Free The Shore by Sara Taylor

her father and Mercury together made Medora think of old couples walking hand in hand; Andrew Day simply looked like a man leading a horse he wasn’t too sure about. They stopped a few feet off from the porch, where she could still see them, and her father rested a hand on Mercury’s cheek while they talked. There was a tentativeness to Andrew’s movements, a flutter in his too-big hands, made all the more pronounced by its contrast to her father’s deliberate gestures. He was clearly there about the tobacco, rather than about the horses.
    Afterward she thought that in that moment she should have felt something, or her heart should have jumped, or some organ should have given a flutter, the way the hearts and organs of young women in books always did. Or maybe not. It wasn’t love, just opportunity, she felt that afternoon; the sight of him ashe led his gelding up toward the house had simply set her mind to turning. When he stepped up onto the porch and passed out of sight she held still for a moment, staring into the middle distance, then turned back to the
Medicinal Herbal
and continued reading about the uses of
A. vulparia.
    That he was the means by which she would escape her father’s house she concluded over the next few hours of reading, though she had not yet determined how. She wouldn’t embarrass herself by trying to seduce him; the idea was inherently ridiculous. Matters of birth aside, she was not the type gifted in the tools of seduction. Her coarse black hair was shot heavily and prematurely with silver, and fought its way out of any arrangement. The years of contention with her father had set her face in a sullen grimace, which even concentration and a mirror couldn’t fully remove. She stooped, she squinted, she stepped heavily. Her bones were large and solid, and when she bothered to winch herself into company-worthy clothes she looked even more ridiculous, more manly, for the juxtaposition between her coarse darkness and the lightness of fine silk. Her shoulders, hands, and face were broad, her skin a shade or seven too brown. She’d known from childhood that the usual feminine methods would not work for her, long before Calley, her father’s housekeeper and the woman who had mothered her into adulthood, had begun to tell her that she’d have to make her way by her wits rather than by her caboose. He was a man, but a businessman: they would have to negotiate.
    Her dinner was brought up to her that night. She could not tell, and didn’t care especially, if it was because she was still in disgrace or her father didn’t want his half-breed bastard at the table with a new business associate. Women, ministers,local families, none of them visited anymore, though Medora vaguely recollected small, golden-haired children rolling with her younger self on the parlor rug while a mushroomy man in a clerical collar and his reedy wife sat nervously on the horsehair sofa. Her father was no respecter of persons when it came to exercising his temper, and only men about the horses, or men about the tobacco, or men looking to buy or sell or sit on the long open porch in the evening air sipping bourbon until the heavy moon hung low over the horizon came round anymore. This did not bother Medora. She spent the majority of their visits locked in her room, its plain paper beginning to peel, the bedstead and two of the windowpanes cracked, plants in chipped pots and teacups and jugs slowly massing and reaching toward the window, her handful of childhood toys put up on shelves above the empty fireplace and their place on floor and bedside table taken by drifts of books gradually migrated from her grandfather’s study. It lacked the dusty sumptuousness, bordering on excess, of the rest of the house, but it was her space.
    —
    Medora’s parents had never married. Her mother had been one of the few remaining Shawnee, who wore dresses and pinned up her dark hair like a white woman, mended clothes and worked the fields, kept