Free Blue Moon by Jill Marie Landis

crudely made, but it had provided the immediate shelter his family needed. There were rough shelves for dishes and for his many books, two long benches, a table and a bedframe, a packed dirt floor, and a loft for the boys.
    Early on he had purchased some chickens, but the wolves had gotten most of them. He had the mare, a milk cow, a plow, and a neighbor who would loan him an ox and cart when he needed them.
    He knew that inside, Susanna had retreated to her rocker, silent and forlorn. She sat there for hours, staring at the bare dirt floor or the empty hearth. Day after day she rocked back and forth, her hands lying idle in her lap, her hair knotted, her clothing unwashed. More often than not she let the fire grow cold while she spent her time dwelling on the child she had lost shortly after their arrival, the lifeless baby girl who had died without ever having wakened to life.
    His sons had taken to escaping the cabin to play somewhere at the edge of the wood—sweaty, barefoot, faces always streaked with dirt, noses runny, hair standing out in all directions. Slowly they were losing all touch with the ordered, civilized life they had once known. They had grown so much that their clothes no longer fit them. Their wrists and arms and their knobby little ankles hung out of the ends of cuffs and hems.
    Payson dreaded every step he took toward the log cabin that he could see across the open land. The field he had struggled to clear himself was still peppered with the stumps of hickory, sycamore, and maple trees he could not pull out even with the horse and plow. His crop of corn had yet to be planted.
    He was no farmer. He knew that now, too late, now that he faced this hard land where brute strength was glorified and a man was judged more by the rows he could plow in a day and the amount of whiskey he could hold than by education or wealth.
    He had what his neighbors called “book larnin’.” He was a teacher, a poet, a man of letters—not a farmer nor a hunter, not a drinker, not even a dreamer anymore. His dreams were long gone. Shattered. Vanished as all visions eventually do, but his had gone not little by little, but all at once. His dreams had vanished with Olivia.
    For Susanna’s sake, for all their sakes, he should have listened to his father-in-law and stayed in Virginia. But instead, he had stubbornly clung to the idea that he would be able to carve a home out of the raw, fertile land available in Illinois. He had been too pigheaded to take the money and small plantation that Susanna’s father offered them, one that would enable him to keep Susanna in the style in which she had always lived.
    Her father was a rich man, one who had felt sorry for a near-penniless, widowed teacher and had hired him to tutor his only child, not to steal her heart. Richard Morrison had fought their marriage every step of the way. He had argued until the bitter end, tried to dissuade Susanna from marrying a poor widower with a daughter very near her own age. But Morrison’s objections only made headstrong Susanna more determined.
    After trying to be the husband Susanna deserved for six long years, Payson finally convinced his wife that if they moved away from her father’s constant ridicule and were settled on their own homestead in Illinois, they would truly be happy. Instead, he had turned her life into a living hell.
    As he walked over the heavy clods of dirt in the field, his steps began to drag the closer he came to the cabin. There was not a wisp of smoke curling out of the chimney, but at least spring was here, and now whenever Susanna let the fire go out the boys were not threatened with frostbite.
    She had let things go so far during the winter that he had been forced to take in a poor Scots girl who had come begging to help fetch and carry in exchange for room and board. He offered her sleeping space in the loft with the boys and gave her bed and board in exchange for help, but Molly MacKinnon was a wild, outspoken girl