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It was a rough and winding road that Jordan Jasper Green found himself on, shackled to a bus that was on a straightaway to Camp Eden Lake. And it was all thanks to Jordan’s no-good-dirty-rotten-horse-stealing-great-great-grandfather.
It was a running joke in the Green family to always blame their bad luck on Jordan’s no-good-dirty-rotten-horse-stealing-great-great-grandfather, but their luck didn’t run sour until Monty Green II had his fortune stolen by Kissin’ ‘Tav Blake. She left him stranded out in the heat, and it was said that he found refuge on God’s thumb.
The lake was once filled with crystal-clear blue water but was now miles and miles of desert. There wasn’t a patch of green grass or shadowy shade anywhere in sight as dust blew up behind the bus. Once a garden of paradise, it was now a wasteland for the punished.
Jordan had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time but had still been sentenced to jail...or a delinquent camp. He told the judge that he had never been to camp before.
But the dry tragedy of Eden Lake started a hundred years before, when Lincoln, the onion man, was killed, and it hadn’t rained a day over the lake since.
Octavia Blake had lived in Eden her whole life. When she was old enough, she became the town’s only school teacher who taught in an old one-room schoolhouse. It was very old. The roof leaked. The windows wouldn’t open. The door hung crooked on its bent hinges. The paint was faded and chipped.
The children loved Miss Octavia and so did the single men in the town. She taught classes during the day to the children and classes at night for the adults.
They all loved her, you see because Miss Octavia was very kind and she was very beautiful.
She stood only a little taller than her young pupils, dark brown curls swept up into buns or braids, and wore the simplest blouses and petticoats over her dainty figure. They were hand-me-downs sewn and worn by her mother, God rest her soul. The Blake family wasn't very wealthy, that’s why her brother had left to Arkadia for work, and why Octavia found herself in many a predicament.
Predicaments like Finn Collins, whose father owned all of Eden Lake and the peach trees Miss Octavia liked to pick to spice, and who would not stop pestering her with marriage proposals.
He sat at the front of her class every evening, not eager to learn but to taunt the other men and try to flirt with the teacher. She always ignored him and shot down his advancements, but sometimes it was hard for him to take no for an answer.
“Nobody ever says ‘no’ to Finn Collins,” the young man said proudly, a finger hooked through his suspenders and hat dangling from a pinky. Octavia thought of him as too cocky for someone with such an ordinary face and ugly manners.
“I believe I just did. Again,” Octavia said impatiently and pushed him out of the schoolhouse into the warm night.
It was a cold night when Monty Green’s family sailed down, down, down to Arkadia from the old country in the east. They settled in the high country, up in the wild mountains, leveling timber and selling it to the businessmen in the lowlands.
Monty worked side-by-side with his father until the accident.
They had a horse, a buckskin Jeju, that traveled across the seas with them. She was strong and helped pull the wood, but she was skittish after months on the water. A mob of brumbies passed through the Green’s station, scaring the horse, who broke free of her chain and caused Mr. Green to be crushed under the rolling timber.
Monty was young but a hard worker, yet he was forced to leave his home in the mountains and told to earn his right to the lands his father left him by working in the lowlands.
It was there that he met Jasper Jordan and Harper McIntyre.
Miss Octavia made the best spiced peaches in all the county, but Lincoln sold the sweetest onions under all of God’s thumb.
“Onions! Get your sweet, fresh onions!” Lincoln would call, as he and his donkey, Murphy Lee, walked up and down the banks of Eden Lake. Murphy Lee pulled a cart full of onions that Lincoln had gathered from the onion field somewhere on the other side of the lake. A few times a week he would row across and pick a new batch to fill the cart. Now, Lincoln was tall and he had big, strong dark arms, but it would still take all day for him to row across the water and back under the hot sun.
Lincoln liked to claim that Murphy Lee was almost a hundred years old. Which was extraordinary for the animal and unbelievable given Lincoln’s young age, but he said it was because the donkey ate nothing but raw onions.
“It’s nature’s magic vegetable,” Lincoln would tell the townsfolk. “Good for the heart, the lungs, the eyes, good against yellow-spotted lizards, and even good for Sheriff Kane’s bald head.”
“Just rub it on your husband’s head every night when he’s sleeping, Mrs. Kane, and soon his hair will be as thick and as long as Murphy Lee’s tail.”
The gathered crowd crowed with laughter and bought up every last bit of Lincoln’s sweet onions. Whenever Octavia Blake would buy onions, she always bought an extra one for Murphy Lee to crunch on out of the palm of her hand while she talked with Lincoln.
“How are you today, Miss Octavia?”
“I’m fine, Lincoln,” she sighed and rubbed the top of Murphy Lee’s head as he crunched down on his onion.
“Are you sure?” Lincoln asked with concern. “You seem distracted today.”
“It’s just the weather. Looks like rain,” she told him and looked up at the sky. Over the lake it was gray and the clouds were rolling in from the north.
“Me and Murphy Lee, we love the rain,” said Lincoln.
“Oh, I like it fine, too,” said Miss Octavia, as she rubbed the donkey’s rough hair on top of its head. “It’s just that the roof leaks in the schoolhouse.”
“I can fix that.”
Monty Green had never believed in superstitions. His family was practical people. They tilled their land and worked hard for what they had. So when he met Jasper, a drunk and once-famous horseman, on his way looking for work he didn’t think anything of the curse that was threatened upon him if he failed to return to Jasper after he had made his mark.
“I’m missing a horse,” Monty told him.
“Well, I just happen to have one. Plucked this one out of a thousand square miles of wilderness,” Jasper led him to the pen behind his shack. “He looks like a mountain horse, but not exactly the breeds we have here in Arkadia.”
Jasper explained how the horse must have wandered away from the brumbies, wild and feral beasts that roamed the Arkadian Alps, and how he had nursed him back to health taking him to the river that’s water ran uphill.
“It’s Old Bess,” Monty stared in amazement at the tan bay horse trotting slowly around the fence toward him. It was his family’s horse.
“I can’t pay you for it.”
“A man without a horse is like a man without a leg.” Jasper hit his thigh a few times, the echoes of hollow wood sounded back.
“I’ll come with you for a little while, but I’m set on finding the color in these hills.” The two men looked toward the mine shaft and the panning system that was connected to a water source that Jasper had created. “Come back this way around when you make your mark down there. We’ll see who makes a fortune first. And then we can check out the uphill river together.”
“I’ll come back, I promise.”
Jasper raised a bottle to him from his wagon as Monty saddled up his horse so they could ride off together and said, “You better, friend. Or else you and your family will be cursed for always and eternity.”
Monty was thankful to have his horse back, knew he was indebted to Jasper because of it and was eager to prove himself. But he was almost too eager. Forever was a long time. And he wasn’t very superstitious.
The McIntyre homestead was the only one hiring hands when the two men rode into Arkadia. It was for a cattle roundup. McIntyre was impressed with the buckskin horse that Monty rode, and offered him and Jasper beds in the crew house to sleep and hang up their boots in.
McIntyre's only daughter, Harper, immediately took an interest in the young men. When Jasper wasn’t drinking, he was flirting with her by the stables. And when Monty wasn’t working, he was with her in the paddock, breaking in her prized colt. It was as black as midnight and as wild as the night itself.
With her father’s approval, Harper soon declared that the first to make his fortune would be her husband. Jasper went back to his mines looking for gold, while unbeknownst to Monty at the time, Monty would bet his luck on the wild horses.
It rained all through the night and into the early morning, so Lincoln showed up after dawn at Miss Octavia’s schoolhouse, tools in hand, to fix her roof.
“Why, Lincoln, I did think you were joking about the roof, but here you are!” Octavia said cheerily, happy to see him when she got to the schoolhouse to work on the day's lesson for her children.
“Yes, ma’am. And I’ll make you a deal, I’ll fix the roof in exchange for six jars of your spiced peaches.”
It took Lincoln a week to fix the roof because he could only work early in the mornings and in the afternoons after school let out and before the adult classes began. He wasn’t allowed to attend school because he was Black, but they had no problem with letting him fix the building.
Miss Octavia enjoyed keeping Lincoln company while they worked. She would grade papers on the steps while he hammered on the roof or read poetry aloud whenever he took a break.
“...In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,” Octavia started to read one of her favorite poems of Poe’s.
“But we loved with a love that was more than love—
I and my Annabel Lee,” Lincoln whispered to his donkey. On more than one occasion he would finish the poems for her by memory.
They sat in silence after the last stanza of the poem and watched the afternoon sun sink further down toward the horizon. Octavia was sad that they would have to part ways soon.
“Well, how does it look?” Lincoln threw out his hands to the schoolhouse and sat down a tool into his tin box.
“Oh, it looks wonderful. It’s just that…,” she trailed off and Lincoln gave her a questioning look. She was even sadder now that the roof was apparently finished.
“Is something wrong?” Lincoln asked.
“No, you did a wonderful job,” she said. “It’s just that...the windows won’t open. The children and I would enjoy a cool breeze now and then.”
“I can fix that.”
The McIntyre's colt ran off with the brumby mob after being mysteriously let out of his stables when no one was looking one night. McIntyre charged his men with going after him at first light and promised them a high reward for whoever retrieved his colt.
The men chased the mob through the plains of the lowlands, past rivers, and up into the hills that were covered in snow. Many men were injured, thrown off their horses, cheated by the other men, or simply too slow.
But Monty and Old Bess were the only ones who could keep up. Not only was the Jeju horse strong enough for hard labor but she was bred to be fast. She flew over the cliffside after the brumbies without hesitation. Monty leaned back in his saddle almost touching the rump of the mare and let his bullwhip crack. The thunder of hooves beating down the rocky quarry were almost drowned out by the beating of Monty’s heart.
He returned the colt and the herd of wild horses to McIntyre. He had made his fortune and was set for life.
Miss Octavia gave Lincoln two more jars of peaches and he fixed the windows.
It was easier for them to talk with Lincoln on the ground and Miss Octavia at her desk, through the windows. Octavia read to him the Greek myths that she had grown up on and he told her of his secret onion farm on the other side of the mountain where they grew all year long and the water in the streams ran uphill.
When the windows were fixed, she complained that her desk rocked when she leaned on it. Lincoln told her he could fix it. And then she mentioned that the door didn’t hang straight and they got to spend another afternoon together while Lincoln fixed the schoolhouse up. By the end of the year, Lincoln, the onion man, had turned the old run-down schoolhouse into a well-crafted, freshly painted swell of a gem that the whole town could be proud of.
The day Lincoln finished working on the schoolhouse, was the day Miss Octavia had never cried so hard in her life. She had run out of things for Lincoln to fix and her heart felt heavy from his absence.
The rain pitter-pattered over the new roof of the schoolhouse as she sat at her desk one afternoon. No water leaked down into the empty buckets scattered around the classroom, except for the few drops that came from her eyes and plopped onto the pages of the book she was reading.
“I can fix that,” Lincoln’s quiet and steady voice surprised her. He was standing in front of her desk, soaked from the rain, and reached out for her hands. He helped her up from her seat, leaned down, and kissed her.
Octavia, with all her suitors, had never been kissed before. When Lincoln let go of her hands to cradle her face, she let her hands rest on his biceps. His lips tasted sweet like peaches and onions mixed with the rainwater that blessed Eden.
Lincoln pulled away much too quickly for her liking, but not quick enough for the person passing by the schoolhouse to see them. They had ducked under the awning of the school steps to take cover in the pouring rain and saw Lincoln, a Black man, kissing Miss Octavia Blake.
Finn Collins rounded up all his buddies and they burned the schoolhouse down in retaliation at the news. The fire blazed high and hot bedside the lake all through the night.
Octavia ran to the Sheriff’s station as soon as she saw the smoke when she rose the next morning.
“They’re burning down the schoolhouse, Sheriff! You’ve got to stop them,” she said frantically. Her hair was falling out from its bun and her chest heaved.
“Good morning, Miss Octavia. Just slow down and tell me what happened,” the Sheriff said and got up from his desk to walk toward her. He was an older gentleman with a silver beard and a potbelly.
“Finn! He’s burned the schoolhouse. He—he—he…”
“Don’t say nothing against Mr. Collins for all his daddy has done for this town,” the sheriff scolded her. “Hey, you sure are pretty.”
Octavia stared at him in confusion. There was a serious matter at hand but the sheriff wasn’t taking her very seriously right now.
“Kiss me,” he said and she slapped him across the face as hard as she could on instinct. The man laughed. “You kissed the onion picker. Why won’t you kiss me?”
She tried to slap him again, but he caught her by the hand and she tried to break free. “You’re drunk!” she yelled.
“I always get drunk before a hanging.”
“A hanging? Who—” Octavia realized very quickly what had all gone wrong in Eden the night before. It was against the law for Lincoln and Octavia to be together. She rushed out of the Sheriff’s station as quickly as she could. She had to warn Lincoln. Tell him to flee and hide.
She picked up her skirt and rounded around until she was in sight of the lake. Lincoln was there with Murphy Lee, hitching the donkey to his onion cart so he could row across the lake to gather up more onions.
Octavia tried to call out to him, but her voice was drowned out by the wind and the sound of men’s voices. They were coming for him. She was frozen in her tracks and watched in absolute horror as Lincoln was shot point-blank in the head. There wasn’t any warning and there were no last words between them. Not a single one.
Three days after Lincoln’s death, Miss Octavia shot the sheriff while he was laughing at her question of if he was ready for her kiss now. As soon as the shotgun shell hit the wooden floor, she had whipped out a tube of ruby red lipstick, carefully applied it to her lips, and gave him the kiss he had asked for right on his shiny bald head.
For the next fifteen years, Kissin’ ‘Tav Blake was one of the most feared outlaws in all the West.
Monty Green betrayed his friend leaving with his new bride to reclaim the lands that belonged to him and had rightfully earned in the highlands. They rode Old Bess up past the river whose waters ran uphill, not giving any thought to the drunk that had helped him on his way.
Harper looked out in amazement over the ridge of her new home as Monty pulled on the reins to slow them down so she could take it all in. There was a thickness on the cold mountain air of Arkadia that excited her.
“It changes so quickly. One moment it's paradise, the next it's trying to kill you,” she said softly, watching the dangerous sierra. The peaks were frosted and the valleys were hidden under a fog. The sun was ever-so-slowly creeping down from its spot in the sky to seek out a place to rest turning a bright orange that hung like a peach in the darkening purple sky.
“Yeah, that's how it can be up here. You've got to treat the mountains like a high-spirited horse—never take it for granted.”
“It's the same with people, too,” she said, smiling at his easy way of viewing things, and tightened her grip around him as he kicked Old Bess’ flanks and they rode down chasing the sunset as it dipped below the horizon.
Monty Green II’s mother died in childbirth. He didn’t talk about it much because of the way it had broken his father, but the loss hung over him like a dark cloud.
As he stood beside the busted right wheel of his wagon, wiping sweat from his brow and drowning in the strange humidity, he wished the cloud wasn’t so metaphorical. He was on his way West in search of a better life after leaving his home country down under. There was nothing left for him there. He had sold the land and the horses and packed up his treasures into an old trunk.
The others he was traveling with shifted nervously as they looked out at the dusty desert before them. They were miles and miles away from any civilization. There were rumors of bandits in this part of the country and whispered names feared by God himself.
Monty Green II never expected he would run into one of them. Or more like she never expected she would run into him.
Kissin’ ‘Tav Blake and her posse of delinquents rode up on the broken wagon and shot all the other men immediately. They took the trunk from its hiding spot underneath the carriage when Monty bargained for his life with it and she told him to get to walking.
The sky was cloudless and the sun beat down fiercely over the dry expanse of land. There were no more peach trees to walk under. There were no more voices of children playing by the water’s edge. There was no lake in Eden. There wasn’t even a town anymore. It was a ghost town on a ghost lake.
And Octavia drifted like a shadow hearing the echoes of Lincoln’s voice across the vast emptiness. “Onions! Sweet fresh onions.”
“Oh, Lincoln,” she would say, speaking to the brightness behind her closed eyelids, “I know it’s hot, but I feel so cold. My hands are cold, yet the air is so hot. My feet are cold, when the ground is hot. The fire doesn’t keep me warm because my heart gas grown so cold. ”
And sometimes she would hear him say, “I can fix that,” and she’d feel his warm breath across her face.
Finn Collins found her at the ruins of the old schoolhouse. There was a desperate plea in his voice when he demanded she tell him where she had hidden her loot at.
When Octavia finally managed to open her eyes, she saw a young woman was there with him. She held a pistol in both hands as Finn was searching frantically in the rubble around them. The young woman demanded where the loot was again.
“Charlotte, is that you?”
Octavia was sure that she had been a student of hers when she was still a teacher. She had been a cute freckle-faced girl with beautiful blonde hair. Now her face was blotchy, and her hair was dirty and scraggly. Not that Octavia could brag. Her hair had curled gray, so dry it wouldn’t hold in a bun or a braid, and her face was leathered and hardened from the years on the run under the sun.
“It’s Charlotte Collins now,” said Finn.
“Oh, Charlotte, I’m so sorry.”
“Where’s the loot?” Finn took a pistol back from his wife and pointed it at Octavia.
“There is no loot,” she threw back at him.
“Don’t give me that!” he began to shout. “You’ve robbed every bank from here to Polis.”
“What’s the matter, Finn? Daddy doesn’t have any more money for you?”
“All the Collins’ money dried up with the lake, Miss Octavia. We kept thinking that it had to rain soon. It hasn’t since Lincoln was killed. The drought can’t last forever. But it just keeps getting hotter and hotter and hotter...”
There was a loud blast as Finn fired his weapon just above their heads. “Where is it buried?” he demanded.
“Go ahead and kill me,” said Octavia. “I already feel dead. But I sure hope you like to dig. ’Cause, you’re going to be digging for a long time. You, and your children, and their children can dig for the next hundred years and you still won’t find it.”
The noise from the gun had startled a nest of yellow-spotted lizards from under the schoolhouse and they scattered underfoot. Octavia sat down and picked one up calmly.
“You better start digging, Finn,” she said, laying the lizard on her shoulder and the creature sank its teeth into her flesh. It didn’t take long for the venom to spread. And Kissin’ ‘Tav Blake died with laughter etched onto her pretty red mouth.
The laughter and the horse hooves crashed together and echoed in Jordan Jasper Green’s mind as he recalled the story of his no-good-dirty-rotten-horse-stealing-great-great-grandfather. The sun was starting to set to his left and the bus was finally stopping in front of Camp Eden Lake.
The Warden personally came out to greet him. She had such an ordinary face with such ugly manners, and she wore the reddest fingernail polish he had ever seen.
“Time to dig some holes, boy.”