The River Widow

by Ann Howard Creel

she was free of him.

There hadn’t been much for her in the world anyway,

People began to fascinate her, not as scientific objects of study but as vessels of soul and desire and spirit, each as unique as an individual leaf or a sparkling stone. She learned that a person’s emotional needs were as important as physical ones.

Love left in spurts with each push, shove, slap, and hit.

Once, she had thought there were a thousand good things ahead of her. But after she married Lester, her dreams, which had at one time seemed so close she could stretch out her fingers to touch them, drifted away like dying stars—shining brightly, then blinking and blinking slowly away into nothingness.

gazed at a world run not by people but by nature.

There was a sense of comfort as she walked the land entrusted to her as Lester’s wife. The shade of old trees, the smell of turned earth, and the unmistakable spirits of other lives before theirs floated on the pollen-rich air.

He had hunted her, then forced her back. He would never have let her go.

After making her own way in the world for so long, she had no intention of letting someone master her. And yet that was exactly what had happened.

Numbness everywhere, no longer human, only a husk of a being. She was already dead. But still she breathed and her heart kept beating. She creaked open her eyes. She was alive even if she didn’t want to be.

And yet there were so many shades of right and wrong, and who was to say which shade made the turn from goodness into sin?

The limb of the family tree that led to Lester had never given up its prejudices,

The women in simple cotton dresses covered by worn coats, wearing soggy boots and holding the hands of young children. The men in overalls, threadbare jackets, and damp hats, carrying a baby or a hastily packed suitcase. Some city workers in hip waders. Younger people helping the elderly. Few people wearing rings or wristwatches. And as always, the colored—in even worse shape—kept separate from the whites.

Many times, as she’d lain in bed next to Lester while he snored, she’d dreamed of walking away, taking nothing but herself to go find her life again, beholden to no one, free of the land she didn’t own, the endless work it took, and the shame of being conquered.

The problem with still, dark nights was their witchy emptiness, which allowed all manner of fears to form and grow.

It was important for Daisy to be able to say these things, to talk to someone who would listen. Adah had watched Father Sparrow counsel church members and had witnessed the benefits when he’d managed to get them to open up and speak of their miseries. She’d seen how even one gentle, caring ear could make a difference.

Over the course of her life, she had learned that people could hold inside the brightest peaks and the darkest pits, and there were those who straddled the break—half of them drawn to evil, half drawn to beauty. Those people could step from one side to the other and back again as if the line were as thin as a strand of hair. Her husband had been one of those people. Was she one of them, too?

Now she had money. Not as much as she still hoped to receive from the farm, but enough to take steps in the right direction. Money could make things happen. Money meant everything. It could buy her freedom

Did this woman own a piano? During the cleanup, more than 2,500 of the estimated 3,200 pianos in the city were found in ruin—only one of the devastating effects of the flood—and would be dumped on the east side of the Illinois Central roundhouse. All that music, silenced.

But solitude had never been a stranger to her. In many ways, it was her best friend.

His line of the Branch family had a deep history of slave ownership, and his treatment of Adah reminded her of what it must have been like to be an indentured servant taunted by her master.

It was honest, pure labor that pumped her heart, opened her lungs, and strengthened her arms and shoulders. She took pleasure in making soiled things clean, hanging clothes on the line with the sun on her back, and folding the scent of fresh air into the items she carefully placed in baskets to return to her customers.

the obligatory front porch—his

The need for release was overwhelming, but not enough to break down her barriers. She could confide in no one, trust no one, not ever. Not completely.

She wished she could take it all back.

If hands could be cruel, they would look like his.

she squinted up to the sky, where a single shaft of sunlight was searching its way through the firmament like a god leaning in with his luminescent arm.

The air froze around her, and the ground vaporized beneath her feet. For a moment, she felt like she was floating. But she could not escape this, and she breathed in the cool air in silent gulps and worked her way back to what was real.

Yes, she could see he was the kind of man who desired knowledge the way that others yearned for success and money.

How strange and fragile were the connections that bound people together.

He was like a geode, hard and scrabbly on the outside, but now she was beginning to see some lovely particles inside.