Isabella
Judah’s voice was soft as he told Hope the story of his first wife. “My pa was sixty-two years old when he married my ma. She was a little bitty thing, only eighteen at the time. But she seemed happy enough with him. He’d been a fur trapper all over the West before he headed back to civilization for a while, met my ma and decided it was time to have a few kids, try his hand at bein’ domesticated.” He turned and looked at her briefly, and though Hope wondered where in the world this story was going, she kept her mouth shut and listened.
“We moved to the Wyoming Territory when I was two or three. Civilization didn’t quite take to Pa the way he hoped it would. So we settled on the edge of the world, just us and bears and wolves and other critters liable to eat us if they took a notion.
“But there were other folks out there, dangerous ones. My pa had been around ‘em enough in his earlier days to know how to keep ‘em happy, keep us safe. He knew all the rules of the tribes and how to get along, and many of them recognized him as a fair and honest white man, so they left our family alone.” He slipped his hat up a little, looked at her for a moment, and then returned his focus to the inanimate structure in front of him.
Judah sighed. “When I was ten, a family built a little sod structure about five miles from us. We probably wouldn’t have ever even knowed they were there if we didn’t see the smoke from their fireplace one cold mornin’. Pa rode over and checked it out. I went with ‘im. Family only spoke French, a language my pa spoke a version of thanks to all the Cassian trappers he’d met in his former life. My pa tried to warn ‘em that there was a ton of Indians in those parts, and he’d decided to put his little dwellin’ on the fringes of one of their sacred grounds. The Frenchman, feller by the name of Pierre Boudreaux, didn’t listen to Pa, though. He had about a dozen kids, oldest of which was just a little older than me. I noticed Isabella right from that very first visit, but she didn’t say nothin’ and I just gawked at her.”
Hope thought she saw a flicker of a smile on his face, and for a moment, she found herself jealous of his deceased wife. But she still kept her mouth closed for fear he’d finish with his story prematurely. “It was about two years later when Mr. Boudreaux decided to start farmin’ on the sacred grounds. That did not go over well. One mornin’ we got up and saw a bunch a smoke in the air, and since it was summer, that didn’t make no sense. Pa wouldn’t let me go with ‘im. He rode over, and sure enough, that entire family was massacred, their house on fire. Pa never would tell me what he saw, but I overheard ‘im tellin’ Ma one night, and the thought of it was enough to make me wretch. So, Isabella had been the only one to survive. She’d managed to hide somehow underneath her mama’s body, and they’d missed her. She was outside or else the fire’d a got her. Obviously, she lived.” He turned to look at Hope again. “But she wa’nt really alive.”
“What do you mean?” Hope asked, her voice still a whisper.
He sighed again. “Isabella lost her mind the night her family died. And I don’t think no one could blame her. She hardly spoke any English, and it was hard for us to understand what she did say, but it was mostly about what she’d seen done to her family. She’d scream in the middle of the night, run outta the house. My ma did her best to take care of the poor creature, but Isabella was a fragile little angelic thing who was so lost in the tragedy that’d struck her family, there weren’t no gettin’ her back.
“I should’a knowed that. But I wouldn’t accept it. I did everything I could to try to reach her, to try to let her know I loved her, that I’d take care of her. When she was fifteen, and I was seventeen, I finished buildin’ us a little cabin behind my folks’ place and asked her to marry me. I don’t know if she even knew what she was sayin’ at that point, but she agreed. So we were married, but not in the biblical sense. If I even tried to kiss her hand, she’d start screamin’ like I was tryin’ to kill her.”
While she wondered why he’d seen fit to include that information, Hope was glad to know it for some reason. She realized it was none of her business, and still it made the rest of the story somehow more manageable.
“One afternoon, Pa and I were out in the field. Isabella was gloomier than usual that mornin’. She hadn’t eaten much at all for the last few days, and I was worried about her. I’d asked Caroline and Ma to check on her when they had a chance, and they told me later they’d gone over a few times during the day, and she seemed like her usual self. But about the time Pa and I were gonna call it a day, I heard the sound of a pistol firin’ and knew immediately what she’d done.”
A whimper escaped Hope’s lips, and she covered her mouth as he turned to look at her. She was confused, but waited for him to explain; imagining that poor girl taking her own life after such a horrible tragedy struck her family was devastating.
“We ran in and found her on the floor by the table, one of my six shooters in her hand. Only she hadn’t done a very good job.” Judah let out a mournful sigh. “I’ll spare you the details, Hope, but it wasn’t pretty at all. And she was still alive and in God awful pain. There wasn’t gonna be no saving her, so there was only one thing to do.” Hope felt tears slipping down her cheeks as she anticipated what he would say next. “Pa said he’d do it, but I knew it had to be me. I was the one who’d promise to keep her safe, and I’d failed. I couldn’t get to where she’d been, to try to find her, and bring her home again. And in her suffering, she’d decided she wanted to be with her family once more. Endin’ that pain for her was the only way I could make things right.”
Judah stopped and gazed up at the sky, and Hope imagined he was thinking of her up there, looking down at them now. She imagined Isabella was grateful he’d given her mercy instead of trying to fix something that could never be unbroken.
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