The Blessing Stone (62 page)

As she crept out from under the protection of his wagon, Emmeline found her curiosity growing about the young Dr. Lively. His long face made him look like he had attended too many funerals.
Did he lose a lot of patients?
she wondered. Emmeline did not know that at the same time Matthew was thinking:
Why is Miss Fitzsimmons always smiling? Where does she get that energy? Didn’t anyone ever tell her it is unladylike for a girl to talk so much
?

On May twenty-ninth, after two and a half weeks of traveling, they reached the banks of the Big Blue River that flowed into the Kansas from the north, and the emigrants were dismayed to discover that heavy rains had so swollen the river that it was impossible to cross. Since the wagon train was forced to stay put, the emigrants took the opportunity to do their first laundry and take their first baths since leaving Independence. Tallow soap was vigorously applied to bodies and clothing alike, children being scrubbed along with grimy shirts, dresses, blankets, coats, and “unmentionables.” That evening a crescent moon came out and the emigrants entertained themselves with music and stories, and innocent flirtations across the many campfires. Silas Winslow, eligible bachelor with a lucrative profession, found himself the focus of the attention of mothers of unmarried daughters, as was Matthew Lively, now that word had gotten around he was a doctor.

But whereas Winslow was thoroughly enjoying being treated like a prince, and gobbled the pies and allowed the ladies to do his mending and washing, Matthew Lively was nonplussed by it all. Shy by nature and awkward in social settings, Matthew had never before found himself the center of ladies’ attention. On top of that, frail Honoria still tugged at his heart and he continued to suffer from the pain of her rejection of his marriage proposal. So the eager young daughters of the farmers and settlers, actively on the prowl for husbands, made him skittish. The only exception was the remarkable Miss Emmeline Fitzsimmons who had been overheard to say she did not believe in marriage. Matthew had heard her telling this to Mrs. Ida Threadgood, explaining that marriage was an artificial institution, invented by men as a way of subjugating women. And so while she did not discomfit him in the same way the emigrants’ daughters did, by bringing him pies and flirtatious smiles, she discomfited him all the same.

Finally the river was passable, but ferries were needed to haul the wagons across. And so big cottonwood trees were cut down to make an enormous raft of logs and timbers, big enough to carry a prairie schooner. The work was hard as the current was deep and swift; and forcing the horses and cattle to swim across was a nearly impossible task. The emigrants worked for two days, in a fresh downpour, to get the whole lot across; during that time tempers flared and two teamsters nearly killed each other with knives.

On the other side, muddy and wet and exhausted, the disheartened company tried to get oxen yoked, horses and cattle rounded up, and some sort of fire going to cook food, when Barnabas Threadgood suddenly gave out a cry and slumped to the ground.

Everyone gathered around the unconscious man as Emmeline went running to fetch Matthew Lively. Ida stood over her husband, hands on hips, and said, “He ain’t never done
that
before.”

Matthew pushed his way through and, dropping to one knee, felt Barnabas’s neck. The onlookers stood in silence as Matthew opened his black bag and drew out the stethoscope. No one had ever seen one before. Their eyes widened as he placed the end of the tube to the stricken man’s chest and listened. After a moment, he looked up and said sorrowfully, “Your husband is dead, ma’am.”

“Is that a fact?” Ida said.

She spent one minute looking at her husband’s face, then, shifting her gaze westward, pondered that direction for another minute, then she shifted her gaze backward toward the east, looked a little longer, and finally said, “After we bury him, I’m headin’ back to Missouri.”

To Emmeline’s shock, four other wives joined Ida, along with their children and six teamsters. If the husbands protested, they did not do so out loud. But now Emmeline was without a ride again, out in the middle of nowhere, 160 miles from Independence. When Amos Tice told her she would have to return with Ida, Emmeline dug her heels into the mud and insisted she was going to Oregon.

What happened next surprised even the seasoned Tice: four teamsters, two widowed farmers, Silas Winslow the photographer, and a gangly teenager all rushed forward offering to escort Miss Fitzsimmons to Oregon. Seeing that a fistfight was about to break out over who got to take over the protection of the young lady, Matthew went back to his wagon and secretly brought out the Blessing Stone.

As he held it in his palm, he pondered his unexpected actions. The decision of what was to be done with Miss Fitzsimmons was up to Amos Tice, or up to the headstrong young lady herself, it certainly wasn’t Matthew’s business. But something inside him, unfamiliar and disturbing, nagged at him to step in and take initiative. His conscience was calling upon him to make a decision, and Matthew was not used to that.

Still, it wouldn’t be completely his own doing. He would do whatever the Blessing Stone told him to do.

He had made a ritual of looking into the crystal every night before he went to sleep and every morning when he woke up because he couldn’t get his mother’s chilling prophecy out of his mind, that a great trial lay before him, “terrible and dark.” He was hoping to find a way to avoid whatever it was, but the Guiding Spirit wasn’t telling him anything. But he had another question for blue stone now, and he took out a child’s school slate he used specially for asking the crystal questions, and a piece of chalk. On one edge of the slate he wrote “yes,” on the other, “no.” Then he placed the crystal between them, asked “Should I offer to take Miss Fitzsimmons to Oregon?” and spun the crystal. It pointed to “yes.” He spun it again. And again. When it kept coming up “yes” he decided it wasn’t good to question the Guiding Spirit as he might be inviting bad luck on himself. So he went back to the fracas that Miss Fitzsimmons had unwittingly ignited, with Tice trying to push two brawling men apart, and, with heart racing and palms sweating at this boldness that was not at all in his character, offered to take Emmeline along with him in his wagon.

She accepted at once.

They buried Barnabas Threadgood at the side of the trail, said a hasty prayer and got the wagons moving again. Behind them, heading back along the way they had come, Ida Threadgood and her brood, along with another three wagons with women and children, and teamsters who’d changed their minds about going west, started the trek back for civilization.

As the Oregon-bound wagons got underway, Albertina Hopkins let everybody know that she did not approve of two unmarried people traveling together.

“It’s none of her business,” Emmeline fretted as she climbed onto the wagon seat to ride at Matthew’s side.

Matthew said nothing. Secretly, he agreed with Mrs. Hopkins.

Albertina continued to furiously oppose the arrangement and let Captain Tice know at every opportunity. A few of the other women joined her, but some didn’t mind and told Tice to leave the two medical people alone. “We might have need of them both,” Florine Benbow said, not knowing she spoke prophetic words.

As they crossed the sweeping, tall grass prairies of eastern Kansas and Nebraska that seemed to stretch into infinity, Emmeline and Matthew came up with an arrangement in which they made sure they did everything proper and above board, with Emmeline sleeping in Matthew’s wagon while Matthew slept in a bedroll on the ground, maintaining decency and propriety at all times. But they ate together, made camp and struck camp together, worked the oxen, fixed the wagon, and collected water together. They fell in with the daily routine of the wagon train: at dawn a bugle blew to waken the camp. The men who had been on night herding duty brought the cattle and horses in from their grazing while the women started their cook fires and prepared breakfasts of bread, bacon, and coffee. After everyone had eaten—generally a congenial time—the tents were taken down and everything stowed in the wagons, oxen rounded up and yoked in their harnesses. The company was underway by seven
A.M.
to take advantage of the coolness and to cover miles before noon, when they stopped for an hour’s rest before getting underway for another five-hour trek. When Captain Tice finally signaled the stop of the night, it was met with groans of relief and a few weary cheers. Now the wagons were drawn into a circle and chained together for protection against possible Indian attacks, although the Indians preferred to attack wagon trains that were on the move and in a straight line. Animals were set out to grazing and women cooked dinner. The hours after the meal was the best time of the day, the visiting time, maybe with music and dancing, certainly gossip and a few good stories told around the campfire.

It seemed a dream to people used to the confinement of farms and houses: the days were hard but the nights were peaceful and the encampments were like picnics, with people making friends, children running free, food generously shared. Jealousies had not yet broken out, envy had not begun to seethe, complaints had not yet started to make their way to Amos Tice’s tent. In time to come, a very short time, tempers were going to begin to flare, nerves were going to start to wear raw, and Tice was going to be accused, as all wagon masters eventually were, of being unfair and having favorites.

His was a thankless job. It was Tice who determined every aspect of wagon company life, the order of the wagons in line, the assigning of duties of wood and water gathering, watch duty, herding. In days to come, those down the line in the train would begin to complain of having to breathe the dust of the wagons up ahead, and even though Tice rotated the order of the wagons so that everyone got a turn at the head of the line, no one was satisfied.

He also had to dispense justice. When Sean Flaherty’s dog got into the Benbow’s chickens and killed six before the dog could be captured, the Benbows demanded that the dog be shot. But Sean held Daisy to him and pleaded with tears on his cheeks that she was all he had in the world. So the company voted and Daisy was spared with Mr. Flaherty paying Mr. Benbow a fair price for the slaughtered fowl.

They had their sorrows as well. Jeb the teamster from Kentucky finally succumbed to the abscess that had festered in his jaw after Osgood Aahrens the barber had pulled the bad tooth. They buried him at the side of the trail and moved on. More graves were added as children died of measles, men were crushed beneath wagons, and babies did not survive birth, sometimes being buried with their mothers. The company encountered more graves along the way, dug by emigrants who went before them. In the decades to come, the Oregon Trail was to be dotted with thousands of crosses and headstones.

As Matthew’s wagon rolled along behind his team of horses, Emmeline sat at his side, her face to the sun, and pictured the promised land ahead where men and women were going to live as equals. Matthew, handling the reins and keeping enough distance behind the wagon up front so as not to breathe their dust, reveled in the broad sunshine of the plains, showing him an existence so different from the dark séance parlors of Boston’s spiritualist community. There, life focused on the dead, here it focused on the living—on the grazing cattle, the soaring hawks, children running and laughing, Daisy the coon dog barking at rabbits and turkeys too stupid to fly.

They spoke little, the doctor’s daughter from Illinois and the young man from Boston, as they rode side by side in the wagon, keeping their eyes on the horizon ahead, never imagining an earth so vast, a sky so limitless. They felt their souls expand with each passing mile, as if they had lived their youths compressed in an attic trunk and now they were being aired on a sunny clothesline. And as the horizon continued to stay distant and elusive, and the wagon rocked, it seemed to Emmeline a good time for conversation. She was curious about the blue stone she had seen Dr. Lively take out and look at once in a while, and so she inquired.

“It’s called the Blessing Stone,” he said, squinting into the sunshine as he handled the reins. “It was given to my mother on her wedding day. She says it is very old, as old as the world itself maybe, and that it possesses the powers of all the people who owned it, down through the ages. My mother always consulted the stone for guidance, and so do I.” He didn’t go on to say that his mother had also used it to contact the dead. Nor did he tell Emmeline about his mother’s dire prophecy of a great trial that lay before him, dark and terrible. Perhaps it had already come and gone: maybe the test of his soul was deciding to take Emmeline along, because it certainly hadn’t made him popular with the others—men and women alike.

Her interest was sparked. “And the crystal really guides you?”

“Without it I would be lost. I sometimes fear,” he added self-consciously, “that I was born a coward. I can’t seem to make decisions on my own.”

“You are simply cautious, Dr. Lively,” she said. “My problem is I’m too brave. Nothing frightens me. And sometimes it can get me into trouble.”

She removed her bonnet and shook her long hair free in the breeze. “You don’t know how lucky you are, being a man. You can pursue any career you wish, without prejudice. I wanted to be a doctor but wasn’t allowed because I’m a woman. It isn’t fair. That’s why I’m going west. The atmosphere will be more tolerant out there, and democratic. A truly free land. There is a new spirit in the nation, women are waking up. I attended a wonderful convention at Seneca Falls where a Declaration of Sentiments was drawn up listing sixteen forms of discrimination against women, including the vote, equal wages for equal work, control of our persons and our children. We women are starting to mobilize, Dr. Lively.”

Matthew shifted uneasily on the wagon seat. He was already familiar with Miss Fitzsimmons’s radical views. Though they were but a short time out of Independence, Emmeline had already begun receiving proposals of marriage—from each of the Schumann brothers (with Mr. Hopkins acting as interpreter), from Sean Flaherty who declared he was going to have the biggest potato farm in all of Oregon, from young Dickie O’Ross, whose voice broke as he proposed. But Emmeline had turned them all down, saying that it was not because of faults in them but because she planned never to marry. She explained to anyone who would listen that she had no intention of being encumbered by an artificial institution that was invented by churches and society to keep women in line. If she had children, she would do so on her own without having to answer to a husband.