The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana)

by Robert Lewis Taylor

  Consequently the captain had a substitute take over at the last minute, who was a man regularly employed in swabbing down the engines with a bundle of waste, which had got to be such a habit that when he changed jobs he just put it on platters and poured gravy over it and served it to the customers, or anyhow that’s what people said.

  The Chouteaus also gave both Jennie and me some new clothes, but I didn’t care for mine. They were a pair of blue pants that buckled below the knees and a jacket with a belt and a cap with a button on top, which Jennie said was a very modish outfit and I ought to be proud. But I wasn’t very long in figuring that over in Illinois, where she came from, the styles might be fifteen or twenty years behind, so I cut off the buckles, to let the pants hang down, and lost the belt off the jacket overboard, and got rid of the button, so that pretty soon I was comfortable again, and didn’t stand out from the herd.

  The trip was interesting but dull, if you know what I mean. That is, it was interesting to look at all that muddy water and those cottonwood bottoms for about ten minutes, but dull if you kept it up much longer. Right off, I found out that the girl Jennie was very well named; I knew now how they worked it out. When it came to balkiness of disposition, there wasn’t scarcely anything to choose from between her and a mule. Not that she wasn’t sweet; I think probably her sweetest expressions were when she was having her bullheadedest notions. Here I’d been living free and easy for a while, without my mother or Aunt Kitty bossing, and now I had to do things to suit this Jennie. In books I’ve read, I notice that they do a lot of talking about so-and-so’s “character,” making the point that hardly anybody’s what they seem but that everybody’s pretty deep and shifty. I can well believe it.

  To look at that Jennie, you would think an angel had come down to help brighten things up, and put us in a happier frame of mind, but let me tell you what she did. The first morning we went in to breakfast, being a wide assortment of food with a crust like a stove lid—fried ham, fried bacon, fried cornbread, fried mush, and such like—she thumbs’d down when one of the passengers, very accommodating and polite, offered me a cigar. I told her I’d been smoking catalpa beans since the diaper stage, almost, but she only gave me that sweet smile and stated that cigars were for grown men, and anyway ought to be smoked out in the middle of a field, so that as few as possible would get suffocated.

  Before we left the Chouteaus, there was talk about getting us different cabins, but Jennie said it was a waste of money; we could make out with upper and lower bunks easily enough. Besides, as it turned out, the boat was crowded. I didn’t entirely understand all the ruckus, but they said it had something to do with “delicacy.” Then they said it was all right because of the great difference in our ages—she would be like a mother to me. When we got ready for bed the first night, it began to seep in what they were talking about. They were afraid she would pester me to death, and she almost did. To start off, it was, “Have you been to the bathroom, Jaimie?” then, “Did you wash your feet, Jaimie?” and “Have you brushed your teeth yet?” I told her I’d been cleaning my teeth, when they needed it, with a willow twig, which is what Indians and such use in the woods, but she had a new pig-bristle brush, along with some salt, so I had to troop back and do it all over.

  Not only that, but she made me put on a nightgown to sleep in, as free as if she owned me. Furthermore, I didn’t care to have her loitering around when I got ready for bed. But she said she’d been raised in a one-room cabin with five brothers, and not to be silly. Even so, there are some things a body wants to do in private, and undressing is one of them. She herself was as open as a statue in the park, and likely imagined that she looked handsome in her pelt, only she didn’t—she was soft and round where she should have had muscles, and I’d bet she couldn’t have sprung a rabbit trap if her life depended on it. When I was tucked in below, and she had snuggled down above, she asked me to say my prayers, but I told her I didn’t know any, so she said one for us both, blessing everybody she could think of, including a number of persons that were strangers to me, and ended up by hoping Slater would find a comfortable berth in heaven. I felt a little better, then, knowing she was off on the wrong foot, and so went to sleep.

  Now I want to tell you how we found my father. At the end of the boat trip, we got a ride with a family by the name of Matt Kissel, who was a man about three pounds heavier than an ox, standing six feet and a half high, with mild, clear-blue eyes like a baby’s and a half-smile on his face. He and his wife, a little woman that they would have to peg down in a strong wind, were traveling to California to be farmers, along with their four children, which they said were named after books of the Bible, being Deuteronomy, Leviticus, Lamentations and Micah. But when I looked in a Bible lying in the captain’s saloon, I judged that they’d picked the worst stumpers in the list, so I asked Mrs. Kissel about it, saying what pretty names the boys had; and she said her aged mother had done it “to foment character.” She said her mother’s idea was that if the children could swallow those names, and learn to live with them, they could overcome anything, and probably turn out to be President.

  Anyhow, the Kissels had a team of six oxen and a wagon on the boat, together with tools and seed, and they said they weren’t interested in gold, but hoped to find a fertile valley in the new land, since their own place back in Indiana had washed down a river-house, sod and good will. They were a nice family, and Jennie said the same. We crowded into the wagon, me on the seat beside Mr. Kissel and Jennie in the back with his wife, helping to attend the collection from the Old Testament.

  This Kissel was about the scarcest talker I ever met; I couldn’t get him to fasten three words onto another. He seemed to live way down inside himself, perfectly sunny and serene, and hadn’t any need to jaw it all over like most people, who spend half of their time explaining what they do, to make themselves feel good. I liked him. You couldn’t imagine anything that might make him mad. He was too big to be bothered by humans, even if he didn’t like them, and whatever circumstances he was in suited him just fine.

  At one point on the rutty mud road to Independence, the oxen, who were frisky and hard to manage from being cooped up, shied at a thrown-away tin and the right front wheel sunk up to the bed in gumbo; we were stuck. Now a thing like that would have prodded a perfect gusher of speech out of my father. He would have confounded this and damned that, and quoted some poetry to cover the case, and philosophized, and then, before he ran down, likely philosophized somebody into taking care of it for him.

  Kissel got rid of his smile, I’ll say that for him—he broke into an outright grin. Then he summed up the predicament by remarking, “Sticky,” and very patiently took two planks out of the wagon, with Deuteronomy, Leviticus, Lamentations and Micah tuning up in the back. Springing down, nimble as a cat, he kind of laid them across the firm and also the soft ground, put a foot on each plank, and before I knew it, bent underneath and lifted up the whole front end, bogged-down wheel and all. Then he edged us over into the tracks again. I guess what struck me as wonderful, and I think about it still today—I mentioned it to him only last month—was that he didn’t even ask me to hop off and lighten. He disliked to inconvenience me, you see.

  On the edge of the town, being mainly tents and rickety shacks, we stopped a man carrying a jug and I mentioned my father’s name, but didn’t get any satisfactory reply. What he said was, “Go ahead in if you’ve a mind to—I’d sooner live in hell with my back broke.” I puzzled it over quite a while, hoping to get a connection, but finally decided to try somebody else. We went on, being often blocked by other wagons, and horsemen, and people in the streets, and lumber carried this way and that, and got down toward the thickest part of the town. I didn’t care for the looks of it, it was so raw and noisy and mixed up, but there was excitement to it, and it somehow made me anxious to get along on our trip. All that liveliness was catching. The Kissels were looking for a site to place their wagon, but they wanted us to find my father, too. Anybody else would h
ave let us shift for ourselves, now, but Mr. Kissel, in an uncommonly long speech, stated that, “She’ll stay put for a while,” meaning that California would wait and there wasn’t any hurry.

  I hoped my father hadn’t gone yet, but I needn’t have worried. We rounded a corner, in a nice section, and there he was, right in the middle of an argument you could have heard out on the salt flats. A knot of grave-looking men and a woman or two with shawls over their shoulders stood on the steps and porch of this brick house, with a confab going on. Swallowing hard, I took Mr. Kissel’s arm and pointed. My father was talking, as he generally was, and we could hear without having to strain. He was spruced up very neat, had his surgical bag in one hand, had one of those heart-testing cones around his neck, and was wearing what my mother called his “consultation manner.” That is, he was full of concern and importance, and to look at him, you’d never guess he was probably itching to get out and consult a deck of cards. But right now he was really worked up, for we heard him say:

  “I’ve made my diagnosis, and you hear my advice—go in, operate. Don’t waste another minute.”

  A nice but vacant-appearing old fellow alongside him on the porch, also in neat black clothes, shook his head with great vigor and said:

  “It is entirely without medical precedent. On top of that, the weight of local opinion is against you. Both Doctors Shipway and Munson concur with me one hundred per cent—the patient has a septic pregnancy. My suggestion is to place a sharpened ax under her bed; it may ward off hemorrhage.”

  “Pregnant! Why, there isn’t a single indication, aside from the swelling. That poor woman is no more pregnant than I am.”

  “Until I’ve had a chance to examine you, preferably in my office,” said the old fellow, “I wouldn’t care to make the comparison,” which they all agreed was a sound good hit, and caused a lot of chuckling and back-slapping among the rougher-dressed men in the yard.

  “Listen to me a moment,” said my father, his face shining with seriousness, “I saw this sort of case over and over as a medical student in Scotland. Same history, same symptoms. In their ignorance, they called it pregnancy, too, and they lost every last patient, the blithering fools.”

  “To my knowledge, the abdomen has never been opened by the best metropolitan surgeons, either in this country or in Europe,” said another of the doctors.

  “Then let’s break new ground here in Independence. That unfortunate young housewife will be dead before morning.”

  Still another man on the porch, who I took to be a preacher, because he had a funny, rolled-up black hat on and was holding a Bible in one hand, now spoke up to say, “The official position of the Church is negative. The Lord has no wish for his unordained servants to defile the sacred caverns of birth.”

  At this, there was an angry muttering aimed at my father, and some threats of violence if he insisted on going ahead on his own. I saw one man, with hair that grew down in front like a chipmunk, loosen a pistol in a holster and grin at his neighbor.

  “All right,” said my father. “I wash my hands of the case, but hear my prediction: The woman has a cystic growth which is surgically removable, with no more risk than she’s taking right now. This operation will be performed within your lifetime, and I hope your consciences are sorely smitten.” Then he walked to the door and shook hands with a haggard, grieving young fellow that was likely the husband. “I’m sorry, I did my best,” he said, and strode down through the crowd. He’d gone twenty or thirty yards up the street before I found my voice.

  “Father,” I called out. “I’m up here—on Mr. Kissel’s wagon.”

  I saw his back stiffen up; then, with a little shake of his head, as if his ears were playing him tricks, he went on without turning around.

  “It’s me—Jaimie,” I screamed, leaping to the ground. Then he was down on his knees with the tears running down his face, and clasping me in a hug that cracked my bones almost.

  My father was a great man in his way, and I told that about the operation mainly to show how easily he could get on the bad side of people over things he was right about all the time. Where I live now, writing our story, I don’t much keep up with events, but I’d like to bet that that same operation was done not long afterwards, just as he promised.

  “Providence has answered my prayers, boy,” he said, wiping his eyes. “I’d never given up hope, not for a minute, but I’ll have to own up that you’ve taken the wind out of me. I think I’d better sit down.”

  So I led him back to the Kissels and introduced him to everybody, and we had a general cry together, with a good deal of nose blowing, particularly by Jennie and Mrs. Kissel, and then my father got up on the seat beside us and was soon his old self again. In fact, he remembered pretty quick how outraged he was about the cyst, and went to the length of explaining it all to Mr. Kissel, using the most technical terms, just as if Mr. Kissel knew the difference between a shinbone and a corpuscle, breaking off now and then to say, “You understand me?” or “You follow that, do you not?” And each time Mr. Kissel smiled in his slow, quiet way, which had the effect of encouraging my father to push right ahead with more.

  That night, sitting around the campfire where the Kissels placed their wagon on the edge of a grassy field, I told him about our adventures. And when I got through, Jennie told some of hers, but you could see she wasn’t very eager, so nobody pressed her. We had a meal of three chickens cooked on a spit over the fire, with Mr. Kissel doing the work, and my father telling him how, and everybody agreed that they were about the tastiest chickens we’d ever run across. My father said it certainly beat the food he’d been eating at his boardinghouse, which had consisted for the past two days of boiled pieces off an old saddle Mr. Wilson had taken in on a trade. But I judged that this was one of his exaggerations.

  He’d got Jennie a cubbyhole room at the Wilsons’, and toward ten o’clock, happy and worn out, we said good night to the Kissels, excepting for the Old Testament group, which was mainly asleep, with some yowling now and then to keep their hands in, and went on home. But before we did, we made an agreement to all travel together to California in the same company, because Mrs. Kissel said they’d admire to have Jennie along, just like one of the family. I haven’t the least doubt they’d have taken in five more without a word of objection, for that’s the way they were. There wasn’t anything small or selfish about them any more than there is about an elephant.

  And I was relieved later to hear my father declare in the strongest terms that this family of Kissels deserved the best, and that he intended to throw a considerable amount of gold their way the minute he staked out his claims.

  Chapter XI

  Right after breakfast the next morning we picked up Mr. Kissel, leaving Jennie at the wagon to help out, and went off to meet my father’s new friends that he said were so gracious toward him in the bar. But first, full of style and flourish, he had to drop into the office of the Independence Expositor, where he introduced us to Mr. Webb, the editor, and to a Mr. Curry, who had been one of the editors of the St, Louis Reveille. “Mr. Matthew Kissel,” my father said, with a kingly sweep of his hand, “a leading agriculturist of Indiana.”

  I never saw anybody who could have so good a time with such thin material. Now his outward excuse for going into that office was to “insert an advertisement for the recovery of a mislaid watch fob,” but his real reason was simply that he felt high-spirited and wanted to bring together some people he liked.

  Anyhow, he inserted the notice, after first putting on his spectacles and surveying the table of rates, making an expert show of deciding on the proper space and type, and he wrote it out himself, longhand: “Lost, probably in Church or in the Last Chance Saloon and Entertainment Estab., 14 Kt. gold watch medallion, struck off by Lazarus of Louisville [this last was pure humbug—Mr. Lazarus ran a brokerage shop back home and sold whatever people brought in to pawn], carrying profilian bust of the late G. Washington, Pres., U.S.A. Substantial reward for return of this cheris
hed family heirloom. Dr. Sardius McPheeters, M.D. (in Syst. Surg.), Box 137, this newspaper.”

  Then he asked Mr. Webb if Box 137 was spoken for, and Mr. Webb said no, that they didn’t have any Box 137, or even Box 1, or 2, but he would make a note of it, and it would be all right. Then we all shook hands around and left, after Mr. Curry had attempted a polite inquiry of Mr. Kissel on the subject of erosion. It went along very much like a dentist trying to pry out a wisdom tooth that had got wrapped around the jawbone. Something like this:

  “Excellent soil back your way, I understand, Mr. Kissel?”

  (Smile and a slow nod from the latter.)

  “Adequate rainfall?”

  “More at some seasons.”

  “But not too much, I hope.”

  “Mortal damp.”

  “A plenteous rainfall can be a downright curse in regions near our larger streams. You are probably fortunate to be situated high and dry.”

  “It washes.”

  “But not to the point of actual damage, I have no doubt.”

  “Some.”

  “By erosion?”

  “Washed it all down the river.”

  “Pardon?”

  “The whole farm. Also the house. Along with barn, silo, woodrack and pigsty.”

  It was about in here somewhere that Mr. Curry concluded to let go his holds on erosion and change the subject, and I didn’t much blame him, for it was pretty clear that he’d got off on the wrong track. So we passed some notes on the local weather, which was good at the moment, but worse at other times, they said. After getting that settled, we made our way on down the street.