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The kitchen, Waverly decides, is as good a place to start as any. She’d had to enter the house through there first, the planks holding up the porch were so rotten. The two-eyed wood burning stove stood sentinel in the corner with its pipes sagging under the weight of the dust that coated it. The firebox door hung ajar and she could see the spent kindling in the chamber. Cast iron pans sat just as they’d left them, the seasoning from generations of meals undone by mere years of neglect. She wasn’t surprised to see Daddy’s coffee tin still perched on the counter amongst canned goods bloated with age and their wrappers nothing but tattered shreds.
'Here you go, sweatpea,’ she remembered her father winking at her all those years ago, ‘while momma isn’t lookin’.” That first sip was bitter and it burnt her tongue but each one after smoothed well enough out. This was before Daddy would tip a different brew, in a shade more akin to pale amber, from his hip flask and into the cup to fill it to the brim. He was careful not let her try it again after he’d done that no matter how hard she pleaded. It didn’t matter much in the long run. She grew to love instead how momma brewed hers, mildly sweet and with a dollop of cream when they could get it.
Waverly heard another motor idle in the driveway.
'I told you it was a lot of work.’ Gus clucked her tongue as she leaned against the doorframe. Her boots tracked mud into the kitchen but Waverly couldn’t quite bring herself to scold.
'I know.’
'I can’t help you much—‘
'I know, Gus.’
'—but I’m sure we can rustle up some spare hands, what with calving season just about over.’
'Champ says he’ll help.’
Gus clucked her tongue again. ‘That boy’d better. Now, are you coming for dinner? I made pot roast.’
Waverly doesn’t bother to lock up. What would vagrants do with decade-old cans of hominy and a burst jar of strawberry preserves? She turns her jeep’s engine over and takes one last look at the homestead. She allows herself one sigh before reversing onto the road.
It would be a long year.
She watches as Gus’s gnarled hands worked the dough over and over again, turning it one way and then the other, dusting the countertop with just enough flour to keep the mass from sticking. ‘Never too much,’ the older woman warned when she first tried to teach Waverly,’ but not too little either and you gotta move quick otherwise you’re begging for the whole thing to stick.’ How would she know if it was enough, Waverly had asked. ‘Bread’ll tell you,’ Gus replied simply, and with that pinched off a piece of dough for the girl to practice kneading with.
Her aunt’s hands weren’t as gnarled or stiff now as they were then and Waverly often marvelled at how much lighter the loaves became, how much higher the biscuits rose, the older Gus got.
Adorned with nothing more ornate than a thin gold band those same heavy hands would, with the precision of a surgeon, peel back the onion skin between the pages of discolored family albums she cradled in her lap after dinner. She’d point out faces and help trace the threads that wove through centuries of Earp history. Of Earp folly. At first Waverly hated when Gus sat her down and got sentimental. She’d even worked up the courage to tell her so one day. ‘The old coot would never leave me alone if I let you forget,’ she’d barked in response. And without missing a beat, ‘Look at Josiah—wasn’t he handsome?’
At this the window shutters creaked gently on their hinges. It was the dead of summer and without so much as the whisper of a breeze for miles.
'Uncle Curtis?’
The window shutters creaked again.
'Determined to give me as hard of a time dead and alive. Who else did you think it would be?’
It takes very little for Waverly to conjure up the final result in her mind.
She would raise modest garden beds, borrow library books on crop rotation and permaculture. There would be potatoes and turnips in the spring, corn and tomatoes in the summer, and blueberries and squash in the fall. A humble, edible Eden bearing enough to barter with the beekeepers over the way and the canola oil pressers two farms over. A brood of hens would be easy enough to manage—she’d overheard one of Gus’s friends looking to get rid of an old coop—and milk would never be in short supply around these parts. She might even raise flowers just to tempt fate and in no better measure of satisfaction would she bask when it came time to pry topsoil from beneath her fingernails after a languid morning of tending to the buds. Shoots and tendrils would flourish under her watchful eye and no one else’s.
There will come a day when Waverly will realize the whole Sisyphean affair was something more than a desperate attempt to wish her sister home. Wynonna, who she missed like a phantom limb—daughter prodigal and wayward and stubbornly incommunicado—and was her only blood relation left alive. The only one that she knew of anyway. Waverly will dedicate over a year of her life fixing up a property so old and decrepit the real estate agents in town refused to even consider it for their portfolio. She will endure every splinter, every strand of hair singed from burning refuse, and every dead fingertip recovering still to this day from hammer blows missing steel only to find keratin instead. But the reason makes itself known—known yet not clear, not to Waverly, and certainly not at the very moment it appeared before her—early in the process.
'Officer Haught, ma’am. Purgatory Sheriff’s Department.’ The deputy touches the brim of her Stetson with an index finger. ‘Can I ask what you’re doing here?’
Waverly doesn’t look up from the spirit level. She asks through the marking pencil between her teeth, ‘Nedley send you to check up on me?’
'No, ma’am—‘
'Waverly’s fine.’
'—Waverly, no. Neighbors reported some activity in the area. As far as they’re aware, the property’s been abandoned for years.’
'It’s my property. I live here.’
Officer Haught looks at the sunken porch and the dilapidated barn.
'I intend to anyway.’
'Alone?’
'Mostly.’
Officer Haught shifts her weight. ‘You’re fixing up and intending to live on this here land by yourself?’
Waverly doesn’t think much of the cop armed with the service Glock and her assumptions, and the insinuation that hers was a task she couldn’t possibly accomplish on her own, so she chooses not to look up from the level and the damned gutter she was trying to set.
She misses, therefore, the look of awe on Officer Nicole Rayleigh Haught’s face.
Nicole knows she lacks the finesse for interrogation that earned her a commendation from the academy when she asks, ‘What do you know about the Earps?’ She is aware that it’s a mite more subtle than tell me all you know about the Earp family, or is Waverly Haught single?
Nedley sets down his tuna melt and brushes crumbs from his mouth with the back of one hand. ‘Why?’ Nicole shrugs and pokes at her own lunch, a humble grilled cheese. He takes a sip from his mug of coffee. There were three of them, Nedley starts—Nicole interjects with a were? that goes largely ignored—the day their homestead was attacked. The eldest went missing, was presumed dead ever since. Wynonna, the middle child, hadn’t been seen in or around town for almost as long. ‘Rumor was that she’d been so traumatized she had to be,’ his voice grew sombre at the recollection, ‘sent away. Always liked her though. Troubled kid, sure, but a good one. Spitfire like her daddy. And young Waverly was left to be raised by her uncle Curtis and his wife Gus—fine people. Damn fine people.’
Nicole takes methodical bites of her sandwich as Nedley continues to speak. 'Earp clan’s been living in Purgatory since before it got its name.’ He asks again, ‘Why?’
'She’s fixing up the homestead. Thought she was some vagrant when I checked the property yesterday.’
'Waverly? Doesn’t surprise me. They were all of them spitfires. Never met an Earp who wasn’t.’
The first thing Waverly puts up is a picture of her and Willa and Wynonna that their father took when he drove them up to Bow Valley. ‘Three sisters,’ he’d howled, mostly to himself but also at the occasional hiker passing by, ‘in front of the Three Sisters.’ They’d laughed with him too, it was the least painful of his most recent attempts at humor. He’d picked up a tattered book of puns a week prior at a garage sale and took to peppering his conversations with them every chance he got. The two older girls hadn’t the patience but Waverly thought her lungs would burst from trying to contain her laughter.
'Complicated man, your father.’ Curtis told her once. She was helping him pile firewood by the kitchen door. Gus was trying her hand at brioche and cursing the butter for not softening fast enough. She’d known this, of course. Not that the butter should have been brought out from the refrigerator sooner—the other thing. Curtis may have been born to the same generation as a distant cousin but Waverly was her father’s daughter. He offered nothing else on either side of that statement. Just the fact, plain and simple, and the suggestion that the man Waverly thought she knew was more of a stranger than she cared to admit.
She remembered how Willa would tease her, secure in her status as Ward’s heir and second coming, and that Wynonna could only stand up for her as best she could. Willa lorded her position in ways she’d prefer now to forget. Still, Waverly loved them no less than what was right for a child in the care of a father who saddled a burden she’d never have to bear herself.
The picture stays up. She touches her fingertips to it at least once every couple of days and tries to forget they’d camped at a site the locals called Dead Man’s Flats.
'Families,’ she’d muttered then out of Curtis’s earshot, ‘are complicated things.’
Waverly throws a switch and the bare kitchen bulb flickers to life for a brief moment before the filament dims completely. She sighs when she rifles through her box of spare parts. Nails, screws, washers and plumbers tape but no bulbs.
She grabs her keys and tries to recall whether she has enough in her checking account to cover a trip to the general store. Maybe she could get the shopkeep to spare her a line of credit. And maybe he sold laundry soap strong enough to wash the spackle and paint from her jeans.
'Hey, stranger.’ Waverley looks up from a box of warm white LEDs to find Nicole Haught smiling at her from the end of the aisle. ‘Officer Haught,’ Waverly can’t help but smile back.
'Nicole’s fine.’
'Fancy seeing you here,’ Waverly says even though they’re in the only general store in the county.
'My apartment needs a fresh coat.’ Nicole holds up a couple of rollers and a can of some pale shade. Eggshell, Waverly spies the label. She’s sporting jeans and a plain tee—it’s the weekend, Waverly realizes, as she holds up her own haul.
'Busted lights.’
Nicole asks her how the homestead is coming along and if working at Shorty’s is as fun as it looks. Alright, Waverly responds, and yes, the regulars make the hours well worth it. ‘You should swing by sometime,’ she adds. ‘The homestead, I mean. It looks much better than when you first saw it.’
'I’d like that.’ The other woman’s smile is broader this time, more earnest somehow. Waverly thinks that if she could just capture that luminescence and craft glass and a filament around it she’d have a very fine source of light indeed. Nicole clears her throat before adding, ‘If you ever need a hand let me know—seems awful difficult to do something like that on your own.’
'Oh, my boyfriend helps out every now and then.’
Nicole’s smile doesn’t dim, at least not perceptibly and least of all not to Waverly. ‘Well, I’m glad to hear it. Offer still stands though.’ She pays for her can of paint and leaves one of the two rollers at the checkout counter.
At first Waverly doesn’t think Champ cares at all that she’s started to slip out from under the covers earlier and earlier in the mornings, or that she lets herself back into the apartment above Shorty’s just before midnight. Purgatory’s population may be small but the distance she manages to put between herself and her boyfriend without even trying impressed her. It wasn’t that she didn’t love him. They were fond enough of each other but it bothered her the way she never seemed to really miss him when he wasn’t around, or that she acquiesced to his every suggestion as an attempt to make up for the fact. He was like a pup, receptive to affection in all its forms and eager to please, and so she treated him like one.
She’d known him for so long and she cared for him deeply. But she knew telling him she wanted more would wound him somehow especially when she hadn’t the vocabulary to explain what she sought in the first place. He was sweet when it counted and forgetful when it counted for a lot more. Sure, his buddies were a little dim but the company he kept was never distasteful. Champ was a catch, she’d been told, what with a pretty girl on his arm and a decent ranching career stretched out ahead of him.
But, Waverly knew, so was she.
The Dutch Mennonites over the way cut sorghum in the same manner as their forebears. Waverly packed them eggs in a makeshift crate padded in newsprint to trade for their syrup and what wheat they grew and milled on the side. She tucked into her shearling coat a couple of sugar cubes for the horses.
While they kept mostly to themselves, the clan didn’t begrudge strangers, nor were they completely ignorant of the undertakings of this last of the Earps knocking on their door. She was invited to sup with them that evening, and then later on to attend their weekly service held at the whitewashed chapel a minute’s walk away. She’d said yes because there seemed to be no better answer and because it was clear they wanted her at the post-service feast rather than for the ceremony itself. ‘We’re not trying to convert you,’ the grizzled patriarch insisted. ‘Just come for the feed.’ And she did.
They spared her three trestles and a well-loved mattock, and she attended their service and ate their food and partook in their drink. Despite being the least likely candidate to put stock in any sort of belief system, certainly not when faced with her family’s history, the parts of it she knew and the parts of it which eluded her, she found herself going often to that chapel. She’d developed a reverence for the silence which stayed her mind every time she sat on those hard pews. Sometimes people would enter, nod at her, and edge their way up the centre aisle and set the dust motes to dancing in the shaft of light streaming from the upper windows. They cast a spotlight on a weightless, soundless waltz. It was here that she would take stock of her life and say a quiet, if secular, grace. Shifts at Shorty’s paid the bills and she had just enough left over to fund the materials she needed for the homestead. She wasn’t destitute by any means but she knew it was foolish to suffer extravagance.
And so she gave thanks while admiring the way that same sunlight bounced off the whitewashed walls—what exact color of paint could it be, she wondered. Eggshell, perhaps like Nicole’s apartment—and how the candlelight sometimes got to dancing too.
'Curtis wanted you to have this considering no one’s been able to find that peashooter Ward used to carry around.’ Gus snorted, ‘Nothing special about that durn Buntline.’
Waverly took the sawed-off from Gus’s hands. The stock’s grain was mesmerizing—years, she’d waited to call the weapon her own.
'There’s a box of shells on the kitchen counter. Take those cinnamon rolls too.’
Purgatory was outlined by miles of open highway and shaded in by vast and equally open prairie. It was verdant homestead upon verdant homestead in the spring, each with their own weather vane calling here, today, this is where the wind might take you. Semis and beat up RVs drove by them and down the endless blacktop, some bearing passengers with destinations in mind and others content to exist in the interstitial spaces of waterlogged Rand McNallys stashed in their glove boxes.
Snowy peaks beckoned in the winter promising recreation in exchange for frostbite, and Purgatory was mortared into the very diners that dotted those highways and squeezed from condiment bottles over hot meals as an antidote to the punishing cold. It sat nestled with the salt and pepper shakers and the cheap one-ply napkins littered across decades-old formica, was peddled by waitresses who started working there fresh out of a high school their own kids were now about to graduate from.
One particular waitress watches her patrons slide themselves into booths covered in cracked upholstery and trace their fingernails against wounded vinyl. Doll, babe, hon, she’d name the very few who weren’t already her regulars. Never mind the illogical hours they all kept working the oil derricks and construction sites, there would always be hot coffee in the urn and she would turn in her apron the moment any of the crew dared to not serve it fresh.
'What’ll it be, Waverly?’ This waitress asks as the youngest Earp folds her wiry frame into a seat. She beams as she shrugs off her coat. ‘Haven’t decided yet. But would you mind bringing out an extra cup? I’m waiting for someone.’
'Sure thing.’ But she doesn’t say anything else when it isn’t Champ Hardy who slides into the booth with Waverly a half hour later. That was new.
Waverly thinks it’s exactly like building a fire. She’d gathered the logs and bits of bramble and bark, and she was ready to press match to tinder. She feels its warmth when Nicole peers through Shorty’s doors late one night. ‘Saw the light on. Do you need help cleaning up?’ So she finishes mopping the floors while Nicole takes the trash out. The warmth compels her to fix a plate of leftovers for them to share.
She feels its warmth when, after a day spent clearing the weed-choked gullies behind the homestead, she points her jeep in the direction of Nicole’s apartment. Gus’s was a big house to be alone in, what with her spending a week in Florida with her book club and Curtis’s ghost given free reign of the place. She makes her way not to Champ, who is touring the rodeo circuit with his buddies, but to Nicole who offers her freshly laundered clothes to change into and a hot shower to boot. Waverly wants to take this warmth and fan it into a wildfire because she and Champ have become one of those on-again, off-again couples, trapped forever in stasis. Perhaps her ribcage was serotinous and a prescribed burn the only way to really get into the heart trapped inside.
To her credit, Nicole doesn’t try to push her way to the front of the line. All she does is leave a hand on Waverly’s shoulders or hold her gaze for longer stretches of time until Waverly can’t stand to have it any other way. But they do nothing except make sure the other is fed and watered. They were both prone to forgetting this most basic of tasks. The responsibility extended sometimes to Calamity Jane who takes to Waverly immediately after they are introduced. The cat gave a bright chirp before weaving figure eights around her legs. ‘I know, girl.’ Nicole cooed and scratched behind her ears after she’d seen Waverly out the door. ‘I know.’
The touches and unbroken eye contact transitioned to hugs, tight and with the purest of intent, until one night it morphed into something entirely new. One night they found themselves prone and in Nicole’s bed. This was uncharted territory, Nicole knew, but Waverly had come to her so miserable and exhausted, mumbling something about it being Wynonna’s birthday. Waverly had held her arms out and so she responded in the only way she knew how.
'Is this okay,’ Nicole asked, her voice remarkably even. Waverly’s hair smelled like cut grass and milled wheat.
'Yes.’
'Okay.’
Nothing else happens but it’s enough that the flames Waverly forced down her throat earlier began to lick gently at her insides. It felt good, like the time Nicole’s eyes shone as they took in all of Waverly’s raised garden beds, all of Waverly’s hard work, and finally Waverly herself. ‘I’ve never seen anyone more excited about Maris Piper potatoes,’ is what comes out of her mouth that day. But Waverly understands.
Shorty scrounged around his basement to uncover a CRT and VHS set which he let Waverly have. They’d borrowed a stack of Golden Girls tapes from the library and were right in the middle of a sick Blanche burn—they were keeping score—when they heard a car in the driveway. Champ stumbles in, not quite drunk but certainly not sober either. Nicole decides it’s time to take her leave.
'I’ll see you tomorrow, Waves.’ She collects her parka from the hook by the front door. ‘Wait, I thought Lonnie was doing overnights?’ Nicole is lacing up her boots when she wonders if Waverly had memorized the roster she’d stuck up on her apartment fridge.
'Ah, you know. He’s still on his training wheels—needs all the help he can get.’ The TV is now on some wilderness survival show. She nods, ‘Champ.’
'Officer.’ He touches his finger to the empty space where the brim of a hat would be. His arm around Waverly’s shoulder squeezes tighter.
Champ cried much the same way Waverly observed when she first tried to break up with him a couple of years ago. Her first real attempt at conscious uncoupling. There wasn’t much to pack up, same as that first time, and she’d moved most of her things over the months she spent fixing up the homestead. Not that there was much to begin with.
The homestead was just about done. All it needed was a fresh coat of paint. Waverly thumbed past her lock screen to mash the speed dial function.
Nicole was exhausted from having pulled a string of doubles. Plus Calamity Jane refused to eat her new dental kibble formula, the damned fool. She was just about to pull the covers over her head when her phone rang.
‘Waverly? Sure, I can do that. What color were you after?’
'There’s easier ways to make coffee but this is how my dad did it. Used to always keep a bag of the stuff by the stove. He’d drop ‘em in and said it made the brew nicer.’ Waverly shook grounds from one tin and dried eggshells from another into the enamel carafe on the stove. She laughed quietly at the memory, ‘It always did.’
Nicole took the mug she was offered and somehow Waverly knows she’d be the type to sleep through two of them after dinner. It’s enough to keep her awake as they put the radio on and paint the living room to the sounds of a late night country station. With every other song they’d pretend the paintbrushes were guitars and plucked gently at their pretend strings.
'Do you mind if I get cleaned up?’ There are pale streaks from where Waverly tried to sweep hair away from her face.
'Naw, you go ahead. I’m just gonna close my eyes a sec on this couch.’ Nicole is stretching her arms when one of the framed pictures on the side table catches her eye. ‘This is Bow Valley, right,’ she chuckles when she picks it up. ‘Three Sisters?’
'Yeah.’
But Nicole doesn’t say anything else. She just stares back at a young, gap-toothed Waverly Earp with an arm thrown around each of her siblings.
In the bathroom upstairs, the grown version lathers soap onto her body and thinks there’s something to the way Nicole’s frame fits into the worn sofa like she’s been the one pressing her form into it this whole time. As if it were her sweat seeping from lazy summer naps that stained the very fabric she now lay on—a foam so imbued with memory before the stuff was even invented. Waverly is almost certain if she’d asked the other woman to pack a blanket and a basket of modest victuals that she would say yes, much the same way she picked up cans of primer and paint and takeout without question. She would ask and be taken by the hand and led out to the prairie on which the homestead stood, an inheritance she shaped with her own hands, and be pressed down into the grass as gently as Nicole would press her lips onto Waverly’s own.
Blessed were those who mourned and hungered and thirsted like Waverly did, for she would inherit a reward beyond the realm of imagination. But to claim it might be another challenge altogether, Waverly mused, as she towelled her hair dry while making her way down the stairs.
For there was Nicole, fast asleep, cradling the picture frame to her chest.