Agnes Canon's War

by Deborah Lincoln

  “He was certainly no Richard Wiggins, tied down to his fusty old schoolhouse.” Elizabeth took the water.

  “No. He even smelled of, I don’t know, something wild. Fresh.”

  “There will be others. Oh dear.” She paled and sank back onto the bunk. “Leave for awhile, Cousin, won’t you? Go roam the deck and investigate the passengers. There must be bachelors among them, don’t you think?”

  Agnes pulled a face and stood. “I’ll send Sarah in with biscuits. You need to feed that child.”

  Elizabeth groaned, and Agnes left, shutting the door behind her.

  

  Under the enervating June heat, the passengers on deck did little but sit while the Belle Gould steamed up the Missouri through a wilderness unlike the tame Ohio River Valley. Elizabeth continued ill and refused to eat so that her frock hung from her thin frame like a nightdress. Even the children suspended their romps and games and raised their voices only to be cross with one another.

  Agnes turned her attention to the Missouri River itself, so often had she read of it in newspapers and fliers back home. Thick mud obscured its bed, snags lay in wait, and the current seethed around ghostly, half-submerged wrecks. Where the channel changed on the river’s whim, tree roots drowned in the suffocating water, their skeletons washed into the flow. Sand emerged here and sank there so that even the most experienced pilot was often caught off guard. Mists hovered so thick on the river that the boat’s crew frequently tied up for fear of catching on a newly formed sandbar or a hidden snag. Agnes didn’t fancy sinking into those dirty waters, and at times believed the demands of the captain’s schedule drove him up the river at real risk of disaster.

  Two days out of Kansas Town, as the steamer picked her way through a fog into which she had no business venturing, the one-armed man from steerage appeared on the stairs and approached Agnes’s family. The man was large, even taller than Agnes’s father, and his empty right sleeve swung at his side. A coarse black beard sprouted from his neck, crept over his chin, across his cheeks and into his ears. Beard, brows and matted hair left little room for features, though Agnes felt in gazing on him that he gazed back and through her. Dressed in coat and pants surely never washed and boots with years of caked filth, he strode across the deck and glared down at the children. James, Nancy’s eight-year-old, scuttled between his mother and Agnes, hiding among the folds of their skirts.

  The one-armed man stuck out his left hand toward Sam. “Name’s Bigelow,” he said. “Reuben Bigelow.”

  Sam stood up from his deck chair, set down his coffee cup and took the hand. “Have a seat, Mr. Bigelow?”

  “Naw.” Bigelow propped himself against the rail, pulled out a plug and bit off a chaw. His scent permeated the cramped space.

  “Coffee?” Rachel asked.

  Bigelow grunted and shook his head.

  Elizabeth, her complexion resembling a tinned oyster gone bad, pressed a hankie to her nose and mouth against his smell.

  “That’s Tom in five years,” Agnes whispered to her. “The wilderness influence, you know.”

  She moaned and glared. Her sense of humor had not returned.

  Sam swallowed his coffee. He set down the cup, and still Bigelow hadn’t spoken.

  “Something we can do for you, Mr. Bigelow?” he asked. “My young’uns been pestering you?”

  “Understand you’re looking for a place.”

  “Thought about settling along the Missouri. Maybe north of Independence. Not too far into Injun territory,” Sam said.

  “I got a place. Holt County. Hundert and fifty, sixty acres.” He picked at his nose.

  “Good farmland?” Sam asked.

  “Sell it to you. Two dollars an acre.”

  “Improved any? Buildings?”

  “Got a good enough house, I guess.” Bigelow glared at the women, and they drew back from his smell as if it traveled toward them on the sheer force of his gaze.

  “Are there settlements nearby?” No farmer, John planned to teach school or work at the law.

  “Lick Creek’s there.”

  “Lick Creek. Got a salt lick does it?” Sam asked.

  “Naw. Folks named it thought the land warn’t worth a lick.”

  “Huh.” It was Sam’s turn to be silent. He peered at Bigelow. Sam measured a man by his eyes, but Bigelow’s hairy features nearly hid his.

  Bigelow chewed and spit.

  Rachel shuddered ever so slightly.

  “Why do you sell?” Tom asked.

  “Belonged to my wife’s folk. Ain’t got use for it; got a place of my own.”

  Sam stared over the river for a moment, then said, “Won’t buy sight unseen.”

  “Seems fair.” Bigelow stood up and offered his left hand again. “We can ride out of Kansas Town.” He turned and towered over little James. His bulk blocked the light, and he looked down on the boy from his great height, his smell overpowering. He reached into a coat pocket.

  James squeaked and sank against Nancy’s knees.

  When the big man’s hand emerged it clutched something. He dropped it into James’s lap and was gone.

  The boy let out a rush of air and groped in the folds of his untucked shirt until he retrieved an arrowhead, finely chipped and fashioned of a deep black stone.

  5

  At Westport Landing, the group followed Bigelow off the steamboat and into Kansas Town, the village that threatened to take the overland traffic from Independence. Sam and John planned to leave the women and children in the settlement while they inspected Bigelow’s farm. Kansas Town was Cincinnati redux, as joyfully unrefined but in its infancy. The fresh and clean juxtaposed with the filth of mud and animals. Raw, unfinished structures grew next to shanties in various stages of collapse. Bustle and rush everywhere. The town crackled with its prime occupation and preoccupation, that of sending Americans across the plains and into the unknown. On Main Street alone, Agnes counted fourteen hand-lettered signs hawking indispensable goods for emigrants at the lowest prices. From the top of the high street she marked three wheelwrights’ shops and two purveyors of canvas. Handbills tacked to a stable’s wall advertised everything from oxen to Smith and Wesson revolvers to guides for hire.

  Bigelow paraded them the length of the avenue, ankle deep in dust and powdered horse droppings, until they clustered before the only hotel. Two stories, stone below and wood above, painted a once-glorious red now washed by the sun, it promised crowded quarters, perhaps mattresses harboring bugs, but all that little concerned them. The sign captured their attention, faded but readable, above the central doors:

  MISS FLORENCE’S

  HOUSE OF PLEASURE

  Nancy pinked and turned away, tugging at Sarah’s sleeve. Rachel squeaked an “Oh, my,” and covered her lips with her fingers. Elizabeth rolled her eyes at no one in particular and sank onto the top step, Tom squatting next to her. Agnes laughed, and John grinned at her. Sam turned to Bigelow.

  “It’s a bordello, man!” he snapped. “Would you have us leave our women here? For the love of God.”

  Bigelow’s expression hid behind his beard, but he shrugged his massive shoulders, palm out.

  “Only place in town, Mr. Canon,” he said, “and besides—”

  He was interrupted by a whoop and a bang as the front door slammed open and a woman hurtled out the doors and off the porch, flinging her arms around the huge man’s neck and wrapping her legs about his torso.

  “Reuben Bigelow—you’re back!” and she planted a smacking kiss in the midst of that shaggy beard.

  The beard parted in the first smile Agnes had seen from him, and he unwound the woman’s arms. “Maggie girl! Ain’t you looking grand?” He held her off enough to take her measure, up and down.

  She sported a mane of the most unusual color, hennaed in streaks of varying shades ranging from cinnamon to carmine. Her complexion, rese
mbling a fine-grained vellum with a spot of rouge on each cheek, betrayed her age as being somewhere beyond the forties. Her peasant blouse and skirt, the kind pictured in travel books as native to the Mexican states, showed off once-supple curves running to fat.

  Bigelow beamed and slung his arm over the woman’s shoulders, squeezing her to him.

  “Maggie, I bring you a whole passel of boarders, but they’re wanting a classy establishment, now. You convince ’em you’re out of the business and run a respectable place.”

  Maggie stepped back and curtsied, holding her blue skirt with both hands. “Sure and I give up that life many a year ago, don’t you mind that sign. I’m Maggie O’Day and I’m a reputable business woman. Just ask anybody here in town.” She waved toward the street. “And besides, there ain’t no other lodging between here and St. Joe. Come on along, you can inspect before you pay.” She turned with swaying hips and disappeared through the wide doors.

  Sam lifted his eyebrows at Rachel, who shrugged. John led Nancy by the arm and climbed the steps, and Agnes followed. She liked the look of this place, and the proprietor fascinated her. The others trailed after, Tom Kreek muttering that Maggie O’Day ought to be painting over the sign if she laid claim to respectability.

  The interior, dark and blessedly cool, looked to be threadbare but dust free and painstakingly clean. Agnes imagined the red velvet and gold braid on the settees and at the window would do any Philadelphia hotel proud. A board floor blotched by years of spittle and clay was scrubbed to a sheen. Her stomach rumbled at the aroma of fresh bread and bacon. Rachel and Nancy inspected the rooms and found the beds clean with linens supplied—and no indication of single females in residence. That settled the question, and they signed their names in the book. Sam, John, Billy and Bigelow ate a quick lunch, stowed the baggage and returned to the steamer, heading north to Holt County and the town of Lick Creek. Tom remained behind to mind the women and children and because Elizabeth insisted.

  That evening, Agnes tucked the children into their first real bed in weeks. No matter that the women and children shared a single room and two beds, as many to a bed as possible, they were true beds, with feather mattresses and sheets and a roof above that didn’t rock and sway with the current.

  “Agnes, is this our new home now?” Rebecca, Nancy’s next-to-youngest, asked. A sleepy hand wound a honey-colored curl round and round.

  “Not quite, darling, but we’re close,” she said, kissing the worried forehead. “Your pa will find us something very soon.”

  Elizabeth stood at the narrow window, watching Maggie’s colored man lead a buggy horse across the yard. “Our new home,” she murmured. The hand she laid on the window frame was thin, nearly translucent with the last of the evening light behind it.

  “Elizabeth, come to bed. You’re not well,” Agnes said, touching her shoulder.

  She shrugged her off and pulled away.

  “I am perfectly well.” She sent her a black look. “I’m tired, that’s all. I’m tired of dirt and movement and of living amongst a crowd.” She sank onto the bed and curled her arms about her knees. “I can’t even be with my husband in the night.” The hotel was crowded, and Tom shared a dormitory room with a dozen other men.

  Agnes pulled the curtains against the growing dusk and lit a candle. The room was stuffy and close.

  “I think it’s poisoning me, Agnes,” she said, her voice low, but not so low the other girls could not hear. Rebecca sat up, her eyes large and frightened.

  “Your sister’s only talking, sweetheart. There’s nothing wrong with her.”

  “And how would you know?” Elizabeth flopped over, her back to Agnes, face to the wall. “You’ve never had something like this inside you. And you never will.”

  Agnes bit her tongue, and sat on the bed undoing her boot laces. “That’s no way to talk about a baby. What does your mother say?”

  “She says it’s what a woman must do. If I die from it, well, that’s only my lot.”

  “Not very encouraging.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  Agnes could scarcely hear her, she’d buried her face in the pillow. “It doesn’t matter whether I do or I don’t.” She blew out the candle and slipped into her nightdress. “You are the only one who can lift your spirits.”

  Elizabeth stiffened beside her and didn’t answer, and Agnes lay awake long into the night.

  

  In the days of waiting that followed, Agnes became better acquainted with Maggie O’Day. The woman showed no shame about her history and seemed to care nothing for the opinion of anyone else. She displayed a natural talent for housewifery and especially for cooking; the smells from her kitchen that first day did not disappoint. They feasted on fried chicken and roast pork, fresh corn and wild grapes and blackberries. What she could do with blackberries! Blackberries and warm cream, blackberry pie, blackberry pastries, pancakes light and airy and covered with fresh butter and blackberries. Sweet potatoes and turnips were on her table at every meal, new peaches, plum puddings and milk for the children.

  She fed the group and the other boarders with the help of one Negro girl and her man, who lived out back in a rough cabin of squared logs. The man stacked firewood and tended a capacious garden, milked the cow and did the odd jobs while the girl worked in the kitchen, scrubbed the floors and hauled our bath water. One day Agnes asked Maggie right out whether they were slaves.

  “Servants, we say down here,” she said. She stood at the oak table in the center of her kitchen, flour everywhere, rolling out circles for pies. Agnes watched her, balancing her mid-morning coffee and leaning against the window frame.

  “But you own them?”

  “’Deed I do. Pinched and set aside for years so as I could get a good pair.” She looked up and gave Agnes a wry smile. “You Yankees don’t approve, do you?”

  “There is a great deal of objection where I come from to treating people as property.”

  “Think it’s depraved, do you?”

  “Certainly degrading. Both for the Negroes and for the owners.”

  Maggie scooped up a handful of flour and sprinkled it over her dough. “You think them darkies know about degraded? They was born degraded. It’s their natural state.” She leaned into the rolling again. “Now I ain’t saying you can’t raise yourself out of the degraded state given the right circumstances. You want to get out of that state you do it from the inside. You just set your mind to it.”

  She straightened and poked the rolling pin in Agnes’s direction. “Just like women. Us women’re born degraded, and it’s up to us to untangle ourselves. Each and every one. Don’t get no help from anybody else.”

  Agnes lowered her cup. “I don’t believe I was born degraded.”

  “Sure you was. You’re a woman, ain’t you? All that fine education and what’s it for? To serve a man, birth his babies, like your cousin there. She ain’t feeling any too special just now.” She peeled a round of dough from the tabletop and fitted it into a block-tin pie dish. “Poke up that fire, will you?” She nodded toward the stove.

  Agnes did as asked and added a scuttle of peat.

  “Now take me, for instance. I worked at a profession that most folk consider the worst a woman can do. I started out at fifteen to keep food in my belly and clothes on my back. It didn’t make me no different than I was before, I figured. It don’t degrade me if I don’t let myself be degraded.”

  “But how did the men treat you? Didn’t they treat you like … well, like dross?”

  “Sure, some of them did. Some of them hit me. Wanted to do worse. I just didn’t allow it.” She turned to face Agnes, leaned against the table and folded her floury arms over her chest. “To a man, a woman’s biggest sin is selfishness and a woman who don’t let herself be bounden to a man is selfish. That’s all there is to it. I decided what was going to happen to me. No one else. It made me good
money and it got me what I wanted.” She gestured around her kitchen. “Here. Place of my own, place where I can cook, which is what I love most to do.” She smiled wickedly and laid a finger along her cheek, leaving a wide streak of white. “Even more than I love to roll around with a man.”

  “What about children? Surely they must have come.”

  “Didn’t want any so didn’t have them. I know how to be rid of that sort of trouble. Fact is, I could help your cousin in that way if she was a mind to.”

  Agnes wondered if her complexion drained away, because Maggie chuckled at her and turned back to her pies, stirring coarse white sugar into a mix of rhubarb and wild strawberries.

  “No,” Agnes said. “I don’t think there will be any need for that kind of intervention.”

  “Tell the truth, I had a baby once. Didn’t get to it in time, so thought I’d see what it was like. It was a girl so I give it away. If it’d been a boy I might have kept it. Can’t imagine why any woman’d want a daughter, knowing what’s in store for her.”

  “You might have taught your daughter what you’ve learned.”

  “It’s a rare woman who can do what I done. Made myself up, I did. My name ain’t Maggie O’Day, just something I made up when I was ready to be somebody else. Hell, I ain’t even Irish. Made myself French, once, called myself Marie Saint Ives. But I couldn’t say it like the Frenchies do, got caught out by one of them French traders from up north. So I changed it again.”

  Agnes shook her head. “You’re a caution, Maggie.” She nodded out the window, where the black man was wielding a hoe. “You freed yourself, why not free them?”

  Maggie glanced up, her expressive face now a mask. “There’s freedom and there’s freedom. They tried to make a slave out of me and I wouldn’t let them.” She folded a top crust over heaping berries and picked up a knife to crimp the edges into a delicate ruffle. “Let the Nigras figure it out for themselves.”