Mail-Order Marriages

by Jillian Hart

  “That’s what I was hoping you’d say, ma’am,” he said with a grin and turned his buggy toward the community church, sitting back from the road at the end of the town proper. Next to it was a small dwelling—the parsonage where the minister, Reverend Blake, and his family lived.

  The wagon pulled in front of the parsonage and Lucas jumped down, motioning to his sons to follow his lead. He assisted Elizabeth from her seat and took her arm, placing her hand on his forearm and walking with her through the open gate and up to the porch.

  This was the final moment in which to change her mind, Elizabeth realized. But one long look at the man by her side gave her the reassurance she sought, for he was tall and well built, a man fit to run a farm and tend to a wife and children. His eyes were direct as they met hers and his raised brow asked a silent question of her.

  Is this what you want, Elizabeth? The message was clear to her, almost as if he’d asked it aloud, and she tilted her chin and tossed him a look of her own. She hadn’t traveled more miserable miles than she wanted to count to back out now. She’d marry him and take her chances, for he certainly looked to be a finer figure of a man than Amos.

  Lucas nodded as he rapped at the door, and in mere moments they were ushered into the parlor, where the minister awaited them.

  “I was at the bank when the stage came in and I hurried back home. I had a suspicion you’d be here right quick, Lucas,” he said with a wide grin. “When I saw the lady arrive I assumed it was your bride. The whole town is atwitter at the news that you’d sent for a lady from back East to marry. This is the bride, I believe?”

  “Sure enough,” Lucas said, his high cheekbones ruddy as he performed the introductions. “This is Elizabeth Collins, sir. We’d like you to perform the ceremony for us today.”

  Elizabeth offered her hand to the minister, and it was taken in a gentlemanly manner and held for just a moment before he turned to his wife, who was standing next to him, and introduced Elizabeth to her.

  “I have my book of prayers in my pocket, and if you two are ready, we’ll go ahead with the ceremony, Lucas. I think it is prudent to have it done today rather than take the lady to your farm for any length of time without a marriage taking place. Gossip is too ready to begin when the ladies of the town are given food for their mill.”

  “I agree totally, Reverend,” Elizabeth said, meeting his gaze and smiling. She took her place by Lucas’s side and waited for the man to begin the ceremony.

  It lasted but four or five minutes, and when he pronounced them husband and wife, Lucas turned to her and bent to drop a quick caress on her cheek. She was relived that he hadn’t claimed a proper kiss, for she would have been most embarrassed by such a gesture. The warmth of his lips against her face seemed more the proper thing to do, and she smiled up at him. And then she realized Lucas was much taller than she. She’d been accustomed to looking down at most gentlemen of her acquaintance and surely her new husband was at least six inches taller than Amos. A fact that pleased her for some silly reason.

  Elizabeth was within two inches of being six feet tall, the bane of her existence at home in Boston, where the accepted height for a woman topped out at three or four inches over the five-foot mark.

  She’d been an anomaly all her life, from the time she was but a girl, for her father’s height had been hers to inherit, instead of the petite blond looks and stature of her mother. Her sister, Sissy, had inherited those attributes, and had used them to her own gain, with young men thronging about her for several years—before she’d married Elizabeth’s beau, the duplicitous Amos Rogers. At that thought, Elizabeth breathed a sigh of relief that she’d escaped the marriage Sissy was now a part of. Any man who would so easily go from one lady to another was surely the lowest of the low. And Amos fit the bill.

  Even though Sissy was small and blond and pretty, Elizabeth knew she herself was a handsome woman, with the blue eyes and dark hair of her Irish father. All her life she’d dealt with the height she’d been gifted from him, and she was relieved beyond measure to find that her new husband was more than she could have dreamed of.

  “Shall we go home, Mrs. Harrison?” Lucas asked her in an undertone, his eyes scanning her face as if to gauge her mood.

  “Yes, of course. I’ll be able to prepare supper for all of us. We can have a celebration.” She included the two boys in her reply, eager to know them by name, and more than ready to put into practice her experience with children. She would finally have a family of her own, with two ready-made sons to care for.

  Lucas spoke in an undertone. “Perhaps we should stop at the emporium and choose items that are in short supply in my pantry. I’ve been there already to pick up my own supplies, but I’ll leave it to you to select the foodstuffs we might need. There’s always a need for sugar and flour and coffee and such. And the lard bucket is about empty, too.” Lucas seemed willing to allow her a free hand at shopping, and she nodded, agreeing to his notion.

  They rode to the general store—a short distance, but one fraught with confusion for the bride sitting atop the wagon seat. All about them folks waved and called greetings, until Elizabeth was almost overwhelmed by Lucas calling out to friends and neighbors who sang loudly with congratulations on his marriage. It seemed that all of Thomasville knew of his mail-order bride and the wedding that had taken place in the parsonage just minutes ago.

  How such news traveled so rapidly was a conundrum, but one Elizabeth understood, for even in Boston there was a network of folks who passed along any small tidbit that came their way. And it was obvious that Lucas getting married was at the top of the list today. She was scanned and gaped at and in general given a complete dissection by the ladies who watched as the wagon traveled the short distance to the emporium. Elizabeth was ready to forgo the shopping expedition by the time they arrived there and Lucas was assisting her from the high seat.

  He opened the door and ushered her inside the store, where several older gentlemen sat in one corner, playing checkers and discussing the state of the world, if she were any judge. The store owner was a gentleman named Harvey Klein, according to Lucas, and in mere moments Elizabeth was put at her ease by the man’s smile and offer of help.

  She named all the items Lucas had mentioned as lacking in his pantry, and then added a few of her own. Tea was one, for she was given to a cup in the middle of the day, when she’d completed her morning’s work and was ready to begin on the afternoon’s chores. A pound of crackers was added to Lucas’s list, along with a ring of pickled bologna and a large chunk of cheese from the round on the counter. Harvey Klein wrapped it in a length of cheesecloth, to keep it fresh until it should be used up, and then seemed to think of something else, for he snapped his fingers and spoke up quickly.

  “We’ve got in a fresh supply of beef today, Lucas. Mason Ridgeway butchered yesterday and brought me several sides of beef and a couple of hogs. Will you be needing anything like that, ma’am?”

  She looked up at Lucas inquiringly. “Have you fresh meat at the farm?”

  Lucas faced Harvey, his query surprising Elizabeth with its promise of hard work to come. “How much is a whole side of beef? I’ll cut it up for Elizabeth and maybe she could can some up for the winter. I’ve got a pork barrel, lots of chops and roasts still in it, but the supply of beef is short right now. I don’t have any steers ready for butchering till next year.”

  “Sold them all for a dandy price, I’ll bet you,” Harvey surmised with a grin.

  “Couldn’t turn down the fella who came lookin’ for some hefty steers. Made me a bundle on them. But it cut the house short on beef for a while.”

  This was a different scene from what she was accustomed to back East, Elizabeth decided. For the local butcher shop in Boston had meat all cut up in tidy roasts and a tray of ground-up beef should a housewife want it ready for a meat loaf. It seemed now that she would be working in a kitchen doing the job of a butcher. She straightened her shoulders and tilted her chin as she determined she could d
o as well at the job as any man.

  Harvey looked to be mentally counting the contents of Lucas’s wallet. “I’ll take care of it, for I can spare half a side for you. I’ll get it wrapped up good and my boy will carry it out to the farm for you, on my wagon. He’s got a couple other deliveries to make for me later on today. I see your wagon is pretty well loaded already, so you’ll not be wanting to add to the load.”

  Lucas seemed to be satisfied with the arrangements. “That sounds fine. Just wrap up a piece of beef for my wife and we’ll be on our way. She wants to get supper in the oven before too long.”

  He looked down at Elizabeth with a raised eyebrow as if asking a silent question. Have I forgotten anything?

  Elizabeth nodded and smiled at the proprietor. “That’s fine, Mr. Klein. Thank you.”

  She folded her hands at her waist again, and her gaze returned to the floor as Lucas finalized their purchases in the grocer’s credit book. It was the way of things, that men and women shopped and then paid at the end of the month, or whenever the arrangements they’d made with the store decreed it was due.

  Harvey wrapped up a piece of beef, looking to be about four pounds or so from the size of the package, and Lucas took it from him, then offered his arm to Elizabeth. The two boys were each holding a licorice whip, given them by Harvey as a form of appreciation for Lucas’s willingness to part with a good sum of money today.

  He handed the package up to Elizabeth when she was settled on the seat, and then climbed in beside her, waiting till his sons were in place before he turned his team and left town, traveling to the west, where his farm lay.

  “It’s a good-sized piece of land, well over two hundred acres, with a house and barn and assorted buildings. We’ve got a good flock of laying hens and a pigsty with two sows and their litters, all waiting for butchering in the fall. I put up a good-sized corncrib a couple of years back, and there’s a dozen apple trees out back, a couple of varieties of them. They’ve kinda gone to waste the past couple of years, for no one was here to put them up or make good use of them. The boys and I just ate them out of hand and I fed a good share of them to the hogs.”

  “I’m a good hand at baking pies, and apple puddings are a favorite of mine. It’s easy enough to make applesauce and can it up for later on,” Elizabeth told him.

  “That’s what I wanted to hear from you,” Lucas said with satisfaction. “We’ve been in need of a woman’s touch for a long time. I fear you’ll want to turn around and leave when you see the mess the three of us have managed to make in the house. It needs a good cleaning and the kitchen especially could use some work.” And if this woman wasn’t as eager for marriage as he, she might very well turn around and head back East once she saw the job she was expected to tackle. Lucas could only hope and pray she was all she seemed to be.

  Elizabeth listened to his listing of the chores awaiting her. It sounded about the same as what had been going through her mind, recognizing that a man alone with two small boys wouldn’t find a clean house to be his first priority. She was silent, thinking of the battle before her, the cleaning she faced and the supper she was committed to making within the next few hours.

  The buggy turned into a lane leading to a farmhouse and assorted outbuildings about a hundred yards farther from the road. The house needed a good coat of paint, but the barn glistened with what looked to be a recently applied coat of shiny red enamel. That anyone would put such expensive stuff on a barn, and leave a house to look like a deserted shack was beyond her, but nevertheless, it was a picture she viewed and shuddered at as she awaited Lucas’s help from the wagon. That she could slide down on her own hook was a given, but if the man wanted to play the part of a gentleman, she’d not deny him the privilege. And it seemed Lucas was indeed a man of good manners, for she was given a dose of courtesy as he lifted her down.

  She carried her package of beef into the house, past the porch where boots stood beneath the roof and dirt was present in the form of sand and scrapings from shoes and boots. It all needed a good sweeping, she decided. Surely the man owned a broom.

  Once inside the kitchen, she revised her opinion, for if he owned a broom, it hadn’t been used here in some time. The sink was full of dirty dishes, the stove littered with foodstuffs that had been spilled on it, and the table had its own share of dishes and bowls, coffee cups and glasses with dried milk settled in the bottoms.

  It was enough to frighten off a lesser woman, but Elizabeth Collins Harrison was up to any challenge and a dirty kitchen was not on her list of things to be avoided at any cost. After depositing the package of beef on the table she rolled up her sleeves and went to the stove, lifting a lid, checking to see the state of the fire within.

  The reservoir at one end of the range held enough water to fill the basin, so she dug it out from the littered sink and, using a pan from the back of the stove, filled it with hot water. Carrying it back to the sink, she glanced beneath it to where there should be a container of soap of some sort. A quart Mason jar held the slimy stuff she required and she dumped a good bit of it into the basin, then added the dishes that looked to have been rinsed off, not wanting to get moldy foodstuff into the clean water.

  The rest of the dishes were transferred to the drain board, leaving her an empty sink for her work. A trip to the pantry earned her two towels and a rag that appeared to have been washed and folded. She carried them back with her and, using the rag, washed the contents of her basin and then rinsed them beneath the pitcher pump and dried them before she found the shelves where they could be stored between meals.

  Lucas went out the door with his boys, apparently deciding not to interfere with her cleaning activities, and she was left alone with the daunting task of preparing a meal in her new home. A roaster from the pantry held the meat and she found a sack of onions hanging from a nail, along with a burlap bag of potatoes beneath it on the floor. She cut up an onion and put it into the roasting pan, along with salt and pepper and a few bay leaves, found in a jar, probably left over from the days when Lucas had a wife here.

  She slid the roast into the oven. splashing it with water and covering it tightly first. It could cook while she cleaned, she decided, and she set forth to make a decent kitchen out of the mess she’d inherited.

  Then she walked down the back steps, seeking out a plot of land where Lucas might have planted a garden of sorts. A weed-infested patch caught her eye, perhaps two hundred square feet of plants of one sort or another, beans being the most familiar to her. Reaching between the weeds, she found, to her surprise, a good crop of green beans, ripe and ready to be cooked on the black kitchen range.

  She filled her skirt with a good peck of them, holding them up, exposing her legs to anyone who cared to look. But not mindful of an audience, she went back to the porch and into the kitchen. The basin she’d washed dishes in was clean, thanks to a thorough scrubbing, and she dumped her beans into it and pumped water over the lot. Rinsed and drained, her crop represented a good dish of vegetables to go with the roast, and given the presence of potatoes in the pantry, she was well on her way to preparing a meal.

  Another cut-up onion and a hunk of fatback from a piece in the pantry sizzled in a saucepan as she snapped the beans and readied them for cooking. The onion was transparent in the grease from the fatback, and she dumped in her beans, then added water to the mix, slapping a cover on the pan and shoving it to the back of the stove, to simmer and cook till the roast was finished.

  She scrubbed the table using a brush from beneath the sink, for the table showed signs of several meals being served there. Her hands had known harder work than this at the orphanage, scrubbing tables after fifty or so children had eaten, and this was no hardship, she thought, since the kitchen was her own and she could keep it to suit herself.

  Finally a house of her own, even if the kitchen did show signs of neglect. She looked around, already plotting. Curtains for the window, an oilcloth for the table, some sort of order for the pantry shelves and a clean fl
oor. She smiled to herself. Rather than hard work, it sounded like heaven to her, a woman married and with a home of her own. This was just what she’d always wanted. She couldn’t ask for more as a new beginning, here in the West, where everyone was a pioneer of sorts.

  The back door banged open and Lucas stood behind her as she scrubbed at the seat of one of the chairs. “Supper on its way yet?” he asked briskly.

  “The roast is in the oven. I picked beans from what you might call a garden and they are cooking even now. I haven’t begun peeling potatoes yet, but your dishes are all clean and the floors are swept. I don’t work miracles, Mr. Harrison. I’m only a woman, not a magician. Supper will be ready in about an hour or so, when the roast is done.”

  She looked up at him and his quick smile surprised her. “Sure looks like a magician has been at work in here, ma’am. Haven’t seen this kitchen look so good in several years, since before my wife took sick and died. I recognize that you’re a woman, Elizabeth. As my father would have said, you’re a fine figure of a woman. He spoke of my mama thataway, and I’d say you fit the bill. You’re a good-lookin’ woman, sure enough, and your eyes sparkle when you’re hot under the collar. Makes you look right pretty.”

  She caught only one phrase he’d spoken. “Your mama? You had a mother?” Her sarcasm was evident as she stood before him, hands on her hips. She looked him in the eye, only a bit shorter than he.

  “You betcha, lady. She was a mother to be proud of. She kept house and took care of a whole houseful of young’uns and kept my pa happy till the day he died.”

  “Well, I don’t have a houseful of young’uns to tend, but I know how to cook and clean.”

  “You’ve proved that already. As to the houseful of young’uns, I think I could help you out with that.” His look was enough to make her blush. “I warned you about sleeping in my bed, Elizabeth. I wasn’t making a threat, but a promise. I hope you intend to be a stickler when it comes to your wedding vows. I’ve put your bags in my room. You can unpack them at your leisure—there’s room in my dresser for your things. You may want to rearrange the drawers a bit to accommodate your belongings, but there’s nails on the wall for you to hang stuff and a place behind the curtain for shoes and such.”