“My family is here,” Ma argued, but she knew that wouldn’t carry much weight. Uncle Andrew and Aunt Molly visited regular, but most of the others were only on holidays or funerals.
“What if the Indians go back on the warpath?” Ma declared one day. In unison, Pa and I assured her that would not happen. I don’t know if he crossed his fingers behind his back, but I sure did.
That letter arrived in January of 1877, and Ma kept up her objections for two months.
It was a strange time in our family because we weren’t used to seeing Ma and Pa on different sides. They always seemed a team to us kids—if one of them disciplined us for something, there was no use seeking refuge from the other. If one of them decided we were changing our regular schedule, the other never contradicted.
The time I most remember that teamwork was after our first day of school when Miss Theede came to teach us. She was the third woman we’d had in our schoolhouse by then. I was twelve and already reading pretty good, but I’d learn more from her than all the others combined.
Miss Theede had a big blackboard at the front of the room behind her table, and when we walked in, she’d already drawn on it a big map that showed Canada and the northern part of America. Then she’d swiped the chalk across the board to signify the Atlantic Ocean and on its far side, she had some strange shapes.
“This is a map of the world and today we’ll get to know one another by learning where we all came from,” she told us in her melodic voice. I liked her right away. But I was most fascinated by the map. Nobody had ever shown me a map before and even blank as it was, it looked like a lot to know.
“Let’s start with you.” She pointed to the overgrown boy who was new to the school and sat in the very back, because if he sat any farther up, he’d have blocked the view. “Tell us your name and your father and mother’s names and where they originally came from.”
The boy looked scared and when he opened his mouth, I knew why. “M-m-m-m-my name is Olaf Lar-lar-larson,” he stuttered and there were snickers throughout the room. “M-m-m-my Far is Sven Lar-lar-larson.” Some laughs now. “M-m-m-m-my Mor is L-l-l-lena.” And now we all were laughing at the strange words he used and the way he said them. He quickly sat down as Miss Theede reminded him, “and where are you from?” and that’s when he finally said his people came from “N-n-n-n-norway.”
Marguerite Brumbach sneered, “He’s a Norskie.” Miss Theede silenced her—and our chuckles—with an upraised hand and a stern look, and then turned to the board and filled in a space that said Norway.
After telling us a little about Norway, she called on the next child, and it went that way until she came to me. “My parents came from Scotland-Ireland,” I said.
“Those are two separate countries,” Miss Theede said, and put their names on the map and honestly, that’s the first time I realized they were different places.
“Your Pa’s people wear skirts,” Marguerite taunted, and Miss Theede gave her that look again.
I turned full in my seat to stare her down. Marguerite Brumbach was a big girl, with arms like tree stumps, and a hint of hair on her upper lip. She wore her hair in braids and was dressed in the same kind of broadcloth as the rest of us, so I didn’t know why she thought she was so special. Oh, did she brag when it turned out that Germany, the country she came from was the largest place on Miss Theede’s map. Taking her on was an invitation to failure—for the boys as well as the girls. But I wasn’t about to have her bad-mouthing my Pa.
“Do not,” I spat at her.
“Do too,” she sneered back.
“Do not.” That’s when I felt Miss Theede’s disapproving stare and turned back to face the front.
But at recess, I couldn’t help myself. I walked up behind Marguerite and gave her a shove, and she looked like a windmill trying to keep her balance. She stayed upright and turned to rush me when Miss Theede stepped in and stopped it.
“I’ll get you,” Marguerite whispered as we went back into the schoolhouse.
To John and James, I was a hero, and they couldn’t wait to get home to tell Ma and Pa how I’d fought the biggest girl in school because she said something bad about our Pa. The whole story came out over supper that night.
John did most of the telling, giving the punch line about the skirt right away. Pa wanted the story from the beginning and, unfortunately, the beginning was the stuttering Norskie who still used old-fashioned words from the Old Country. As John told it, Jimmy reenacted the funny scene and we three laughed. Pa stopped the story right there. Ma put down the spoon that was dishing out stew.
“You laughed at the boy?” he asked, and the tone of his voice was a strong clue that we were about to give the wrong answer. “Ellen, did you laugh, too?”
I frantically searched for a way to deny it, but since I was already smirking as the story had begun, I knew I couldn’t. “Just a little, Pa,” I said to make the best case I could. “But that’s not the important part….” I heard my mother’s disgusted cluck and Pa’s eyes started burning through me.
“Not the important part?” he returned. “Laughing at a poor boy with a speech problem is not the important part? Laughing at a boy who still speaks his father’s tongue, that’s not the important part?”
“Let her tell how she fought that fat Marguerite because she said your people wore skirts,” Jimmy chimed in, oblivious to what was happening. But Pa didn’t want to hear any of that now. Neither did Ma. Eventually, I’d learn the difference between a skirt and a kilt, but it wasn’t that night. That night the three of us were sent to bed without any supper.
“Ellen,” my father commanded as I reluctantly climbed the loft with a hungry stomach, “did you like it when that girl made fun of your Pa?”
“No, sir, “I answered.
“Do you think that boy liked it when you made fun of him?”
“No, sir,” I answered again, hoping the lesson was over and we’d be called back for supper. But we weren’t. We went to bed with the disappointed voices of our parents ringing in our ears: “Our children do not laugh at people with problems. You will not shame us that way.”
So, after seeing the wall of unity my parents represented, it was strange to see them on opposite sides of the fence about going to America.
At night, I’d lie in the loft with my sisters under our feather tick, and I’d hear the murmurings from their bedroom downstairs—never enough to make out words, but enough to know the arguing didn’t stop at the bedroom door.
I could see Ma’s side, looking around the nice cabin it had taken a whole summer to build, back when I was just a girl. We’d added on since then, of course, as the children came—raising that roof for the loft had been a job for Pa and the boys and all our neighbors—and you could easily see how much love and muscle was in this home. I think my Ma had about the best kitchen you’d find in all Ontario, laid out in an “L” so she could do several things at one time. She could be canning tomatoes off the cast iron stove while someone else was shucking corn by the sinkwell and there was still room to roll out a pie crust. Of course, I knew it was one thing to have a grand kitchen and another to know what to do with it, and my Ma knew what to do. Pa joked that the bachelor boys down the road could smell my Ma’s baking bread better than their own smelly selves, and that’s why they always showed up just when a loaf was cooling on the sideboard.
Randall and Gregory would sit down at the big table that took up most of the room—Pa had traded Mr. Specht an old plow for that beautiful table—and act like they just happened to be in the neighborhood. I could see why Ma wouldn’t want to give this house up. I loved the place too. I don’t remember living anywhere else, and until now, I thought I’d be coming here with my own children someday from my own farm not far away.
Of course, I didn’t know yet who I’d be settlin’ down with. It wasn’t like I wasn’t lookin’. I looked plenty, but nobody r
eally seemed to be the right one and when I asked Ma if I should be worried—after all, she already had two children when she was my age—she looked me in the eye and said, “There’s no hurry. What’s important is to find the right one.”
“I want a man like Pa,” I told her and she smiled because she already knew that. Here’s what I knew: I knew that Mickey Larkin wasn’t the right one. I knew Adam Jennings wasn’t the right one. I knew Joey Phalin wasn’t the right one. And pickings got slim after them. Maybe I’d never find the right one, I worried at night in my bed. Maybe I’d end up an Old Maid. There was a shame in that I didn’t want to feel, but I didn’t want the wrong man, either.
But for all my sympathizing with Ma’s side of things, there was something else pulling on me.
I saw a burning in my Father that would not be squelched. He wasn’t a man who made quick decisions or foolish choices that put his family in harm’s way. He was a thoughtful, hard-working, determined man. In all my years, I had never once worried about going hungry or not having a roof over my head. This was a man you could be proud of. I know my brothers, John and James, shared the feeling. For the rest of the children, I don’t think they ever thought about those kind of things. But we were old enough to pay attention to the decisions our parents made, and this time, all three of us were completely on Pa’s side.
The barn’s loft was where we nurtured our conspiracy, trying to think of things to help Pa sell the case. Poor Jimmy didn’t know much about salesmanship. I started calling him “Stu-pid” whenever he came up with another idea that I knew would push Ma in the opposite direction.
It was after I discovered he got most of his information from Beadle’s Dime Novels that I understood what I was up against. “You know, when the Cavalry fights the Indians, the Cavalry always wins,” Jimmy told us one day.
John and I looked at each other and laughed out loud. “For a thirteen-year-old boy, you are pretty stu-pid,” I hissed at him. “How about Custer? He sure didn’t win. And, young man, you bring up fighting Indians with Ma and we will never get to Kansas.”
He had to allow as how that was right. I vowed to find his secret stash of those ten-cent novels and throw them away. You’d think a pamphlet with orange wrapper paper would be easy to find on a farm in Canada, but James hid his dime novels so well, I never did find them.
Then one day he came home all excited, telling almost-ten Andrew that they were going to live with cowboys. The boys at school knew all about Kansas and there was this place called Dodge and there were gunfights in the streets, but the sheriff was strong and wise and….well, you can imagine how well that went over with Mrs. Tom Watson.
“You want me to move my family to a place where they have shoot-outs in the streets?” and she stopped Pa short for a moment there. “And I bet they have a drinking establishment every ten feet and that brings those women, and no, I want none of that for my family. You boys ever drink and play cards and I’ll tan your hides, I don’t care how old or tall you get. I had no idea Kansas was so uncivilized!” Pa reminded her that the letter-writing lady said our part of Kansas—I was already thinking of it as “our part”—was Dry, but Ma said she didn’t believe that a place that would allow gunfights in the streets would ban liquor.
I wanted to tan Jimmy’s hide myself and got him to lie and tell her the boys were wrong and they weren’t talking about Kansas, but my Ma is no dummy, and she knew he was just trying to put the horse back in the barn.
Years later, a cowboy passing through our roadhouse in Wyoming Territory entertained us over my best stew with tales about Doc Holliday. He knew the man long before the Tombstone shoot-out and all the trouble in Arizona Territory. Knew him back in the days when he dealt faro in Dodge at night and was the town dentist by day. I almost spit out my mouthful of coffee.
“Doc Holliday used to live in Kansas?” I asked him in amazement, and because of my tone, he asked if I knew the man. “No, never knew him, just heard stories about him. Had no idea he once lived in Kansas.”
The cowboy laughed and said most of the stories were dime novel inventions and Doc wasn’t the killer everyone claimed. I had to laugh to myself. I sure was glad Doc Holliday wasn’t yet famous when we were thinking of moving to Kansas, because if he had been, and Ma knew he lived within the boundaries, we’d never have moved there.
It took Pa a couple months to wear her down. I never knew if it was the strength of his arguments or just that she loved him so much she couldn’t stand the disappointment of not letting him get all that land.
We learned on a Sunday in April in the glorious year of the Lord of 1877. Ma kept us inside for our praying circle because the Canadian spring doesn’t come that early, and this day even Pa stayed to give thanks to the Lord. (He preferred the barn at moments like this.) Ma always said that it didn’t take a church to make a Sunday service, but it did take clean children, so the boys came with their hair combed and the girls with fresh aprons.
While she was praying for all the good things in our lives, she simply said: “And please give us a safe journey to our new home in Kansas.”
Well, I don’t care if it was Sunday service, most of us jumped up and shouted in glee. We were laughing and yelling and hugging each other and Pa was beaming and Ma still looked hesitant, but she’d said the prayer, so it was settled.
“Your Pa wants to go this fall, so we have a lot to do to get ready.” It was just like Ma to focus on the work ahead, rather than the journey.
We turned to Pa because we figured he was thinking like us at that moment. “How will we go, what can we take, when will we leave?”
Jimmy was beside himself to think he was going to live with real cowboys and breathlessly asked Pa, “Are we going in a wagon train?’
Pa laughed and tousled Jimmy’s hair: “We’re not going that far west, son. We’re going to Kansas and they don’t have wagon trains to Kansas anymore—probably did at one time, but Kansas is far more civilized than that now,” and we knew Pa used that word for Ma’s sake.
Jimmy was clearly disappointed, because he knew a lot about wagon trains from his dime novels, but when Pa said we’d build a covered wagon and go in that, it seemed a second-best that Jimmy could brag about to the boys at school.
“Can we take Bessie Number 4?” came a little voice from almost-ten Andrew, who was so fixated on his next birthday, he regularly reminded us, “I’m almost ten.”
When that magic day finally arrived we were already in Kansas and had a special birthday pie for him. I told him: “I suppose now you’ll want us to call you almost-eleven Andrew,” but we never did, and that became one of our lasting family jokes.
Pa assured us that the fourth cow we named Bessie was going with us and we’d buy two ox to haul the wagon. Somewhere in the revelry he mentioned that we’d have to walk most of the way, but we were too excited to hear that just then.
“Ellen, you need to write me a letter,” Pa told me that afternoon, and I didn’t hesitate to get the paper and pen and ink. I sat next to him at our dinner table with everyone else hanging around—the little ones kneeled on their chairs with their elbows on the table. “Write to Bruce…Mr. MacDonald. Tell him we’re coming and to start the search for my claim. Tell him we can be there before the snow. Tell him Ma sends her best to his missus.”
We had a sale to get rid of what we couldn’t take, which was almost everything. That beautiful table Mr. Specht made went to Gary Golder’s family, and before they hauled it off, I saw Ma sneak a loving rub along one edge, her thumb sweeping over the top like it was memorizing every moment her family had sat there. I watched as she handed over her best linen cloth to her friend, Ann, and she whispered, “Please take good care of it and think of us when you use it.”
Pa sold off the few acres he owned and our house. The Goss family was the new owner, and they were ready to move in. Their missus—a beautiful young woman who insisted I call her Lisa, inste
ad of Mrs. Goss—was so happy that Pa threw in the stove and the pie safe. He did so only after swearing to Ma that he’d replace them when we landed in Kansas. He sold his favorite rocker to our uncle Mel, and the bachelor boys came and bought the washing cauldron. Ma insisted on keeping the rinsing tub, but to give it a reason to go along, she filled it full of blankets that cradled the fine dishes her Ma had given her over the years.
Pa’s fiddle came with us, of course, and our clothing and bedding. Ma’s butter churn was fitted with a strap so it could attach to the bottom of the wagon. Each morning on the trip, I’d milk Bessie Number 4 and the cream would go in the churn and by the end of the day, after all that jostling, we’d have supper butter.
There was no question the big coffeepot was coming along, with the box mill (although it ground more barley than real coffee over the years, but you get used to weak coffee that’s stretched as far as its taste will go). Ma’s favorite iron skillets were coming for sure—she was forced to limit them to three—and her kettles—four of them—and, God-forbid she should leave behind her rolling pin. The candle molds didn’t take up much space, and the washboard was lashed onto the side of the wagon.
Of course, the family Bible was safely tucked away for travel. When we started making the list of what we wanted to take—then pared it down to what we should take; then cut it again to what we could take—the family Bible stayed Number One on every list.
What broke our hearts were the things impossible to take, and the top of that list was the graveyard. For awhile, I was certain we wouldn’t go because Ma couldn’t leave her six babies out there under that tree. At times, I wondered if I could bear that myself.
The graveyard was the last stop before we left for the State of Kansas in late September of 1877. Our family held hands and circled the last resting place of those precious little babies. Ma was so choked up she could barely speak, but she led us in a prayer. Little Elizabeth cried the whole time and her wailing spoke for the entire family.
Cattle Kate Page 4
