Prairie Widow (11 page)

“Sure you can,” said Nancy, only now removing her bonnet. “And you'll be very good at it, too. You have education.”

“You don't understand. I can't stay.”

“Now see here,” said Lucy, placing her hands on her hips, “we rode all up and down these two prairie paths scraping together readers from people who were not so willing to give them up! You have an obligation, Jennifer Vandermeer, and you should not be so quick to run out on it!”

“I—don't see that I have an obligation.”

“Don't you? This will be our first schoolhouse.”

Turning her head away, Jennifer timidly pressed the fingers of one hand against her cheek. She wished to protest further, but she found herself choking up.

“Lucy,” interrupted Nancy, noticing Jennifer's distress, “perhaps we ought to let Jenny decide this for herself.”

“Please, Nancy,” came back Lucy hotly, “you don't have children. I do!”

Nancy fell silent.

“Well?” asked Lucy, returning her attention to Jennifer. “What have you got to say?”

Jennifer lowered her head. “I want to return to Ohio.”

Lucy stood fuming. “And how do you expect to cross the prairie?”

“I can try.”

“Try? Tell me, what would you do if you should run into Indians? Who will protect your children?”

“You said they were harmless…”

“Or bandits!”

Jennifer wiped a tear from her eye. “I don't know.”

“You don't know,” repeated Lucy sarcastically. Nearly mute with frustration, she fixed her piercing gaze on Jennifer and tried to calm herself. “You realize,” she resumed, “that if you wait, there may soon be a railroad spur right here in Four Corners.”

Jennifer looked up. “A what?”

“That's the talk,” said Lucy. “At least, it's something that Bill Wilkes has been fighting for.”

“A railroad? How long before…”

“Within a year. Maybe by next spring.”

Jennifer pictured herself aboard a train, chugging across the prairie away from Four Comers. “I wish it were here already.”

“I'm sure you do. But you must be patient. Listen to me. Stay here at least until the spring. By then we should know better about the spur. In the meantime, you can teach. You might even come to like it.”

“It's not really the teaching I mind…”

“Yes, I know. Perhaps, then, you'll become used to Kansas.”

At this, Jennifer finally looked directly into Lucy's dark grey eyes. “Tell me, are you used to it?”

“I've seeded this land with two of my children,” said Lucy, solemnly. “I'll never leave it.”

There was now silence in the little dugout as each of the three women fell still and reflected upon different thoughts.

“I suppose,” began Jennifer slowly, more to break the silence than anything, “spring will come soon enough.”

Lucy, who had become darkly quiet, brightened slightly.

“That's right. The months go quickly—and you'll be able to stay with Seth and me during the winter.”

“Oh no, that I couldn't do …”

“But I won't hear otherwise,” said Lucy, feeling strong again. “Winters can be harsh out here and isolate homesteads for weeks at a stretch.”

Jennifer contemplated the grim prospect. Isolate homesteads? Even more than now? She shuddered.

“Besides,” continued Lucy, sounding practical now, “our soddy could always use the extra body warmth. So! You'll stay?”

“Mind you, I'd only be waiting for the railroad…”

“Yes, yes, that's all understood,” said Lucy. “Then it's settled. When would you like to begin teaching?”

Settled? thought Jennifer. Just like that? She had only been considering a possibility. She nearly protested, but she said, “Monday?”

“Monday it is! That will allow a few days for word to reach all the homesteads. And the hour?”

“Eight.”

Lucy took a deep breath and began to tie her bonnet back on. “Perhaps Franz can get you a blackboard from somewhere. Come, Nancy, we have other stops to make, and then I must get home.”

Nancy rose from her seat. She silently tied on her own bonnet. She seemed to be harboring some resentment, but she obediently followed Lucy out of the dugout and onto their buckboard. Lucy, apparently not noticing her friend's darkened mood, took the reins, and soon the two women were off.

Jennifer leaned against the door frame, feeling sapped of all vigor. She watched her neighbors get smaller and smaller as they cut across the grassy sea to some other homestead beyond the horizon. It was only when they were that far away that she whispered, “My God, what did I agree to?”

Jennifer remained in the doorway several minutes more; Lucy and Nancy's buckboard was so far away, and yet it remained in sight. She marvelled at how far one could see out on the prairie.

Overhead, meanwhile, an armada of clouds drifted quickly across the sky, the white edges teased out into tatters by high winds. Soon, the vanguard of these clouds were above the distant buckboard. As they moved still farther off, the clouds met the horizon, so that it soon appeared as if the buckboard were riding right toward them.

The clouds now over Jennifer's dugout thickened. Perhaps, thought Jennifer, they'll sail all the way to Ohio. Perhaps Poppa will be reading the Gazette and hear on his window panes the patter of raindrops falling from these very clouds.

“I have a message for him,” she whispered to the floating procession. “Will you take it to him?” At that moment, she realized it was time to write her father.

She waited until that evening, after Peter and Emma were tucked away in their corner. Then she brewed herself some of her own sassafras tea and placed a pen, paper, and inkwell on a crate, which was to serve as her desk. She pulled a kitchen chair over, opened a McGuffey reader, and set the book on end to shield the lantern light from her children. The page showed an upside-down engraving of a boy running with a hoop.

Jennifer sipped her tea from a cup that had been cracked in transit. She checked the two windows, which were black with night. On one sill was the pot of geraniums, which had steadily lost more of their drying petals. A slight breeze, freshened from a light rain, occasionally stirred the sickly flowers. Jennifer turned her attention to her task. She dipped the pen in the inkwell and began to write:

September 7, 1873

Dear Poppa,

Forgive me for not writing to you sooner, but until now I have lived under the illusion that I would not be staying in Kansas long, and that, indeed, I would surely be home as quickly as it would take for a letter to reach you. Alas, that illusion has burst. A commitment I've made—perhaps impetuously—will keep me here until the spring. What that commitment is I will tell you shortly, but there is something else I must tell you first-something very painful.

Please prepare yourself, Poppa, for I know of no gentle way of saying this: Walter has died.

He contracted a fever several days ago. There are no doctors out here, and so a neighbor treated him, this to no avail. He now lies buried in a little cemetery where grasses grow rank among the tombstones. This hurts me. When I think how there will be no one to tend to his grave when I leave Kansas—I wish I could take his body back with me to Ohio, where it may be interred properly beneath some spreading oak.

I miss him, Poppa. He was an exasperating man sometimes, but I did love him. And he loved me
—
though, on reflection, I can't say why. I was not very supportive of him. I thought only of my own comfort. I never stopped to consider the likelihood that Walter, in coming west, was sacrificing as much as I.

Of course, these are the contrite words of a widow. It is possible—indeed, probable—that if it had been I who died, then it would have been Walter to feel the contrition for dragging me out here.

Oh, Poppa, why couldn't we have stayed in Ohio? I feel like a dandelion seed that has been blown far from home, only to settle on some uncongenial soil. I wish there were no such thing as the West. I wish history had worked out differently, that Thomas Jefferson had never made the Louisiana Purchase. Or I find myself sympathetic to the plight of the local Indians. By all rights, White people shouldn't be here.

Yet I know I don't really care about the Indians. I wish only to let my cowardice appear as something nobler, something righteous. But I will not pretend with you, Poppa. I will tell you outright: I want to come home.

Sometimes I lie awake at night and pretend that is where I am. I needn 't even shut my eyes, so dark is it here. Even still, my other senses remind me of the reality, for the prairie wind is always in my ears, and in my own house there is the smell of soil.

Soil? you wonder. That's right, Poppa, for I live in a cave. This is no exaggeration. Walter excavated it for us, displacing a badger in the process.

Do you see now what your daughter has come to? Even as I write, my ceiling—which is little more than the underside of prairie sod—grows damp from rain outside, and the water is seeping into my home. Indeed! Do you see the water mark on this page? It could easily be a tear from me, but it has just fallen from the tangle of roots above my head. And I hear other drops falling upon the floor and furniture in the room. I must pause now, Poppa, and tend to the children…

Jennifer put her pen down and lay the McGuffey reader flat so that the lantern's light, though kept on a low flame, filled the room, including the corner where her children slept. The brown floor showed dark dots where the water had struck it. Every so often a glistening drop fell from the mesh of the roots and soil and, with a plop, added another dot to the floor. All the while, outside the two black windows, the rain sizzled.

Careful not to awaken her children, Jennifer arranged a tent of oilskin over them, with one end tucked under their mattress and the other end hanging over the high backs of two chairs. The drops made a louder plop on the tent than they did on the floor.

Jennifer then returned to her crate and saw that several more drops had splotched the page, causing the ink to bleed. The letter was ruined. As she stood there, another drop plopped into the tea cup. Jennifer sighed. She was too tired to start all over. So she abandoned the letter, wrapped herself in oilcloth, and sat on her rocker, where the sound of rain and her own gentle rocking soon put her to sleep.

The next morning, Jennifer awoke to find that her entire floor had turned to mud.

“Momma, look!” said Emma, standing a few feet away, still in her nightgown. “It's up to my ankles!” Peter, meanwhile, walked about, making a sucking sound with his feet in the mud.

Jennifer, still sitting in her rocker and wrapped in the wet oilcloth, gazed at the room, then tossed her head back. “God,” she muttered, “give me strength.”

All during the rest of that morning, Jennifer and her children lugged all their wet possessions—much of it packed in crates, sacks, and baggage—out of the dugout to dry in the sun. They had help by mid-morning from Joseph Caulder, who rode up on his grey-faced mule. He brought with him a sack of buffalo chips for Jennifer's cookstove and a couple of rabbits he had shot. These things he gave to Jennifer, whereupon he single-handedly hauled out the kitchen table.

Soon, everything was set out in the sun, spread out more than it had been in the dugout. The wet clothing was strewn on the drying grass and hung on a line running from the dugout to the wagon. Tired and perspiring, Jennifer sat in her rocker midst her things, and she looked out onto the prairie.

“It's going to be a hot one,” said Joseph, standing before her, looking mostly at the ground. “Your stuff'll be dry before long.”

Jennifer arched a seemingly disinterested eyebrow. “And my floor?”

“That'll take longer,” said Joseph, kicking mud from his shoes. He looked at the wagon. “I'll grease that axle now.”

Overhead, the sky was intensely blue with only a few straggling clouds almost becalmed. Among the furniture flitted an orange-and-black butterfly. “Momma, I'm hungry,” said Emma, leaning on the rocker's armrest.

“Please, Emma,” snapped Jennifer, “don't hang on me. I'll get you your breakfast. Where's Peter?”

Emma removed herself from the rocker and pointed at her older brother walking at a distance in the grass.

“Tell him not to wander off,” said Jennifer, rising from her chair. Emma hurried obediently away. “And put your shoes on!” called Jennifer. She took the sack of buffalo chips and approached her dugout. She considered removing her own shoes to save them from the mud, but she didn't want to be seen barefoot by Joseph Caulder. She sloshed across the mud to the cookstove.

Later, she served breakfast to her children and Joseph at the kitchen table under the big sky. “It's like a picnic!” declared Emma. She propped up her doll, Melissa, to sit at the table. “Do you want any more flapjacks?” she asked her.

All through breakfast, it was Emma only, conversing with her doll, who enlivened the table. Joseph Caulder, as expected, ate in grim silence, barely looking up from his plate. Peter was still quiet since his father's death. And Jennifer herself had little urge to speak. “Melissa!” said Emma, shaking her head. “I declare, you are being very sloppy.”

It was around noon, with Emma playing with a toy tea service, Joseph repairing the ox stalls, and Peter watching him, that Jennifer set out on the cleared kitchen table her inkwell, pen, and a new piece of paper. Once again, she wrote:

Dear Poppa,

But she could go no further. There were too many distractions: a warm breeze kept threatening to blow the page way; a sparrow was perched atop a grass stalk, singing in a high, buzzy voice; the orange-and-black butterfly was still about—or perhaps it was another one—resting on the rocker, its bright wings opening and closing languidly; an occasional bird flew by; and there were the activities of her children and Joseph Caulder.