On the Rocks: A Willa Cather and Edith Lewis Mystery by Sue Hallgarth Page A

large enough for an actual swim, and the water in the brook was generally too cool for anyone to linger.

    Eel Brook
    Refreshing, Cobus called it. Edith chuckled. Willa’s niece was shocked the first summer she visited.
    “Those ladies just took off all their clothes in broad daylight and jumped in the water,” Mary Virginia’s voice rose almost to a squeal. “I didn’t know what to do. So I did it, too.”
    Willa laughed and laughed.
    “That’s just Cobus,” Edith finally intervened. “Cobus thinks it’s healthful to bathe where the water is bracing.”
    “Yes,” Mary Virginia said slowly, then glanced at Willa, whose efforts to contain her laughter were beginning to appear painful, “I expect it is.”
    “You did exactly the right thing,” Willa finally managed to say, “though heaven only knows how you came by such good sense.”
    Willa put an arm around her niece’s shoulders and hugged her close to make sure Mary Virginia understood just how good she had been. Thirteen was a difficult age. “You should have seen your mother the time we took her with us to the Wind Mountains. Horrified, all the time, horrified.”
    Edith smiled at the way Willa pantomimed Jessica’s horror and at her own first response to the Wind Mountains. Edith and Willa discovered Wyoming and the Wind Mountains at different times, but all Nebraskans eventually went west for camping and east for culture. Edith fell in love with the mountains the moment she arrived, but Willa’s sister Jessica, who was the same age as Edith, paid more attention to her own appearance than she did to the world around her. Jessica despised the mountains and hated tents.
    “Animals, she called us. Animals. And she called your uncle Douglass a he-goat.” Willa threw back her head to bray like a donkey, “He-goat. He-goat.”
    At that Mary Virginia, Edith, and Willa caught the giggles and Willa was unable to continue until tears streamed from her eyes.
    “That’s when your uncle Douglass called your mother Jessicass,” another wave of laughter bubbled over, “and the name stuck,” Willa wiped her eyes.
    Mary Virginia’s lips formed a large O.
    “Oh, she hated the name. And she hated us,” Willa threw her hand to her forehead to assume the pose of Patience Betrayed.
    “From then on Jessica was Jessicass, and Douglass was Billy Goat Gruff. And I tried out for the role of the Troll,” Willa’s grin deepened and she contorted her face and swung her arms and gallumphed several steps backward.
    When their laughter subsided and Willa straightened up and shed her silly Troll grin, Mary Virginia was sitting on the ground where the giggles had dropped her, her arms draped across her body, still holding her sides.
    “Momma can be a cross to bear,” Mary Virginia’s face expressed a certain surprise. She had never before said a word of criticism about her mother.
    “Mothers are, sometimes,” Willa nodded and reached down to help her niece up. “Like a thorn that never lets loose.”
    E DITH glanced over to see what progress Willa was making in her search for the trail. Amidst all that laughter, she realized, had been a hint of Willa’s early turmoil with her own mother and a glimpse of the gargoyle-like character Willa was just then creating in her new manuscript about daughters. She called the character Blinker.
    Family, Edith smiled to herself. Mary Virginia still had so much growing to do. Edith remembered her own coming to consciousness and the difficult struggle to define her own footing. Willa’s passage had been similar. But independence, they finally realized together, did not have to mean eternal defiance or standing alone or stepping out of one’s place in the human family. Memory held, if nothing else did. And all that youthful stomping and strutting about to assert one’s place in the world, Edith snorted out loud. That was the chimera.
    Ties that bind, and ties that set free. Edith finished tying her shoestrings and resettled