Stranded
Page 2
I about swore a blue streak, but kept my teeth tight, especially when those youngsters hugged their skinny mama’s skirts and all but dared me to light into them. And I would have, too, bony Ethel or no, but Papa caught my eye across the dooryard and stared me down. He did it as he always does, silent-like in that way he has of saying a whole lot without saying anything at all. He sort of looks down his long nose, lips off to one side as if he is considering a purchase. But it’s his eyes that say it all. I laid off them kids and went about gathering the hens. And all the while Ethel’s cooing and hugging her varmints because she thinks the chickens gave them a fright.
Those twins are playing her like a tight-strung violin. Good luck on the farm, I say.
I see I am stomping a path around the real reason I wanted to write in my new journal tonight, but all I can think of is how sad we will be come morning when we leave this place behind, when we leave Mama behind. For the life of me I cannot see how Papa will be able to do it.
I asked him that two weeks ago when I brought him hot cornbread and cold spring water out to the stone wall marking our south field from Mr. Tilden’s. Papa saw me and waved. Then he finished cultivating the row, and guided Clem on over.
Clem, our old mule, stood off by the thinnest excuse for a tree the farm has, a whip of alder barely eight feet tall, where there was good tree shade not but a few steps away along the wall. As Papa says, Clem never was much for thinking things through. As he approached, one of that mule’s long ears flicked, waggling at a pesky bluebottle. I was about to ask Papa if there would be bluebottles out in Oregon, but he looked tired, too tired and sweaty to answer fool questions from me.
Papa wiped his eyes with his shirtsleeve, then slowly, like he was a hundred years old, he lowered himself to a patch of grass on the shady side of the wall. He sighed, his eyes closed as if he was napping.
I swear I wasn’t going to ask him a thing, only sit beside him while he chewed the cornbread—Mama’s recipe. It made me feel so proud that he liked my cooking, even said it was getting close to Mama’s. Now that was a compliment I could take all day long.
Then Papa cleared his throat and looked at me. “Janette, it is too late, I know, but I want to tell you I am sorry for putting you through what we are about to do. The trip west and all.”
This caught me by surprise. I could not bear Papa apologizing to me. I don’t recall hearing him apologize to anyone, ever. I started to say something but he held up a big, knuckled hand between us, as if to say, “Whoa now.”
There were the dark nubs of his calluses, that bandolier of a white scar running across his palm, the visible trace of a bad cut he’d gotten from a fouled plow line years before. I held my peace, wondering what I’d said to make him say such a thing. I felt about ready to crack in a thousand pieces and scatter in a stiff Missouri breeze.
“I have talked for a long time about moving westward, but never really asked your opinion of the trip, nor of your brothers.”
He smiled and the white lines by his eyes, what he called his “squintin’ wrinkles,” disappeared for a moment. Even with the wrinkles, he looked younger when he smiled. Maybe everybody looks younger when they smile.
“So tell me, girl.”
He crossed his long legs. “What is your opinion of the venture?” He popped cornbread into his mouth and looked at me while he chewed.
All I could think of to say was that I doubted the boys wanted anything more than to travel west to Oregon. I unwrapped the tea towel I’d swaddled around the cornbread. It was still warm and moist under my hand. Even on a sticky day, warm cornbread is a welcome thing, one of those little mysteries of life, as Mama used to call them.
Papa accepted another square, held it in one of his knobby hands in his lap. He looked at me with his blue-gray eyes. “That isn’t exactly what I asked, now is it?” I could tell he was serious because he kept that sly smile tamped down.
I looked at my bare feet, all grimy around the edges, dusted on top like they’d been powder-puffed. They were dirty enough that they didn’t much look like they belonged on my body. “No sir.”
Then I gave him that hard stare right back. “Won’t it be about impossible for you to leave this place . . . and Mama . . . behind?” I regretted saying it near as soon as it jumped out of my mouth. I am prone to saying a thing that’s bothering me, then worry about it too late. But that is the way I am and I cannot do a thing about it.
Papa sat quiet, then sort of leaked out a sigh. His eyes looked tired. “Your mama and me, we built this place with nothing much more than our hands, a few tools—a spade, whipsaw, and my double-bit axe. And one old horse, Clem’s mama.”
He cut his eyes to the sad-looking affair that was Clem, baking in the sun, the row cultivator not moving an inch.
“Then you children come along and put your own shoulders to the wheel, and that right there is what makes a good farm. It’s family.”
He had changed the course of his answer, which was fine by me. He bit the cornbread, chewed longer than he needed, nodding in time with his chewing. In a low, quiet voice, he said, “I will regret not being able to visit with her in the family plot.”
He looked up at me again. “But she’s not there, you see? I won’t really be leaving her behind, because she’ll be where she’s always been, since that first day I met her at your grandfather’s smithy shop when I was fifteen and she was thirteen.”
He closed his eyes and rapped his thumb against his sweat-dried shirt, the one that used to be blue. “She’s been right here in my heart since that day and she will never budge from there. She will make the trip with us.”
We sat like that a while longer, then as if told to, we both smacked our hands on our knees to stand. And that set us to laughing. We are so much alike, even more so than the boys are to him. At least that’s what I like to think. I know it’s childish, but I cannot help it. It’s my way and that is that.
I shook the tea towel of crumbs and hefted the water jug. Before I turned to walk back to the house, I asked him the real question I’d wanted to ask for a long time. “Why is it we’re going west, Papa?”
“Why? Seems to me we’ve talked that one to death, Janette girl.”
“We’ve talked around it some, that’s true.”
He nodded, got that crinkly look around his eyes again. “It’s what your mama called my wanderlust.”
“What’s that?” I asked it even though I had a good idea of what it was.
“Oh . . .”
He stretched wide and I heard his shoulders and back pop and crack. “I have an incurable desire to always know what’s over the next hill, and around the next bend in the road.”
He smiled and looked at me. “I expect it will be the death of me one day.”
“Don’t say that, Papa.”
“Oh, I’m only funnin’ you, girl. Now you best get back to the house. Do me a favor and make sure those boys are still working on those fence posts. You have my permission to give them what for if they are lazing on their backsides—like me!”
I had to laugh at that, as Papa is the least lazy person you will ever find.
Despite what he told me, I cannot help but think that come tomorrow, wanderlust or no, leaving this place will be a whole lot harder for Papa than it will be for me or the boys.
MONDAY, JUNE 18, 1849
* * *
Four days into our trip and I can see that keeping this journal will be more of an effort than I imagined. Not that I am one to shy from effort, mind you. Who else would keep house for these three? That in itself is ordeal enough.
I do not wish to slip into the ease that I expect jotting a list of the day’s undertakings can be. That would be nothing but tedious for me to write and for someone someday to read. Which makes me wonder why keep a journal at all? I expect it is to remind myself of the journey one day when I am an old wrinkled crone with my grandbabies about me. If not for that reason, I ask again, why keep a diary?
Yes, every day I do
most of the same things “on the trail,” as Papa insists on calling this adventure, as I did at home. I cook, I mend torn shirts and trousers, I gather firewood, then chop it for the fire (Thomas is not dependable). I clean and clean again everything we have brought with us. There is that much dust. I haul water when Thomas forgets, or more likely plain shirks the tasks that Papa has set out for him. I also tend the few chickens we brought with us, and I milk our Jersey cow, Floss.
Sadly, she has begun to show sign of strain, even this early in our travels. I think her old udder, swinging low as it is and slapping against her legs, must be a mighty sore thing by the time we stop each night. She walked plenty in the pasture at home, but at her own poke-along pace. She was not forced to walk all day, every day, even if we are not moving nearly as fast as I expected we would.
Papa says he is considering selling Floss at the next prosperous-looking farm we come upon. He says he does not want to have to resort to the inevitable. What that is he would not say, despite Thomas’s wheedling, but I think it does not need explaining. And I think it is kind of Papa to think of Floss’s comfort, even though he will miss fresh milk and butter. I am the one who milks her and makes the butter, though I was pleased to find the thumping and jiggling of the trail nearly does the churning in the cream pail for me. I will miss old Floss most of all. Her quiet ways and big brown eyes are a comfort. I can write no more of her now, so sad does it make me.
Don’t let me sully these crisp new pages with talk of the shame of laundry day. The things I am forced to clean! Young men are, well, I was going to write that they are pigs. But every pig we’ve ever kept has always struck me as tidy about itself. They will do their personal business in the same spot, usually a corner, so as not to soil the rest of a pen. No, young men are not pigs, but what they are, I have found nothing quite so nasty to compare yet. Perhaps there will be some bizarre beast we’ll find on the trail that will remind me of them. On second thought, I hope not, as I don’t know how many more sloppy, lazy, messy, rude critters I can take.
This is as good a moment as any to talk of my family. Thomas, my youngest brother, is two years my junior, which makes him twelve. While I am the middle child of the three of us, William, at age sixteen, sometimes seems older than Papa. I do not claim to know why this is, but I can say that he has always been this way, even as a child. That doesn’t mean he’s the cleanest person you’ll find on a farm, but compared with Thomas, I will allow as how William is somewhat tidy.
But there is no one like Thomas. I admit I have not met a whole lot of people in my life, but with Thomas, you get an uneven mix of good and rascal, of laziness and kindness. And that mix changes with the sun. He is without doubt the most frustrating person I know. He still tugs my hair though he has been told too many times to count by Papa and me and even William not to do it. It is as if he cannot resist, as if some devil pokes him in the ear when he walks by me.
Why once, back home, he sneaked up on me while I had a pan of hot bread balanced in one hand and my apron balled in the other, trying to shut the oven door. I spun on him, and smacked him hard on the cheek. His eyes went wide and I remember feeling awful about it, and thinking I had slapped a baby, so innocent did he seem. Five seconds later he was giggling as he ran out the front door. I reckoned I should have whacked him harder.
I am not certain I will do justice to this journal, untouched by my mother, something an aunt from Boston, Miss Minnie, I believe it was, had mailed to her years ago. I recall Papa saying it arrived a month after Mama’s birthday, but judging from the inscription it was intended as a birthday gift. Papa said Mama was puzzled by it at first, as the aunt had rarely shown an interest in her during her entire life to that point.
But once she got a leg over that confusion and shock, Mama laughed at the gift. Especially, said Papa, considering the old woman had spent years disapproving of Mama’s side of the family and their choices to move away from Boston to New York. Imagine what the old bird would think of us taking the trail to Oregon!
Papa and I had a laugh about that when he gave me the journal. He said Mama had never used it, but he had seen her a time or two with it open before her on the worktable. It would have been of an afternoon when her kitchen chores were in hand, at least for a time. There is never really free time in a kitchen, as something is always needing to be done and you cannot depend on a boy to do a lick of it, asked or no.
Papa said Mama could never bring herself to write in it. She told him it was so pretty and full of possibility that she didn’t dare set pen to it for fear that anything she might put in there would sully the beauty of the blank page before her. That was just like her.
He’d laughed at that, but not to her face. He never laughed at Mama. Then he gave me the journal. Said I was to do with it as I saw fit, but that he was certain Mama would want me to have it.
He has told me many times that I am a whole lot like Mama. I will take that as a compliment, though I will also be quick to say, at least here in these pages, that I am a whole lot like Papa, too. And it’s that part of me that couldn’t wait to commence filling these pages with my words, good, bad, or otherwise.
This journal will be what I make of it. No better, no worse. I am writing small because I have been told I can be windy when I get on a roll. I expect there will be long stretches on the trail when there won’t be anyone but Papa and my mule-headed brother, Thomas, to talk with. William doesn’t count because he rarely opens his mouth except to eat.
It will be such times I will want to talk to my journal, and in that way I reckon I will be talking to Mama, too. And since I expect I will be the only person to ever read this, I might as well fill it chock-full with everything I can think of saying. And then some.
Now the firelight is low, Papa is dozing sitting up, and the boys have gone to sleep. Papa is being polite and waiting up for me to finish off whatever it is I am doing in this journal. So with that I say good night.
SATURDAY, JUNE 23, 1849
* * *
I have known for some time about the horrors that can happen to people traveling west by wagon. I have read all the guides Papa purchased or borrowed, as well as the newspaper accounts he has managed to accumulate. He is a great one for newspapers, is Papa. There are all manner of atrocities hinted at in those words. Mostly, it seems, they are committed against women and girls, in particular. And mostly by “red savages.” By which I am quite sure the writer means Indians.
I do not doubt there is some kernel of truth buried in those lines of type, but I wonder why those journalists need to make out like people should not be told the details. They say such things as “took the utmost liberties” and “committed unspeakable acts” and “bothered in the night.” This is not helpful. I for one would appreciate knowing exactly what I am in for should the “red savages” upset our little rolling home. I do not like feather-headed behavior and despise it in the written word. So I will endeavor to fill these pages with the bald truth. Knowing me, that should not be much of a labor.
WEDNESDAY, JULY 11, 1849
* * *
We are stopped in low country, a hot and foul place Papa calls “the oven.” Actually it is somewhere in the Dacotahs. Same thing as an oven, as far as I am concerned. Why, I do not doubt I could bake a loaf of bread right on the wagon’s tailgate as we roll along. Except that loaf would bounce off and burn to a cinder on this foul, scorching ground.
We have been making poor time. Bub and Bib, our oxen, are moving slow and Papa isn’t switching on them much. I am glad of it, as you can hear them breathing hard with each step.
Papa has taken to defending his decision to outfit our wagon with one brace of oxen rather than two. When I brought up the topic, he said, “Fewer beasts of burden will reduce our days of burden to all the fewer.” I suspect he does not believe that. But it is neither here nor there since we are far from home with no hope of procuring a second brace, nor reversing our journey, not that anyone among us would, save for Bib and Bub.
Problem is, here in these Dacotahs, every now and again we come upon great ravines like cracks in the earth you will see after a rain when the sun comes out and jags up the mud something fierce. Only these cracks are big enough to swallow up everyone in Missouri and then some. No warning, just “blup” and there they are.
I think we should keep moving during the day, no matter how hot it is. I cannot stand the thought of walking on solid ground one minute then stepping off into nothing the next, only to land a hundred feet down, all broke up and not able to do a thing while snakes and lizards and only God knows what else tuck into me like I am a Sunday meal.
We will be staying here today as the heat has taken the steam out of the oxen. A rest is in order, except it is so hot no one will do much more than sweat. Papa and Tom and Will have gone off early this morning to scare up a mess of game, as Papa says. What that likely means is Will and Papa will hunt and Thomas will not be allowed to fire his gun. Still too young, Papa says.
Thomas says that’s not fair because when William was his age he was providing for the table for a year or more, and on his own, too. Papa tells Thomas to hold his horses, that life on the trail is different. But really it’s because Papa doesn’t trust Thomas with a gun yet, I know it. We all do, though no one says as much. Can’t say as I blame Papa, but I do feel bad for Thomas. Still, he ought to work harder at pleasing Papa instead of sneaking biscuits when he thinks no one can see him.