virginia, Bessie informed Sarah of who the Alexanders were and where each one was. She spoke of the trouble with catching the chickens that morning, of the latest filly born and the news about the northern aggressors. Sarah didn’t know how the woman could be so swift with her fingers and so fast with her tongue. She could hardly digest all the information.
By the time Bessie introduced Sarah to the corset, she realized that she would endure much discomfort. How in the world did women where such horrid things? Her ribs ached and breathing felt shallow as if she had a boulder pressing down on her. Next came a hoop and a pile of petticoats, which felt strange as if her legs had a private room. But Sarah forgot all about her discomfort when she saw the dress.
Blue and ivory plaid with narrow pink striping, it was trimmed with edged bows. The neckline swooped from shoulder to shoulder and the sleeves were nothing more than caps like the bell of a lily. “This will show off those pretty blue eyes of your, Miss Sarah.” Bessie slipped the softest shoes onto Sarah’s feet that were ivory with leather soles. “You do look presentable, and just in time.”
Bessie led her downstairs to a formal dining room where the men were each holding crystal glasses with dark amber liquid. They all turned and stared at Sarah and she worried that maybe something was wrong with her dress. Why were they staring at her?
“Well, Miss Sarah, for an accountant of German origins you do clean up nicely.” Allen toasted her with his glass.
“Very nice, Lass, very nice. I see why my grand-nephew needs an accountant.”
Cob’s brown eyes the color of the liquid in his glass had deepened into a smoldering stare. “You look beautiful, Sarah.”
For the rest of her life, she’d never forget that dress. Bessie packed her two simple cotton dresses, one the color of dried tobacco with tiny orange flowers and the other a dark hunter plaid with blue and ivory stripes. And as Cob predicted, they left riding two long-legged bays followed by two pack mules, a mare and a filly. Cob was riding a stallion and as his Uncle Moses said, he was leaving Kentucky with the beginnings of the finest horse ranch Pikes Peak would ever see. Cob struck gold barely out of Tennessee.
Coffee for WriMos: Day Ten
Experience what your characters are experiencing.
Unless you are killing off characters. Don’t do that. But like a method actor, crawl inside the experience you are writing. You can do this physically–today we drove up the Pack River one last time because the mountains are filling up with snow and soon we’ll need a snowmobile for the Pack. It was cold and I knew I was working on this chill that Sarah gets so I let myself get cold and thought about Sarah. I came home and wrote 2,500 chilly words.
You can also do this vicariously. Never have we had so many incredible resources so readily available to us as writers. I found photos of the Robbins Hotel from the time period when Sarah had returned to North Carolina. It wasn’t the hotel that struck me with ideas, but the fact that the hills had been strip-logged. Vicariously, I stepped into that photo and let Sarah’s character inform me what it was like to see her childhood home so greatly altered.
Music sets a tone for an era. I’ve been listening to Appalachian music, fiddles and ballads. Last night I found a 1930s radio show that told the story of the 1850s pioneers and had music in the background of the story. Isn’t it amazing what we get to experience as we have this glorious time to free write?
Thought for Day Ten:
“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” ~Ray Bradbury
Word Count: 2,549
Excerpt From Rock Creek:
“Watch your step, Sarah. It’s crumbly, this rocky trail.”
“Oh, yes.” Sarah looked down at her battered leather boots. These weren’t her boots. That’s right; they belonged to a great grand-nephew or another. Her family begrudgingly provided for her as basically as they could.
Once down the hill, Sarah warmed up in Mrs. Williams’ kitchen. She liked Mrs. Williams, Jesse’s mother. Sarah tried tucking her boy-boots beneath her chair, desperately wishing that her dress were longer. Mrs. Williams looked neat and tidy, her dress ironed, her collar crisp. Sarah always kept herself neat and tidy, but she couldn’t seem to remember where she put her hair pins. ”I’m so sorry. My hair is undone.”
Mrs. Williams smiled and fetched a brush and a tin of hair pins. “Sarah, you have such beautiful thick hair. All snowy white.” She carefully brushed Sarah’s hair. “What color was it, dear?”
“Chestnut brown.” That’s what Cob called it. Like the color of a chestnut horse. But it was Mary’s black, inky locks, her pale skin carefully kept from the sun and her blue eyes that were darker than hers that Cob preferred. Sarah’s eyes were more periwinkle, and Mary’s indigo. She felt like she was washed out in Mary’s shadow. He danced with her that night. By the following February, Cob married 15-year old Mary Greene. He was just 19 and Sarah was only 13, nothing worthy of notice. By the time he was 21, Cob was elected the first sheriff of Watauga County, North Carolina. The Sheriff rode his blood bay Captain everywhere. Sarah still watched him and listened for the pounding hooves. It wasn’t until she was 22 that Sarah caught his attention.
Pinning her hair carefully, Mrs. Williams patted the bun and said, “Done. It’s so thick, even now. I’m sure it was beautiful, all chestnut brown.” She smiled down at Sarah.
Voices from the porch announced Jesse had returned with Luna. Sarah stiffened. Mrs. Williams told her to wait and left the kitchen.
“She wants to be in her cabin.” Sarah could tell by the tone that it was Luna speaking.
Mrs.Williams kept her voice low and even. “That’s not a cabin, it’s a dirty shack and not fit for habitation. Especially in this cold.
“I know your family means well, but you are butting into my family’s business. Aunt Sarah was offered a room in our home and she refused it.”
Sarah heard Jesse ask, “The pantry?”
Luna would not like that she told. She didn’t mean to. Jesse was a clever girl and asked so many questions that Sarah had difficulty keeping track of her answers. Some things she wasn’t to tell. Blood in her hair? She didn’t tell them about the blood in her hair, did she?
“It’s the largest room we have available and the cot fit in there just fine.”
“Well, we have a lovely guest room and we will even take on the expenses of caring for Sarah. When is the last time she’s seen a doctor?”
“Old woman’s healthy as a horse. And no need. She’s our kin and you’d be setting tongues to wagging if you took her in.”
“She has a birthday coming up. She and Jesse share a birthday, you know. She’s going to be 98. She should see a doctor and be kept warm and comfortable.”
“You’re after her money. Well, you can’t have it. She’ll remember where she buried it. By the cabin and that’s our property so don’t be nosing up the mountain with shovels.”
Sarah couldn’t remember the money. Luna kept asking her about it. Threatened to twist her arm even, if she didn’t tell. She had no money. If she had money she would have never returned to this place where the Shulls and the Greenes never forgot her sin.
The kitchen door flung open. It was Luna standing in the door frame, frowning. “Get up, Aunt Sarah. We have a room at the hotel for you.”
Sarah got up and followed Luna out the door. Why was Jesse crying and hugging her mother? She didn’t hear Luna say anything mean. But Luna did have a saber for a tongue. Sarah thanked Mrs. Williams. Did she eat dinner? She couldn’t remember. She followed Luna back to the Robbins Hotel. Instead of going inside, Luna led her to the shed. It was dark but Sarah could see a bed in the back. A chair and a table, too. And there were a few more of those military blankets. How did the soldiers keep warm with those?
“You stay inside. Use the employee bathroom. You do remember where it is?”
Sarah nodded, and sat down on the bed.
“You can eat when we bring you food from the kitchen. Do not go looking for food. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“You are not to speak to guests, nor wander the property. Remember, you are a blemish on our good family name. Do not embarrass us further.”
Sarah looked down at her hands on her lap. Those hands looked so old. Cob never lived long enough to have old hands. Neither did Hickok. They both had fast hands and died young. Sarah always did have slow hands.
“When you are ready to tell us where you buried the silver, you can have a a room in the hotel.” Luna smiled an ugly smile. “Because then you would have the money to pay for it.”
“What silver?”
“You stupid old fool! The silver Cob stole from the good people here.” Luna turned and slammed the shed door.
So long ago, Cob sold Captain so they could leave. Sarah carefully pulled out her hair pins and set them on the floor by her bed. She laid down and began to shiver again.
October 29: Flash Fiction Challenge
Peek behind every door.
When you research, you find lots of doors. Some don’t look inviting. Some lead to narrow halls of thinking. Some are too far-fetched. And some doors have already been so thoroughly discussed it doesn’t warrant walking through.
What happens when historians review a single event, over and over, is that ruts appear. It’s kind of like the Oregon Trail itself, or rather, what remains of it. So many heavy wagons trundled across the prairie that the trail is compressed two to three feet below the grassy topsoil. It remains so compacted that nothing grows.
Ruts can occur in thinking, too. And that’s the case with what happened on the day of July 12, 1861 at Rock Creek, Nebraska. We know that three men died by gunshot that day. But history has formed ruts going over the incident and camping out on one idea or another. Soon, no one traveled outside the ruts, only regurgitating what someone else already wrote: Cob was a bully; Hickok saved the day; Rock Creek was owned by the Pony Express.
As a historian, I’ve opened every door (and some I shut quickly, such as the Nichols story that is the equivalent to published twaddle about Elvis sightings). But as a fiction writer I asked, what if…
Flash fiction has allowed me to play with those questions. I wondered, what if Cob was the bully that every historian seems to think he was. Then I wondered if Sarah was capable of setting him up to commit a crime as sheriff (in capacity of tax collector). I wondered how his father felt, his wife, his son, his brother. These are all questions not found in history books, so I wrote to explore plausible answers.
But I found the poetry that Cob’s father wrote and that gave me a glimpse through one door. I discovered that the alleged fraud in NC was never substantiated. I looked in one door that told several stories of Cob “punishing people,” and I compared it to what I found behind another door that told how Cob organized settlers into adjudicating communal law in the territory.
Suddenly, I was seeing different paths outside of the ruts. And really, writing flash fiction has helped me explore these paths and what hid behind doors. Exploration led to insight. And it only took 99 words at a time to figure out the road to a novel based on historical sources. I’ll not be writing in the ruts.
While I’m excited for this journey–I’ll start drafting November 1, using NaNoWriMo as a tool–I’m also nervous. New doors, new paths; where will it all lead? It will certainly be an adventure!
So ruts, it is. You can get stuck in the rut of routine (or your character can). How does he/she or how do you break free? Or the rut can be the focus. What does it look like, feel like and how can it be described? The rut can be an object, like a rut in the path that trips the star cross-country runner.
October 29, 2014 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story about a rut. The rut can be a habit, a circuit or a furrow in a road. It can be what causes the crisis, tension or the need to change. And if your writing feels stuck in a rut, use the flash fiction to do something radical. Who knows what is lurking behind the doors of your imagination!
Respond by November 4 to be included in the weekly compilation.
Cornered by Charli Mills
And still the flow of wagons continued. By day, Sarah took coins from teamsters for crossing Cob’s toll bridge and at night she tallied the income. Cob was amassing a fortune in dimes and silver half-dollars. He’d stop by when he wasn’t building. Last week it was a hay barn for the stage coach company that agreed to make Rock Creek their stop, and this week is was a cabin for the schoolteacher he hired. It all pounded against Sarah–the busy days, the lonely nights. She felt as cornered as the iron-clad wheels that rolled down rutted tracks.
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Rules of Play:
- New Flash Fiction challenge issued at Carrot Ranch each Wednesday by noon (PST).
- Response is to be 99 words. Exactly. No more. No less.
- Response is to include the challenge prompt of the week.
- Post your response on your blog before the following Tuesday by noon (PST) and share your link in the comments section of the challenge that you are responding to.
- If you don’t have a blog or you don’t want to post your flash fiction response on your blog, you may post your response in the comments of the current challenge post.
- Keep it is business-rated if you do post it here, meaning don’t post anything directly on my blog that you wouldn’t want your boss to read.
- Create community among writers: read and comment as your time permits, keeping it fun-spirited.
- Each Tuesday I will post a compilation of the responses for readers.
- You can also follow on Carrot Ranch Communications by “liking” the Facebook page.
- First-time comments are filtered by Word Press and not posted immediately. I’ll find it (it goes to my email) and make sure it gets posted! After you have commented once, the filter will recognize you for future commenting. Sorry for that inconvenience, but I do get frequent and strange SPAM comments, thus I filter.
October 22: Flash Fiction Challenge
Hi. My name is Charli. And I like to hang out in cemeteries.
It sounds like the opening to some Anonymous Group I should belong to, but the truth is I don’t want to quit. For me, it’s about history and discovery. Reading a cemetery is like reading an historical record of a family or community.
I’ve stood in family graveyards where blood of my blood is buried, feeling a strange connection to people long dead before I was ever born. I’ve been to high-desert ghost towns in Nevada, marveling over the marble monuments to those who dared to seek fortunes in remote places. The Radio Geek, now living on the upper peninsula of Michigan, posts photos of old cemeteries to lure me in to visiting.
When I lived in Minnesota, I researched the Hub’s New England family who helped settle the Midwest. I was able to locate the unmarked graves of children lost to the Mills family during times of sickness, Civil War and the Dakota Uprising. Through years of research, I finally found the resting place for a Mills black sheep, reuniting a lost line.
As if my own family research wasn’t enough, I found other excuses to haunt cemeteries. I recorded the names of “lost wives;” the young women who died in childbirth in Dakota County before the 1900s. I looked up the history of every family buried in an old Irish-settlers cemetery near my suburban home.
At my height of cemetery-obsession, I volunteered to do grave look-ups for an organization called, Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness. My kids often went with me, and they still tease me about trying to find abandoned cemeteries by locating “cemetery trees.” It’s true; I can spot an old cemetery a mile away.
Earlier this month I got to kneel at Cob’s grave. After Hickok shot him, James Gordon and James Woods, Cob was buried unceremoniously in a common pine box with Woods on the hill behind Rock Creek Station. When the railroad cut a track through the hill, their box was relocated to the Fairbury Cemetery. I wrote about my impression of finding Mary’s grave next to Cob’s over on Elmira Pond Spotter.
Sometimes, creepy and unexplained things have happen when I’ve been researching cemeteries. Since Halloween is next week, I thought I’d share with you a creepy photograph.
This is from the Fairbury Cemetery, looking west from Cob McCanles’s grave. I didn’t notice anything odd while we were there, but these green lights appeared when I was scanning my photos on my SLR Nikon D80. Creepy, but I figured it was just a sun flare or reflection since I was shooting at the sunset through the trees and markers. But it only got creepier when I enlarged the photo.
I dare you to click on the photo. Full-sized, you’ll see it’s a luminous green fog. What the heck? It reminds me of ectoplasm from Ghostbusters! Pretty creepy and not at all why I hang out in cemeteries.
So I returned to collecting historical data. The next day, we stopped at the Fairbury Cemetery on the way to Rock Creek Station, and I took photographs of the graves near the green fog. Here are a few ghostly suspects and bare-bones data that I found in Census records:
Christiana Sigsworth and Henry Beal. A ship’s log for the Hindao records that Henry, a carpenter by trade, left Southampton, England 24 Jun 1876, bound for Nebraska. Immigration records show that Henry arrived earlier in 1871 and Christiana in 1873, the same year they married. Both were from England and are recorded as living in Fairbury by 1880. Nothing unusual other than Christiana was seven years older than Henry, and that she was 43 years old when they married. She had her two sons prior to Mr. Beal. In 1880 one son is living with them and his last name is Beal. The name Sigsworth on the gravestone did not turn up a single clue. Ghostly or otherwise.
Only a few tantalizing hints from the Beals–her headstone reads, “Mother” and his simply reads, “H.B.” Her name is etched in granite as Sigsworth. Was that her previous married name or maiden name? Why list is at all? Other than the 1880 Census, I can find no trace of Mrs. Beal’s sons, yet in 1900 she claims two have had two births and two living children. Is that enough to be a source of unrest that manifests as green fog? Who knows!
By now you know I’ll be wanting creepy stories from you this week.
October 22, 2014 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a creepy story. It can be prompted by the green fog in the photo, an imaginative idea about the Beals or take place in a cemetery. If other creepy ideas take hold, go for it! We’ll all shudder and be in the mood for Halloween–or grateful for its passing.
Respond by October 28 to be included in the weekly compilation.
Unmarked Graves by Charli Mills
Sarah pushed open the heavy wooden door of the cabin. Behind her the baby wailed and Mary snarled, “I hope the Pawnees scalp you!”
Tears flowed and she twisted her ankle in the deep wagon ruts of the hard packed road. She followed a slight trail through the tall grass turned autumn red. It ended at the two graves marked only by letterless river rocks. Sarah sat by Billy’s grave and cried. Not for Billy, the orphan from North Carolina who only lived two weeks in this Nebraska hell.
Mary wanted her dead and Cob fiddled across the creek.
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The Unmarked Graves of Rock Creek
Rules of Play:
- New Flash Fiction challenge issued at Carrot Ranch each Wednesday by noon (PST).
- Response is to be 99 words. Exactly. No more. No less.
- Response is to include the challenge prompt of the week.
- Post your response on your blog before the following Tuesday by noon (PST) and share your link in the comments section of the challenge that you are responding to.
- If you don’t have a blog or you don’t want to post your flash fiction response on your blog, you may post your response in the comments of the current challenge post.
- Keep it is business-rated if you do post it here, meaning don’t post anything directly on my blog that you wouldn’t want your boss to read.
- Create community among writers: read and comment as your time permits, keeping it fun-spirited.
- Each Tuesday I will post a compilation of the responses for readers.
- You can also follow on Carrot Ranch Communications by “liking” the Facebook page.
- First-time comments are filtered by Word Press and not posted immediately. I’ll find it (it goes to my email) and make sure it gets posted! After you have commented once, the filter will recognize you for future commenting. Sorry for that inconvenience, but I do get frequent and strange SPAM comments, thus I filter.
October 15: Flash Fiction Challenge
Crickets and insects hum like a hidden orchestra tucked away in the dry prairie grass. It’s original grass, the tall feathery stalks that buffalo once grazed. The Oregon Trail is so deep, the ground so compacted that nothing grows in its pale ruts. It cuts across the grass, winds along a muddy creek and opens up to a ranch. Buildings of hewn logs gray in the summer heat and winter wind, held together with chinking. A sturdy wooden bridge traverses the steep gorge of the gurgling waters below, connecting the west ranch to the east.
This is Nebraska in October. The setting is an historical road ranch along the Oregon Trail–the super highway of pioneer wagon trains, Mormon ox carts, gold-seekers on horseback, US Calvary, freighters, stagecoaches and the Pony Express. This is Rock Creek.
Western historian, Joseph Rosa says this about the place:
Rock Creek is situated just six miles from Fairbury, Nebraska. It flows into the Little Blue River from the north. Today, it is little more than a landmark, but in 1861 it was the scene of a quarrel which ended in tragedy–death to three men, and fame to one other. It was here that James Butler Hickok’s legend really started.
No single gunfight, with the possible exception of the Earp-Clanton fight in October, 1881, in Tombstone, Arizona, has caused so much controversy as the Hickok-McCanles affair at Rock Creek on the afternoon of Friday, July 12, 1861.
Controversy. That’s putting it mildly. For over 150 years, people still squabble over who was to blame. Clearly, if you’ve studied the event, it has neither heroes nor villains, yet stories attempt to retell that day in black hats and white. Fantastical tales arise from this affair and rob the humanity of the men involved. It came down to tensions, personalities and a clash of righteousness. Women were involved as much as the primary men.
My goal is to stand where Sarah Shull stood as the events unfolded; to stand where Cob bled out in front of the cabin door; to see where Hickok made his daring shot through the curtain and the women in the kitchen. I was disappointed in that regard. The replica cabin is built incomplete.
There’s only one known photograph of Rock Creek Station prior to 1861. While several people, including Cob’s son, Monroe, have drawn diagrams and sketches, the replica is based on what can be seen in the photograph. It only has one door and lacks the common kitchen I had imagined as an alcove off of the main cabin. The interpretive center describes the missing section as a lean-to. The second door in proximity to the curtain and kitchen is crucial, yet omitted.
Expectations often lead us astray. What I expected to see was not there and was the root of my disappointment. Sometimes this is true of writing. We expect the story to go a certain way and it does not. But we can also find gold in those dashed expectations if only we let go enough to see a different view.
One view of Rock Creek was crystal clear–the west cabin where Sarah most likely lived at the time Hickok was tending horses at the east ranch would have afforded the two the perfect view of one another. In an earlier flash fiction, I wrote that Sarah watched Hickok with the horses every morning. From visiting Rock Creek I now know that this a plausible scenario.
What does it mean? I don’t know, yet. I’m preparing to let the research settle and the characters inform the story through the writing process. Once I have a draft, I’ll return to the research and make certain that details are historically accurate and my characters believable. I’ve decided to call my WIP, Rock Creek because the place is key to the characters’ conflicts and ultimate crisis. In preparation for writing, I created a mock-up cover.
Back to expectations. I hadn’t expected to find Mary McCanles buried next to Cob, her grave reading “wife of D.C. McCanles.” I have several new ideas about her–she never stopped loving Cob and she never returned to North Carolina. I encountered a new person, a young girl in the kitchen with Sarah Shull and Jane Wellman the day of the incident. She fabricates a story that makes my blood boil with anger and she earned herself a place in my novel as an antagonistic character who stirs up strife.
I hadn’t expected to feel at peace at Rock Creek. I wonder if Sarah felt that there, or if it was Mary. After all, Mary McCanles was the only one who stayed in the area. Her tea pot and rocking chair from North Carolina reside at the visitor’s center. Maybe Sarah never felt settled after leaving North Carolina.
Beyond my expectations was the owner of the Fairbury Executive Suites. Julia Katz has a gilded touch for interior design and marketing. Her place is a bakery, espresso and wine bar, antique and craft store with suites above the retail center. We stayed in the Manhattan Suite with its red and gold decor, full kitchen, two bedroom with feather beds and cotton robes for each guest. That such a place existed in rural Nebraska, I had no idea!
Julia also put me in contact with a McCandless cousin who is also writing about Rock Creek. He’s an actor, playwright and theater professor in Nebraska. I hadn’t expected that at all. I called him while in Nebraska and he shares my passion for the family, the story and for getting into the minds of the characters to tell it.
Expectations can set up our characters for disappointment or surprise. Expectations can foreshadow, enhance a setting, or create a plot twist. What expectations are lurking in your stories?
October 15, 2014 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story that has an expectation met or missed. It can be an implied expectation to your reader, or a character’s expectation for an outcome. Think of how expectations can direct a story.
End of the Trail by Charli Mills
In the dark Sarah stood at the embankment, brushy and weedy. She’d never seen grass tall enough to hide prairie wolves or fierce Pawnees. The thought should have pushed her back to the safety of the campfires where Cob sawed an Appalachian reel on his violin. She could hear the thud of men’s boots on the hard-packed ground as they danced and whooped. Cob wanted to buy this road ranch and build a toll bridge across the narrow gorge of Rock Creek. Toiling days and rowdy nights on the Oregon Trail was not a fair exchange for North Carolina.
###
West Cabin Across Rock Creek From East Corrals
Rules of Play:
- New Flash Fiction challenge issued at Carrot Ranch each Wednesday by noon (PST).
- Response is to be 99 words. Exactly. No more. No less.
- Response is to include the challenge prompt of the week.
- Post your response on your blog before the following Tuesday by noon (PST) and share your link in the comments section of the challenge that you are responding to.
- If you don’t have a blog or you don’t want to post your flash fiction response on your blog, you may post your response in the comments of the current challenge post.
- Keep it is business-rated if you do post it here, meaning don’t post anything directly on my blog that you wouldn’t want your boss to read.
- Create community among writers: read and comment as your time permits, keeping it fun-spirited.
- Each Tuesday I will post a compilation of the responses for readers.
- You can also follow on Carrot Ranch Communications by “liking” the Facebook page.
- First-time comments are filtered by Word Press and not posted immediately. I’ll find it (it goes to my email) and make sure it gets posted! After you have commented once, the filter will recognize you for future commenting. Sorry for that inconvenience, but I do get frequent and strange SPAM comments, thus I filter.
October 1: Flash Fiction Challenge
It was the second day of the Hearts of Gold Festival, late August when the desert air of Fallon, Nevada felt like the inside of a clay oven. My husband was hawking hearts of gold cantaloupe with a childhood friend who farmed the melons. I was slicing orange-fleshed samples that were as refreshing as sherbert on a hot day. Nearby, our 10-month-old daughter in her Wrangler diaper cover, red-and-white striped top and straw cowgirl hat was riding green watermelons like a pony.
Riding Wild Watermelons
Today is the first day of October, yet my mind wanders back to this one in August a quarter of a century ago. My Wild Watermelon Rider will soon celebrate another autumn birthday and I’m ever so grateful. We almost lost her that day.
Recently, someone who knows us mutually online commented about my daughter, “Is there anything she can’t do?” Modestly, I can reply that Watermelon Rider is a typical first-born, a high-achiever. I could boast in ten thousand words what incredible talent she has with which to line her many achievements. But I’ll spare you a bragging mother, and her some privacy.
I almost missed seeing her her in ballet slippers, arctic parka and wearing her radio producer Muppet-like sound recording gear. On that day long ago, Watermelon Rider disappeared.
Where could a baby–a baby!–dash off to? I was slicing, Todd was hawking, she was gone.
Panic flushed the crowd. This was a close community and one of their own was missing. As people spread out to look, I called her name in sobbing tones. Shortly, the rodeo announcer paged the “parents of a missing three-year-old.” Oh, my God, someone else’s child was missing, too! Was it a serial kidnapper come to prey on a sleepy farm-town festival?
We’d later find out that the announcer couldn’t tell the difference between a 10-month-old and three-year-old. The child he spotted was ours. He was horrified because he could see from his lofty view over the rodeo arena that a tiny tot all alone was ambling to the tug-o-war pit–a wide and deep expanse of water and mud built for one team to drag another through. He was afraid she’d go in and made the hasty announcement.
Her Dad found our wee Watermelon Rider and we were like drunken sailors trying to find our shore legs after that. In retrospect, she wasn’t missing for long but long enough for me to write a series of thrillers out of all the thoughts that battered my imagination. It made me realize that there are worse things than death. The word gone stops my heart.
For the remainder of motherhood–two more joined their sister in giving me frets–I developed a quivering fear that my children would disappear and I would never know what happened. This fear drove me to watch shows like America’s Most Wanted, hosted by a man whose son disappeared in the 1980s; a heartbreaking mystery never resolved. Cold Case Files and Missing tortured my thoughts with fates I swore I couldn’t bare.
Somehow, we all survived their childhood. There’s nothing like in-the-trenches experience to conquer fear and as they matured, I began to let go of that idea of “the worst thing that could happen” and savor the moments I had with each.
Then a morbid thought came to me this past weekend as I worked on the last revision of my novel. I came to a point where I felt satisfied. There’s still work, there’s still the editor and no one has yet picked up my glass slipper and made me a writing princess with a publishing contract. But I’m satisfied to say, “I wrote a novel.” And the queer thought that came to me was, I can die now.
It surprised me, the peaceful feeling that came to rest, knowing I could die and not regret ever having written a book. It’s not published, but that doesn’t matter. I’ve finished something I’ve wanted to do since childhood. Instead of being shamed in death by volumes of notes, journals and incomplete stories–I’d leave behind proof that I did this. It fulfills me. I laughed off the idea that I was ready to meet my maker.
Until I suffered an ocular migraine on Sunday. I have had two in my life, both under extreme duress and within days of each other. I went blind, total darkness. This happened decades ago, when I escaped a bad situation. The terror of escape brought on the migraines and I’ve not had cause to experience one since.
Except that I gave up coffee a week ago. And replaced it with black tea. Caffeine has never left a noticeable calling card for me. I don’t get jittery or headaches. But this new tea–organic, expensive and not my cuppa evidently–caused an eye spasm that triggered an ocular migraine. I’ve since eliminated the tea and have not had a re-occurrence. Back to the safety of coffee.
Knowing that the weird zig-zaggy flashing lights are the first sign of going blind, I panicked. Because I was not even remotely stressed, and hadn’t yet connected it to the tea, I didn’t know why it was happening. I tried to ignore it, but soon I couldn’t read my own writing on the screen.
And that’s when I realized that although I was accepting of death now, the worst thing that could happen to me is to go blind. I’m visual. I write visually. I’m not auditory and when I speak I often say things like, “It’s better in writing.” I’ve come to trust that if I write, I’ll discover the story on the page. But what if I can’t see the page? I depend upon my eyes for my craft.
This week we’re going to poke a stick at our hidden fears–or those of our characters. Anne Goodwin wrote a review of literary dementia on her blog Annecdotal and recites a masterful passage by author, Michael Ignatieff from his novel Scar Tissue, as he describes a character facing the same deterioration of dementia as he witnessed in his parents.
She challenges anyone to come up with a better description of terror.
Yet fears can be quirky, too and an interesting way to create unique characters. Amber Prince wrote this week that she fears teeth (congratulations, Amber, on your One Lovely Blog Award and thank you for sharing). While it made me chuckle and recall wriggling baby teeth, I also thought it would be a brilliant quirk to give a character. It’s such details that build the story.
October 1, 2014 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) show a character confronting something worse than death. It can be a universal fear or something unique to the character. What does this fear reveal about motive? Does it color the tone, deepen the plot or add to absurdity? Go ahead, poke a pencil at fear this week.
It’s an interesting question for me to ask of Sarah Shull. History is vague on what she did after Hickok shot and killed Cob McCanles at Rock Creek July 12, 1861. Legend says that the Pony Express put Sarah on a stage the next day. That Sarah left Rock Creek the next day after the incident is most likely, and historian Mark Dugan suggests she lived with Cob’s brother Leroy at least until August 12, 1861. Sarah faced death at Rock Creek. What more did she fear?
Widows by Charli Mills
“You were fixing to leave again, weren’t you?” Mary climbed the buckboard to sit next to Sarah. “With Cob?”
Sarah stared at buffalo grass on the prairie horizon, waiting for Leroy. He was taking her to his ranch north, but wanted to see his nephew before they left Rock Creek. “Maybe.”
“Why keep running? You afraid I’ll follow?”
“Wasn’t me running this time. I don’t want to be mocked. And I don’t want to be alone.”
“I’ll not go back to Carolina a widow. They shunned me, too, Sarah.”
Sarah shuddered despite the summer sun. Not that. Never again.
###
Rules of Play:
- New Flash Fiction challenge issued at Carrot Ranch each Wednesday by noon (PST).
- Response is to be 99 words. Exactly. No more. No less.
- Response is to include the challenge prompt of the week.
- Post your response on your blog before the following Tuesday by noon (PST) and share your link in the comments section of the challenge that you are responding to.
- If you don’t have a blog or you don’t want to post your flash fiction response on your blog, you may post your response in the comments of the current challenge post.
- Keep it is business-rated if you do post it here, meaning don’t post anything directly on my blog that you wouldn’t want your boss to read.
- Create community among writers: read and comment as your time permits, keeping it fun-spirited.
- Each Tuesday I will post a compilation of the responses for readers.
- You can also follow on Carrot Ranch Communications by “liking” the Facebook page.
- First-time comments are filtered by Word Press and not posted immediately. I’ll find it (it goes to my email) and make sure it gets posted! After you have commented once, the filter will recognize you for future commenting. Sorry for that inconvenience, but I do get frequent and strange SPAM comments, thus I filter.
September 24: Flash Fiction Challenge
“You can call me ‘spots’,” says the diminutive woman with hair so white and eyes so blue that I don’t notice the spots she’s referring to. She holds out an arm and points to two healing spots where recent moles were removed.
“Oh, well, you can call me ‘freckles’,” I respond, holding out my own arm to hers noting that we both have a generous sprinkling of freckles. Maybe when I’m pushing 80 I’ll have spots, too.
“You seem nice,” she says looking at me. And I’m relieved. She seems nice, too.
The drive from Elmira to western Montana is not long, but the road winds along the bank of the vast Clark Fork River as it cuts through Cabinet Gorge. My husband humors himself by taking the curves, suggesting we should go faster. I’m not humored. I’m nervous. Not because of Todd’s driving, as of this past Friday I have officially endured 27 years of it, but because I’m meeting a woman whom I’ve met online for the first time.
Bobbie is my husband’s third cousin once removed. She’s my father-in-law’s second cousin and just a few years older than he is. We met through a genealogist who was trying to help Bobbie trace her paternal family line. It turns out that Bobbie is a Mills (something she never knew until we met) and she descends from the one black sheep I couldn’t track.
With the help of the genealogist, we were able to repair a broken branch in the family tree. You can read about the story at “Tracking a Black Sheep.” By coincidence, she and her husband like to camp near my home. She also likes history as much as I do.
Sitting on the hulking campground table I spread out my three-ring binders and carefully unwrap a photo album that is over 150 years old. In it is an 1850s photo of her great-grandfather. She tells me she hardly knew her father. He hardly knew his and her grandfather didn’t know the man in the photo album at all. This broken chain fractures each link.
Blue skies. In the fall, the skies seem so deep blue. The sun is not so hot as to feel like it scours everything, washing away color, nor is it icy yet. We sit under these blue skies, repairing the broken links. From Bobbie’s perspective, it’s come at the end of life. She’s uncertain how much longer she will be around, phrases I try to ignore.
When she gets out her notebook and starts writing down her grown children’s names, addresses, emails and even cell phone numbers, I’m struck at how important it is to her that the chain continues. She wants her children to know who they are. I receive the piece of paper as reverently as she holds the photo of her great-grandfather.
We leave, hugging like family, swapping final jabs of humor as if we’ve known each other a lifetime, and drive away. It hits me that I’ll most likely not see this woman again. It was the one meeting of our lifetime. It brings to mind lyrics from the song Promises by local musician John Shipe:
“Blue skies won’t wait for you, blue skies don’t wait for you,
To put you in the mood, to put you in the mood, to put you in the mood,
For sunshine…”
We have to go after those blue skies, go seek our dreams, find missing links and decide to greet another day. Death often stuns us when the rest of the world continues. Each day, each patch of blue sky encourages us in living. We can’t wait to be in the mood for it.
This week’s prompt is a phrase. When I heard the John Shipe song after meeting Bobbie, I thought of Sarah Shull and blue skies. The intent of the song is not to ponder death, nor is that the prompt. But “blue skies won’t wait for you” made me consider all the things Sarah waited for in her life and how they ended abruptly one fateful day at Rock Creek.
I wonder if Bobbie’s great-grandfather waited for the right moment to reunite with the son he left as a baby, only to discover that his son died first.
September 24, 2014 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) include a story where “blue skies won’t wait for you.” What is your character waiting for? Is it too late or does the impulse come in time? Maybe blue skies are a calling. Try not to think to deeply, and do a quick free-write. Invite your unconscious mind to the page and see what it makes of the phrase.
I don’t know if I’ve pulled off what I’m feeling inside about Sarah Shull and what it was like for her the day after Hickok shot Cob. What I like about flash fiction is that it challenges me to bring that feeling out without telling you the story of it. But like all practice, we try, try and try again until we get the lines right. This is my first go at it.
The Day After by Charli Mills
“I’m not ready for this.” Sarah had spent the long night alone at the sod house, scrubbing congealed blood from her hair. The stained dress she burned in the woodstove. Several Pony Express riders came by to convince her leave on the morning stage to Denver. Hickok was not one of them.
Leroy settled a trunk with her belongings in the back of the buckboard. “It’s best you come with me, Sarah. Emotions are running hot.”
“Cob?”
“He’s dead.”
“I know. But…a funeral?”
“He’s already in the ground.”
“Mama tried to tell me ‘blue skies won’t wait for you.’”
###
Rules of Play:
- New Flash Fiction challenge issued at Carrot Ranch each Wednesday by noon (PST).
- Response is to be 99 words. Exactly. No more. No less.
- Response is to include the challenge prompt of the week.
- Post your response on your blog before the following Tuesday by noon (PST) and share your link in the comments section of the challenge that you are responding to.
- If you don’t have a blog or you don’t want to post your flash fiction response on your blog, you may post your response in the comments of the current challenge post.
- Keep it is business-rated if you do post it here, meaning don’t post anything directly on my blog that you wouldn’t want your boss to read.
- Create community among writers: read and comment as your time permits, keeping it fun-spirited.
- Each Tuesday I will post a compilation of the responses for readers.
- You can also follow on Carrot Ranch Communications by “liking” the Facebook page.
- First-time comments are filtered by Word Press and not posted immediately. I’ll find it (it goes to my email) and make sure it gets posted! After you have commented once, the filter will recognize you for future commenting. Sorry for that inconvenience, but I do get frequent and strange SPAM comments, thus I filter.
September 10: Flash Fiction Challenge
“Hey, Baby, what’s your sign?”
It’s a cheesy pick-up line that brings to mind a stereotypical caricature of a slick-haired, middle-aged man wearing gold chains and polyester disco pants trying to hit on a woman more hip to the 21st century.
The zodiac is a zone in the sky that follows the path of the sun, moon and significant planets. It’s divided into 12 equal parts with each one representing a zodiac sign used to determine one’s horoscope (a destiny governed by the stars).
While I’m not interested in predicting futures, I am interested in signs. It was the first influence I encountered in regards to personality traits. As a kid, I didn’t read my horoscope to determine my day, I read it to gain a greater sense of self-awareness.
Once I got into management, my interest turned to personality types and how teams could work together more effectively. Through leadership training, I learned about Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. It’s based on a Jungian theory about behavior and personality types.
Later I got into following strengths-based psychology because it develops the opportunity to do one’s best. Personally, I like to review my own strengths when feeling blocked or negative. Self-awareness continues to be important part of my writing, to better understand who I am and what this world and humanity are all about.
Over they years, I’ve attended writing workshops and read books that discuss personality traits of characters. Usually, I get to know my characters through writing so I haven’t yet used any kind of assessment for my characters, although I believe it’s a plausible pursuit.
However, I’m in an unique position to know the signs of my characters Sarah Shull, Cob McCanles and Wild Bill Hickok. They were real people with real birth-dates. It was while writing out my research cards that I recognized Hickok as a fellow Gemini. It got me wondering. Turns out that Sarah is a Libra and Cob a Sagittarius. What does this mean? I didn’t know but I thought it was worth exploring so I went to The Secret Language to look up their birth-dates.
What a gold mine of insight I found there! If you’ve been following my flash fiction, then you know I’ve been using it to explore the relationships of these three. I’m interested in who they are as holistic people, not as one-dimensional heroes or villains that legend has made of them. In knowing their signs (based on their day, month and even historic year of birth) I felt as though I got to better understand who they were.
Sarah Shull: “Prone to exhibitionism, those born on this day are never happier than when they are the center of attention in any gathering. It is extremely difficult for them to go unnoticed, and although they can spend long periods alone, they need to emerge periodically and be recognized for who they are.”
Does this sound like a woman who would take being shunned by her community or set aside by her lover? Oh, I feel the plot thickening already.
Cob McCanles: “Most November 30 people also have a fine sense of humor that is subtle, but it can also expand to the full-out thigh-slapping, raucous guffaw as well. Excellent mimics, those born on this day use satire in such a subtle way that others may miss the intention…almost. Their humor is indeed of the thought-provoking variety.”
Now I believe that it’s true (according to the stories passed down in my family) that Cob teased Hickok mercilessly and dubbed him “Duck Bill” because of his nose and lip.
Wild Bill Hickok: “Generally on the side of the individual, they hate oppression and exploitation, opposing them both in theory and in practice. These people will not usually back down from a fight. Naturally combative, they stick up for what they believe is right and will not hesitate to attack wrongdoing in any form, be it moral or practical, for these individuals believe there is a right way and a wrong way to do things, and that only the right way will yield uniformly positive results.”
This trait supports my theory that Hickok believed he was protecting the oppressed–be that Sarah, or the station manager and his wife on the day Cob showed up to “clean up” on Rock Creek.
Further, the horoscope site let me use a relationship finder. I wasn’t surprised to find out that Cob’s and Hickok’s personalities clash, or that Cob and Sarah naturally had an easy physicality that was hard to suppress and prone to flirtation. That helps shed light on the question of why Cob had an affair with Sarah. As to her relationship with Hickok, it was one that was fun and relaxed. Even just as friends, their enjoyment could have caused Cob jealousy.
So in honor of signs, we will explore the influence of the stars this week. You can explore the 12 signs to see if a particular one fits a character you are developing. Or maybe a particular sign gives you a story idea, a nugget of the unseen influencing lives. While you don’t have to be cheesy like that guy asking, “Hey, Baby, what’s your sign?” you can have your characters explore horoscopes as a topic.
September 10, 2014 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) focus on the personality traits of a character informed by the zodiac. It can be a revelation of how he or she acts or a focus on behavior because of personality traits. It can be a relationship ruled by the stars. You can have fun and exaggerate, or keep it subtle and refined. You can use zodiac terms or not.
Respond by noon (PST) Tuesday, September 16 to be included in the compilation.
When I started to write, two stories emerged. It must be in today’s horoscope for Geminis.
For the Fun of It by Charli Mills
“I don’t know Cob, he was born in the spring. He’s fresh as peach blossoms.” Sarah smiled, pouring coffee at the woodstove. She sat down next to him at the table with two enamel mugs. Autumn sunshine and cool air sifted through the open door of the sod house.
Sipping her cup, she leaned into Cob. “Hickok means nothing to me. I just hate being holed up by myself. He’s fun, that’s all.”
“Funny looking,” said Cob. “He’s got that duckbill look. Quack, quack. Sara’s fun friend, quack quack.”
“Somebody call my name?” Hickok’s tall frame filled the doorway.
###
Stars and Seasons by Charli Mills
“In 1858 a comet streaked across the sky,” Sarah said in between bites of apple cobbler. The Williams family seated around their polished dining table listened, spoons clinking on fine china. “It was destiny. Something I was born to do.” Sarah stared into her empty bowl.
Jesse Williams, twelve years old, shared the same birthday with the vagrant old crone her mother pitied. “Was it in the stars to go west, Aunt Sarah?”
Sarah barely nodded, still looking down as if viewing a sad painting. “Peach blossoms and fiery fall maple leaves are not meant for the same season.”
###
Rules of Play:
- New Flash Fiction challenge issued at Carrot Ranch each Wednesday by noon (PST).
- Response is to be 99 words. Exactly. No more. No less.
- Response is to include the challenge prompt of the week.
- Post your response on your blog before the following Tuesday by noon (PST) and share your link in the comments section of the challenge that you are responding to.
- If you don’t have a blog or you don’t want to post your flash fiction response on your blog, you may post your response in the comments of the current challenge post.
- Keep it is business-rated if you do post it here, meaning don’t post anything directly on my blog that you wouldn’t want your boss to read.
- Create community among writers: read and comment as your time permits, keeping it fun-spirited.
- Each Tuesday I will post a compilation of the responses for readers.
- You can also follow on Carrot Ranch Communications by “liking” the Facebook page.
- First-time comments are filtered by Word Press and not posted immediately. I’ll find it (it goes to my email) and make sure it gets posted! After you have commented once, the filter will recognize you for future commenting. Sorry for that inconvenience, but I do get frequent and strange SPAM comments, thus I filter.
July 30: Flash Fiction Challenge
Summer sunlight blazes through the cracks between drawn curtains, creating bars of light across my dog as we all huddle inside the shadows to escape the heat. We have no air-conditioning because it’s rarely needed. Today, I can empathize with those hardy pioneers who settled on the prairie and endured summers without modern conveniences.
My office upstairs feels like a stuffy attic so I’m writing at my kitchen desk; books scatter across the dining-room table as I try to make sense of recent research. There are cracks in the stories that historians tell about Wild Bill Hickok. Cracks also in my loyalty to kin as I realize I’m becoming enamored with Hickok like some wild-west-junkie.
Researching Sarah, Cob & Hickok
Hickok biographer, Joseph G. Rosa, has both deepened the spell and broken it. Rosa himself fell in love with the idea of Hickok as hero when he watched Gary Cooper portray Hickok in the 1936 movie, The Plainsman. Called “highly fictional,” it nonetheless sent Rosa on a lifelong search for who Hickok really was as a man.
Rosa would discover that early Hickok historians were often highly fictional, too. While some based their stories on exaggerated newspaper accounts, including the one that launched the whole “M’Kandlas Gang” myth into existence, others nagged the Hickok family for facts, or made up their own. One even harassed a 93-year-old Sarah Shull until she confessed to historian, F. J. Wilstach, that David Colbert McCanles was a “horse-thief for the Confederacy.” Even Rosa says that Sarah most likely told Wilstach what he wanted to hear so he’d leave her in peace. Historian, Mark Dugan, goes deeper to surmise that Sarah would rather confess McCanles as a horse-thief than as her lover.
That Sarah was Cob’s lover is documented by my 4th-great grandfather, James McCanles who was Cob’s father. Sarah had a baby out of wedlock in 1856. A year later, the baby died but was memorialized in a poem that James wrote to his granddaughter. That shows the McCanles family accepted the girl as one of their own. Also, it is documented that Sarah’s father refused to grind corn for James after 1856, and it’s known locally that he shunned his own daughter. He did not accept the baby born out of wedlock and held the McCanles family accountable.
“Cob” was a familial nickname, probably derived from David’s middle name Colbert, phonetically making the “l” in “Colb” silent. In recognizing the phonetics, you can almost hear the deep southern drawl in how the name was pronounced, “Cawb.” It’s important to remember that his name was perceived as southern as we consider the misconception of historians, including Rosa, that because Cob was southern, he was a Confederate sympathizer. Absolutely not. I’ve extensively researched the duality of Civil War sides in my North Carolina kin, having ancestors that fought brother-against-brother. I have records that show the dividing lines, and the McCanles men were Unionists.
Where historians make their assumption is in the bloody scrimmages that marked the Kansas-Missouri territory as “bleeding Kansas.” Here, staunch abolitionists went toe-to-toe with diehard slavers over the issue of slave-states as America expanded west. The Hickok family came from Illinois and were abolitionists, even participating in the underground railroad. Thus, historians pit McCanles against Hickok as part of the border ruffian battles. While Cob wasn’t necessarily for or against slavery, he was staunchly opposed to succession. Ultimately, both men were pro-union but for different reasons. So nix the idea that Cob was doing anything on behalf of the Confederacy.
But what was he doing out west? Several historians in the 1920s dug up information that Cob had made off with tax-payer money as sheriff of Watauga County, NC. Court records substantiate this claim, although most historians, Rosa included, rely on the hearsay accounts of historian, J. P. Arthur. And here’s another crack: if Arthur is correct, and court documents do show multiple parties involved in a scheme, then Cob was not the only one who benefited.
Consider this–your buddy says, “Hey, I know how we can scam the system.” If the scam includes only your buddy getting money with your help, you’d probably pass. But if the scam means that you get money too, then you’d be more likely to get involved. So, to say that Cob was helped by his brother Leroy, the deputy and his kin, the Coffey kin and several others, you have to wonder what was in it for them. Cob might have left North Carolina with his pockets lined, but who else lined their pockets, too?
This leads to an interesting, unexplored crack. While historians take sides regarding why and how Hickok shot Cob, and families ruffle feathers over the bad light old tales cast on dead ancestors, we have failed to consider Sarah’s role beyond that of mistress. Women are crafty, too. Consider what Arthur writes about Cob:
“McCanless was a strikingly handsome man and well-behaved, useful citizen till he became involved with a woman not his wife, after which he fell into evil courses.”
Add that thought to the skills that Dugan attributes to Sarah:
“As the children [Shull] grew to adulthood, they would help run the mill or work in the store. Following her arrival in Nebraska in 1859, Sarah reportedly kept books for McCanles and undoubtedly learned this while working in her father’s store.”
If Cob didn’t go wayward until 1855 when he met Sarah, who was 21 and working in her father’s store, is it possible that she–as an experienced accountant–came up with the scheme to defraud tax-payer money. Her motive? To leave town where she had been shunned, buried a baby and master-minded a fraud to fund her new life out west. Because after the money changed hands, that’s exactly what she and Cob did. They left.
Other cracks that seem minor, discrepancies such as whether or not Sarah left after Cob’s death, or how Hickok was injured before coming to Rock Creek are difficult to prove or disprove. So many historians rely on the accounts of others. Rosa discredits earlier Hickok biographers but then relies on their same work to show McCanles as a sadist horse-thieving Confederate bully. Rosa fully cites from Hickok’s great-nephew, but sneers at Cob’s son who shares his eye-witness account of the Rock Creek incident because it was published 50 years later.
My conclusion: historians are all cracked.
While I hope to one day write a fictional account of Sarah, Cob and Hickok as a BOTS (based on a true story) it’s hard to sift out what is true. That I fell for the legend that is Hickok is partly because of letters Rosa published from him as a young man, first arrived in Kansas Territory. So full of enthusiasm, humor and adventure it’s hard not to love the boy he must have been. I hope to find that in Cob, too and certainly I feel sad for Sarah who lived long knowing the real reasons for what happened that hot summer day on the prairie in 1861.
Let’s Get On With It!
If you haven’t already guessed, I’m exploring cracks. We crack-up at jokes; we call the mentally-crazed “cracked”; we know it as slang for cocaine, a sharp retort, a split, a change in voice. There are cracks in times, cracks on her face, and worrisome cracks across thin-ice. What a wonderfully rich word is found in crack.
July 30, 2014 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story that involves a crack. It’s a rich word, full of possibility. Do cracks reveal something to you, something beyond the surface? Take a crack at this prompt and respond by noon (PST) Tuesday, August 5 to be included in the compilation.
Calico Curtains by Charli Mills
Sarah stared at the crack between calico curtains. Cob had teased her when she hung the divide.
“Why the bed veil? I like watching you stir the fire from here, Rosebud.” He reclined on the trundle bed, leaning on an elbow. Thick black hair tousled. Blue eyes shining like summer sky on water. She remembered smiling, abandoning her task.
Her ears rung as acrid smoke drifted from parted calico. Cob had just come to the back door, asking for water, touching her fingers lightly as she passed the cup.
It was the perfect place to hide, behind those curtains.
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Rules of Play:
New Flash Fiction challenge issued at Carrot Ranch each Wednesday by noon (PST).
Response is to be 99 words. Exactly. No more. No less.
Response is to include the challenge prompt of the week.
Post your response on your blog before the following Tuesday by noon (PST) and share your link in the comments section of the challenge that you are responding to.
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Create community among writers: read and comment as your time permits, keeping it fun-spirited.
Each Tuesday I will post a compilation of the responses for readers.
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