A Path Worth Taking

by Mariella Starr

  Jasper and Matilda were the drivers of the wagons, while Garret and Joe acted as cowmen. When they pulled into the homestead, Pierre met them at the corrals and opened the gates so they could herd the cattle into the pens.

  The cabin looked really good to Beth when they pulled in front of it. She was tired and glad they were home. Marie Chardon came out of the cabin to greet them. Matilda screamed, grabbed her children, and held them close to her.

  “Hush,” Garret exclaimed. “Marie and Pierre are friends.”

  “She’s a savage!”

  Beth turned on Matilda furiously. “Be quiet! Marie is a friend of mine. If you can’t be civil, take your wagon and put it in the barn.”

  Matilda hustled her children to the other side of the wagon.

  “Marie,” Beth said hugging her friend. “I apologize. I’m so glad to see you.”

  “Your friend is afraid I will remove her scalp.”

  “Ignore her, she is ignorant! She’ll get over it. or I will plant a boot in her butt!”

  “Beth!” Garret sent his wife a stern, warning look as he passed her with an armload of supplies. “Behave yourself!”

  Beth pulled Marie close and put her arm around her friend's waist as they walked to the wagon to help unload it. “Why is it men can cuss a blue streak and be excused because they are men, yet women have to watch everything we say?”

  “I can swear in three tongues,” Marie laughed. “Unfortunately, Pierre knows all the words and I get into trouble, too!”

  The women laughed with their heads together.

  “What language can’t you swear in?” Beth asked with a smile.

  “The Arapaho do not swear, we insult or threaten. It is very much the same in French. Did you get everything you needed on your journey?”

  “I have a lot to tell you,” Beth exclaimed. “Have you been practicing?”

  “Every day,” Marie admitted. “Ranch living is too civilized for my husband, though, he cannot wait to return to our camp. Who are your friends?”

  “Casualties of the Oregon Trail,” Beth replied. “They were on the same wagon train we came out on, but things went bad for them. They have decided to return back east in the spring. Garret offered Joe Braxton a job and shelter for the winter. His wife, Matilda, didn’t mean to insult you. She’s had hard times for the last few months. She lost a child.”

  “Poor woman,” Marie agreed. “I am going to gather my savages. I will see you next week when we return for new lessons.”

  “Thank you for watching the place,” Beth said hugging her friend and watching as Marie and Pierre called for their children, mounted their horses, and left with waves.

  “We need to help the Braxtons get settled,” Garret said dropping an arm around her waist and pulling her close. He gave Beth a light smack on her bottom. “I’ll address your rudeness later.”

  Chapter Seven

  “Oh! That woman!” Beth exclaimed stamping her foot once she crossed the threshold of their little cabin. She slammed the door closed behind her.

  “What’s wrong, now?” Garret asked coming out from their little bedroom pulling on his suspenders.

  “Matilda asked me if I would teach her children while they are here,” Beth said.

  “What of it? You like teaching children.”

  “I told her to send Max and Sally here on Wednesday morning, and I would include them in the lessons I give Marie and her children. She said she would not allow her children to sit next to savages! The nerve of her! She said she would send Max and Sally on Mondays and Thursdays. Who the heck does she think she is setting a schedule for my time and effort!”

  “Watch your language,” Garret admonished automatically. “I’m sure she didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “I’m sure she did,” Beth countered. “If she wants her children taught, she can teach them herself. I gave her a set of the books.”

  “Honey, you are not being very neighborly.”

  “They are not our neighbors,” she snapped. “They are living in our barn, using furniture we set aside for our use. Matilda Braxton has done nothing except whine and complain ever since she got here. I wish you had asked me before you invited them.”

  “I was doing the right thing,” Garret said mildly. “Joe Braxton treated us decently on the wagon train. He is doing his best, now. I see him limping and know he is hurting, yet he never complains.”

  “He can’t get a word in edgewise with Matilda,” Beth snapped. “She hates Marie and insults my friendship with her. I won’t stand for it! You need to tell her to mind her own business.”

  Garret sat down and pulled Beth into his lap. “You need to calm down. We’re helping a family in need. I’ll talk to Joe and tell him you don’t have time to teach separate classes. I’ll let him know if he wants his kids to continue with their schooling, it will have to be at the same time you teach Marie’s children. I’m sure he’ll set Matilda straight.”

  “What is wrong with her?” Beth asked. “She sneaks around searching for something all the time or lies flat on her back in their wagon.”

  “I’m sure it’s your imagination, why would she be sneaking around?” Garret asked with a chuckle. “We don’t have anything to hide. It will only be until spring, Beth. Joe says she has not been the same since they lost little Trudy. She is probably still grieving. I want you to make an effort to get along with her.”

  “Why doesn’t she have to make an effort to get along with me?” Beth grumbled, but she waited until the door had already closed behind her husband before she voiced her opinion.

  Marie Chardon and her children missed the next week’s lessons. Beth worried Matilda had insulted her friend and driven them away. She had little time to dwell on it though as there was work to be done.

  Beth spent a lot of her time silently fuming. Matilda Braxton was always busy when Beth was hoeing weeds in her vegetable garden. She disappeared when Beth had to carry buckets of water to her plants. Matilda was conveniently available and friendly when Beth was harvesting the various vegetables from her garden. It was, of course, a shared bounty. Beth could not be so selfish as to deny them fresh produce.

  Marie and Pierre rode onto their property the next week. Marie dismounted carrying a strange round wheel, which had been pieced and woven together from sticks and grasses.

  “I have brought you something,” Marie exclaimed with a smile.

  “It looks like a wheel on a small paddleboat.”

  “It’s a fish wheel,” Marie explained. “Pierre will set it up for you. You put it into the stream and bait it. The creek current turns the wheel. The fish swim into the baskets for the bait, and then they cannot get out.”

  “It’s fishing without a pole,” Beth exclaimed. “It’s ingenious!”

  “I cannot take credit for it,” Marie laughed. “We saw them last summer when we went further north. I have seen your larder, and you need to start drying fish for the winter months. The fish can be dried in the sun or salted in crocks.”

  “Thank you, Marie. I don’t know what we would do without your help.”

  “I don’t wish hardships on you, my friend. We will not be here much longer. Pierre has seen your husband and the new man preparing the logs to build another cabin. He is here to help.”

  The logs weren’t being prepared for a second cabin. They were for a second room addition to their cabin, and building the room was going to be a lot of work. While the three men chopped, sawed, and built a fulcrum to help them raise the logs into place, Marie, Beth and Jasper dragged bucket after bucket of mud from the creek and mixed it with ashes to chink the logs together.

  The work was hard and filthy, yet the husband and wife teams worked well together. In less time than Beth would have believed possible, a new room was added to their cabin. The new room was larger than the existing structure. By adding it to the side of their cabin, only three solid walls had to be raised.

  When the roof struts were raised, the loft living space in the new par
t of the house would be larger than the original cabin. The older children including Jasper were put to work cutting sod squares to cover the roof.

  The only person missing from the building project was Matilda. She would occasionally appear to help, doing little more than standing around and watching. After a while, she would claim she had something else to do, which needed her immediate attention, or she would say she was feeling poorly and then disappear for hours. There were many days when she did not show her face at all.

  Beth knew darn well the men noticed Matilda’s absence, yet they made no comment on it. When she brought the subject to Garret’s attention, he made excuses for the woman. Meanwhile, Beth worked hard and so did Marie. She was gathering vegetables from her garden, and carefully drying and storing them in the cellar under Marie’s tutorage. Marie had an extensive knowledge of native methods of preserving food for the winter months. Beth was pampering her two chickens because of the daily eggs she was harvesting. Occasionally she would get extra, which she would carefully submerge in pickled beet juices to preserve them.

  On the day of the first heavy frost, Marie and Pierre stopped by the cabin to say their goodbyes for the season. They were heading north where Pierre would follow the herds of elk and moose and set his traps for red fox and mink during the winter months. Pierre’s six pack mules were piled high with pelts, and he was anxious to begin their journey. They promised to be back in the late spring.

  Beth cried as her friends rode out of sight. Garret gave her a hug and returned to his chores. She went inside and put on the old work coat Jasper had outgrown, and went to her garden to see what damage the frost had caused. She picked what was left of the squashes and pumpkins carefully storing them in the root cellar. She took her rifle and went to the creek to check the fish wheel where she found three fish and put them in her basket. When she heard splashing of the water, she looked up to see a small troop of mounted soldiers crossing the creek at a point below her. She ducked out of sight and hoped they had not seen her.

  Returning quickly, Beth ran into the house and hung the fish on a hook hanging from the rafters so the cat could not reach them. She started to step back out the door and then ducked inside and out of sight. Matilda was coming from the root cellar carrying three large squashes in her arms. She watched as Matilda carried the vegetables Beth had picked earlier in the morning into the new portion of the house where she and Joe were currently setting up housekeeping.

  Beth’s immediate problem was the soldiers. She quickly hid all evidence of food supplies from her kitchen area under the bed in their lean-to bedroom. She took the rifle and ran to find Garret.

  Garret was already aware of the Cavalrymen since they had found him cutting hay. The captain dismounted, shook Garret’s hand, and nodded toward the other man and boy in the field, as they had not left their work. The captain noticed a small woman running across the field carrying a rifle. She slowed, but never lowered her firearm until she joined Garret.

  “Ma’am,” the soldier acknowledged removing his hat.

  “Beth, this is Captain James Sumners,” Garret said. “Captain, this is my wife, Mrs. Wakefield.” He turned to Beth, “These soldiers are from Fort Morgan. They are searching for a band of renegades who they believe massacred two families traveling without the protection of a wagon train. Nine people were killed.”

  “We were told there were no renegade bands in the area,” Beth said.

  “By who?” Captain Sumners asked.

  “Marie and Pierre Chardon,” Beth replied. “If anyone knows, it would be them. We heard about the attacks, but Marie said her people didn’t know about the raids. Her people are among the Northern Arapaho, who have signed treaties and are banding together with the Cheyenne and Lakota to move to the Powder River region. Your army has won, Captain. The Arapaho have been driven from their lands.”

  “Beth, hold your tongue,” Garret said firmly.

  “Your woman is an Indian lover,” one of the uniformed men growled at Garret.

  Captain Sumners turned to the man. “Quiet, Corporal!”

  “We have friends among the Arapaho,” Garret explained. “I’ve scouted these trails for years and have made peace with most of the tribal leaders from Missouri to California and Oregon. We have had no problems since we’ve been here.”

  “That may be, Mr. Wakefield, but our job is to warn everyone in the area. Keep your eyes open and be prepared.”

  “We will,” Garret said.

  They watched as the soldiers rode off.

  “It wasn’t necessary to be rude to them, Beth,” Garret said.

  “I wasn’t rude, I was speaking the truth,” she countered. “We’re in the middle of an Indian War and our soldiers, the one’s wearing blue, are guilty of as many atrocities as the Indians, if not more. I hid our supplies before I came out here. I don’t trust them.”

  Garret put his arm around her. “Your previous experiences are tainting your viewpoint. The Army is the only protection we have out here, honey. They don’t have any reason to steal from us.”

  “Neither does Matilda, but she is stealing from us,” Beth said looking her husband straight in the eyes.

  “What?”

  “Before the soldiers came, I saw her coming out of our food cellar with our squash in her arms. She didn’t ask for them, Garret. I’ve suspected things were missing from the food cellars, and now I know why. You gave her husband a job and put a roof over their heads. They have eaten a majority of their meals at our table, and we have been more than generous with them. How dare she steal from us!

  “Matilda hasn’t done her share this past summer, and you know it. She has not been any help to me at all and has embarrassed and shamed me by treating Marie and her children badly. She hasn’t worked in the gardens, and she didn’t help with building the room, which you built to house her family. She has not done her share of the work, and I’m tired of you making excuses for her. The weather is turning, and I will not subject myself to her laziness and dishonesty any longer. If you don’t want me to be exceedingly rude to her, you need to do something about it.”

  Beth turned and walked away from her husband. Her resentment had been building for some time, and she had finally told Garret how she felt. It was her husband’s job to take action on the problem.

  ***

  Garret returned to working in the fields with Joe and Jasper. He was aware of Matilda not doing her share of the work. Since Marie had been there to help Beth, he had let the matter slide, and it had been wrong of him to ignore the issue. Apparently, Beth was not willing to live with Matilda’s deceptions any longer. He waited until the end of the day before approaching Joe and spoke to him privately.

  It was long after the supper dishes were done when Joe knocked on their door. He was red-faced with embarrassment. He returned three large squashes and a sack of potatoes. He apologized to both Garret and Beth. He said they would leave in the morning, and he asked to speak to Garret in private.

  “I didn’t mean for them to leave,” Beth said to her husband when he returned. “I only wanted Matilda to do her share and stop stealing from us.”

  “It’s probably for the best, Beth. Joe says Matilda has been acting strangely since Trudy died. He thought she was getting better. He is embarrassed by her behavior, yet Matilda refuses to accept responsibility for her actions. She claims she wasn’t stealing, and you have been withholding her family’s fair share of the garden produce.”

  Beth huffed indignantly. “Her fair share of what? She didn’t plant the garden, and she certainly hasn’t done her share of work in it!”

  “I know,” Garret said. “The point is, Joe can’t hold his head up with any pride if he can’t control his wife and she has proven to be untrustworthy.”

  “It isn’t fair for her family to be punished when she is the one who stole from us. Where will they go?”

  “I don’t know. Let it be, honey. Every man has to do what he thinks best for his family.”

  Th
e Braxtons left in their wagon the following morning. Garret and Beth would miss Joe and the children. Neither of them voiced their opinions, but they were not unhappy to see the last of Matilda.

  “I feel so bad for Joe,” Beth said.

  “There’s a lot going on there,” Garret said truthfully. “I asked Joe if he thought she should see a doctor. He found a whole carton of medicines she had taken from one of the trunks. She had hidden the bottles and boxes in their room. Stealing if you are hungry is one thing. She has been hoarding and hiding food. He seems almost at the end of his rope. If you ever begin to behave crazy like her, I would take a much sterner position.”

  “I wouldn’t steal food,” Beth protested sharply with a bit of temper. “Even when Lettie, Jacob, and I were without, we didn’t steal from others.”

  ***

  Day-to-day life on their little ranch returned to what Beth thought of as normal. She and Garret moved their bed into the new room addition of the cabin while Jasper moved into the small lean-to bedroom on the other side of the main cabin room, which was now the kitchen and sitting area. The boy protested at first, although Beth thought he was secretly pleased as he was forming a closer bond with them.

  Garret already had plans to add another room to the cabin, when he had time. He showed Beth his hand-drawn sketches on how they would add onto their home gradually. She was very proud of his plans and hung the drawings on the wall in a glass-fronted frame she dug out of one of the trunks.

  With the additional space available and a cat in the house as a permanent resident, they moved the trunks of usable clothing into new bedroom loft for safe keeping. Of the three kittens Jasper had captured, two had remained feral and the gentlest of the three they kept in the house. It wasn’t a pampered and well-fed cat. The feline’s job was to catch and kill the rodents. They would occasionally get a glimpse of the cats in the barns, but they remained wild. The rodent population in both the outbuildings and the house had decreased quickly.