Never Look Back

by Lesley Pearse

One of the good people who had welcomed them today, a burly blacksmith by the name of Solomon, who looked tough enough to rip a man’s head from his shoulders, had taken Giles to one side and pointed out that the town could be a wild place come early spring when the wagon trains were preparing to roll, with more than its fair share of drinking, gambling, fornication and fighting. He pointed out that while the travellers themselves were peaceful, industrious, God-fearing families, just like most of the settlers in the area, the scouts, soldiers, professional gamblers, whores and other itinerants could create trouble and disturbance.

  Giles had asked if there was any trouble with the Indians. The news that so many of them were being moved out of their ancestral lands in the East to make room for white settlers was a cause of deep concern to him. But back in New York it was hard to separate fact from fiction about this, as land-hungry men in authority would say anything, use any propaganda to justify their actions. He had always suspected that the tales of settlers being murdered in their beds were wildly exaggerated, yet desperate people could do desperate things and he was anxious to learn the truth.

  ‘The redskins ain’t ones for towns,’ Solomon said. ‘I heard tell they meet every wagon train that passes through their land, after food and horses, but the way I sees it, that’s fair enough, it is their land. You’ll hear a lotta scary talk about ‘em, but don’t you mind it none. If we leave ‘em alone, they’ll leave us alone, that’s my thinking.’

  Giles would also have liked to ask Solomon about this town’s views on slavery. Missouri was a slave-owning state, yet as Giles had noted, there were no vast plantations here, and he assumed the many Negroes he’d seen were mostly house servants or farm hands. He had heard from the Abolitionist movement back in New York that native-born Missourians, said to be a fiery bunch, were firmly pro-slavery, but the new settlers, particularly the devoutly religious Germans, were vigorously opposed to it.

  But perhaps it was wisest to wait and sound people out first. To poke a stick into a hornets’ nest wasn’t a sensible thing to do, and besides, there was so much else here that delighted him.

  After visiting the pretty little white clapboard church, complete with a bell in its steeple, in the centre of Independence Square, the Milsons were then escorted to their new home, and the moment Giles saw it he said a silent prayer of thanks. It was not some makeshift shack-like one like those on the edge of town, or a cabin made from logs, but a two-storey frame-built house right in the centre of the town. It was painted white, and the small front garden was surrounded by a picket fence. There was a wide porch complete with a swinging chair to sit out in on warm evenings, and inside the comfort and space that he’d never dared to hope for: a fair-sized parlour, with doors that opened on to a dining-room, a big kitchen with a stove every bit as good as the one they’d had back in New York, and a pump just outside the back door. Upstairs there were three good-sized bedrooms, and around half an acre of land at the back.

  Mrs Homberger, whose husband ran the mail office, had personally overseen the preparation of the house for them. The floor had been scrubbed and polished, sparkling white curtains hung at the windows, the beds were all made in readiness, even the kitchen cupboards had been lined with fresh paper and stocked with basic provisions.

  It was a little Spartan compared with the rather over-furnished house in State Street, the furniture well worn, but after the blistering heat outside it was cool, airy and sweet-smelling. Then when Mrs Homberger disappeared, only to return half an hour later with this meal for them, they had all been speechless with surprise. Lily was so touched she burst into tears, forgot her normal coolness with strangers and hugged the woman.

  ‘Will I go to school tomorrow?’ Tabitha asked eagerly, her mouth full of pie.

  Her mama rebuked her for her bad manners and said she thought getting the house straight was of greater importance than school for the time being.

  ‘We’ll have to see about trading the horse and cart for a gig,’ Giles said, smiling beatifically. ‘We ought to get some chickens and a pig too. We’re country folk now, and we’ve got to learn country ways.’

  Lily looked at her husband in horror. ‘Pigs smell, Giles,’ she said. ‘And chickens make such a fearful mess.’

  ‘But they make good eating,’ Matilda said, guessing Lily had imagined she was going to lay out the land at the back with flowers and lawn. ‘And we’ll have to learn to grow vegetables too.’

  Giles smiled at his wife’s stunned expression. Like Matilda he knew she had visions of an English garden. ‘You can have flowers in the front,’ he said. ‘I’ll even order some rose bushes for you, but we’ll have to make the land at the back work for us.’

  Matilda cynically expected that once they settled down in their new home the old order of mistress and servant would return. She also anticipated that Lily’s old ways, along with her fears and phobias, might very well come back if something upset her.

  But happily she was wrong on both counts. Whatever miracle had changed Lily into a happy, carefree woman, she remained so. Right from the first day when they got up at dawn, Lily was adamant that all work should be equally divided, and they learned from one another. Matilda had to show Lily how to scrub a floor without turning it into a lake, clean and light the stove and how to work the water pump. But Lily knew a surprising amount about growing vegetables, because as a girl staying with poorer relatives in Bath, she’d helped them. What she didn’t know she soon found out by asking local people.

  It was terribly hot right through to September, and the school was only open in the mornings as the children’s help was needed on the farms. Tabitha was delighted at this arrangement and though only five she was all too eager to pull weeds, and try her hand at digging. Her face and arms turned as brown as a berry from such long periods outside, and she often said she never wanted to go back to a city to live.

  Yet however much fun planning and starting a vegetable garden had seemed, Lily and Matilda soon discovered that clearing land, digging, planting and hoeing was back-breaking work. In the evenings they staggered in with aching backs and painful blisters on their hands. But as the first neat rows of seedlings began to grow, the feeling of satisfaction, and the knowledge that come winter they would have their own source of food, more than made up for the effort.

  Matilda had imagined too that Lily would get right back into the corsets and hooped skirts she’d abandoned on the way here, but she continued happily to wear the same old simple calico dress and sun-bonnet from Monday to Saturday. She not only learned to tolerate the smell of the two small pigs they bought, but grew fond of them, naming them Cain and Abel. Her dislike of chickens vanished the first time she ate a newly laid egg. But there was still a shadow of the genteel Lily. She almost fainted with shock when a neighbour told her to collect horse droppings from the livery stable to work into the soil. She said that however good it was for the garden she drew the line at being seen walking through the town with a pail of manure. She squeaked with alarm every time a spider or other creepy-crawly came into the house.

  It was a completely different way of life to the one in New York. There was no ice man calling each day here, no great variety of food in the store, so they had to make do with what was available. There was no theatre or concerts, or invitations to tea or elegant suppers. But neighbours did call in the evening when the day’s work was done, often bringing a batch of cakes, vegetables or fruit, and they sat on the porch, drank lemonade, and shared their experiences and knowledge.

  These people were so very different from the brittle society folk and solid merchants the Milsons had rubbed shoulders with in New York. They were plain people, many of German extraction, to whom wealth meant merely a second or third room added to the primitive cabins they’d built themselves, or a real cook stove like the Milsons had.

  Most of these people had arrived here after a series of moves, always looking for cheaper and more fertile land, or a start in a new business. Some started out in the North, gradually
working their way down, others had come up from the Southern states, or the East coast.

  All their lives had been very hard. Most had lost several children in infancy, many were on a second or third marriage because their previous husbands or wives had died. Whether born in America or immigrants, most married into their own nationality. Matilda heard many stories about how the bride had been found for the groom back in Berlin or Hamburg by his parents, the courtship was by letter, and often the first time they met was just shortly before the marriage.

  Romantic love as Matilda knew it didn’t seem to come into it, marriage was a contract, and if it wasn’t joyful, the couple made the best of it. Perhaps the sheer hard work they had to endure and their faith held them together, for church on Sundays was something few of them missed.

  Dressed in their best clothes, these devout people flocked into Independence with their many children by foot, horse or cart, often setting off at dawn to do so. They thanked God for their blessings and prayed that they could endure future disasters, but it was also a time for mixing, to gossip and exchange news. The ones who lived a great way off often brought picnics which they shared with others, for making friends was all important to people who lived in isolation. Good neighbours could be counted on at harvest time, to help with building work, and to find good marriage partners for their older sons and daughters.

  Matilda and Lily soon discovered for themselves the advantages of encouraging their female neighbours to call. They learned how to make pasta from Angelina from Naples, sauerkraut and spicy sausages from Heidi from Berlin, how to salt pork for the winter from Mrs Homberger, and to make their own soap from lye and animal fats, filtering it through ashes. Tabitha learned to count in German and Italian, and to play dozens of new games with other children.

  Lily was glad to teach English to any of the foreign women who asked her for help, and her ladylike manner and sophistication were much admired by women who had never lived in a city.

  Giles seemed to grow in every direction during those long summer days. His sermons in church were secondary to his care for his new parishioners. He visited them all in his new gig, often driving fifty miles to outlying farms, he was there to bless a new cabin as the roof was raised, often driving in nails with the other men, he buried the dead and consoled the bereaved, officiated at marriages and baptisms.

  There were people with long-established, extensive farms, who perhaps could loosely be called gentry, for their houses were large colonial-style ones, with lush green lawns and paddocks for their horses. Although Giles welcomed them at his church, he kept his distance socially, for these were the slave owners.

  Slavery was an inflammatory topic, and while Giles still detested the idea that men, women and children could be owned, and sold on like cattle, he’d also come to see that if he was to serve his new community well he had to calm hot-heads on both sides. By taking a cool, calm look at the situation, he could see for himself that the great majority of slave owners were decent people, and they treated their slaves well. Many of the slaves, fired up by the Abolitionists to run away, found only far greater misery than they’d ever experienced under their former owners.

  What concerned Giles much more than the well-fed slaves on the outlying farms was the plight of the people living down by the Missouri river. They were desperately poor, living in conditions as bad as anything he’d seen in New York. They camped in shacks, unfit even for animals, some in holes in the ground covered with a crude roof of wood and sods, and even tents, at risk of being drowned when the river rose in a downpour.

  Many of these were Negroes, escaped slaves and freemen, but just as many were white, and like the poor of New York they were considered inferior beings and ignored. They received no medical attention and their many, many children didn’t attend school. Most of the crimes committed in the area were hatched in this quarter, just as it was a breeding ground for disease and every imaginable vice. But Giles was at a loss as to how to solve the problem. He had no Reverend Kirkbright or board of governors to back him up here, no funds from the church to alleviate the innocents’ suffering.

  Most of his preaching on Sundays leaned towards trying to foster a little more Christian charity towards these people. Much of it fell on deaf ears – his parishioners were in the main kindly, but they had little enough themselves. But Giles kept chipping away, doing what he could, and hoped that in time his message would not only be heard, but acted upon.

  All through that first summer Matilda looked in wonder at Giles, for happiness simply shone out of him. He let his dark hair grow longer, he didn’t care that his clothes were covered in dust, he smiled a great deal, and laughed even more. She found him showing Tabitha how to climb a tree one day, another time he came home late from a wedding and insisted he taught her and Lily the steps of a dance he’d learnt. They didn’t need a newspaper, he brought all the news and gossip home, and hardly a day went by without his praising Lily and Matilda for the hard work they did.

  Matilda had been warned by many women that the first winter in Missouri was always a testing time for new arrivals, and as the leaves began to fall in October and Tabitha went back to school for the whole day, she watched Lily anxiously. She had come to love their outdoor life during the summer, and Matilda was concerned that now there was much less to do, and no visitors to the porch in the evenings, she might slip back to the way she’d been in New York.

  Yet instead of becoming withdrawn when the rain came for days on end, turning the streets into a treacherous swamp of red mud, Lily seemed to grow even happier, turning to preserving fruit and vegetables, making new clothes for Tabitha and even drawing up plans for next year’s vegetable planting.

  It was quiet in the evenings without visitors calling, but the pot-bellied stove in the parlour and the stove in the kitchen warmed the whole house and Giles would read aloud to the two women as they sewed. As Thanksgiving and Christmas drew nearer Lily made plans for special meals and decorations for the house and church. But even after Christmas when thick snow came and bitterly cold winds seemed to creep in through every window and crack in the floorboards, she had new plans. Twice a week she tramped through the snow to the school-house to help the foreign children learn English, and one day a week she threw an open house for other women to come and sew quilts with her and Matilda.

  It was through the quilt-making venture that Matilda finally discovered the root cause of Lily’s new contentment. One bitterly cold grey February day they were sitting huddled in front of the stove, both taking apart old dresses to use for patchwork squares. When Matilda saw Lily smiling as she looked at some red printed cotton, she asked about it.

  ‘I don’t remember seeing that before. Was it a dress of Tabitha’s?’

  ‘No, mine,’ Lily said and blushed. ‘I brought it all the way from England out of sentimentality.’

  ‘I can’t imagine you ever wearing red,’ Matilda said in surprise. Lily always wore subdued colours.

  ‘It was given to me by my Aunt Martha, the parson’s wife whose children I used to care for. She guessed I was falling for Giles, he was the curate then in their church in Bath and always coming to the parsonage. She had the opinion he was smitten with me too, and she insisted I wore this dress because she claimed the colour would be a signal for him to speak out. I felt very foolish in it, red was much too bold a colour for me, but it worked, he told me I looked beautiful that day and asked if he could court me. A short while after he asked me to marry him.’

  Lily rarely spoke of her life before she married Giles, and having met her overbearing parents in Bristol, Matilda surmised that her childhood and girlhood weren’t something she wished to recall. But as Lily seemed in the mood for reminiscing, Matilda prompted her to talk about Giles’s courtship of her, about his proposal and their wedding.

  Lily’s sharp comments about the speed with which her father arranged the marriage proved that she was very aware her family were only too glad to be rid of her.

  ‘Father s
aid, “You aren’t much of a prize, Lily, you are as plain as a pike-staff, but then a poor curate can hardly be choosy.” Mama was just as cruel, she made me wear one of my sisters’ wedding dress, even though it was far too big for me. She said they weren’t prepared to waste any further money on “frivolities” as whatever I wore I wouldn’t turn into a beauty.’

  ‘How horrid of them,’ Matilda exclaimed indignantly. Lily wasn’t eye-catching, but she had a dainty figure, her skin was good, and she had enviable grace and elegance.

  ‘I didn’t care what they said,’ Lily laughed. ‘I altered the dress myself and the cream satin was very becoming. Besides, Giles was much more handsome and a far nicer man than any of my sisters’ husbands. And he was marrying me for love, not money.’

  She began to giggle when she moved on to the wedding, and told Matilda how they spent their wedding night in a coaching inn on the road to London. ‘I don’t know if I should really tell you this, but I wish someone had told me the truth as it would have saved me a great deal of embarrassment,’ she said, her pale face growing flushed. ‘I didn’t know anything about men, Matty, or about the business on the wedding night, and I made the mistake of listening to some advice from Mama. She told me it hurt terribly, and that if I moved around a great deal, it would be over very quickly.’

  Matilda was astounded that Lily was prepared to speak of something so personal. She had never referred to sex before, not even obliquely.

  ‘But I misunderstood what she meant. Even before Giles took me in his arms I was moving. He asked me if there were bugs in the bed.’

  Matilda laughed heartily. She had a very good idea now of what married love entailed, and she could imagine how disconcerting it would be to get into a bed with someone hopping around.

  ‘Well, you know how I am about such things, just the suggestion was enough to send me flying out of the bed. Giles stripped it all down, and there wasn’t one, and he persuaded me back in. But I started it again. Well, the upshot of it was that he eventually got me to explain myself, and when I told him what Mama had said, he laughed and laughed so loudly the people in the next room began banging on the wall.’