The shouting never stopped; it just grew faint, and when I finally came to a stop and eased myself up, I saw the coach continuing on at an impressive clip, with my father and brother each hanging out a window, pounding on the sides to get the driver’s attention. Before the coach could come to a complete stop, Daddy jumped out of it, somehow keeping his footing as he landed, and ran back to me.
“Belinda! Darling, are you all right?”
I nodded. I was able to stand, able to walk, and though my shoulder was sore from the fall, both arms seemed to be functioning.
“This isn’t the time or place for games.” Daddy’s voice was stern. “You could have been killed.”
I nodded again and slowly, hanging onto his strong arm, walked back to the coach. Whip looked down at me and smiled, stopping just short of laughing when my father shot him a threatening glare. He jabbed and shared a laugh with the shotgun guard, though. The harnesses continued to jangle as the horses pranced in place. Daddy opened the door, and I climbed in.
“Oh, Belinda, your dress,” Mother said. “It’s ruined. Are you hurt?”
“She’s fine.” Daddy settled in beside me.
“That was a really stupid thing to do,” Phoebe said. “You could have been killed.”
“Yeah.” Chester was leaning back in his seat, his arms folded, looking every bit as if he’d just slept through the near death of his sister. “Next time you jump out of this thing, wait until it’s not raining. And take me with you.”
“Stop it, all of you.” Daddy settled in his seat, reached an arm outside the window, and slapped the side of the coach. The driver called out to the horses, and I braced myself for that first lurch. But nothing happened. There was a crack of the whip and another shouted command, but again, nothing.
“Why aren’t we moving?” Phoebe asked. Even though it was still quite dark in the coach, I could tell her eyes were boring straight through me.
“My guess is we’re stuck.” Chester opened the door and leaned out, holding the side ladder for balance. “Hey, Whip, are you going to need some help?”
Whip must have shouted something affirmative, because Chester sighed and jumped out into the rain.
Mother rolled up the window shade, leaned her own head out, and asked, “What on earth are you doing?” Without waiting for a response, she pulled her head back in. “What is he doing?”
“Wheels are stuck,” Daddy said.
“That’s silly. We were moving along just fine.”
“Yes. Then we stopped.”
I heard a hissing sound from Phoebe’s corner and slunk down in my seat.
Our driver counted off, “One, two, three …,” and a grunting sound came from the men outside. I rolled up the window shade on my side of the coach and looked out to see my brother with his shoulder braced between two spokes of the coach’s back wheel. His face, sheathed in rain, was contorted in the effort of pushing. His legs were bent beneath him, quickly losing their traction in the slick mud. After a couple of seconds with no results, he gave up his grip and shouted for the man on the other side to do the same. Standing upright, he saw me through the window.
I’m sorry, I mouthed, but he just smiled, winked, and gave his head a vigorous shake, creating a spray of water in the midst of the pouring rain.
“Hey there,” the shotgunner’s face appeared at the other window, causing my mother to jump. “We’re gonna need a little more help out here. Get these front tires.”
“Certainly,” Daddy said.
“Gotta have one more,” the gunner said. “Gotta keep it all equal.” He disappeared, leaving Phoebe, Mother, and me to look at each other.
“Well, Phoebe?” Mother said with a chipperness that had to hurt. “Belinda appears to be injured. Is it going to be you or me?”
“I’ll go.” Phoebe heaved herself off the seat. “I don’t want you to think I’m completely useless.”
I held my tongue and drew myself further back in my seat as she made her way past me. Daddy had gone around to the other side, so I could see Phoebe from my window. The wheel itself was almost as tall as she was, and she stood obstinately beside it until Chester left his own place and came over to her.
“Let me help you,” he said in that sweet, gentle voice that made you wonder how he could ever be such a snake. He positioned himself behind Phoebe and drew her back to him. Placing one hand on her upper arm and the other on her waist, he bent her body to the angle necessary to maneuver her shoulder between the wheel’s spokes. “Then on my count, you’re going to push as hard as you can and try to turn the wheel.”
He was leaning forward, pushing her, speaking right into the curve of her neck. Her face was just on the other side of the window, flushed red despite the pelting rain. She kept her eyes closed until Chester released his grip and went back to his own wheel. On a three-count, the driver gave the command to push, and Phoebe’s face contorted in the effort. It seemed the coach budged a bit, and just as I was about to speak an encouraging word to Phoebe, she slipped in the mud, hitting her face on the wheel’s hub as she fell to the ground.
“Hold up!” Chester sloshed to Phoebe’s side and took her arm, helping her slowly to her feet. “Hey there, girl—you don’t know your own strength.”
Phoebe offered a weak smile and made a useless attempt at swiping the mud from her skirt. Her cheek was marked with a long black streak of axle grease, and a slight red trickle below it was the only clue that she’d suffered a cut.
“Here, Phoebe.” I leaned out the window. “Come back inside and let me try.”
“I’m fine.” She turned to the wheel again.
Chester had disappeared behind the coach and was back now with an ax from the toolbox which he wedged through the spokes of the wheel. “This will give you a little more leverage. Just be careful not to fall on it.” He took off the kerchief that was tied around his neck and used it to wipe the grease and blood off Phoebe’s face. “Don’t want anybody thinking you’re an Indian.”
Once he was back in his own spot, he hollered to the driver, and they tried once again to dislodge the coach from the mud. I heard Chester shouting encouragement to Phoebe, and I joined in his praise, saying, “Good job, Phoebe! You’re doing fine!” Bright red blood trickled down her cheek, spreading thin in the spattering rain. Her eyes were squeezed shut, but at the sound of my voice she opened her right one—the one above the cut—and sent me a glare that convinced me of two things: she would single-handedly push this coach clear to Oregon for my brother but she wouldn’t move it a single inch for me.
Eventually strength and passion won out, and the coach rolled out of the rut it had been mired in. The driver kept the horses at a walking pace, slow enough to allow Daddy, Chester, and Phoebe to grab the ladder next to the coach’s door and swing inside after the shotgunner resumed his place on top. Mother didn’t say a word as my father, his shirt soaked through to his skin, settled in the seat beside her. I pressed myself against the wall of the coach to make room for Phoebe, who began to shiver the moment she sat down next to me. Chester pulled the door shut and latched it. When he sat down next to Phoebe, she scooted a little closer to me.
I kept my eyes on the coach’s floor and said nothing. The only noise was the faint chattering of Phoebe’s teeth and the sound of water dripping onto the puddles forming beneath my gaze. Soon enough the heat inside our coach overtook the refreshing chill of the rain outside, and we became a rumbling soup—soggy, steamy, and silent—until Mother said, “I want to go home.”
“The driver assures me that we’ll be quite comfortable at our next stop. We might even stay an extra day to really wash up, change clothes—”
“I mean home, Robert. Our home.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Daddy said.
“Don’t call me ridiculous or silly or absurd or any of those little words you call up when I assert myself.”
“This is not the time—”
“You’re right. The time was in Belleville, when I had mi
sgivings about this entire mess.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Phoebe press Chester’s neckerchief to her cheek, pull it away, examine the blood, and press it back.
“I knew even then,” Mother continued, “that first evening you mentioned that cursed place. I knew then that you would lead us into disaster—”
“Ellen—”
“But I assumed at some point logic would ensue and you would realize the folly of it all. So like a good little wife I held my tongue and prayed that God would bring you some shard of enlightenment. But like a stubborn fool—”
“Ma, that’s enough,” Chester said without much conviction.
“I allowed you to sell off my life piece by piece, uproot our children, take me away from my only family—”
“We are your family, Mother.” I felt my own chills set in at the shrill tone of her voice.
“I meant my still-living sister. Phoebe’s mother. The only blood relative I have left in this world, and you just yank it all out from underneath me. I should have stopped you. I should have put my foot down and refused to take part in this ridiculous fiasco.”
“Ellen.” Daddy’s tone discouraged any further discussion. “Darling, you didn’t have a choice.”
8
Just as our driver promised, our stagecoach rolled to a stop in a little courtyard surrounded by a generous, two-story house, a smaller clapboard cabin, and an impressive barn that must have housed the half-dozen horses trotting around the corral. Not quite five o’clock, it was early to declare this the stop for the night, but Daddy had prevailed in his request that we be allowed to bathe, change our clothes, and recover from the day spent driving through the raging summer storm. I lifted the leather shade and peered through the stagecoach window. The sun was just beginning its afternoon descent, and the land—wet with rain—glistened in its brilliance. Off in the distance, a single spire rose from the ground.
“That’s Chimney Rock.” Daddy flipped through the pages of The Emigrant’s Guide to Oregon and California.
“How far away is it?” I asked.
“Not sure from here. But just past it, and we’re in Wyoming territory. We’ll be halfway there.”
Even before the coach came to a halt, a man and a woman emerged from the front door of the bigger house and stood together, waving to us and offering shouts of welcome. The broad smiles on their faces turned to something else—a cross between pity and amusement—as one by one we stomped down the little steps that unfolded from beneath the coach’s door.
I can only imagine the sight we made—our clothes still damp and mud covered, Phoebe with a scabbing slash on her face, I with one sleeve nearly torn from my dress. Only Mother appeared, on the surface, to be civilized, and a closer inspection of her would reveal days’ worth of little stains and splotches and traces of grime in the grooves around her neck.
“Oh, good heavens, let’s have a look at you,” the woman said, and as she approached, I noticed that she was much older than she appeared at a distance, but not any bigger. In fact, she was just about my height, but the comforting arm she put around me suggested a strength to match any man’s. “We don’t get many children coming through this way. It’ll be good to have a little one around for a while.”
Normally I chafe at being referred to as a child, but after all these days, I could imagine curling up in this little woman’s arms and being rocked to sleep. Soon enough, though, she’d left me and was fawning over my mother, insisting that no woman could have endured the journey we had and still emerge looking so fresh and beautiful.
“Well, thank you.” Mother pressed her hand to her throat and smiled as if she believed it. “It was a harrowing day, Mrs.—”
“Bledsoe. Myra Bledsoe, and this is my husband, Calvin.”
Introductions were made all around, and Mrs. Bledsoe effused over each of us in turn. Chester seemed perfectly suited to play the dashing hero on a theater stage, Daddy was a welcome sight for someone who was so deprived of ever seeing a true gentleman, and poor Phoebe must get a salve put on that cut right away because the last thing she needed was a nasty scar. Under Mrs. Bledsoe’s brandishing finger, Whip and the shotgunner, with the grudging help of Calvin Bledsoe, brought down our trunks and bags and took them to the second-floor bedrooms in the big house.
“Now all of you follow those bags up there and get out of those things,” Mrs. Bledsoe continued, giving my father a little push. “Calvin will fetch some water to the stove, and we’ll see if we can’t get you cleaned up.”
The four of us—Mother, Daddy, Phoebe, and I—made our way through a modest front room and up a set of narrow stairs to find the rooms we had been assigned. Nobody spoke; in fact, Mother and Daddy hadn’t said a word to each other for the last ten miles of our drive. When we found our rooms, Daddy carried Mother’s bag inside, tipped his hat like any bellman, and announced that he would join Chester and the other men in the little cabin down by the barn. Mother didn’t say a word to stop him. Without any attempt to smile over the tension, she turned to us and told us to go into our room and change out of our filthy clothes.
“Our underthings too?” Phoebe asked.
“I don’t care,” Mother said, her voice thick with weariness. “I’m not about to declare myself your laundress.”
Without another word, she went into her room and seemed to take great care closing the door behind her. We walked into the room next to hers, and the back of my throat swelled with gratitude. The walls were painted a soft butter yellow; lace curtains fluttered in the late summer breeze. The bed was covered with a pale blue calico quilt, and a small dish of wildflowers adorned the bureau. To wear such sullied clothes in here seemed insulting, and with unspoken agreement, Phoebe and I set upon them, tearing at buttons and stepping out of moist, muddy heaps.
Soon after, Mrs. Bledsoe knocked on our door. After peering through a narrow opening to be sure there was no one in the hall, Phoebe opened the door wide enough to allow the little woman and her large wicker basket to come through.
“What a shame, what a shame.” Mrs. Bledsoe held up our discarded clothing. “But we’ll get these washed up, mended, and hung out tonight so they’ll be fresh as a Tuesday in the morning. Now, come on,” she made a beckoning gesture with her hand, indicating she wanted our undershirts and pantalets too. “I believe these could use a bit of washing as well.”
Phoebe and I looked uneasily at each other.
“Now, now,” Mrs. Bledsoe said, “this isn’t the time to be shy. I’m a woman, same as you. And I’m keepin’ all the men out till you’ve had a chance at a good long bath. Water’s heatin’ up now, so off with those, and I’ll call you down when it’s time.”
Phoebe unlaced her corset, pulled her chemise over her head, and plopped on the bed to yank off her stockings. Then she was back on her feet to step out of the pantalets. She wadded all of this up and dropped it in the basket, with the air that she was doing Mrs. Bledsoe a great honor in the donation of her dirty laundry.
It was a complicated awe I felt at Phoebe’s brazen nudity. Part of me took on the shame that she seemed to lack, never once folding her arms to cover herself. And yet, it wasn’t exactly shame that I felt, but rather embarrassment as I slowly performed the same task. I wasn’t so bold as to stare openly at my cousin’s body, but I was nonetheless struck by the differences between hers and mine. She was soft and round—everywhere. Her legs curved at her calf, again at her thigh, while mine were like a pair of planks marked at the center by a hard, knobby knee. She didn’t have sharp little bones poking out at her pelvis and shoulders. Her ribs were nestled safely behind soft, pink flesh rather than straining through white, veined skin. Chester used to joke, saying that he always wanted a little brother and if he just looked at me from the neck down he could pretend he had one. I took a peek at Phoebe as I gathered my discarded clothes and felt a pang of envy. No one would ever tell her she had the figure of a twelve-year-old boy. The mouth of one, maybe, but not the body.
&n
bsp; “Oh, my dear!” Mrs. Bledsoe said as I dropped my clothes in the basket. At first I took the shock in her voice to be her reaction to my emaciated appearance, but she put her hand on my shoulder and turned me around, saying, “Just look how you’ve hurt yourself.”
With one hand still holding her basket, she steered me toward the bureau, which had a mirror mounted on the wall above it. After some twisting, I could see what she was concerned about. Nearly a quarter of my back was black and blue.
“Does it hurt?” Phoebe asked, disinterested.
“Not much.”
And it didn’t, but I could feel the prologue of true pain to come.
Mrs. Bledsoe called us down one by one to bathe in the large galvanized tub in her kitchen. By the time it was my turn, my scalp felt like it was crawling under the dried mud in my hair. So before getting in, I knelt down and bent over the side of the tub, soaking my hair and running handfuls of Mrs. Bledsoe’s good-smelling soap through it. While I bathed, she buzzed around the kitchen, humming half-songs under her breath and tapping out little rhythms as she sliced potatoes to boil. The modesty I felt upstairs with Phoebe was not so powerful here. Mother would have been shocked at my sitting stark naked in a room with a stranger. She, no doubt, had tossed Mrs. Bledsoe out of the kitchen in order to have some privacy. But there was something comforting about this woman, like Saturday nights at home with Lorna slathering butter and sugar on bread for my after-bath treat.
Once we had bathed, Mrs. Bledsoe instructed Mother, Phoebe, and me to put on our nightgowns and stay in our rooms to rest; she would have our supper sent up on a tray. “You deserve some pampering, poor things,” she said, and we heartily agreed.
With Endless Sight Page 7
