These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901

by Nancy E. Turner

  December 9, 1892

  It is now five in the morning and Jack is gone. He came back here and saddled up for a long ride, since he had ridden bareback to the Marshal’s and the fort. He loaded up both his pistols and the bandolier he sometimes carries, and then took his old army carbine and plenty of shot for it in his saddlebags.

  You’re going after George? I asked him.

  He just nodded.

  Will you take some food? I said.

  No, he said.

  He might be back in a few hours. He might be gone days. So I went in the kitchen and put some slices of bread and leftover roast beef in some waxed paper. I put those and some hard candy in his saddlebags with a clean handkerchief full of dried fruit. I dread to think what is in Jack’s mind. I dread to think what is in my own.

  We both know there is no sense trying to follow a track through mud before dawn. But he thinks he knows where George might go. I put on a pot of coffee but he left without having any. Jack left to track down his friend.

  I sat in my parlor and stared out the dark windows. I tried not to think that George might be so wrong in the head that he would lay in wait for Jack, but is just flying for his life on a fast horse somewhere.

  The sun was up although it was cloudy and dim when I woke to find Suzy climbing up into my lap. I was cold and stiff.

  Mama, she said, have some bed’fast.

  I patted her head and went to the kitchen. April and the boys were yawning and scuffling their feet around the floor, looking dazed because the heat stove has not been warmed for them like I usually do. By the time I got a fire going, I heard a strange sound coming from the little barn we built to shelter the buggy and a team of horses. It sounded like a striking of something heavy and wet, like two men fighting, but it never stopped, it kept on and on. I told April to start some oatmeal for the others, and to keep everyone inside while I went to see what the horses were kicking.

  In the barn I found Jack, swinging a shovel against a soggy bale of hay. He had already broken the shovel part off, and was beating the hay again and again with the handle. He looked weary and wild-eyed, and damp with sweat and cold rain. Over and over he swung that big handle like a machine of some sort, grunting with every beat. The horses skittered around in their stalls, fretting.

  I held a lantern up high as I could. Jack, did you find him?

  Yes, he said, and smashed the pole into the hay.

  I felt my heart squeeze up and I couldn’t breathe. I was hoping he would never find George. What did you do?

  Jack spoke slowly, whacking the hay with every word. I am ashamed to tell you, Sarah.

  So I knew. Jack would have been cut to the bone to have to take George in to face a gallows, but he would be purely ashamed to let a murderer go away free. He must have done something the others don’t know about to let George Lockwood slip away, so he is paying this debt all by himself. That explains him coming back so soon, too.

  I told him, You did the right thing, whatever it was. Come in the house when you get through, and take a warm bath so you don’t get sick. And then I left him alone.

  It was only a few more minutes until he came in.

  All the food was gone from his saddle bags.

  We haven’t talked much today. Now and then I see him watching me closely, and when I look up he turns his eyes away.

  April 8, 1893

  My life feels like a book left out on the porch, and the wind blows the pages faster and faster, turning always toward a new chapter faster than I can stop and read it. We lost the baby I was carrying at Christmas, in February. It was a little boy almost full term, but born too small and never took a breath. I knew something was wrong. My back hurt so terribly the whole time I carried him, and I just felt sick and so tired so I tried to take it extra easy. But suddenly one night, about two months early, I started laboring, and there wasn’t even time to send for the doctor. The children were asleep, and Jack was gone just until the morning, and Anna never stays the night. I didn’t know what to do, but I couldn’t get help on my own and I was afraid of frightening the children. I wished Blue Horse was singing on my front porch again. I patted the baby, just a little handful of a fellow, but he didn’t wiggle or stir at all. I think the life was already gone out of him before he was born. I am so very sad.

  For weeks afterward I had nightmares about what happened at George Lockwood’s house, and my friend Mrs. Page said it is likely that a fright like that can cause the baby to drop early. The doctor said that is just an old wives’ tale, and sometimes these things just happen, and not to worry. But I still felt mournful because I had felt the little one move, and was happy expecting him. We hadn’t even chosen a name yet, but we had to buy a little coffin. It made me too upset. Jack had to tend to it all.

  Jack and I comforted each other with thoughts that we will have another one, maybe next year. In so many things he is rough and ornery, but in ways of our family, he is always so gentle it is like I am married to two different men. I love them both and need them equally.

  June 9, 1893

  Just as we might have expected, Harland and Melissa declared to us that they have been in love since they were children and they married last week. Melissa had on a beautiful white dress sprigged with tiny yellow flowers, with dark blue trim and buttons. Harland had on a gentleman’s suit and a bowler hat. He looked like a professional man and indeed he is, for he has graduated now and has gotten a position at an Architect’s office in San Francisco. He said they will return for visits, but we all miss them so. I’m sure Mama feels lonely and I’m glad Mr. Sherrill continues to pay her calls.

  August 22, 1893

  Two days in a row I have been troubled by a nightmare. It is the same one each night. When I awake I am shaking and my heart is banging like a drum, but I cannot put back to my thoughts just what it is that scares me so. I wake on the verge of tears from fear, and hold onto Jack like he is my last chance to stay on earth. He just pats my hand and goes back to sleep, but I lie there fearing to shut my eyes.

  I was looking at Jack this morning after breakfast, and followed him into the bathroom and watched him shave. He looked at me and grinned kind of puzzled, and said, What are you up to?

  I couldn’t answer. I just told him, I want to remember you real good, for those times you are gone.

  I’m coming back, he said.

  I know, I told him. If you don’t I’m coming after you.

  He just smiled and nodded. Then he said, I’m counting on that, Sarah.

  September 1, 1894

  Time is flying. It is Gilbert’s first day of school. The boys walked to school together today, tagging after April, who walks with her girlfriends and told Charlie and Gilbert not to walk with them, only behind. The boys let her put down endless rules for them, quietly taking all her orders as if it is the natural way of things. I am sure in a few years, they will grow tired of her bossiness and have a mind of their own, and their peaceful way of doing whatever she asks will be gone for good.

  I hope Gilbert pays attention. Often he comes up with the most curious questions, and he takes his time but finds some real clever answers. Charlie is fast on his feet and can throw a ball long and hard, and rides real well. Gilbert is good with little things, and he has fine, even handwriting for such a little fellow, and can put together a puzzle or work a letter box fast as lightning. His whittling has taken to looking more like animals and such, also, pretty fine for such a little fellow. They look so big to me, but walking from our front gate down the road to the school house with a little pail of lunch in their hands, they seemed mighty small.

  I picked up Suzanne and we went to look at our tiny garden, and she cried because she couldn’t go to school. I told her that I have shed those same tears, and one day soon she will be luckier than her Mama and go to school with the big children.

  September 2, 1894

  Gilbert got into trouble the first day of school. April was mortified to own up to having him for a brother and I was force
d to scold him soundly.

  It appears he drew a very distorted picture of his brother on his slate. Charlie took it upon himself to discipline Gil with a sound pinch right in the middle of the fifth grade recitation. Gil squealed and whacked his brother over the head with the slate, and soon the boys were rolling together across the floor, each trying to get in a good punch.

  They disrupted the whole school and both got a rod and sent to opposite corners to be stared at and mocked by the other students. Mrs. Fish has little patience with nonsense of that variety, and I know she is a fine teacher, but still, when they were out of the room, I had to smile when I pictured them both in the act. Rascals to the end.

  September 4, 1894

  Suzanne is coming down with another cold, her third in as many months, and is whining today and following my every step hanging onto my skirts. It is so hard to get anything done this way, and so I asked Jack to please try to get her to sleep some. He sat in the big rocker and held her, telling her stories until she did sleep, but when he moved she immediately woke and cried. So he carried her with him and came out to where I was hanging out the wash. She’s got a bad fever, he said, and handed me a wet shirt from the laundry basket.

  I felt her little head, and pulled a wash cloth from the cool, wet clothes and put it on her head. Just another baby cold, I said to him.

  For a while he stood there handing me things to hang out so I would not have to bend over as my back has been bothering me some lately. Then he said, There’s a call for men to go track and catch a gang that has robbed the Southern Pacific Railroad near Lordsburg. I told the Federal Marshal I’d go.

  Oh, you did, I said. Well, when do you leave?

  In the morning, he said, and walked away with Suzanne and took her in the house.

  I hung out those clothes and hung them fast. There’s nothing I can do. Here I am not feeling well myself, and the little one sick, and Anna only comes but three days a week. I suppose I am just worn out. All I can do is pack him a couple of days’ food and hope they feed him later on.

  September 5, 1894

  I fixed up his two saddle bags this morning just after dawn. Jack is still carrying the one I gave him for our first Christmas, and keeps his razor and extra ammunition in the old one with a bullet hole in it which doesn’t hold much, but he won’t go without either of them. I put in a few biscuits and some hard candy, and salt bacon and jerked meat and I added a bottle of Doctor Forthcum’s Lung Elixir as Jack gets affected with a cough now and again and I warned him to take it at the first sign of a cough. I kissed him goodbye, and the children waved as they headed off to school.

  I have never told him about the nightmare. It is always the same when it comes, which it did again last night. I was up with Suzy several times, and was actually glad to be forced not to sleep.

  Suzanne is sicker than ever this afternoon, and I dressed her up and took her to the doctor’s office. We had to wait almost half an hour, but finally, he saw her and in just a minute pronounced that she had an acute inflammation.

  Well, I said, acute inflammation of what? I know enough to know something has to be inflamed, it is not realistic to say her whole body is an inflammation.

  That doctor stood there and got all tight in the jaw and looked at me indignantly, and said, I will not argue my diagnosis with a woman, period, pay at the door before you leave, one dollar.

  I was ready to tell that character right then and there that he was mighty high in the britches and I had read plenty of medical books and I knew that was not a genuine diagnosis. After all, it is my child who is ill, and if she were his, he might care a fig what happened to her. But I held my peace. I paid him his dollar all in pennies.

  September 6, 1894

  I sent April to school with a note to Mrs. Fish to please loan me those two medical study books again. Suzanne has broken out in a dark rash, and has quit crying and now just lies in bed, weak and feverish. This afternoon when April gets home I will do some diagnosing of my own. At first all I could think of was wishing for Suzanne to quit crying, but now that she is not crying I pray that she would again. At least that was a sign of some fight in her.

  Something is badly wrong with this child.

  September 13, 1894

  I have been waiting for days. Walking this floor. Watching. Waiting for Jack. Finally, Jack came home this morning noisily stamping trail dust off his boots on the back porch like he always does. I was ironing in the kitchen, ironing the sweat that rolled off my face right into the dress in front of me, yet I didn’t feel the heat, I was cold inside and out. He came in and tried to throw his arms around me, and I said to him Jack, come lets’ sit in the parlor.

  He got a funny look on his face, but just leaned out the kitchen door to the rest of the house. Children at school? he asks. Suzanne! he starts to call. Where’s my Suzy! Papa’s home!

  Jack, I said again, and pulled his hand after me toward the parlor so I could make him sit down. Jack, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, I said, crying. Suzanne was buried four days ago. I sent men to ride to find you but they never could. We tried to find you Jack, we tried, I said.

  The look on his face was like I never have seen before. It was like the fire that has always burned inside him had kerosene thrown on it, and it seemed to have taken over him. He broke the screen door banging it open, so that it hung off the hinge and swung all crazy, and he jumped onto his tired horse without even touching the stirrups, galloping off down the road towards the cemetery up north. A heavy trail of dust followed him, then obscured him from my line of sight. I finished ironing my newly dyed black dress. For days I have been stirring everything we own into boiling pots of black dye and tears.

  Jack didn’t come back home until nearly three o’clock this afternoon, and there was a hurting and frightening look on his face and red rings around his eyes. I was sitting in the rocking chair, staring out the front window. Every now and then the breeze would lift the corner of the black crepe bow on the front door and it would flick at the window pane. I watched that black flicking. Like a little black bird pecking at this house, trying to get inside.

  He knelt in front of me and put his hands on my knees. I couldn’t even look at him. What was it? he asked in a voice I didn’t recognize.

  Scarlet fever, I told him. Then we held each other. I felt the dirt and sweat from his clothes smudging into my stiff ironed black dress. I watched my black sleeve turn brown and smeared. I felt brown and smeared, through and through. The other children came home from school and walked somberly into the house, and as they came in, each of them patted Jack on the shoulder and said Sorry, Papa. When they had gone on to their separate places and left us alone, the most awful, hurting, frightening sound I’ve ever heard came out of Jack and he sobbed into my shoulder like a child.

  September 18, 1894

  Jack walked in this morning while the children were getting ready for school and stood in the middle of the usual uproar of lost pencils and missing buttons like a statue.

  When they were gone, he said to me he has done some thinking and reckoning, and he was terribly sorry to have been gone when Suzy died. There was no way to know, he said again, echoing words I heard a hundred times since he got home. But, he said, he has decided to quit the Army for good, and has found a job as the town Fire Chief, which they were in bad need of, anyway. That last was added hopefully, as if it made sense to him to fill some kind of need in other people’s lives.

  Maybe the fight is over inside him, I do not know. Maybe he will be happy to be home every day, and have hot meals and eat at a table and lie in a bed. He is blaming himself for Suzanne’s dying, and there is nothing I can say to him, he just looks kind of haunted and dead and pained all at once.

  November 1, 1894

  No wonder Mama went away in her head when Clover passed on. And then Papa. I am going to visit my Mama tomorrow and tell her I am sorry for everything I ever did that caused her sorrow or worry, and for ever wishing, during those days, that she would co
me back. She probably wanted to stay there. It’s a wonder she came back at all. If I knew how to make myself go away in my head, I declare I would.

  Christmas day, December 25, 1894

  This house is just too quiet. I told the boys to bring their friends over, and they did but the weather is nice and they are all playing in the yard. It is still too quiet inside. I wish Mama had come to visit, but she takes Christmas with Albert, and I didn’t feel like going out to the ranch for just a day. April says she hates the ranch anyway, and she is off to show off her gifts to her friends.

  Jack said last night he wants us to think about having another child. The truth is, I don’t know if I want another child or not, but I said to him, this time, let’s just let nature take its course, and see what happens. We loved each other for the first time in months.

  So he seems a little cheered. He has not been the same man since Suzanne died. He smiles and plays with the boys, and is cheerful around the house, but in everything there is a mood of sadness, a shadow over his face. He claims he likes being the fire marshal, although there are stretches of time where there is little to do. But he stays busy and tends the fire horses.

  He has no interest in the ranch really, and I still run it all with Mason by mail, even though Jack has the time now. I suppose he never was cut out to be a rancher, but asked his Papa for all those cattle just for me. It is good to have him home every night and know that he will be here. He spends a lot of time with the children that I have never been able to, what with the cooking and cleaning, and making soap and ranch business. Most of the time, they hurry after school to get homework and chores done then he takes them riding or they play baseball, or practice roping, or some other thing.