When Winter Comes

by V. A. Shannon

  Perhaps he had not heard his wife. He did not answer her at all, but looked me up and down with an assessing stare. I smiled and nodded at him, and held out my hand. The five silver dollars winked and sparkled in the sun. He jerked his head behind him.

  “You can ride along with my teamster—for now.” That was all he said to me. The wagon passed on, and the second wagon come up. I reached up my hand, and the teamster reached down and took it. I scrambled up onto the seat beside him. And off we went, heading for our new lives in California.

  4

  It is close to midnight. I lay down my pen, and stretch my cramped fingers, and yawn; I should awaken Jacob, and get us to bed.

  Jacob stirs. The periodical that lies abandoned across his chest, The California Journal of Useful Sciences, falls to the floor, open at a drawing of a house. Some scraps of paper come with it, scribbled over with notes and measurements. I go and gather them up neatly, and place them on the table beside me with a sigh. Jacob’s business is prospering, and he is well established in our community and feels that we should live somewhere that reflects that fact. So he has purchased a parcel of land some way out of town with a view to the lake, and is intent on building us a grand house with a wraparound porch with steps up, and a turret with a window set in, and bits of carved whatnot all over; what the periodical describes as a Gingerbread Trim.

  It is a fine dream, and I understand it, but it is not one that I share. Even though our little house is modest and the girls sleep in one room, it is the house Jacob built for us when we married. I have lived here happy enough these past thirteen years and would for another thirteen, if the decision was mine to make.

  The house faces southwest, giving us the afternoon sun in the parlor and the morning sun in the kitchen. It is on the side of a gentle hill, so that our yard out front slopes away from the house and down to the dusty track that leads into town. On the other side of the track, pastureland stretches into the far distance, with feathery clumps of grasses rippling in the wind, and pools of violets at the feet of tall lilies, and the little fire-bright-red cardinal flowers. Everywhere are golden-yellow poppies that shine like butter in the sun. A more beautiful sight it is hard to imagine.

  With three children and a hungry husband to provide for, my yard is mostly given over to neat rows of vegetables. Even so, I can’t help but have some flowers of my own, and one corner is given over to roses. Jacob fetches these home for me from Mr. Smith’s botanical warehouse in Sacramento, when he goes there on business.

  Their names are written on labels attached to the stems, and I wonder who chooses them, and where the plants have come from, but Jacob doesn’t know, and never thinks to ask Mr. Smith, so they remain a mystery to me. I have one called Jaune Desprez, which has the loveliest fragrance, and is a color I cannot describe, not orange or yellow nor yet pink but something in between them all. I think of it as the color of a silk gown, though why that should be I do not know. I have the old white Cherokee rose, which everyone knows, and one of the very palest pink, called Duchesse de Gramont. Jacob tells me that “duchesse” means a grand lady. I long to know who she was, that grand lady, and why a rose should be named after her, but I guess I never will.

  A garden is a sociable place. I’ll be out there of an afternoon when school is over, pulling some beans or fixing up the tomato plants, and a neighbor will stop to pass the time of day. Some of my pupils will go by; a couple of the older girls whispering together and giggling, calling out a greeting, “Hello, Miz Klein!”

  They are invariably followed by a couple of slouching boys with their hands in their pockets and their hats tipped to the backs of their heads, who mutter my name and then flush red to their ear tips. They are on their way to the other side of town, where our little trickle of a creek widens out into a shallow pool with sandy sides. Here the boys will have a sly, spluttering attempt at their pa’s tobacco, while the girls make eyes at them, and cool their feet in the water.

  It’s unusual for a married woman, especially one with children, to be a schoolteacher; but in our new State of California, where there are ten men looking for wives for every girl who wants to be one, single schoolteachers are as rare as hen’s teeth. We all pray for an ugly one to arrive in the town, in the hope that she might stay in the school for more than a few months, but they come and they go, even the ugliest being up and married and moving on before you know it.

  A year or two previous I lost all patience at the town meeting, when yet again there was general grumbling and complaining, with no one able to find a solution to the unusual problem of young, unmarried women arriving in our town and energetic young single men wanting to marry them. Quite before I knew it, I’d stood up and said, “Well, I’m intending to stay put, so I’ll do it and make a good job of it, too.”

  The school board is three men. They looked pretty startled at a woman jumping to her feet and speaking out. They whispered among themselves for a while, then asked Jacob for his opinion. He said it was fine by him, and so it was decided: I could run the school for now, until they could find someone more suitable.

  Jacob comes from a family where learning is taken to be a necessity, not a luxury. Perhaps he is proud of me, in his quiet way. All he said to me, with a half smile playing round his lips, was that if I was to be pursuing such an illustrious career then I would need some help. And this is how we come to employ Martha. She lives in town with her mother, and walks out to us each morning and then home again in the evening escorted by her young man, Simon Cooke, who works in the blacksmithery.

  Martha is a blessing to me. Many women of my acquaintance seem to be content with the endless round of cleaning and mending, but I cannot find it in my heart to love such tasks. I like cooking well enough and trying out new dishes, and Jacob seems to enjoy them; that is, he eats all that I put in front of him, and makes no comment, though I think sometimes there is something of a suspicious pucker round his lips.

  I have no wish to change my life. But I can see that eventually a proper schoolmistress will arrive, with a recommendation from a college back East and qualifications I don’t possess. I will stop being Miz Klein, schoolteacher, and be returned to being plain old Mrs. Jacob Klein, wife and mother. Martha will be let go, for I will have time enough and to spare for the cooking and washing and the rest. And we will move away from the town and out to the lake and into Jacob’s fine new house.

  Then every day will pass the same. The children will be off to their schooling and Jacob in his workshop over at the lumberyard. And I’ll be sat alone and quiet on that fine wraparound porch, gazing out over the lake with just my own thoughts for company.

  To think on it gives me a hard, bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. I don’t tell my husband that, though.

  5

  That first morning when we left Cincinnati I felt grand, sitting up on the wagon seat like a fine lady, looking all around me with a great grin on my face to see the folks cheering as the wagons pulled out. I quite forgot that I was a fugitive from justice; for that little while the thought of arriving in California and doing something splendid with my life—though what that was I couldn’t say—overtook all else, and I felt vastly superior to those folks I was leaving behind me.

  After leaving the meadow our way lay through farmland. At first I thought it very pretty. Here was the clear blue sky stretching overhead, and to each side of us, fields of freshly turned black earth. In places they would be cut through by a creek. By the creek would be a cluster of cabins, and some little children in pinafores would come running out to wave at us; or a couple of mules or horses pulling a ploughshare, with the farmer walking behind, his dog scuffing along at his heels and turning to bark at our wagons. But after an hour or so of this, my head began to ache. And soon I began to feel quite peculiar.

  I was used to clatter and noise and folks everywhere, but now it was so very quiet; nothing to hear but the creak of the carts and the slow clop of the animal hooves, and some muffled conversation floating back to me
here and there from the other wagons.

  I had spent all my life with closed-in streets and great tall buildings all around me and hardly no sky at all, but now the sky was everywhere I looked. I couldn’t get away from it, and there was too much land and it was too flat. I began to think it was tilting this way and that, and I clutched hold of the wagon seat, in fear that I would slide off and go rolling across those fields with nothing to stop me until I fell right off the edge, into the sea or the sky, and was lost.

  So far the teamster and I had rode along in silence, but I sensed him looking at me. Now he reached into his pocket and fetched out a wrapper with some candy in it. He handed a piece to me, and took a piece himself and popped it into his mouth.

  “Goot. Is goot? Candy.”

  Feeling foolish to have been scared, I smiled at him, and felt a little better.

  “What is name?”

  I told him my name, and asked him about himself, and how he came to be here. I tried him in German and he understood some, and I tried him in English, and he understood some of that as well, but he wasn’t either.

  He told me his name, Lukas Benoit Hardkoop—“a good old name,” he said. He came from a country called Belgium, and had a daughter there and grandchildren. When he reached California he was getting on a ship and going home, and couldn’t wait to see them again.

  I indicated the wagon ahead of us. Little Ada was leaning out of the back and waving at us, and I guess her ma was resting.

  “I thought they were your family.”

  He shook his head. “The Kesebergs? Ach, no. I look for work, driving wagon, but all say to me, too old, too old! But this man listens to his own head only!” He laughed, and shifted his candy to the other side of his mouth.

  “Is my dream, to see California. And then home. Old man by fireside.” He acted out the idea of an old man, huddled in a blanket and holding out his trembling hands to the fire, and then straightened up and laughed again, and I laughed, too.

  He had the sort of weather-beaten face and faraway eyes of the sailors I had seen on the wharfside sometimes; men with itchy feet and a thirst for travel. Something about him reminded me of my pa—when I was younger, and he was with the India trade, and traveled the world on the sailing ships. Before he gave it up, and took to the drink.

  * * *

  Another couple of wagons came up behind us as the day wore on. By the time we reached our first stopping place, a trading post by a large pond, we were seven or eight families, with a handful of teamsters and outriders up on their horses.

  Mr. Hardkoop pulled the wagon over. I climbed down, glad to stretch my legs, and wondering what I should do next. I didn’t have to wonder long. Mrs. Keseberg came across to me, seeming something recovered from the sickness, with a tight little smile on her face.

  She looked me up and down with her head tipped to one side, a tiny frown creasing between her brows. Her smile vanished away, and she turned down the corners of her mouth. She looked the very picture of sympathetic kindness.

  “My goodness,” she said. “I hadn’t quite realized . . . well, we must do something about your clothes. And your hair. Oh, dear. We will do something about that, too.” She had a girlish whisper of a voice, as sweet as could be, but it was something at odds with the glint in her eye.

  With that, she set Mr. Hardkoop to heat up a kettle of water over the cooking fire, and sent me into the privy out back of the trading post. The hot water was handed in through the door, and with it a lump of rough green soap, and she bade me strip off my clothes and wash myself all over.

  My clothes disappeared—I discovered them, after, burning on the fire—and Mrs. Keseberg found me a linsey gown to wear. The dress was too short, for she was a tiny slip of a woman and I was taller than her by several inches. It was an ugly color, too, a drab brownish-yellow, something faded in places from the sun, and I put it on right unwilling.

  I had no shoes on my feet. Mrs. Keseberg took me into the trading post, and found me some boots. They were old and the laces gone, replaced by strings, but still had enough wear in them, or so she said. They didn’t fit right and had to be padded out with some sheets of paper.

  I thought my humiliation could get no worse, at the sight of my feet in these ugly boots, but I was wrong. For when we came out of the trading post, Mr. Hardkoop was waiting for me, a stool set out for me to sit on, and scissors and his razor in his hand. I stopped dead at the sight.

  “I do not wish to have my hair cut off!”

  “No, I am sure you do not! But you have the lice in your hair, my dear, and I will not allow you in the wagons until it is gone.” Mrs. Keseberg’s smile was quite vanished away. I took one look at her face and knew there was no arguing with her.

  Most of the other folks pretended not to see as Mr. Hardkoop set to, busying themselves with their cooking pots and fetching water from the creek and seeing to their animals. But of course, the little children thought nothing of gathering round me and watching this fine show, laughing and pointing, and cheering each time a lock of my hair fell to the ground. When the long lengths of it were cut off, Mr. Hardkoop took his razor, and shaved the rest, so that my head was as naked as that of a newborn babe.

  When it was done, Mrs. Keseberg set me to peeling vegetables, and with pure hatred in my heart for her, I set to work.

  Through all this, Mr. Keseberg had kept his face from me and his back turned. But when our dinner was over, and Mrs. Keseberg had climbed back into the wagon to put Ada to bed, and I was at the creek washing out the cooking pots, he walked up to me quiet-like, and said, “I saw this in the trading post. I thought you might like it to cover your head, while your hair grows out.” And he dropped a pretty pink kerchief into my hand, and walked away before I could thank him.

  * * *

  Through March, through April, and into May, we made our slow way from Ohio to Missouri. Every day followed the same routine. We rose at first light and Mr. Hardkoop made up the campfire. While he and Mr. Keseberg looked to the animals and Mrs. Keseberg looked to Ada, I was set to make the breakfast: bacon and biscuits, and coffee.

  Oh, that coffee! Making it was a misery for me, and drinking it was a misery for everyone else.

  Coffee was the mainstay of our diet and every wagon carried a great store of beans. It was said to be good to settle a bellyache and the very thing for a sick headache and to give energy for traveling. But even just the smell of the beans made Mrs. Keseberg heave and retch, and she stayed as far away from the cooking fire as she could. She was most put out to discover that I hardly knew how to even boil up a can of water, and Mr. Hardkoop was set to show me the mysteries of the coffeepot.

  I would take a scoop of beans from the sack, and then tie the sack tight again, for the fields to each side of us were swarming with mice and at every stop along the way we would find a couple sneaked into the wagon and nibbling at the sacks of flour and sugar. These beans would be set into a pan over the fire, and it was my task to sit and stir them for thirty minutes at a time, so that they would roast but not burn. Woe betide me if my attention was caught by something else and I forgot the task at hand, but forget I did. I cannot tell how many times I burned those beans, too taken up by listening to conversations that did not concern me, or being distracted by the sight of a rabbit, or even just nodding my head with tiredness.

  When the beans were evenly roasted, they were put into a bowl and pounded into a coarse powder. This was tipped into the coffeepot, which had been set over the fire to heat, and the coffeepot moved to the side to stay warm but not boil. I could not get the hang of it. I forgot to set the water to heat, and tipped the powder into cold water, or I forgot to move the coffeepot to the side, so water and powder boiled up and over into the fire. My coffee was stone cold, or bitter; too weak one day and too strong the next. I came to hate the sight of the beans and the coffeepot as well.

  My only comfort was that Mrs. Keseberg knew nothing of these disasters, looking to the menfolk to tell her if it was good cof
fee or not. Mr. Hardkoop and Mr. Keseberg drank down what was given them with nothing more than a twist to their lips, and not a word to her of the filthy brew that they were consuming with such gallantry.

  The process was too time-consuming to repeat night and morning, so what was left in the pot at night was warmed through again in the morning, with plenty of milk added and a good heaping spoonful or two of sugar. This should have been easy enough, but what with looking to the bacon and worrying about the biscuit batter, my last great disaster was to heap up the pot with salt instead of sugar.

  Mr. Hardkoop took a great mouthful and then jumped to his feet and sped across to the wagon to fetch a dipperful of water, which he drank down in a very great hurry. Mrs. Keseberg was sitting up on the wagon seat with a cup of water and a bit of dried cracker, which was all she could keep down. When he had finished coughing, he said to her that he enjoyed cooking. Why not let him do it, and perhaps it would be a better use of my time if I were to see to Ada in the mornings.

  Mr. Keseberg’s mouth twitched, and he said, “Yes, my dear, I think this is an excellent idea. You are so very indisposed in the mornings and I cannot bear to see you work so hard.”

  At that, he and Mr. Hardkoop disappeared off together round the back of the wagon, where I could hear them both laughing fit to burst, and Mrs. Keseberg looked after them with a puzzled frown on her face.

  So it was settled. Instead of making coffee I was to take Ada to the creek to wash her hands and face, and to brush her hair and dress her. I think all were happy with this arrangement, and by watching and helping Mr. Hardkoop here and there I eventually mastered the art of making good coffee, and many other dishes as well.

  Once the cooking pots were cleared away, we set off along the trail once more. We’d have a short stop at noon, to give the animals a rest and a chance to graze a little at the side of the road, and we’d eat something cold and leftover from breakfast or the previous night’s supper. The best part of the day was in the middle of the afternoon, when we finally drew into camp, anticipating a good hot meal and the chance to rest. The animals would be roped loosely together and turned out to pasture and the men made repairs to the wagons if they were required, and the women got the fires lit and the cooking pots set over. We ate well, for the farmland gave way to woodlands and then forest, and all around were birds and animals for the taking. Once supper was over and the cooking pots cleared away, folks would go visiting with their friends, and talk over the events of the day.