by Rosalyn Eves
“Maybe some air will dry them out,” she says.
I hurry to add the second book to the first. I shouldn’t hurt so for a book—but it’s not just the physical damage, it’s the thought of letting down Miss Wheeler, of losing the words myself. “Thank you.”
After we’ve repaired our hair as best we can, we head downstairs. The small dining hall is full to overflowing—clearly, the passengers from the train have all been rescued, and they’ve been joined now by the passengers on the westbound train, forced to wait in Rawlins until the track is repaired. There’s no sign of Will.
A new clerk, a middle-aged man with a drooping mustache, suggests that we try the Union Pacific restaurant, as it’s likely to be less crowded.
My boots still squelch a bit as we walk down the street, and I notice Alice wincing as she steps. We’re both recovering from the long trek last night.
If the Union Pacific restaurant—a square, boxy sort of place with round tables shoved close together—is any less crowded, I can’t see the difference. But we do spot Will, sitting with a pair of strangers at a table near the back, and he waves us over.
We weave through the crowd to the table. There are not quite enough chairs for all of us. Alice offers to share one with me, but I worry that my wide hips won’t allow her enough space to sit and so I refuse. One of the gentlemen with Will, a tallish man with a bushy mustache, stands and offers me his seat. My face burns—I didn’t mean to displace anyone—but I sit down.
Will’s eyes are bright. “Alice, may I introduce you to my roommate from the hotel?” He gestures to the man beside him, a handsome young man of about thirty, with a clean jawline. “This is Mr. Thomas Edison!”
I nearly fall off my seat. Now that Will has named him, I recognize him from his photos in the paper, though of course people look so much more vivid in real life. How has he come to be in Rawlins? I answer my own question—for the eclipse, of course. Rawlins must be in the path of totality. If the eclipse were not still more than two weeks distant, I’d think our train accident was providential. But surely the trains will be up before then, and duty will carry me on to Cheyenne and out of the eclipse’s path.
Will introduces the second gentleman, the one whom I displaced, as Dr. Henry Morton, who is the president of Stevens Institute of Technology. Knowing his importance, I feel all the more wretched at having forced him from his seat.
I try to apologize, but Dr. Morton says, “Nonsense! You must allow me to be of service to a lady.”
I watch Alice dip her head gracefully in acknowledgment and try to do the same, wishing furiously that I had something nicer to wear than my torn, stained dress, with my hair pulled back in a severe braid. Dr. Morton’s “lady” is generous, and I like him for it.
Alice and Will make light conversation with our new acquaintances as Mr. Edison finishes up his breakfast. From the empty plate before me, I deduce that Dr. Morton was already finished. I’m too overawed to do much but listen, but as Mr. Edison pushes his plate away and prepares to stand, I manage to speak.
“Are you here for the eclipse, Mr. Edison?”
He smiles a bit wryly at me, one side of his mouth dipping up more than the other. “Yes, though more in the capacity of a student and observer than a true researcher. I told reporters before I left New York that I know no more of an eclipse than a pig does of learning Latin. Dr. Morton and Dr. Draper are the true scientists of our group.”
Dr. Morton shakes his head. “Edison knows more than he’s letting on. But it’s true that I’ve had some experience with eclipses—I helped photograph the 1869 eclipse in Iowa, and a rare experience that was.”
Edison claps his hands on his trousers and stands. “We really must be going—we’ve got work to do, setting up our observation site, but we hope to have at least a rough frame up by evening. You’re welcome to stop by to see Dr. Draper’s telescope, if you’d like. It’s quite extraordinary.”
Dr. Morton shakes his head in mock displeasure. At least, I think he’s not truly upset, because a smile flickers around his mouth. “Edison, if it were up to you, the whole town would turn out for our telescopes.”
“And why not? Isn’t science meant to be shared?” Edison smiles at me. “What do you say, Miss Bertelsen?”
“I’d be honored, sir!” I no longer care that I’m hungry and dirty—I’ve an invitation from Thomas Edison to see a real telescope.
The two men depart, and Will leaves us to flag down a waiter. Alice turns to me, a slight smile tugging at her lips. “First those science books in your bag, now the eclipse. I admit, I’d not even thought of the eclipse in connection with these men and couldn’t for the life of me figure out why someone as renowned as Thomas Edison was staying in a rotten hotel in the middle of nowhere. You’ve been holding out on me, Elizabeth. Are you a scientist too?”
“Not really,” I say quickly, lest Alice give me more credit than I deserve. “Only interested, is all. I’d like to study astronomy, but there’s not much call for that in the small town where I live, and my family needs me.”
“Hmm,” Alice says. “I’m not sure need is the only worthwhile reason for doing something. Look at me. Do you know what I’d like to do more than anything?”
I shake my head. I don’t remember Alice saying anything the night before about great dreams, but surely a girl with money is capable of bigger dreams than a poor frontier girl like me. But then, being a woman always seems to limit some dreams, and probably being colored affects the kinds of dreams she lets herself have, like being Mormon affects mine. Sometimes the things we are, whether we choose them or not, shape the things we can be. Sure doesn’t seem fair, though.
Alice hesitates. “Promise you won’t laugh?”
“I promise.”
Alice’s eyes go starry, and she stares up at the ceiling, blotchy with smoke stains, as though seeing something I can’t. “I want to study art. I’ve nearly persuaded my parents to let me go to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, in Philadelphia. After that, I want to go to Paris. The École des Beaux-Arts does not admit women students, but Mary Cassatt went to Paris anyway and studied with the masters privately.”
“Why would you think I’d laugh at that?” I ask. “I think it’s wonderful.”
Her gaze comes back to me and she smiles, a genuine smile tinged with gratitude. “Thank you. My papa is a doting father who sees my going to school as a gift one gives to delight a child. My mama accepts my study as polish that will make me a brighter ornament for a husband someday. And Will—he takes nothing seriously, especially not his baby sister’s hobby.”
It makes my heart ache that she should be grateful for so little. Perhaps we are not so different as I supposed. “My mama believes astronomy is not a suitable study for a woman. She wants me to marry and settle down to the real work of life.”
Alice laughs. “Your mama should meet mine.”
I grin back at her.
“Anyway,” Alice says briskly, “some would say that painting is not a necessity, particularly not for women, who do not need to earn their living as men do, to support their families. But I say that is foolishness. Doesn’t a woman have a need to support herself, if others cannot or will not? And anyway, art sustains my soul.”
“I’d like to see your work sometime,” I say. “Do you draw, or paint, or sculpt?”
“A bit of everything,” she says. “Only drawing when I travel, mostly painting at home. I’d like to try sculpture, but I’ve not found a good teacher for that.”
Will comes back then with some boiled eggs and biscuits. The eggs are cold by the time he reaches us, but we are both starving, and no one complains as we eat.
We spend the rest of the day wandering around the town (after carefully wrapping our blistered feet) and sending letters home. The circuit of town takes rather less than an hour, the letters, somewhat more. Alice sends a
long wire to her mother in Denver. I beg a coin from Alice, promising to repay it as soon as I can, and send a much shorter telegram to Rebekka, telling her my arrival will be delayed. I wish I felt more guilty—Rebekka needs me, the baby may already have arrived—but I’m too happy at having met the scientists, at the promise of the telescopes tonight.
Surely this is more evidence of my wickedness.
After a supper of some rather gamey meat and indifferent boiled potatoes, we meet up with Mr. Edison and his party in the lobby of the hotel. As Dr. Morton predicted, we are not the only ones Mr. Edison has invited to see the telescopes. In addition to us, there are half a dozen others gathered in the lobby, and we acquire two or three more on the walk from the hotel to the backyard of a residence, where a rough shed is being assembled to house the telescopes.
We meet the rest of Mr. Edison’s party—Mr. and Mrs. Draper, who have financed the expedition; Professor George Barker; and Dr. Morton, whom we’ve already met. I watch Mrs. Draper, a pretty redhead with a kind smile, rather enviously. From her easy conversation with the others, it’s obvious that she knows a great deal about science, enough that she’s regarded as Mr. Draper’s assistant and not merely his wife. I cannot imagine such a life, such a marriage. In Monroe, marriages are partnerships of necessity—everyone has to work hard, and men and women rely upon one another for their labor. But a partnership of the mind? A mutual joy and interest in scholarship? I have never seen such a thing before.
One of the people we acquire on the way to the telescopes is a young girl, about twelve years old, with a round face and twin dark braids framing her rosy cheeks. She reminds me a bit of Mary, but that may be a trick of her size, because she’s got nothing of Mary’s moodiness, and she talks more than enough for three of Mary. She latches on to me, perhaps because, as the shortest (and, barring some of the older men, the roundest) of our group, I am the least frightening.
Her name, I discover, is Lillian Heath, and she means to become a doctor. “Sometimes my pa lets me attend him when he assists Dr. Maghee. I’ve even helped cut open dead bodies,” she adds with rather ghoulish relish. I hope she doesn’t mean to tell me of them. My interest in constellations and astral bodies doesn’t extend to corpses.
Luckily, Lillian quickly seizes on to Dr. Morton, asking him questions about chemistry with unselfconscious eagerness. And now I’m jealous of a child, because even at twelve, she has no doubts about who she is going to be, what her life is going to look like. She does not ask questions hedged in by what others think she ought to be, to do.
As we gather around the larger of two assembled telescopes, the sun sinks below the western horizon, shafting light across and through the houses, turning everything in its path to gold. The torn clouds drifting across the sky light like fire. It stops my breath. What curious combination of atmosphere and light and chemicals turns the sky twice daily into such a glory? Dr. Morton might know, were I brave enough to ask him.
The telescope is a long, glorious thing, half again as tall as a man on its three-legged mount. It’s of some shiny metal, wider at the upper end and narrow at the bottom, where we take turns peering through the eyepiece. Dr. Morton explains that two rounded glass lenses inside the telescope magnify the light from the stars.
I wait my turn as others inspect the telescope and exclaim as the stars burst into their vision. Overhead, more and more stars appear as the light fades. The moon isn’t up yet, giving a clearer view of the constellations. I pick out familiar ones, following the cup of the Big Dipper to the North Star, then rotating to see Cygnus, and then the Dog Star, Sirius, in the middle of Canis Major. It’s the brightest star in the sky, easy to see even without a telescope. The distant reddish light winks at me.
All across the dark arc overhead, stars twinkle, brighter and brighter as the night deepens. And though Rawlins is a place I didn’t know existed a week ago, the sky is as familiar as my own hands. I don’t think I could ever tire of this.
Then it’s my turn. My hands shake a little, so I tuck them under my armpits. Dr. Morton peers into the telescope first, making sure it’s still aligned. He points to a nebulous cloud of light in the Sagittarius constellation. “Messier 8,” he says, referring to Charles Messier, the astronomer who extensively cataloged stars and nebulae in his quest to find comets.
When I peer through the narrow lens of the telescope, I find that the nebula isn’t just a faint cloud of light, but dozens of distant stars in an oval shape, all clustered around a central bright patch. I’ve seen that nebula all my life, but never before have I seen the stars within it.
What other things do I miss because I haven’t the apparatus to see them with?
“Do you see that brightness in the center?” Dr. Morton asks.
“Yes,” I say. “What is it?”
“John Herschel—son of William Herschel, the famous astronomer—named it the Hourglass Nebula. I’m not sure I see the hourglass shape, myself, but it is rather pretty, isn’t it?”
Rather pretty? That’s like calling the sun a dim light. “It’s magnificent,” I say, my eye fixed to the telescope. Everything in me—mind, body, heart—concentrates on this moment.
“The stars do have a way of giving us perspective,” Dr. Morton says. “Per aspera ad astra. Through hardship to the stars. It’s the motto of the Stevens family, you know, who founded my university.”
I pull away from the telescope to look at Dr. Morton. His gray hair gleams silver in the moonlight, and he looks to be everything a scientist should be. Dignified, wise, kind. “What does it mean?” I ask.
His mustache twitches. “You might also translate it as ‘To the stars in spite of hardships.’ I always think that one must persevere, to win the greatest rewards. The stars shine brightest, after all, that are the hardest sought for.”
“Through hardship to the stars. Per aspera ad astra.” Whispering the words to myself to remember them, I peer through the telescope again, marveling that a bit of glass and wood and brass can make the sky come alive.
I don’t ever want to leave.
chapter ten
Friday, July 12, 1878
Rawlins, Wyoming
Seventeen days until eclipse
A loud banging pulls me from a sound sleep. For a moment, I’m lost, the strange room all plain walls and angles in the brilliant moonlight. Ah—the hotel. Rawlins.
The banging persists. Our trunks still have not arrived, and I’m in my underclothes, but I creep to the door and open it cautiously, peeking down the hallway.
A man dressed in fringed buckskin with a wide-brimmed hat stands pounding at a door only a few down from ours. A long nose terminates above a dark mustache and narrow, frowning lips. Dark hair waves about his shoulders. In any other situation, I might think him handsome, like something out of one of my dime novels. But just now, fear stabs through me. I know the door. Will’s door. The man wears a gun holstered at his hips—the handle gleams in the faint light of the hallway.
Heart pounding dully in my throat, I shut the door. What if this man intends harm, to either Will or Mr. Edison? I don’t know why anyone would want to hurt Mr. Edison. But Will—sometimes folks don’t take kindly to black people for no other reason than the color of their skin.
“Alice,” I whisper. When she doesn’t stir, I repeat her name louder. “Alice!”
She blinks at me and sits up. She’s wrapped a length of cloth around her head to keep her curls fresh, and she tucks a bit that’s come loose back in place. “What is it?”
“There’s a man in the hallway, banging on Will’s door. He’s got a gun.”
Now Alice is on her feet. She darts past me to the door, peering out. She shuts the door, leans against the wall as though thinking. Then she grabs the blanket off her bed, wrapping it around her shoulders like some night-robe, and dashes into the hallway.
I snatch my own blanket and follow h
er.
By the time we’re both in the hallway, Will—or Edison—has already opened the door and the man has pushed his way into the room. At the sound of loud, unhappy male voices, we rush down the hall, crowding into the doorway.
The stranger is standing between the two beds, the gun now free of its holster and glinting in his hand. Mr. Edison is on his feet, a robe slung hastily around him. Will is still in bed, sitting up with his back against the wall. He doesn’t look frightened yet, just alert, his eyes oddly bright.
“I’m looking for Mr. Edison!” the man roars. The edges of his words fray a little. I think he might be drunk.
Beside me, Alice lets out a long sigh but doesn’t ease her tense posture. The man might not be looking for Will, but he’s drunk and armed, so he’s still dangerous.
“I’m Thomas Edison,” Mr. Edison says in a calming voice, his hands out, palms up. “What do you want?”
“Want to meet the inventor. He’s a great man, they say.” The man waves the gun toward himself. “I’m a great man too. Name of Texas Jack.”
When no one in the room responds, he says, louder, “Jack Omohundro! In these parts, folks know me as Texas Jack.”
Something about the name tickles my memory. Why do I know it? I’m certain I’ve never seen the man before.
“I’m sorry,” Mr. Edison says, his brow wrinkling. “I’m afraid I don’t recognize—”
Texas Jack cuts him off. “Buffalo Bill Cody, know him? Wild Bill Hickok? Great men, good friends of mine. I’m a scout, like them. A showman.”
I blink. Texas Jack, a scout…
Oh.
I know now where I’ve read his name—he was the hero of one of the dime novels Emily smuggled home, his name and face emblazoned across the cover. I didn’t realize the books had been written about the exploits of a real person. Or maybe the person is real and the stories fictional? But now hardly seems the time to ask.
