Together Apart (5 page)

After I'd seen all there was to see in the main house, Eliza led the way into the one-story structure, which
was
as I'd imagined it. Eliza invited me to sit in one of the two rocking chairs that were pulled up to the cold potbelly stove. She sat in another, then said, "I'm anxious to hear your idea."

"If I were you, ma'am, I'd support myself by turning this space into a resting room for farm women."

Eliza rocked forward. "Tell me more."

"It's hard for farm women to come into town because there's no place for them to bide their time once they've made their trades with the merchants. They must wait in the wagons, sometimes for hours and in all kinds of weather, while their husbands do their business. If they have children, and most do, there's no private place for them to feed or change their babies."

"Are you proposing that I charge a fee for the use of this room?"

"No, ma'am. Charging a fee would never do. Some few farmers have prospered, especially those who have many sons to help work the land. Though most, like my papa, still struggle to make ends meet. Even if there were a penny to spare, farm women wouldn't think to spend it on a comfort for themselves. If the resting room is to make a go, it must be free to all, but not a charity. You will earn your profit by accepting freewill donations—a mold of butter, a pound of home-cured bacon, a jar of chokecherry preserves—in trade for a homey place to wait. That's our way."

"I'm intrigued, but how do we turn butter and bacon into cash?"

"There are a couple of ways you might go about it. First, if you are paid in bacon, you have bacon for your table and save the price of buying it from the butcher. Same with eggs, butter, and the like. Second, if you have more produce than you can eat, you trade the extra at the grocer for the things you need but don't have. Lastly, you might skip the merchants altogether and sell the extra produce to the women here in town. The merchants double, sometimes triple the price between the buying and the selling. If you cut the difference by half, I believe the women of Prairie Hill will form a line at your door."

"How many women do you think would make use of such a place?"

"Prairie County is settled now, all the land taken up. For the most part, there is one farm on each quarter section. Four farms, four farm women, more or less, for every square mile. I've done the arithmetic. The county is twenty-four miles in both its length and width, which multiplies out to 576 miles square. That counts the number of farms, the number of farm women, at something over two thousand. Half might never come, especially those whose husbands don't tarry. Of the other half, some might come only if they need to get out of the weather. But I believe some will come as often as once a month, and others, the ones whose farms are closest to town and those who most crave the companionship of other women, will visit as often as once a week. It might be slow going at first, until word gets out, but once the women know you are here, I truly believe they will come."

Eliza clasped one hand over the other and exclaimed, "That's what we'll do then, turn this space into a resting room." She leapt from her chair then and began waltzing about the room, pointing out the placement of the furnishings—a chair over there, a sofa here, a table yonder. Isaac would build shelves against one wall, which Eliza would fill with books from her collection, with one shelf saved for the most recent issues of the
Women's Gazette.

While Eliza chattered I did some imagining of my own. I imagined a blazing fire in the stove. Wood smoke threaded and scented the air. A resting place, safe and warm. If only my brothers had found such a place. If only it had been that simple.

"And I know exactly how we'll spread the word. We'll print handbills, if I can coax my cantankerous printing press back into service, that is. You're the clever one, Hannah. Perhaps you can remedy whatever it is that's ailing the beast."

I followed Eliza into the print shop, where she showed me how the thick ink was applied to the large platen disk. "It's a clamshell letterhead press," Eliza said, fitting a sheet of blank paper on a blotterlike pad. When she set the thing in motion, it printed only half a page. On the page were the words "Ten Reasons Why Women Must Be Granted Suffrage."

"For your gazette?" I asked, trying to hold my brows from creeping up.

"Oh, my yes, this is the blasphemy that Reverend Cobb's in such a dither about. His self-righteous indignation would be better served if he rousted one or two of his male parishioners from Shipman's Saloon and Billiard Parlor."

My brows stayed in place, but the corners of my mouth curled into a smile. Shipman's Saloon and Billiard Parlor was responsible for none too few of the wagon-waits farm women had been made to suffer. My papa had said his own visits to Shipman's were necessary because much of the town's business was conducted within its walls, which were single-storied behind a false two-storied front.

As for the matter of suffrage, I chose not to comment because I hadn't given it much thought. Papa had. I'd once heard him say from behind his newspaper that if women got the vote it would crumble the foundations of the American home. Mama, who'd been darning a hole in his sock, peered over the top of her spectacles and quietly replied, "Don't see that it'd make much difference around here. When you live in a sod house, crumble is about all you've got." If Papa heard, he didn't let on.

***

"Try it again," I said, crouching so I could watch the workings of the press's many arms and gears.

"And again."

On the third try, I spied the problem. A bolt had worked itself loose from an arm. I asked Eliza if she had a wrench. She answered that she wouldn't know a wrench from a plow blade, then fetched the Judge's toolbox. And finely forged tools they were, with wrenches of every size. I removed the one I thought would best fit the job, then tightened the bolt to the arm as firmly as I could.

"Once again," I said. That time, when Eliza set the beast in motion, the arm didn't jerk to the side.

Eliza plucked the page from the press and passed it to me. "We're in business. See here, the page printed perfectly."

The ink was damp, but the letters were as crisp as the notes of a meadowlark's song. Words, sentences, neatly arranged thoughts—a thing to be reckoned with. Before the ink had dried on the first, Eliza had printed a second and a third. A thought multiplied. Eliza stepped away from the press. "Needless to say, your trial period is over. I'd like you to stay on permanently."

I focused my eyes on the floor. "I'm honored, ma'am, but I cannot accept your offer. That's what I wanted to tell you earlier."

"Nonsense, you must stay. I wouldn't be able to manage the resting room without you."

I wanted to tell her the truth, that my papa would never approve of my living and working in the same house as Isaac.

"I'm needed at home."

"Its me being here, isn't it? I'm the reason you've told Eliza you can't stay."

I spun toward the door, where Isaac was standing.

"Oh, no. It's not you. I truly am needed at home."

Isaac strode toward me, stopping only when his face was inches from my own. He smelled of leather and fresh air. "Then why did I find this pillow cover stuffed with your belongings on the kitchen stoop?"

I hiccupped.

"Is there something I should know?" Eliza asked.

"Yes, ma'am, there is," Isaac answered.

C
OME
S
ATURDAY NIGHT
, H
ANNAH'S RESTING ROOM WAS READY.
In ones, twos, and threes, depending on the heft of a piece, we'd toted furnishings from the house to the resting room. I'd have set these things down any old way, but not Eliza. We'd place a piece of furniture against a wall, Eliza would stand back, look hard, then say it wasn't right, and we'd drag it across the room only to have her decide the first way was better. Almost every room in the house had taken a hit in Eliza's hunt. The parlor was minus its velvet settee, the front hall its parson's bench, and the Judge's study its mahogany library table, which Eliza had said was old and rickety. Rickety, my eye. The tabletop didn't have a scratch, and its legs were as stout as a lumberjack's.

Getting the word out about the resting room was the only thing that still needed to be done, and that's what Hannah and Eliza were fixing to do that Sunday morning. Seeing as how Eliza didn't feel welcome in the Reverend Cobb's church, and seeing as how Hannah was planning to spend the day at home, Eliza had asked if she might tag along, meet Hannah's family, and, as she'd said, "discreedy distribute" handbills to the ladies at Hannah's church.

Before they rode off in the surrey, I'd begged a favor of Hannah: If she could get my ma alone after church, would she tell her my whereabouts? Hannah had said she would try.

I spent most all of the day with my nose buried in a boat-building book I'd found in the judges library. It was head-scratching complicated—the soaking and bending of boards, the watertight caulking. But, along about dark, I put the book aside and headed outdoors, which had be come my habit. Lying low in daylight and going out only after dark, like an owl or a raccoon, had solved a couple of problems.

The first problem being Sheriff Tulley. He'd come to Eliza's door not three hours after I'd returned from the Ice Works, saying that there was a thief on the loose, a thief who played the harmonica, a thief by the name of Isaac Bradshaw. Seems the sheriff had been asking folks around town if they'd seen me, and the proprietor of the Ice Works had told him a suspicious-looking boy had been seen driving Eliza's surrey. Lucky for me, I'd been in the print shop when the sheriff had come nosing around, so I'd heard the story secondhand. Eliza had twisted the truth and told the sheriff that she'd hired a boy to go for ice that morning, but that the boy had made himself scarce soon after.

After the sheriff left, she'd come straight to me and said, "If I were in your shoes, I'd seek out the sheriff and tell him my side of the story. And I'd do it today."

I couldn't do that. It would've been Mr. Richards's word against mine. I knew which side of that coin would land face-up. On the short side of things, I'd have to turn over my pa's tools. On the long side, the sheriff would lock me up in his jail. Losing my freedom, only a few rooster crows after gaining it, wasn't the way I wanted to spend my second chance.

In a roundabout way, my lying low had fixed Hannah's problem, too. Hannah's pa had forbidden her to be
seen
with me in public. If I weren't
seen,
Hannah would be free to stay. Hannah, who could be as stubborn as a thistle root, had kept on claiming that she'd have to leave, that bending her pa's true meaning didn't make it right, and if she were caught that would only make matters worse. Eliza had been the one to sway her. "After all you've been through, you've earned the right to make up your own mind," she'd said, then reminded Hannah of the good that was to be done by the resting room, adding that the women might not come if one of their own wasn't there to make them feel welcome.

***

I was some worried about Eliza and Hannah being on the road after dark that Sunday evening, so I shimmied up one of the taller trees on Eliza's property. When I'd climbed to the highest branch that held my weight, I straddled a limb and stared out across the prairie in the direction of the westerly road. There was only a hangnail of a moon, and, try as I might, my eyes couldn't split the dark. Leaning my back against the trunk, I bided my time with a little of Hannah's make-believe. The tree was the mast of a sailing ship, a ship bound for far-off shores. I was the first mate, keeping watch for other ships passing in the night. Little did I know that my make-believe was about to turn real.

I heard the wagon before I saw it—the clank of the doubletree rings, the creak of the wagon box, the snuffled complaints of tired horses. These sounds didn't come from the street, but from the prairie to the back of Eliza's property. As the wagon got closer, I was able to make out its odd shape. Most traveling wagons were topped with canvas, but the top of this wagon looked to be all wood.

The driver halted the team not fifty feet from my tree, then jumped down from the seat. He leaned a tiny ladder at the back and opened a skinny door. Three children climbed out. The oldest girl, who looked close to Hannah's age, headed straightaway for Eliza's well and began to pump water into a bucket. The father tended to the horses, wiping the day's sweat from first one then the other's coat. The younger children, a boy and a girl, made a beeline to the woodpile, where they scooped up armloads of kindling, which the father later used to build a campfire. Both the clothes the family wore and the language they spoke were foreign. I knew it was rude to spy, but someone had to keep an eye on Eliza's property. I was more than happy to oblige.

There was much going in and out of the wagon, much rattling of pans, and before long, smoky food smells rose from the stovepipe chimney that poked through the wagon's roof. My stomach let out a growl. It'd been a couple of hours since I'd wolfed down the last of the leftover pot roast. Hungry as I was, I didn't want to give myself away, so I stayed put even though the wind had picked up and was threatening to roust me from my roost.

The food was cooked inside the wagon but was eaten in the light of the campfire. The mother ladled something that looked like stew into bowls. Good-smelling stew, spicy. To keep my stomach from growling louder than it already was, I switched my attention to the wagon. The wagon walls were crusted with woodcarvings—scrolls and curlicues and fretwork—like my pa had fashioned for homes in Bismarck, North Dakota, before our train trip south. Perched there in that tree, I couldn't help but think how different things might've turned out if we'd made our journey in a wagon like that, moseying along, eating Ma's cooking, stopping to rest every night.

The train had sickened Pa from the start. The rocking motion, the babies bawling, the stifling heat of having the windows closed, the choking smoke and cinders of having the windows opened, had heaped up on Pa like the weight of a blizzard's drift. We'd been headed for the Gulf Coast of Texas, which Pa had said was about as far from North Dakota winters as we could get. We weren't halfway along when Pa's heart gave out. His hand had flown to his chest. The color had drained from his face. He'd gasped and slumped forward, and by the time the train whistled the next stop, Prairie Hill, my pa was dead.