Something Worth Doing

by Jane Kirkpatrick

  “You can’t stay married to her, Pa,” Harvey said. “She dishonored you.”

  It was June, the summer heat beginning its rise in the Willamette Valley. They sat in the parlor, the coolest room of the inn, darkened by shades that made Jenny think they were at a wake. Perhaps they were. They all spoke as though Jenny’s stepmother wasn’t even present, but she was, sobbing with a broken heart. Her remorse was genuine, Jenny could see that. But they’d all recently learned of her indiscretion before she ever married their father; the child she now carried was not Tucker Scott’s. If word got out that the child wasn’t her father’s, it would be worse than the divorce he was contemplating. Either way, it would be scandalous for marriage-aged daughters to be living in the same home as a fallen woman or a divorced father.

  Jenny was torn. His wife had made a poor decision, but she shouldn’t have to have her life destroyed by gossip and rumor when the man who caused it had no repercussions. And a divorce—such an act would spill down on all of them like water over a ridge, splattering everything below it. All the girls were in the splatter. She supposed her brothers were too, but they’d at least be able to decide for themselves whether to stay with their father or go live with one of their married sisters—as soon as the girls found husbands.

  Her stepmother had written a letter at her father’s request where she apologized and revealed how she’d been duped by a previous proposal following the death of her husband. Widowed and desperate, she’d accepted the man’s word of marriage and succumbed to his advances. But she hadn’t known she carried a child when the man abandoned her, and she met Tucker Scott and fell genuinely in love with him. She begged for forgiveness, and why shouldn’t she have it? Wasn’t that what Christian compassion was all about, making space for healing from the hardness of life?

  “Jenny!” Her father barked her name to bring her back to the tension of the room. “Ben hasn’t officially asked me for your hand. I imagine you’ve told him not to.”

  She nodded. And he’s honored that request.

  She had wanted the decision about marriage to be hers and Ben’s alone. She could stay on at the inn with Fanny if her sister was forced to marry Amos. Or try to rent a room somewhere. She couldn’t go with her father, with her stepmother’s mistake becoming known. Her father’s indecision about divorcing her—she could see he still loved the woman—caught them all off guard. It was the close of the school term, when she planned to take on more sewing in her spare time, help at the inn, and get to know Ben. It was all a swirl, and her growing feelings for Ben were in the middle.

  If only her father had waited to remarry! If only she’d had more time to pursue her profession. If only Ben’s farm were closer to civilization so she could consider a fee school operated out of their home. If only. The most useless words in the English language.

  “I asked him not to talk with you until I was ready,” Jenny told her father. “I’m still not sure I am prepared.” She didn’t add how dismayed she was that despite her father having made the decision to marry so quickly, it was all the women who would pay the highest price for having choices rushed or made for them.

  “Not much time to spare,” her father warned.

  “Yes, time’s a-wasting and we with it,” Jenny said. “I’ll advise him to seek your permission.” As had happened for her mother, John Tucker had taken a choice from her.

  Jenny and Ben married on August 2, 1853, in the town of Lafayette. She wore a dress the color of daffodils, with a white bow that trailed down her back and showed off her tiny waist. She’d sewed the dress in between making one for Fanny too, who two weeks later married Amos Cook, a well-regarded pioneer of the Territory but still twenty years older than his new wife.

  “It isn’t fair,” Jenny told her sister as she pulled the curling iron from the coals, tested it with her spit to make sure it cooled enough to not singe her sister’s hair.

  “Some things aren’t.” Fanny dabbed at her eyes with the blueberry-dyed handkerchief.

  “But Papa married whom he wanted. Men get better choices not because they’re wiser—but because they’re men.” She thought of Harold Bunter and the law that aided him if he found a wife in time. “And because they make the rules. Why is that?”

  “Oh, Jenny. You’ll frustrate yourself wishing it weren’t so. We’re girls. Men aren’t. We have to make the best of it.”

  There didn’t seem any other option but to accept. Still, Jenny’s tears as her sister spoke her vows came from both sadness and guilt—because Jenny at least had the luxury of love. Fanny had to learn to love her husband if she could.

  At Fanny and Amos’s wedding, Harold Bunter showed up. “Holy cow chips,” she told Ben when she saw his brooding scowl as he dismounted and tied his horse to the rail. Oddly he said nothing perverse to Jenny or Ben nor anyone else. He stood at the edge of the crowd, spitting his tobacco juice into a cup, while he stared at Jenny.

  “Don’t worry,” Ben said. “I’ll always protect you.”

  She nodded, took her serving platter of beef dodgers, and set them on the sawhorse table between the vases of wildflowers dotting the crisp white tablecloth. Fanny had served the same foods—beef dodgers and beans, blueberries, and pies of various nature—at Ben and Jenny’s wedding. Jenny had waited for Harold to show up on that day and decided, when he hadn’t, that a woman could waste a lot of time in worry. Better to think of what to do if trouble did appear and have a plan of action for then but otherwise focus on the moment. At Fanny’s wedding he was less imposing to her with a husband by her side. He did nothing but stare, and Jenny could abide that. She turned her back to him, welcoming Ben’s assurance that he’d be there to take care of her should the need arise. Many husbands weren’t so protective of their wives and daughters—her father included—but she had hope in Ben.

  The yo-yo of “yes or no” about Jenny marrying or not had ceased, and there was relief in that. The vows—for better or for worse—rang true. This was a lifelong commitment, and having made it, she prayed their union would be blessed and gave herself wholeheartedly to loving Ben.

  Little Josie attended their nuptials, along with her parents and new brother, and Jenny met all Ben’s family for the first time that August day. She heard stories about his growing up in Illinois, about his waddling to the barn and petting the nose of a big draft horse shortly after his first birthday. “Horses were his first love,” his father told her. “But I’d say he’s found their match in you.”

  “Come here, my new wife.” Ben held out his hand to her and asked her to sit before the gathering on a rocking chair brought to the outside from the inn. “I’ve a little present for my bride.” He strummed the guitar strings. “I wrote this myself.” Jenny blushed at his attention and that of the guests. The words of his song praised “a girl with the eyes of kindness and a heart of hope” and went on to tell a story of a strong-minded woman who ultimately “determined she’d fall in love and marry.” She applauded and the crowd with her. I should have written a poem for him. She’d do that, she decided, and read it to him in the privacy of their cabin she had yet to see.

  They spent their first night at the inn and rode to Ben’s ranch the morning after, the sweet scent of honeysuckle bursting in the air. They stopped to pick blackberries, filling a basket, laughing as they fed each other the warm, plump fruit that stained their fingers and lips.

  “I couldn’t be happier, Jenny,” Ben said, his naturally white teeth a faded blue.

  “It’s a good day, Ben Duniway.” And so it was. Perhaps not the sweeping romantic fantasy she’d thought of when she read those novels her mother slipped into the house, but sweet and safe nonetheless. This man beside her loved her, and while she wasn’t sure what love was, she knew that when he touched her hand to help her from the wagon, then held her to his chest, she felt warm and wanted, and worries over the past and of the future sank like the sunset, slow and easy from their view. Surely if that was not love, it was close.

  “I’ll thi
nk of it as our claim.” Ben swept his arm before them. He tried to see what Jenny did: tall firs thick as weeds covering the vast expanse except where he’d worked so hard to clear ground. Would she see the potential? He’d built a small cabin and acquired horses for breeding and riding. He had two cows, chickens, and sheep for wool and mutton.

  Ben thought of it as “their claim,” even though he’d farmed it an entire year before he even met Jenny. Besotted, his own father had said of him, and Ben guessed he was. Her acceptance of his offer of marriage sent him spinning his hat to the wind in gratitude. He suspected he loved her more than she him, but he was a persuasive man and he’d convince her in time that no man would ever love her more. She would come to love him deeper. He knew that she cared for him but also that he was a good way out of a bad situation in her family. He’d appreciated her honesty in her acceptance.

  Today, he walked behind the mule plowing the rock-peppered earth. John Henry, her little brother—the Scotts called him “Little Toot”—picked up rocks and made cairns of them beside the field. Ben knew it was hard land and he might have made a better purchase, but it was his. It was also beautiful and green, though as Jenny pointed out once or twice, it wasn’t as good a cropland as farther west in the valley. He hated to hear disappointment in her voice, but most of that land had been already claimed by the earlier arrivals of the 1840s. Still, this farm was much better than the Boonsboro land of Kentucky, or Pike County country of Illinois where his family came from.

  Ben had managed to bring his father west in ’51, a year after his own footsteps onto Oregon soil by way of California. With earnings from the gold field, he’d paid his father’s way out west and operated his own farm from those gold nuggets too. He’d made some lucky strikes but preferred farming to mining any day. Shoot, if he hadn’t come to Oregon, he never would have met Jenny, and what a great loss that would have been.

  The jerk of the shoulder harness as he split the earth brought him back to the field, but his mind soon wandered to Jenny. He’d first seen her as part of a relief team sent out to meet the wagon trains in the fall of ’52. Locals had heard several Illinoisans were headed that way, and like his father’s company of ’51, by the time they reached the Willamette Valley, people had slim pickings for food and other provisions. Ben had helped organize rescue parties. Well, relief parties. People liked that term better and were more willing to accept the beans and bacon and blankets the settlers had brought with them. He’d seen but a glimpse of the slender brown-haired beauty. She was sitting on a rock beside a stream, writing in a book, waiting for others to get their beans and bacon before her. Something about her made Ben look longer than a stranger should have, and she raised her baby blues to him, he guessed because she felt him staring.

  He tapped his fingers to his hat, nodded. She stared back, didn’t acknowledge him at all, and soon returned to her book. Ben turned his horse away, not wishing to interrupt the lady, and looked instead for someone to tell him who she was. He couldn’t see who her family might be, as she was off by herself, and when she wandered back to the cluster of folks, he noticed her handing out biscuits to anyone who came along. He guessed she saw everyone as her responsibility—once she set her scribbling down.

  Then one day in the rainy winter of that year, Ben learned about a new schoolteacher in Cincinnati, a little burg in the Oregon valley. She was boarding out—what teachers did, living with parents of students a month or term at a time. One of Ben’s neighbors said she was a popular guest at parties, well-chaperoned by her father and sisters, and a sought-after sweetheart, though she turned most suitors away. “Her tongue’s got acid on it, so be wary,” one of Ben’s friends said, punching him on his shoulder. He’d taken the courting from there and didn’t mind, when he later told her, that she had no memory of that gaze exchanged back on the trail. Now here they were, man and wife. God was good.

  A late-afternoon breeze dried some of Ben’s sweat. He felt he had a few virtues to offer. His hardscrabble farm, for one, with its tall timber and horses. He trained them to ride, gentled them rather than broke them, and they’d taken to the harness too, with his whispering words to their twitching ears. He’d even worked a few to tricks and sold a pair for circus horses. He’d begun a breeding program and hoped for matched white teams one day or a pair of trained pintos to prance at Fourth of July celebrations. For now he’d limited his breeding to help farmers needing animals ready for harness. He had a good reputation for hard work and won loyal friends, and his word meant something. He offered Jenny that.

  And he could read. That was a virtue, though he wasn’t prone to it. Words didn’t hold the same reverence that they did to his wife. She’d even insisted on leaving the word “obey” out of the marriage vows. He’d gotten a kick out of that and how she’d talked down the Methodist minister’s objections. Ben preferred to sing and play guitar and talk to friends or work beside them if they had a need. Giving was an important virtue in this young country, and Ben knew how to do that.

  Ben had had a gal or two say he was good-looking, and he’d never been in a fist fight. He hadn’t had to defend himself, because no one wanted to take him on, being six feet by the time he was twelve. Hard work had filled him out.

  Another virtue was his desire to be a matched team with his wife, not one pulling in different directions, so he didn’t tell her what to do and she didn’t direct him. At least that’s what they’d agreed to that day in August. And though they were newly wedded, he hadn’t minded a whit having her ten-year-old brother John Henry move in with them after two weeks. The boy liked the horses and the hardscrabble place too, though he was of slight build and tired as easily as Jenny. Her back hurt her often “from an old injury,” she’d told him without her usual detail.

  Ben unharnessed the plow mule and led him out to pasture. He washed up at the pump, taking water from a shallow well. He wiped his tanned arms as he surveyed his land. Their land. God had been good to them, bringing them together and to this place, an area bordered by split rails to fence the mule and horses in without having to be hobbled. Ben was a good rail splitter too. Another of his attributes along with being a bit intuitive when it came to women’s needs, he hoped.

  They’d been married a little over two months. It had been an ongoing education. He walked to the log house, stopped at the garden to pull an October carrot. He’d planted these vegetables, but next year, with Jenny here, they’d have a better garden with potatoes and pumpkins and maybe even a little popped corn.

  He kissed Jenny and inhaled the scent of supper on the table he’d built. He tried to remember to call her “Abigail.” She said a married woman ought to give up any childhood nickname—but it wasn’t easy. She’d always be Jenny to him. He took the platter she handed him, set it on the table, then lifted his leg over the back of the chair to sit. Little Toot, not yet ten, was already there, smiling.

  “What are you grinning about,” Ben said. The boy swung his legs beneath the bench. Ben reached for the fresh bread. Heavens, he loved this married life. How blessed he was and more to come, once they began their family. “Come on, Jenny. I mean, Abigail. I’ll say grace over the food for the three of us.”

  “Make that four,” she said as she took her seat.

  “Who’s coming for supper?” He put the steaming bowl of potatoes she handed him on the table as she sat. “Should we wait?”

  “Already here.” She patted her abdomen. “He—or she—will be joining us in May in person.”

  “Well, I’ll be. She tell you first, Little Toot? That why you’re grinning big as a canyon?”

  “Yes, sir, she did. I’m gonna be an uncle.”

  Ben rose and took Jenny in his arms. “Thought I couldn’t be happier with getting you as my wife and now this. All that laboring not in vain.”

  She laughed and pushed against his chest, but not before he kissed her. “We have children present,” she cautioned.

  “More than one. I’m happy for us, Jenny.”

  �
��I am too, though I’d have liked a little more time to get this cabin into shape, perk up the chickens into better layers, and make and sell more butter. A baby’s going to cost, Ben.”

  “That I know, but it’ll also give back twice its weight in joy.”

  “I hope it’s a boy,” she said after Ben had spoken a table grace.

  “Do you? A daughter would be grand.”

  “Yes, but she’ll have a harder life than you boys have. Girls just do.”

  “We’ll love her like a son, then,” Ben said. “And do all we can to make it easier on her. And on you too. What can I do to help?”

  “Me too,” Little Toot said.

  “Well, aren’t you versatile men,” Jenny said.

  “But another of our many virtues,” Ben said. “Just know, I doubt I’ll ever learn to cook, so give me something else to commandeer.”

  “Laundry,” Jenny said. “It’s more work than planting corn and twice as arduous. A babe will bring on more.”

  SIX

  Early Storms

  1853 TO 1856

  _______

  She hadn’t remembered the winter being so drippy and dark. So much had happened their first months in the Territory—her teaching, her father’s marriage, the work at the inn, the dances, her sisters always present—she guessed she hadn’t noticed the heavy downpours, broken now and then by shards of sun. “Sun breaks,” the locals called the half hour or so when the rains stopped long enough so a girl could jump the puddles and head to the privy without getting wet. Maybe it was a wetter winter. Or perhaps the weather wore on her without the joy of her sisters’ voices or the children from her school to invigorate. Morning sickness didn’t help.

  It was just the three of them at Hardscrabble, as Jenny thought of their 320 acres. Ben often rode off to drum up potential breeding contracts or sales. Little Toot would go with him, so she had hours alone, never hearing another voice while she mended torn pants or churned butter she put in molds to sell. The chickens gave in to winter and ate more than they gave back in eggs. “We’re both gaining weight,” she told them as she reached beneath their warm plumage seeking one or two eggs instead of their usual four or five.