birdbrain

Set in the late 1700s, not specific yet.

Mavis is a Scotch-Irish immigrant, leaving her home at the age of 8.

On the way to the new world, she wakes up in the middle of the night and decides to explore the ship. While she's on the top deck, a storm approaches. One of the ropes holding a sail is hit with a strong gust of wind and the rope breaks free, whipping her in the head. She loses the sight in her left eye, and starts seeing blueish mist in the darkness of her missing vision.

Her and her family arrive in Pennsylvania, moving from place to place over the course of a few years. They finally settled in Shenandoah Valley, where her father was able to get a land grant to build and raise livestock on. Mavis is now 15.

In this place, Mavis meets a war veteran from the French-Indian war. His name is Eli, he came from England and was recruited to the war in his late teens. He was thrown into a wooded battlefield and could barely keep up. It left him emotionally scarred. Afterward, he started seeing that same blue mist.

Over the years the mist starts to look more humanoid. They're ghosts. He becomes an outcast, most people think he is crazy. Except the few who believe in the supernatural. Eli and Mavis end up meeting at a general store. Mavis is there with a note from her father to give to the store owner. While she waits for him to be done with his other errands, she starts seeing more of that mist. She's only just started to see them in a human shape, and started covering her good eye to get a better look at them. She follows them around the room and Eli notices this, he can also see the ghost. He also knows who it is, someone who was robbed and shot inside the store years and years ago.

He doesn't feel welcome enough in the store to start talking to her, he draws sometimes, back when he was a soldier he would sketch out the landscapes and maps. He has hundreds of drawings of the ghosts. He waits for her to leave the store and hands her one of the drawings before leaving.

When Mavis realizes he might know what these figures are, she has a more fantastical idea of what their relationship could be, he's going to be her tutor and she’ll be able to see and communicate with ghosts. But he is just looking for someone who's going through the same thing, someone he can talk to without the fear of them thinking he's crazy.

They end up becoming good friends over the years and Eli ends up working with her father (his name is Les) on their ranch. But after hard winters and medical problems, Les slowly built up a large debt. He ended up having to sell the land and most of his livestock. Together, Les, his wife Bonne, Mavis and Eli drove the rest of the cattle all the way to what would later become Texas. There was a lot of unclaimed land, if they got in first and established their ranch there, they wouldn't have to do any paperwork, it could just slowly be known as their land.

They ended up settling along a river near Nacogdoches, in the Tejas frontier. Mavis is now 26.

Mavis has always been good with animals, instead of working on the ranch, she started working as an informal veterinarian for both cattle and pets. Through her work, she meets another family. A man named Thomas Harlan, his wife, Ruth and their son(10 years old), William. William's dog was sick and she nursed it back to health. They didn't meet for long enough to actually get to know each other deeply, but they considered each other to be good families. So it was a shock to hear a month later that William was murdered, supposedly by his father. This enraged the townsfolk, most of them knew the family well and especially loved William, but Thomas was always in some other town for work, they didn't know him as well. They find him and chase him down, they corner him at the river and start to beat him. He is lying on the ground, blood pouring out of his face. Mavis has been in the crowd, not to join in, just to see what's going on. He points up toward all of them, he tells them he would never do this to his son, and if there's any afterlife, he will find a way to prove it. His body goes limp and Mavis sees his body leak out bright white foam that swirls around him. By now she knows what ghosts are and that she and Eli are the only ones, so far, that can see them. She goes home and tells him about it, he remembers the white foam, from his time at war. They walk back down to the site where he died, his body has already been moved but the white foam is still swirling. He tells her it takes a full day for the ghost to fully form. They walk to Williams' murder site.