The Ride of Her Life by Elizabeth Letts

Author:Elizabeth Letts [Letts, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

There is something about riding down the street on a prancing horse that makes you feel like something, even if you ain’t a thing.

—Will Rogers

Chapter

18

Lost

THERE IS A TIME in every journey when a person is hit, with the heavy brick of certainty, by the knowledge that life isn’t a game. That there is no swooping, logical, Milton Bradley–esque path to follow. That your choices, or destiny, or whatever other power you attribute life’s turns to, may lead you to a spot that has inescapable consequences—consequences you may not like or think you deserve. Annie Wilkins hit that place about fifteen miles east of Forrest City, Arkansas.

The state of Arkansas had always held sway over Annie’s imagination. Some places become more than just locations to us; they begin to embody possibility, glittering at the edges of consciousness like some incandescent Xanadu. Annie had been born with a foot in two equally powerful American traditions. One foot was as firmly planted in Maine as those stubborn rocks that littered the fields, symbols of a family that after one giant lurch across the ocean had stayed put for hundreds of years. But the other foot itched with wanderlust, with a belief that somewhere out there was a locale that just might be better. For Annie, that place, unlikely as it might seem, had always been Arkansas. It had shimmered on the edges of her imagination, not just a state but a state of mind.

After Annie’s father had lost one of the many jobs he’d cycled through during her childhood, he’d done what so many other down-on-their-luck Americans had done before him: he’d taken off for points west, certain that he would find a place where his family could prosper. He was gone for months, and when he came back, he was full of stories—about crossing the Mississippi River in Memphis, about walking through Arkansas until he arrived in the city of Little Rock. His favorite story was about a hotel he’d seen for sale. A good hotel with a nice location, right near downtown, at a price that, by Maine standards, seemed like a song. He could make his fortune as a hotel proprietor, Annie’s mother could cook up homestyle meals, and Annie could be the chambermaid, the laundress. The way he told it, that Arkansas hotel was the Stuart family’s surefire ticket into the prosperous class. For Annie, the word “Arkansas” had always conjured up images of a better life.

Of course, no matter how cheap that hotel was, it was out of the price range of her tramping father. He’d left Little Rock fired up to return to Maine and find investors, but somehow that project had fizzled, leaving only the glowing trail of missed opportunity in its wake.

After Rex’s seeming unwillingness to leave Tennessee, the quartet had managed to get across the Memphis & Arkansas Bridge and take their first footsteps in that thwarted promised land.

Rex’s cough was long gone, and his stamina had improved so much that Annie had taken to riding only him, letting Tarzan carry more of the heavy load.

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