The Diary of Mattie Spenser

by Sandra Dallas

  Your very sincerely devoted

  Thompson Earley

  July 24, 1868. Prairie Home.

  It appears I shall recover, and so shall the babe I yet carry. For a long time, I am told, it was thought neither of us would survive. I was senseless for many days, and without the tender nursing of Mr. Bondurant and Kathleen Richards (the young wife who now lives in the Earley place), I should have died. O, my sad heart! If only I had done so! By what rights should either this babe or I live?

  After reading Tom’s missive, I was consumed with self-pity over the lost letter, my mind as black as a beehive. I knew that as my only course was to remain with Luke, I must rid myself of this child conceived in sin. Then with great bitterness, I realized the only one who could help me do so was Jessie, and she was with Tom, both lost to me forever.

  In desperation, I drank huge quantities of bitter tansy tea, and when that failed to produce the desired result, I made a decoction of rhubarb and pepper, mixing it with the laudanum Jessie had given me in Denver. Then I took a dose big enough to kill a horse, as the saying is—but it was not sufficient to kill the baby or me.

  Luke found me senseless on the floor, and when he could not rouse me, he went for Mr. Bondurant. That kind friend declared I had eaten tainted food or was suffering from a complication of pregnancy. If he knew the true cause of my illness, Mr. Bondurant uttered no word of it. He has confided that Luke did not leave my side until he was assured I would recover, and Luke himself told me he had concluded that if I died, he would leave Colorado Territory.

  Now that the danger is past, I am under orders by Husband and friends to rest. So I lie in bed with time enough to write but little to say.

  There is no solace in confiding in my journal. Why should I record the events of my life when I take no interest in them? I have neither enthusiasm nor hope for the future. When I awoke from my long illness, I was not the gay bride who had started these pages, but a tormented woman whose life henceforth will be duty.

  This book has become a burden to me, and so I put aside my pen, perhaps forever. In time, I shall destroy this once-beloved companion, upon whose pages I have written so faithfully. But I cannot do so now, for it is yet too much a part of me. I could no more toss it into the flames than I could burn away my own arm. So I return it to its hiding place in the trunk. Perhaps one day I shall take it out and in reading its story rediscover the joyful young girl who just three years ago began its journey. Pray God that she is not lost forever.

  January 12, 1869. Prairie Home.

  Just before dawn on this day, I was delivered of a healthy baby girl, who is named Carrie Lorena. She favors her mother.

  Epilogue

  Mattie Spenser never wrote in her journal again. Still, judging from the wear on the diary’s leather cover, as well as the rusted safety pin that had replaced the original strip of leather securing the flap, I think she must have taken the volume from its hiding place and reread it often.

  As I closed the diary and slipped the flap through the safety pin, I felt a sense of disappointment at the lack of resolution. It was as if I’d read a book all the way to the end, only to discover that there wasn’t any end, that the last page was missing. I wanted closure (a word that certainly wasn’t used in Mattie’s day), and I hoped Hazel could provide it.

  Her portable radio was on, turned to some talk show, which meant Hazel was home. So gathering up the diary and the transcript that I’d printed out for her, I pushed open the side gate that separates our two yards and found Hazel sitting on her patio. Her feet, clad in Nikes, were propped on a footstool. A stemmed glass was on the table at her side.

  “Oh, hello there,” she said when she saw me. “I’m having a martini. Can I fix you one?”

  I shook my head.

  “Every time I see him, my doctor warns me against liquor, says it isn’t good for me, but my stars, what harm will it do at my age? Cut me down before my prime? I can’t think of a better way to leave this world than loaded, can you?” Hazel shook her head as she switched off the radio. “I don’t know why I listen to that drivel. It just makes me mad. Sit down, dearie.”

  But I was too excited for small talk and blurted out, “I read your grandmother’s diary. I transcribed it onto my computer and made you a copy.” I set the journal reverently on the table and dropped the printout on the footstool next to her feet, noticing that Hazel still had great legs. I wondered if Mattie had had good legs, too, and if anybody ever knew it.

  Hazel glanced at the computer copy. “Why, isn’t that nice of you. Honestly, with the way those old people wrote, I never could have gotten through that diary. Was it any good?”

  “Oh, Hazel, it was wonderful. You ought to donate it to the Western History Department of the library or the Colorado Historical Society. But read it first, and the sooner the better, because I’ve got some questions about your grandparents.”

  “And you want the answers before I kick off. Well, don’t worry about that. Mother lived to be older than God, and I suppose I will, too.” She drained the martini glass. “I’ll get to it this week. It’s nice to have an excuse to stop packing. That surely does tire a body.”

  Hazel picked the olive out of her empty glass and threw it into the bushes next to the house. At my look of surprise, she said, “Yes, I know what you’re thinking. Why bother to put an olive into the martini when I’m not going to eat it? Well, that’s the way Walter made martinis, and I never thought to do otherwise.” She chuckled. “I had a martini every night of my life after I got married, but Mother pretended I didn’t drink. She had a wonderful sense of humor, just like her own mother, she said, but she was awfully straitlaced. She got that from her father.”

  “Was your mother’s first name Carrie?”

  Hazel looked stumped. “I don’t rightly remember. Isn’t that awful? She always used Lorena. But now that you mention it, I believe Carrie may have been her first name.”

  “Did she have brothers and sisters?”

  Hazel shook her head. “Not any who lived, anyhoo. Birth control being what it was back then, it wouldn’t surprise me if there were other children, who died, or miscarriages, but you didn’t talk about such things.” She looked down at her hands. “Children don’t much run in the family.” Hazel sighed, then looked up. “Mother absolutely adored my grandmother.”

  “What was she like, your grandmother?”

  Hazel thought a minute, twiddling the stem of the empty glass between her fingers. “I hardly remember her. She was tall, I know. We were all of us tall. In my mind, I see her wearing a big apron that went all the way around her and standing in the barnyard with her feet apart, leaning forward. I’d forgotten how farm women stood like that. She seemed awfully old to me then. But I was a little bit of a thing, maybe four or five when she died. I don’t suppose she was out of her sixties. Who knows, she might have lived to be as old as I am if she hadn’t been killed in the accident.”

  I moved the printout and sat down on the footstool next to Hazel’s feet.

  “My grandparents died together. Their car turned over. The accident made the newspapers in Denver because it was the first fatal automobile crash out there in Bondurant County. And then they were quite prominent, too. My grandfather was a rancher. He came out here as a homesteader, but the land wasn’t much good for farming. So he turned to cattle and built up quite a spread. I suppose he bought out everybody around him. My grandmother was an educator of some kind. I don’t know exactly what she did, but there was a school named for her in Mingo. They left quite a bit of money to Mother, and she used it to build this house. She saved some for my education. I went to Oberlin.”

  Hazel reached up and pulled a yellow rose from the bush that shaded the patio and held it to her nose. “I remember my grandparents’ funeral. All those people dressed in black.” She was lost in thought for a moment, and I waited for her to continue. “Walter and I went out to the Mingo farm. I think it must have been in the early fifties. Whoever bought the place f
rom Mother abandoned it during the Depression. The house had fallen in, and one side was completely overgrown with these same yellow roses. Walter took a clipping for me, and I planted it here.”

  “Was there a big veranda with a swing?” I asked.

  Hazel shook her head. “There was a porch all right, but if there was a swing, it was long gone. I remember Walter pointing out where there was sod under the siding. The ranch house had been built around the original soddy.” Hazel looked off into the distance for a moment. “What I remember most is the floor—wide pine boards that had fallen through. Wildflowers had grown up through the rotted places.”

  When I went out for the paper early the next morning, Hazel, dressed in the same Nikes and denim skirt and blouse she’d worn the day before, was sitting on the swing on the front porch. “I read the diary. I stayed up all night to do it, and I’ve been waiting here since four this morning for you to get up.” She waved aside my look of astonishment. “Do you have any coffee, dearie? No cream or sugar, you know.”

  I went back inside, poured coffee into two mugs, and set them on a tray with some doughnuts left over from yesterday. “You can see why I was so anxious to find out about your grandparents, can’t you?” I asked, letting the screen door bang behind me. I handed coffee to Hazel and sat down on the porch steps in the morning sun with my own cup.

  “The passion of it is what startled me so,” Hazel said, watching the steam rise from the cup, which she held between the palms of both hands. “She was just an old lady to me. How can someone so old be so vulnerable, so . . . so sexual?” Hazel looked up at me. “Good Lord, when she died, she was twenty or thirty years younger than I am now. You don’t suppose somebody will say that about Walter and me, do you?” Hazel blushed, then ducked her head and quickly sipped her coffee. “To think that after churning the butter and chopping the kindling, my grandmother turned into Mary Astor.”

  To my quizzical look, Hazel explained, “Oh, you know, that actress in the 1930s. She recorded all the juicy details of her affair in her diary, and her husband made it public when he divorced her. Back then, it was all quite the scandal. I thought it was rather tacky of him.”

  I asked Hazel if she wanted a doughnut.

  “The plain one. Chocolate gives me migraines. I must have inherited them from my grandmother.” Hazel shook her head. “She didn’t know about chocolate, poor woman.”

  “Did your grandmother ever mention Tom Earley?”

  “Not to me. Mother never spoke of him, either. You don’t suppose he discovered a famous gold mine, do you?”

  I told her he had not, at least not that I could find out. I had gone through my mining books, but I couldn’t find even a mention of Thomas and Moses Earley. I’d even called the Western History Department, but it had no record of either name.

  Hazel finished the doughnut and brushed the crumbs off her skirt onto the porch floor. Then she picked up a box lying beside her on the swing. “I brought you some things. This picture came from Mother’s photo album. It’s Mattie.” Hazel handed me a square card with an oval tintype in the center, showing a young woman, her head held high. The pink hand-tinting emphasized her high cheekbones, but her eyes were blurred because she’d blinked when the picture was shot. Her long hair was parted in the center and drawn back.

  “I want you to have the eardrops she’s wearing there. And the breast pin she wrote about in the diary, too. Mother left them to me, but I don’t wear them anymore.” Hazel took them out of the box and handed them to me. I protested that they were too valuable, but Hazel waved away my objections. “They’ll just be stolen where I’m going. Go ahead. Take them.” She put them into the palm of my hand.

  I slipped the old-fashioned wires of the earrings through the holes in my ears. Then I examined the brooch. One stone was missing, and the gold showed signs of wear, but whether that was due to Mattie or Lorena or Hazel, I didn’t know. “I’ll treasure them,” I said, looking up at Hazel, who smiled at me.

  “Oh, and here is something else. It was on one of the bookshelves. I thought Mother saved it because she liked birds.” Hazel handed me a bird’s nest and pointed to a tiny curl that was woven into it.

  “Johnnie’s hair?” I asked

  “I expect so.”

  “What do you think happened after the diary closed?” I asked, touching the little curl with my fingertip. “Do you think Luke ever found out the baby—your mother—wasn’t his daughter?”

  An automatic sprinkler system went on across the street, and Hazel looked up, startled. She watched the water spray out, the little droplets shining in the early-morning sun. Then she turned back to me. “That’s the odd thing of it. Mattie was wrong.”

  I looked up at her in astonishment, shifting a little because the sun had moved and was shining into my eyes. “Luke, not Tom, was my grandfather.” Hazel nodded for emphasis. “Mother always said she looked just like her mother but that I was the spitting image of her father. I should have brought his picture so you could see. Just look at these ears.” Hazel brushed back her hair and cocked her head so I could get a better look. “And this.” She untied her Nike and slipped out her foot. “Six toes. I’ve got those same spots Luke and Johnnie had on their bodies, too. I guess they’ve been in the Spenser family since time out of mind. Mother hated them. She said it was like being born with liver spots. You’ll have to take my word for the spots, because I’m not going to unbutton my blouse to show them to you. So there isn’t the least doubt about who my mother’s father was.”

  Hazel sipped her coffee thoughtfully. “I bet Mattie intended to get rid of that diary but never had the chance because she was killed so suddenly. Otherwise, I don’t know why she’d keep it around. Good thing Mother never found it, because she’d have burned it along with the family papers she destroyed just before she died. I bet you Carrie’s letters were among them.”

  “What a shame.” I closed my hand over the brooch and felt the pin prick my skin. “Were your grandparents happy when you knew them?”

  “I was too young to notice if they weren’t.”

  I sighed. “I guess we’ll never know what happened after the diary ended. Do you suppose Luke found out about Tom? Maybe Mattie and Luke ended up hating each other for the rest of their—”

  “Like the characters in Ethan Frome?” Hazel interrupted.

  “That’s a possibility. After all, as Mattie wrote, she didn’t have any options. She had to stay with Luke, and they must have lived on together for what, thirty or forty more years?” I picked up Hazel’s cup to get her more coffee, but she put her hand on my arm and gave me an impish grin.

  “Don’t be so quick, dearie. There is an ending of sorts. I brought you something else. This morning, when I finished reading Grandmother’s diary, I went back to the carriage house and turned that trunk upside down. Then I stretched my arm through the hole in the lid and felt around and discovered this. It was caught in the lining. That’s why we didn’t spot it when we found the diary.” Hazel waited for me to set down the cup before she reached into the box and brought out an envelope. “You read it while I get the coffee. Now, go on.” She got up from the swing and went inside.

  I studied the envelope, which was tattered and dirty, as if it had been handled often. Mattie’s name and address, written in pencil, were so faded that I could scarcely make them out. I removed the single piece of paper, which was folded once, and smoothed it out. The letter was written in pencil, too, but it was easier to read, since it hadn’t rubbed against the inside of the trunk all these years.

  Fort Madison, Iowa

  June 11, 1902

  Dear Old Girl

  I see by the calendar that you are a year older today. I wish I was at home to wake you up with a kiss and a hug and a yellow rose from the bush by the porch, but instead, I send you this bit of lilac. I cut it off a branch next to the parlor window out on the McCauley farm. I went to the old place yesterday, and you’d be mighty pleased. Jemima and Husband keep it as fine as they
did three years ago when you and I were last there.

  Well, I thought I’d surprise you and get that fellow in Mingo to lay pipes to the kitchen so you’ll have hot and cold running water instead of the pump. But Carrie said, “Thunderation, Luke! What woman wants a kitchen sink for her birthday? You get it for her just for putting up with you all these years. Then I’ll help you pick out a hat for Mattie.” Well, I guess I know what my wife likes better than Carrie Fritch does. Carrie wears her hats as big as a turkey platter, says it’s the fashion here, but I know that’s not for you. I’ll look for a little purple one, like that bonnet you bought on our first trip to Denver.

  Carrie’s loaded me down with so many homemade geegaws that I hardly have room for a hat, even if I do find one. She says next time I’m not welcome here without my wife. I could hardly tell her Fort Madison in the summer makes you think you’d fallen in a barrel of treacle, or that you feel closed in when you can’t see a horizon. So I said you wanted to be with Lorena now that she’s due. Carrie and Rose are as excited as hens about seeing Lorena’s baby, but Carrie says the visit will have to wait until after harvest. That way, Will can go along, too.

  O, here’s a thing you’ll be interested in: Will tells me there’s talk about “contour plowing,” as he calls it. Seems that the rest of the world is getting wise to what me and that fellow over on the next farm did near forty years ago, plowing circles on our place. Remember, there were two brothers named Earley, but I’ll be hanged if I can recall their first names. We gave it our best all right, but rain never did follow the plow the way we thought it would. The land wasn’t meant for farming. Good thing we turned to cattle. Will’s showed me a new hay baler he thinks I ought to get. I wish you could see it, for I value your opinion. What would you think if I bought you a hay bailer instead of a hat? I suppose you’d speak your mind about it. You can do that all right.