Mattie

by Judy Alter

  “Yes, ma’am, Ma calls us her pride and joy.” Then he bit his lip. “Pa, he says we’re trouble and nuisance.”

  I already didn’t like Pa too well. When I got to the Grubbses’ soddie, I liked Pa a whole lot less. The place was a mess, and a tired, frightened woman lay in the bed. I shooed all the children out of the room, drawing the curtain to give what privacy I could. If the weather had been at all decent, I’d have sent them outside, but the wind was beginning to howl, and I knew a good Nebraska blizzard was brewing.

  Mrs. Grubbs wasn’t a frail woman, just tired out like so many on the frontier. She’d used all her strength hoeing and plowing and cooking and giving birth, and she had precious little reserve left to help this new baby into the world.

  “I’m scared, Doctor. I . . . It’s never been like this before.”

  “You’re doing fine,” I soothed her, not wanting her to know that I, too, thought the labor was going too slowly. There wasn’t much I could do at that point beyond cleaning her up, smoothing and changing the bed and generally making her comfortable. After I brought her a cup of tea, I turned my attention to the rest of the soddie, telling her to call out if she needed me.

  I began with the children, each of whom needed a bath and clean clothes, a good scrubbing of the face and a hairbrush. It seemed to take forever, with cries of “That’s not my dress. It belongs to Elizabeth.”

  “No, it doesn’t. That’s mine.”

  “I want Ma to dress me.”

  “I’m hungry. What’s for supper?”

  Finally I had them all sorted out. Ralph was the oldest and the one I could always identify. Next was Rachel, a smug and proper young lady with perfectly braided hair, then Elizabeth and Kate, at eight and seven only a year apart and scarcely distinguishable, even to their strawberry-blond and perfectly tangled hair. Littlest of the lot was Henry, an amazingly plump five-year-old who doted on his oldest sister and followed her everywhere.

  I tried to be gentle but ended up being quite firm and even swatting lightly at a couple of bottoms with a hairbrush, but finally I had all five of them clean and neat.

  “Now, sit and read a book. Ralph, do you read?”

  He looked at his toe. “No, ma’am. Not too well. Never is time for me to go to school, ‘cause I got to help Pa and do the chores when he’s away.”

  Pa again, I thought.

  The oldest girl, Rachel, piped up. “I can read real good. Ma taught me, and sometimes I even read to her.”

  “Fine, Rachel. You read to all the others, quietly now, over there in the corner.”

  Then I started on the house. Of course, every few minutes I had to go to Mrs. Grubbs, who called every time a contraction set in.

  “You’re doing better now,” I said. “I think this baby is about ready to come in the next hour or so.” That meant I had to turn my attention to the birth and forget that messy house for a while. The birth actually went much more smoothly than I expected, and soon we had a healthy, nice-sized baby boy. When I got the mother straightened up, the baby cleaned and in her arms, I called the other children in quietly to see their new brother. As always, the mother looked like a different woman than the one who had just screamed and struggled her way through labor. Now she beamed in proud happiness, staring down at the little thing.

  “Isn’t he beautiful, children? We’ll call him William.”

  “That makes three of each,” announced eight-year-old Elizabeth.

  “Yes,” sighed the mother. “Three boys and three girls. I think that’s enough for this family, don’t you?”

  “No,” said Elizabeth. “We need another girl now, so there’ll be more girls than boys.”

  “Pa’s going to be mad,” said Henry, the littlest of them.

  “Oh no, Henry,” his mother answered. “He will be very proud.”

  “He says we’re trouble.” Henry confirmed his own opinion. “He’s going to be mad there’s another one.”

  “I couldn’t keep out of the conversation any longer. “I’m sure he knew, Henry. It’s unfortunate he had to be away just at this time.”

  Mrs. Grubbs looked away and didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure if she thought it was unfortunate or if, perhaps, she was relieved he wasn’t around.

  I told the children their mother needed sleep and put them to work helping me to straighten. Each child had to pick up his own things, and the older girls were to help me set the table for supper. Outside, I could hear the wind howling, and I was hesitant to send Ralph to check the animals, but it had to be done.

  “Don’t worry, Dr. Armstrong. I’m used to it. We ain’t got but a few cows, and they’re in the barn right close. I’ll hold on to the rope.”

  I went to the door with him and recognized the blizzard I had thought was coming. Fine, hard snow, blowing almost straight across the prairie, was already piling up at the side of the house. By morning, we’d be snowbound.

  “Be sure to check the horses,” I called, my voice whirling in the wind.

  Ralph turned and said something over his shoulder, but I couldn’t hear it.

  With my cooking skills and the lack of supplies I found in the soddie, dinner for the children wasn’t much that night, just oatmeal, bread and honey. Mrs. Grubbs had done her best to prepare ahead, and there were several loaves of bread, some canned preserves and dry staples, but I hadn’t thought to ask Ralph to saw some meat off the carcass I presumed hung in a shed somewhere, and I wasn’t sure he knew how to do it anyway. But somehow I got them all fed and off to bed, checked on mother and baby, who were doing fine, and fell into the one big chair in the house to sleep myself.

  I woke stiff and sore in the morning and found that we were indeed snowed in, tight as the proverbial drum, and the snow was still blowing. I settled down to straightening up the cabin, keeping the children occupied and not fussing at one another, and trying to care for Mrs. Grubbs and little William, who, fortunately, needed me far less than the others. Briefly, I remember wondering if Em had gotten back to town before the blizzard and then fantasizing, as I worked, about marriage to Em, with our own children. As Elizabeth shouted at her sister and Henry screamed for attention, I decided there wouldn’t be six of them, not ever!

  I was at the Grubbses’ soddie for three days, and by the time I left, Mrs. Grubbs was up and about and back to her routine. She apologized for the shape her house had been in, and I could see she really was a good housekeeper when she was in control of things. But I felt sorry for her. No one mentioned Pa much, and of course he never showed up, couldn’t have gotten through the storm if he’d wanted to.

  Mrs. Grubbs was grateful for all the work I’d done in her house, and she was profuse with her thanks. But one thing I did scared her, I could tell. In straightening and cleaning, I’d found six bottles of whisky. Now, mind you, I never was as militant as Carrie Nation, and Em had given me an occasional glass of homemade wine, which I enjoyed. But I knew whisky was expensive, and there wasn’t any money to spare around this household. Besides, I figured Pa, whatever he was like, probably drank too much, neglected his family and ran off to drink more. So I poured all that whisky on the ground, choosing a spot where the wind had swept the snow clean. I heard later that nobody could get anything to grow on that spot for years.

  When I got home, there was a note from Em. “Had to get back to town before the storm. Hope you got home all right.” He was enough of a prairie dweller, I guess, not to worry about me, and I appreciated that. But I was a little sorry he wasn’t there to greet me.

  Sometimes it was days, even a week or more, between times when I saw Em, and he would greet me with “Miss me?”

  “Of course,” I’d reply, and the truth was that I did.

  “Good,” he’d smile. “I’ll stay away more often, so you’ll realize how important I am to you.”

  He was important, though I was hesitant to let it show too much. But I couldn’t imagine life without Em or what it had been like before I met him. Yet sometimes I couldn’t imagine
life forever with him either. There were nagging doubts that bothered me, like his stories about the various places he’d worked. If he worked that many places, he must have started when he was six! And his parents. Why didn’t Em ever hear from them or talk about them? That early conversation about his newspaper-owner father and socialite mother was all I ever heard about the Jones family of St. Louis. And why, I wondered, was a man with so much ability and so much future clerking in someone else’s mercantile store? At the very least, he should have his own store or be buying a farm or whatever. Em’s future was always right around the corner, if he got the right break, met the right people. He never talked about earning his own future. I closed my mind to my doubts.

  Will Henry was more open about his doubts whenever he came to call. “Em Jones still hanging around you a lot?” he asked bluntly one day as he sat at my kitchen table.

  “I believe, young man, the word is courting, and yes, he is. I feel rather special about him.” I stood with my hands on my hips, ready for an argument.

  “Well, Sis, I got my doubts that he’s the man for you.” He said it straightforward, though I could tell the conversation was difficult for him.

  “Well,” I replied, uppitylike, “fortunately, you don’t have to make the choice. I do.”

  “Now, come on, I worry about you. You know that.”

  “Will Henry, I’m seven years older than you, and the worrying goes the other way.”

  “You may be seven years older, but you ain’t seven years smarter about some things.”

  “Aren’t,” I corrected automatically.

  “Ain’t, aren’t. Okay, you’re smarter about grammar.” He laughed as he said it. Will Henry had grown into a fine young man, nearly twenty years old now and strapping big and strong from all the work he and Jim Reeves did. He never had liked school much, and neither Jim nor I could persuade him to stay beyond about his fourteenth or fifteenth year, so grammar didn’t matter much to him. But Will Henry would be all right, I knew, with his own place someday and a good, solid future. Add to that his good looks, and I thought it was about time he worried about his own romance rather than mine. What didn’t occur to me that day, or what I ignored, was the difference in what I sensed about Will Henry’s future and that of Em Jones.

  Will Henry knew, though. “What I’m trying to tell you is, just think real carefully before you do anything. I . . . well, I hear things from time to time, you know. And I like Em, don’t get me wrong. He’s fun, but . . . well, is fun what you want for the rest of your life?”

  “Will Henry Armstrong, you’ve been listening to gossip. You know how I feel about trying to sew a button on your neighbors’ lips. You can’t do it, but that doesn’t mean you have to listen to what they say. Now, go on, get out of here. I’ve got things to do.”

  When you’re twenty-six and unmarried, you don’t want to listen to the gossip about the man in your life, and I was afraid Will Henry would elaborate on the things he’d heard. I didn’t want to know. Just because I was a doctor, a woman in that masculine profession, didn’t mean, like most folks thought, that I had given up all ladylike things. I wanted a husband and family and home, and I saw in Em Jones my chance to have them. So I loved him, without questioning, and sadly, without listening to myself or others.

  Jim Reeves never mentioned Em to me. I later decided he figured I was old enough to make my own mistakes, and he’d stand by me no matter what I did. And neither Sally Whittaker nor her husband at the general store where Em worked talked to me at all about our courtship. But Lucy Gelson mentioned it in no uncertain terms. Lucy was the only close friend I’d made, and I was delighted with our friendship.

  Lucy lived in a soddie about an hour’s buggy ride out on the prairie, with her husband, Jed, a hardworking, no-nonsense man, and their three sons. She worked from dawn to dark every day milking cows, picking up eggs, collecting what cow chips she and the boys could find, all the chores that went with living that kind of life. She cooked over a wood stove and was lucky to have that, scrubbed clothes in a copper kettle, attacked the dirt in her soddie with ferocity and yet remained cheerful.

  After I got to know her, I asked once why she liked that life.

  “I don’t know that I do, Mattie,” she said slowly, raising a work-hardened, strong hand to tuck in a wisp of pale hair that had escaped from the knot in the back of her head. She sighed and frowned, her hazel eyes strong with concern, and her face, with its sun and wind lines, temporarily lacking its usual smile. “But I won’t shrug my shoulders and tell you I’m here because Jed brought me. There’s got to be more to it than that. I love Jed, and I adore the boys, so that explains in part why I like the life. But there’s still me, and I have to explain that. I think I do it because there’s a sense of adventure, doing something new like we never did back in Illinois. And there’s a sense of future. Jed and I won’t live like this always. We’ll have a grand house and a big, prosperous farm for the boys to run, and we’ll sit on the porch with our feet up and sip whisky . . .”

  “Shhh,” I laughed. “The preacher will get you.”

  “Shaw, I don’t even like whisky. It’s just that’s the men’s idea of the lazy life. But it’ll be good someday; I know it will. So I stay and do what’s given me for all those reasons.” She smiled, the kind of truly happy smile that was rare in frontier women, and went on with her mending. Jed and the boys had gone to town and dropped her off for a visit. But even as we sat that afternoon and talked, her hands were busy while mine were, I thought, conspicuously empty.

  Probably Lucy had no choice about staying on the prairie. Women alone rarely left the frontier to return to their families, but many chose other ways to relieve themselves of the strain of frontier life. Some became nagging, whining, complaining and unpleasant witches, others were soon chronically ill and often died young, a few simply lost their reason trying to cope with it all. Lucy chose none of those alternatives.

  I got to know her, after a couple of brief meetings in Whittaker’s store, because she brought her youngest son to me with a case of the croup, and we spent a long night together in my soddie boiling water and helping the youngster breathe. He would sleep fitfully at times, and during those moments we talked. And it was then I confessed to her my hopes and dreams about Em Jones. It was strange, of course, to become so familiar so quickly, but I think it was a combination of the need to talk to someone, particularly another woman, and Lucy’s warm, outgoing personality. Unfortunately, I didn’t really listen to both sides of the conversation but only heard myself talking.

  “Mattie, the best of marriages are bad maybe half the time. There’s no way you can be happy through all the little troubles that life brings you, let alone the big ones, but what you have to hope is that you’ve chosen someone who will work through all those long, difficult spots.”

  “Em and I have no difficult spots,” I told her naively, and she smiled gently at me.

  “Of course you don’t. Neither did Jed and I back in Illinois when we each lived with our parents and only had the moments of courting. Life together is a different thing, Mattie. Are you sure Em is the kind of man you want to see first thing every morning the rest of your life, no matter if you feel rotten or he does or the crop hasn’t come in or you’ve been up all night with a patient or who knows what?”

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  She looked long and hard at me without saying a thing. Then, finally, after I had fidgeted uncomfortably, she said, “Just be sure you’re not getting married to be married. You have to be sure Em is . . . well, there’s a saying out here that if a man is true and trusted, he’ll do to ride the prairie with. Are you sure Em will do to live a life with?”

  Fortunately, the baby awoke, crying, and saved me from having to answer.

  All thoughts of Lucy and Will Henry fled when Em said to me, as he did one day, “All right, when are you going to marry me?”

  “Sometime, I suppose.” I was evasive because much as I loved being courted by t
his handsome and laughing man, and though I knew the marriage was going to take place, I wasn’t quite ready. I don’t know what held me back unless it was some inner warning that I should have heeded.

  “You have to be sure about this,” I told him. “How many men do you know whose wives may have to get up in the middle of the night, ride twenty miles and be gone for two days?”

  “Not many, not many, but I don’t know any other women like you. It’s the other fellows’ losses, not mine.”

  “Em, be serious. You know my work could become a problem between us . . . or between me and any man.”

  “Aha, is there another man?”

  “Em!”

  “All right, I’ll be serious for a minute. I’m very proud of what you do, and I know you need to do it. You wouldn’t be Mattie Armstrong if you weren’t doctoring, so what’s the problem? It may be inconvenient, but it’s the best choice. I don’t believe I could stand a woman who stayed home all day every day baking and cleaning. I’d get fat as a hog, for one thing.” He was sitting in my rocker and got to laughing so hard at the idea, sticking his stomach out to demonstrate, that he nearly went over backward.

  “Serves you right,” I said without sympathy.

  We went on that way for almost two years, maybe even a little longer. Em driving me on my calls, Em tending my vegetable garden and the few flowers that I’d planted by my soddie, Em doing all the repairs that I needed and, in short, acting like the man of the house, except that I made him ride back to town each night. Things weren’t the same then as they are now, and I’ve often wondered since if I would still make him take on that long ride morning and night. I think I would. Of course, he still worked at Whittaker’s store, which meant that he worked six days a week, so it was mostly Sundays that we spent together, if I didn’t get called out. Sometimes, though, Em would come out during the week, protesting that a whole week was too long to wait to see me, and often I’d stop in the store several times during the week.