Prairie Widow (3 page)

“Where do you want these chairs?” he asked Jennifer as he began hauling furniture through the doorway. “Where do you want this chest?”

Jennifer didn't answer. She didn't think it much mattered where they were placed in that hole.

“Where should I put this clock, Poppa?” asked Peter, carrying in a mantel clock.

“Where should I put these books?” asked Emma, hurrying with one volume under each arm.

Jennifer stayed back and watched as all her lovely furniture, scratched and dull from the long journey, was now shoved into this cave, in a squat Kansas hillside. Only when her husband and children were done moving in, and the wagon— her only home for hundreds of miles—was stripped of its canvass top, did Jennifer at last go in to inspect her new home, bringing with her the pot of geraniums.

Her heart sank. Though it was pleasantly cool inside, the room was murky, with only a feeble light entering through the two windows and door. And her beloved furniture, placed cheek-by-jowl, appeared merely as poignant momentos of her bygone life in the civilized East. She located her rocker, which Walter had placed near the cookstove, and she brushed from its needlepoint seat some soil that had fallen from the ceiling. Then, while Peter and Emma played outside, and while Walter hitched the oxen to the plow, Jennifer rocked back and forth, the geraniums on her lap once more. The smell of the earthen walls was in her nose, and the room's grave-like silence pressed upon her ears.

Over the next few days, Jennifer went grimly about her wifely duties. One thing she learned quickly: it was going to be impossible to keep her home clean. The loam sprinkled down continuously from the root-laced ceiling. The table, the cookstove, the pots and pans, the silvery daguerrotype of her father, the high-backed chairs, the few books, as well as the hard dirt floor itself, all had to be swept daily.

Then there were the intruders. Ever so often, Jennifer had to pluck an earthworm from the low ceiling, or a mole would push its way through her walls, blindly sniffing the sudden, open area before retreating.

Walter, meanwhile, devoted his attention to matters outside the home. He broke the sod, which peeled back in long strips from his curved, steal plowblade. He cut through the tough mesh of grass roots—the fabric of the prairie—to the rapidfire muffled clicks and snaps, as if an unending string of tiny, buried firecrackers were being set off. After a few days, he built a shelter of poles and hay for the oxen. And, that afternoon, he went to town to refill one of the barrels with water from Frank Turner's well.

But instead of fresh water, Walter returned to the dugout with a dark-haired, bearded man. He told Jennifer the man's name was Mr. Riley, and that he was a water witch.

“We'll soon have our own well,” he told his wife while Mr. Riley, all eyes upon him, walked hunched over around the dugout, holding before him the forked ends of a willow branch. His face was in deep concentration as he walked in ever larger circles, moving steadily farther from the dugout across the plowed field. Finally, about a dozen yards from the door, back in the middle of the wild bluestems, his branch began to dip. He walked a bit farther, and the branch pointed straight down. “Here!” he announced, stomping the ground with his foot. “Dig here.”

Walter hurried over with his shovel. “You sure?” he asked.

“Sure, I'm sure.”

Walter began to dig. Mr. Riley stood back, stroking his beard.

The water, however, was not very near the surface. Walter dug over six feet down and found no water. “You sure there's water here?” he again asked Mr. Riley, who watched the whole time.

“Oh, you've got to dig deeper'n that,” answered Mr. Riley. He fetched his horse while Walter dug. “I'll be in and out of town for a few days,” he said from atop his horse. “You can pay me when you strike water.”

Walter, his head down as he dug, grumbled some acknowledgement, and Mr. Riley rode off.

By the end of the day, Walter had gone down nearly twice his own height, and still there was no water. He began to curse Mr. Riley under his breath, calling him a charlatan taking advantage of desperate homesteaders. “He won't get a penny.”

Jennifer looked smug, which didn't escape Walter's notice when he came up to rest. “You'd better pray we find water,” he said, “I mean, it's not as if we're leaving.”

This sobered Jennifer, and she began looking anxiously down the hole.

The next morning, Walter had a little trouble finding the hole in the tall grass. When he did find it, he tied a piece of red cloth to the nearby grass, then lowered himself down and resumed his digging. By morning's end, he had gone down nearly the length of his height again. Jennifer by now had to help by hauling up dirt in a bucket. Still, there was no water. Walter dragged himself out as he cursed Mr. Riley and threatened to toss him down the hole and cover him over.

Jennifer almost felt sorry for her husband. After all, he was trying so very hard. Still, he had brought this upon himself.

The next morning, however, when Walter returned to the hole, he found the bottom was muddy. With great excitement, he resumed his labor. Each time Jennifer hauled up the bucket, she found the mud was looser and looser. Soon, it was muddy water. Then the muddy water became clearer. Finally, Walter called up, “Tastes terrific!” When he came to the surface, his pants were wet up to his thighs.

That night, Walter wished to celebrate. And he knew how he wanted to do it. It was two weeks since he and Jennifer moved into their new home, and longer than that since they had been intimate. There had been no privacy on the westward journey, and, as far as Jennifer was concerned, there still wasn't. She and Walter shared just the one room with their children.

But Walter would not be put off any longer. The dugout, after all, was pitch black at night, and the children slept on the opposite side of the room. So, as soon as the children's gentle breathing showed that they were asleep, and with a warm breeze blowing in through the two windows, Walter pressed close to his wife, his hand sliding under her nightgown, across her belly, his lips nuzzling the curve of her neck. Jennifer resisted at first, but, really, she wanted to be close, too. When Walter finally slid on top of her, slowly hoisting her nightclothes above her thighs, she whispered in his ear only, “Don't make noise.”

After that night, life in their new home was little less tense. It was with some amazement that Jennifer one day realized that she had been living on that Kansas prairie for one month. She had never imagined herself surviving so long in such a God-forsaken place. The heat at times could be brutal. And she couldn't escape it on that treeless land except by retreating into her dugout. And while she hadn't noticed many mosquitoes when she first arrived, there were soon plenty of them to add to her misery.

Then there was the wind. It didn't seem to ever stop blowing. Unhampered by anything vertical within view, the wind sometimes whispered, sometimes groaned, sometimes screamed. But always it was there, and it threatened to drive Jennifer mad.

And, yet, it didn't. Jennifer simply went about her duties: hauling water from the well, bathing her children, washing clothes before her door on the scrubboard, sewing buttons, plucking earthworms from the ceiling, sweeping the dugout, and stoking her cookstove with, of all things, buffalo chips.

But whatever the inconveniences and hardships she had to endure, she discovered that there was one burden that proved to be the very worst—one, indeed, that only weighed more heavily on her with each passing day—the loneliness.

In all that time and, despite all the immensity of land contained within her view, she saw—aside from her own family—not another human being. In the evening there was no light from any distant window. During the day, there was no smoke from another stovepipe. No wagons passed on the trail.

Jennifer fondly remembered how she used to be able to sit on her front porch back in Ohio and, raising her voice only slightly, speak to the neighbors on their porches; or how, on summer evenings, she would greet neighbors, dressed in their best clothes, as they strolled by her house down the lane colonnaded with massive tulip trees. “Good evening,“Good evening, Jennifer,” they would respond, Charles always tipping his hat. “Nice evening.” Their four children would hurry ahead. “Isn't it, though?” Jennifer would add, “A little muggy perhaps…”

But no neighbors strolled past Jennifer's dugout now. Indeed, it seemed at times that her family was the only one left on the planet.

And so it was with some relief that, one morning, Jennifer finally espied a group of people walking up the trail toward her homestead. One stooped figure was on horseback. Walter was away, which made her nervous, but she saw, even at a distance, that there were at least one woman and two children in the approaching party, and so she didn't worry. Indeed, she ground some coffee, primped in the mirror hanging outside the dugout, and waited outside her door, occupying herself with some darning. She would not be as cold to her neighbors this time as she had been in Franz Hoff-mann's store.

It took a long while before the party came close enough for her to make them out better but, when she did, Jennifer's enthusiasm turned to terror, and she looked about to see where her children were. “Peter! Emma! Get inside!”

“What's the matter, Momma?” asked Peter, walking up to her, a tin soldier in his hand.

“Just do as I say,” responded Jennifer, ushering him along.

“Look, Momma, people!” announced Emma, pointing as she, too, was swept along by Jennifer into the dugout. Jennifer herself went in and closed the door, which had a latch but no lock.

“Momma, who are those people?” asked Peter, looking out the window.

“Get away from there,” snapped Jennifer, tugging him back.

“But who are they?”

Jennifer pulled her children to the deepest recess of the dugout. She stared at the door and two bright windows, which showed within them, like two paintings, the tawny prairie and blue sky. “Shush!” hissed Jennifer. “Stay here.”

Jennifer approached the windows. She peered out and gasped. The band of people were walking from the trail toward her dugout. Jennifer spun around to face her children. “Where does Poppa keep his gun?”

“Why do you want that?” asked Peter.

“I'm scared,” said Emma, her eyes watering as she stepped away from the dirt wall.

Jennifer pushed her back. “I said stand there.” She turned to Peter. “Where's Poppa's gun?”

“I'm scared too, Momma.”

“Don't be!” snapped Jennifer as she began frantically searching through the dugout.

“Momma! Look!” squealed Emma.

Jennifer spun and faced the windows. In one was a portrait of a grim, dusky-faced man with long, braided hair. He was dressed in a red blanket, and three feathers were sticking from his head. Without ceremony, the man stepped in through the window, even as the door opened and another man, wearing a red blanket, his long hair unbraided, entered.

“Indians, Momma!” declared Peter.

Jennifer pushed him and Emma behind her skirt, her heart pounding nearly out of her chest. Before her were the first Indians she had ever seen outside a book. “God, please protect my children,” she whispered.

The two men looked about the furnished cave, the first one picking up a pewter mug and inspecting it, the other, his face pock-marked, apparently from a bout of smallpox, studying the picture of Jennifer's father. Then the first man, putting down the mug, returned his attention to Jennifer. He pointed outside the door to an old man on a sorrel pony, two little boys, and a woman carrying a papoose across her back. He gestured as if shoveling food into his mouth. Jennifer hurried to get them some food. The first man then said something to those outside, and they came in, crowding the little dugout.

While Jennifer prepared to serve them some flapjacks, bacon, and corn dodgers, the Indians walked about the gloomy room, squeezing themselves among the furniture. The man with the pock-marked face flipped blankly through the pages of the King James Bible, pausing to look at the engravings. The young woman with the papoose investigated first the mantel clock sitting on the bureau, putting it to her ear, and then she opened the drawers and pulled out one of Jennifer's undergarments, rubbing it against her cheek. The two boys, roughly Emma's age, picked up Peter's tin soldiers from the dirt floor while Peter watched nervously. The old man, toothless, his face weathered and cracked, approached Peter and stroked the boy's long, blonde hair, which unnerved Jennifer, and she hurried even faster to set the food on the table.

When she did set it out, the Indians pulled up chairs and packing crates to sit on, and they began to eat with their fingers. They said nothing, and Jennifer said nothing either, but just stood as if in waiting, her children behind her. Whenever one of the Indians finished what was given to him, he lifted his empty plate and gave it to Jennifer, whereupon she quickly refilled it. Even the old man and the young woman had huge appetites, for they kept asking for more, always more.

Jennifer was certain that when the food ran out, the Indians would turn on her and her children, butchering them all. Surely Peter's blonde hair would make a particularly good trophy for their tepee. Or maybe they were all to be kidnapped—her children to be raised as savages, herself to become the white concubine of an Indian brute.

The Indians were still eating, exchanging an occasional word among themselves in their own language, when Jennifer heard Walter's wagon approaching.

“Poppa!” cried Emma, hurrying to the window.

The first two Indian men jumped to their feet. The one who had come in through the window returned to it and looked out, standing behind Emma.

Tears bursting from her eyes, Jennifer pushed her way in front of the man and cried out what she thought were her final words, “Walter! Go back! Indians!” And, with that, she slumped to the floor, grabbing Emma and holding her to her heaving breast.