Bone Necklace by Julia Sullivan: Excerpt

Bone Necklace by Julia Sullivan

Bone Necklace is inspired by the true story of a small band of Native American warriors who, in 1877, held off four converging armies for four months while their families escaped to Canada. In addition to an Idaho militiaman and a Nez Perce warrior, the narrators include an English painter named Nicole, who gets caught up in the violence.

Nicole and her husband, a geologist, are touring Yellowstone Park when the Nez Perce ride through, full of fury after a bloody battle on the Big Hole River. Nicole’s husband, Witt, is killed, and she is taken hostage along with the couple’s guide, Mr. Ford. In this excerpt from the book, Nicole and the guide have just been released after traveling for nearly a month with the tribe.

***

Nicole doubted she could have survived with the Indians for much longer. She was too exhausted, too cold and hungry, too unaccustomed, by birth and experience, to the hard way that they lived. She was well-educated and well-traveled, but it turned out she was helpless in the wilderness, having acquired not one single useful skill through all those years of boarding school. She knew how to plant a flower garden, but she didn’t know which flowers she could eat. She knew the difference between a fish knife and a butter knife, but she didn’t know how to use a knife to gut a gopher or a squirrel. She could embroider a handkerchief, but she couldn’t patch a moccasin. She could select the silver, but she couldn’t cook the meal. The Indians must have found her ridiculous.

She supposed they were no better suited to life on a reservation than she was to life in the high, cold mountains. She tried to imagine Running Bird wearing farmer’s coveralls and laughed out loud at the absurdity of it. The government might just as well tell a fish not to swim or a peacock not to preen. 

“I can’t imagine what you find so funny,” Mr. Ford said, as if she owed him an explanation. 

“I can’t imagine you finding anything funny,” she said. 

Nicole folded her arms, conserving warmth, and tried to ignore the gloomy guide, against whom her resentment had softened, but only a little bit. A brisk wind gripped from the north, scattering leaves, which caught in the riotous curls tumbling down her back. Her hair, which hadn’t seen a comb in weeks, was tangled like a sticker vine hanging down from a dried-out tree. She’d traded her impractical skirts and petticoats for Indian garb and lost her wide-brimmed hat. Her face, hands, and arms were sunburned and scratched with angry lines. Her lips were chapped and cracked. 

The dour guide made a fire the laborious way, rubbing two sticks together to produce a wisp of smoke, coaxing the wood into flames which flickered in the wind as he added tinder. Nicole huddled near the warmth and thought about home, and the long distance she’d have to travel to get there, and the many months it would take. 

According to Mr. Ford, she had two options. She could travel a thousand miles west, back over much of the same treacherous ground she’d just covered, and catch a boat out of Portland, which would take her around Cape Horn. Alternatively, she could travel a thousand miles east, catch the Union Pacific Railroad to New York, and book a steamer across the Atlantic. Either way, the trip would be long, tiring, lonesome, and sad. 

Perhaps she’d spend the winter at Fort Smith, recovering her strength, and then go back to Yellowstone Park in the spring to look for Witt’s body. There wasn’t much waiting for her in London anyway. The home she yearned for was a home that had Witt in it, which wasn’t the one she’d be returning to at all. She’d gone away a wife and would return a widow. The life she’d had was over now. The life she faced was a footnote at the end of a story whose best parts were already finished. 

Witt’s voice stayed strong in her head while she traveled with the Indians, but she was half delirious then. Once she was warm and plump again, sleeping on a feather bed instead of a buffalo robe, she knew that her husband would become more memory than presence, and that even his memory, in time, would start to fade. His leather chair, his piles of books, his dresser filled with collars and cuffs, the mattress hollowed out on one side by the vestige of his shape—every empty room would evoke a longing for the past, a nostalgia for trivial things from a life that had come unspooled. 

Nicole worried that people would treat her differently, now. Assume that she’d been raped and whisper behind her back. Unpack her words, looking for evidence of lingering trauma. Avoid her altogether, for fear of not knowing what to say. Treat her like damaged goods. She’d be the carriage accident that people craned their necks to see without bothering to stop and help.

With physical effort, she threw back her shoulders and tossed her hair. Her life might not be as easy as it was before, but it wasn’t a scrap to be thrown away, either. She’d learn to live around the grief, like a tree root encircling a boulder, pressing through the crevices and the gaps.

What else can I do? 

Exactly, my dear, Witt said.

***

BUY BONE NECKLACE HERE

Julia Sullivan is an American lawyer, an English solicitor, and an international arbitrator. Bone Necklace is her first novel. 

For more information about Bone Necklace or the author, please visit www.juliasullivanauthor.com 

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing