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Portland State University PDXScholar Dissertations and Theses Dissertations and Theses 1-1-2010 A Wind River Romance Megan Breen Leigh Portland State University Follow this and additional works at: https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Recommended Citation Leigh, Megan Breen, "A Wind River Romance" (2010). Dissertations and Theses. Paper 394. https://doi.org/10.15760/etd.394 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of PDXScholar. Please contact us if we can make this document more accessible: [email protected]. A Wind River Romance by Megan Breen Leigh A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Thesis Committee: Debra Gwartney, Chair Charles Deemer Craig Lesley Portland State University ©2010 i Abstract A first-person narrative adult novel explores the theme of abandonment with its residual and enduring effects, and its antithetical theme of loyalty that is continually tested and measured. The protagonist, editor of the local newspaper in a small, isolated agricultural community in the mid-1960s, provides the narrative nexus of two families. His is a community which is a mix of characters that are quirky by virtue of their natures or the remote circumstances of their existence. Both families in focus have treasure troves of secrets. Only after the appearance of a mysterious young woman and her subsequent murder do the tightly bound secrets of the families and the larger community begin to unravel. The narrator reveals his personal story as it relates to how he reacts and responds to the events at hand. Adding to his personal experience in the community, the narrator offers texture and enhancement to the story through archived newspaper articles and his interpretation of short silent movie reels chronicling the town‟s history from its earliest days until the end of World War II. Characters from within and without the ii community assume disguises to maintain their lifestyle or achieve a nefarious purpose while other characters hide behind the falsehoods of their comfortable, everyday lives. The one honest character becomes a victim of his own purity, despite attempts of the narrator to intervene. Not until forty years after the events that changed so many lives is it safe for the truth to bubble to the surface. iii Table of Contents Abstract...................................................i Chapter One ...............................................1 Chapter Two ..............................................31 Chapter Three.............................................54 Chapter Four..............................................65 Chapter Five..............................................92 Chapter Six..............................................118 Chapter Seven............................................151 Chapter Eight............................................167 Chapter Nine.............................................188 Chapter Ten..............................................214 Chapter Eleven...........................................241 Chapter Twelve...........................................257 Chapter Thirteen.........................................289 Chapter Fourteen.........................................320 Chapter Fifteen..........................................345 Epilogue According to Rufus Dandee.......................371 References...............................................375 1 Chapter One Angry black powder from thousands of firing muskets replaced the early morning air as Cyrus Erlewine took his last breath just after dawn in September 1862. In the company of a phalanx of dauntless Federal Army troops and surely an equal number of timorous fellows, Cyrus and I had trudged through the Miller cornfield near Sharpsburg, Maryland, not far from the Dunkard Church and only a short march from Antietam Creek. In the quiet before the clamor as Cyrus and I waded across the creek, he told me he might someday want to fish there, that its riffles and runs looked most promising. Amidst the tassel and silk of mature corn mowed down by the march of warring men and countless bodies of fallen Union and Confederate soldiers, Cyrus rammed a ball down his rifle barrel, replacing the ramrod in one swift motion. He took that last breath and turned his head at the precise moment the conical three-ring minié ball from the Confederate Springfield rifle shattered the right side of his skull, nestling in the soft convoluted sponge that was his brain. 2 Perhaps he turned his head to look at me as I took position behind a mound of bodies still warm with waning life; perhaps he heard me call out his name in that nasty noise of warfare. More likely, what he heard as his dispiriting body deflated to the trampled, bloodied soil was his killer‟s rebel yell penetrating the grimy haze of battle. I want to believe that Cyrus Erlewine experienced no absolute pain in his finite moment of mortality, but only the exquisite sensation of hope. Like a coyote emitting a high quavering cry at a non- existent moon, Cyrus‟ killer, a scarecrow of a youngster with pale-yellow hair that stuck out from his forage cap like straw, issued forth one more gleeful rebel yowl as he reloaded and started his cast-about for another Yankee soldier to put out of his misery. In that sanguinary cornfield when he became intimately and eternally linked to Cyrus Erlewine, the straw-haired soldier, draped in the counterfeit invincibility of youth, was unaware that I, Virginia Erlewine, had already fixed him in my sights. From behind a bloody, muddy hummock of dead and near-dead men some two hundred yards from the Confederate boy-man in his 3 too large butternut and gray uniform, I squeezed off a shot that ripped his rebel heart asunder. I fled the battle along with a handful of other disheartened souls. Feigning familiarity with a dead soldier whose body was propped up against the trunk of a weeping willow as if he‟d finally found a place to rest, I removed the blood-soaked rags from his wounds and wrapped one around my head low over one eye and another around my thigh. Not a single officer who flashed a look in my direction ordered me back to the front. As a severely wounded soldier I was more a liability in battle than an asset to the cause. As one of many dead men staggering, I passed unnoticed through the tumult of the encampment, the distant pop and boom of battle sifting through the agonal lament of the truly wounded laid out everywhere. Managing to sneak into our tent at the regimental encampment a safe distance from the battle, I collected what few belongings Cyrus and I had brought and simply walked out of hell. After fifteen months of divine deception, my life as a Union soldier came to a bitter but easy end. 4 Cyrus was opposed to the idea of me taking on the appearance of a man just to be at his side to help put down the rebellion. Well, I said to him, I don‟t trust that you‟ll come back to me. Cyrus said I should trust him and that it was his hope to come back with his head on his shoulders, two booted feet on the ground, and his arms dangling at his sides. Not satisfied with his safe return being hitched to hope, I dug in, anchoring my decision in what I knew was best for both of us as man and wife. There was no doubt I could manage the charade. My father Johannes Caulfield seldom let pass an opportunity to declare that I was a mongrel-ugly child and the fact I had come into this world with female accoutrements was God‟s sorrowful joke. As a young girl, if any neighboring boy turned his head in my direction, his eyes would rest upon me only for a beat, never lingering long enough to consider the possibility of great companionship and unparalleled pleasure of the flesh. Before Cyrus Erlewine ambled into my life I had spent my entire near-eighteen years on the family‟s Wisconsin farm. When I was ten years old our mother Esther Caulfield 5 slipped into memory on a moonless night, fearing, no doubt, she would never recover from the wounds inflicted upon her in the life she was living. As witness to an especially brutal beating from Johannes earlier that evening because his dinner bowl wasn‟t on the table when he came in from the fields, it came as no surprise to me that Esther woke me with a gentle run of her finger along my cheek. Her face battered, both eyes bruised and swollen, she leaned in close to me and whispered don‟t take no shit from no man. She stood up, slowly tied the ribbons of her heart-shaped bonnet under her chin, and stared down at me as if she may have been reconsidering her choice. She pulled on her gloves, picked up her carpetbag, and glided out the door as effortlessly as a seasoned skater on smooth winter ice. I grew taller and stronger than my two older brothers, managing to outwork and outthink the both of them with little effort. My brothers and I shared a great indifference toward one another, and a potent and healthy mutual hatred for our spirituous, doddering father. We spoke to one another only out of necessity and sometimes not then, like the time older brother Curth neglected to tell younger brother Leland that he, Curth, had been 6 intimate with his, Leland‟s, sweetheart Ruth LeFors, a tall, skinny gal with rounded shoulders from hours of squeezing and rubbing away other people‟s dirt for a penny a piece on a washboard behind the Oshkosh Mercantile. Since Leland had never been on snug terms with Ruth, it was a wallop for him to hear the announcement from Ruth‟s own pouty mouth that she was with child and the begetter was none other than Curth Caulfield. Leland caught Curth off guard, beating him into a deeper state of stupid with the flat side of a shit shovel.

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