Free The Six-Gun Tarot by R. S. Belcher

feeling that way. Ashamed of feeling old, ashamed of feeling ugly and unwanted. Ashamed of being past the point of relevancy anymore, at least to Arthur and to herself. She hated caring about all that. Why should she give a damn about what others thought of her, what men thought of her? Especially Arthur. She could hear Bonnie saying the words in her skull, but the fire and the joy they had once carried was gone. In its place she had regret and an ache stronger than any she had ever known to secure in her daughter the tools needed to never fall into the trap Maude had found herself in, the one she had sworn to never fall into.
    Her hair fell about her shoulders. She brushed the bangs out of her eyes. And wiped a smear of mud off her forehead. She suddenly wanted to cry and hated herself for that as well. She blinked and looked deep into the eyes in the mirror, ordering the tears to hold. The eyes belonged to a stranger.
    Her earliest memory was of the ships in Charleston Harbor. Father would take her with him to work in the city in the vague intervals between the care of governesses or distant relations. They would pass the harbor on their way to his offices, near Market Hall, and every time Maude would feel as if she were glimpsing some fantastical world, more colorful and exciting than any that she had been presented in the stories of Anderson and Marryat she listened to wide-eyed each night.
    The ships clustered in the docks were like alien castles: masts spiderwebbed with dark cable-like lines, the colorful flags from distant, mysterious nations snapping in the gusting wind, and everywhere the men who mastered the ships—swaggering, lanky, unkempt. They strode across the decks, scurried up and down the gangplanks and the nests; they spit, cussed sang and laughed, all with such vital purpose. They were so different from Father, so different from all the other men she had ever seen in her life.
    “Father,” she said once as they passed the harbor, “when I am grown, I wish to become a sailor and travel the world and have my own ship, with my own crew, and have grand adventures!”
    It was said with grave seriousness. Her father had smiled. In the years to come, Maude would see the same smile cross the faces of many men in her life, even when she was a grown woman. Always the same smile, full of patronizing amusement and smug condescension.
    “Don’t be a featherbrain, Maude, my dear,” he said, without a drop of malice in his loving tone. “Women can’t be sailors, or own ships. That’s the kind of nonsense that sped your dear mother to an early passing. Women simply are too delicate for such adventures, you see. But perhaps you may marry a merchant captain that owns a fleet of ships. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
    That night the stories were not as magical. They never would be again. Maude had begun to wonder what else she was not allowed to do, to be. The world had suddenly become a much, much more narrow place.
    Mother’s proxies were an endless stream of brittle, joyless women paid to care for her. When one would quit or be dismissed Maude would often spend the intervening time passed from one relative or another, mostly from her father’s side of the family, the Andertons.
    Father had experienced much success in the trade and export of indigo and deerskins and was very well off. Mother had been a governess and schoolteacher prior to meeting Father. She was outspoken and well educated, a trait found in many of the women of her family, the Cormacs. Father loved her and tried to endure her mannish proclivities, including a well-known and often much-maligned enthusiasm for the abolition movement.
    As difficult as being married to an abolitionist in South Carolina could be, Mother was equally vocal about her support for the burgeoning suffrage movement. While Martin Anderton endured numerous indignities because of his wife’s views, he loved her dearly and tried to make the best of the near-constant ribbing he