by John Babb
Ben started to say that his aunt had managed to cut firewood, keep up a cabin, care for her daughter, plus run her soup business. But he knew he’d pay if he did. Unsatisfying as it was, he held his tongue.
“Then you can lay our garden by for the winter. Since you’ll be livin’ here, you’ll need to make the garden bigger to account for all that food a growin’ boy eats. The barn has a leak and some of the hay is wet that yer pa cut afore he went upriver. The roof needs fixin’ and that hay needs to be turned if it’s not ruined already. You’ll need to bank the fire at night and get one started soon’s you get up in the mornin’ before you go to school. I’m wore plumb out from all these chores around here. About time you done yer part.”
Ben didn’t mind work. In fact, he preferred it to sitting in the cabin with his stepmother and her two girls. Sometimes he sat by Arthur’s cage, and if there was an extra biscuit, he’d share it with him. But the communication was only one way. Arthur never responded, although sometimes Ben did believe he saw a flicker in his eye.
It sounded like there would be little time for school with the arrangement described by his stepmother. He picked up a cold biscuit from the Dutch oven and walked outside to get an idea of what needed to be done. He had not visited the cabin during the five months his pa had been gone, so he was surprised to see the state of the place. Weeds and high grass covered the yard. What a contrast to the neat, swept yard at his aunt’s house! The sheer weight of honeysuckle and poison ivy vines had just about pulled down the rail fence by the barn. It appeared that at least a quarter of the hay was moldy and not fit to feed to the cow this winter. He would need to talk to his pa, as he wondered if there would be enough usable hay left over to last until spring.
When his stepmother said the firewood rack needed to be filled, she wasn’t kidding. There were four sticks of kindling in the rack and nothing to cut in the wood yard. About one more meal and she would have been cold at night. He thought about his hiding place and considered going there this morning but knew he was expected to immediately get to work, so he put that off until later. The last thing he needed was to raise her suspicions, not to mention stoke her temper.
Ben picked up the axe that was sunk in a large stump in the yard, noticing that the head was covered with rust. She probably hadn’t touched it the entire time his pa had been gone. He pedaled a large whetstone wheel for ten minutes to sharpen the blade then walked into the woods. Several limbs had broken off trees—probably the result of a strong wind storm that had passed through—and he went to work dragging the limbs back to the yard. By noon, he had cut what he figured was about three week’s worth of firewood. He sharpened the axe again, rubbed some coal oil on the blade, hung it on two pegs in the shed, and went back in the cabin to see if there was anything to eat.
“We only ate twice a day all summer long.” Ben heard one of the girls whine in front of the fire. “Maybe we’ll have more to eat if your pa finds a job in town.” Ben went back outside, drank a dipper of water at the well, and fished around in his pants for the last couple of bites of salt pork, which required more water. He decided to go back to work.
The fence surrounding the garden was as vine and weed-covered as everything else on the place. Ben used a hand scythe around the fence then started on the garden with a hoe. Not much had been done to keep the weeds out during the summer, and it was a wonder the vegetables hadn’t been overwhelmed. After a couple of hours, he realized this was not going to be a job he could finish in an afternoon. To break up the monotony, he decided to clear a small area with the hoe. Then he would shovel a wheel barrow full of manure from the chicken house, spread that on top of the cleared garden area, and mix it in the soil with the hoe. It was near dark when he heard his pa coming up the lane. He had only finished clearing and fertilizing about half the plot.
He and his father cleaned up at the well and went inside, facing a supper of turnips, cornbread, and buttermilk. Although he wouldn’t pick turnips as a favorite food, Ben generally didn’t mind eating them, but these were so pithy that they were hard to chew. He remembered all over again how much difference there was between his stepmother’s cooking and that of his aunt.
Ben made his pallet near the fireplace, and thankfully, he remembered one of his new chores before he went to sleep, so he went back outside and brought in two armloads of the wood he had cut. Then he laid two big pieces against the back of the fireplace, stoked what was left of the hot coals, and put enough wood by the door to rejuvenate the fire in the morning.
When he awoke the next morning, it was all he could do to pull himself out of bed in time to get the fire going again and get ready for the day ahead. The school was on Seventh Street, and consisted of what was a simple dog-trot house—two distinct rooms separated by a hallway that ran the length of the building. Students in the first six years were on one side of the hallway, and the last six were on the other side. They sat on backless benches that were not much more than split logs. Some of the smallest kids’ legs wouldn’t touch the floor, and it didn’t take long in the school day before they were squirming with discomfort as the circulation was pinched on the backs of their knees. Only the teacher had a real chair.
There were twenty-eight children in the grammar school and eight in the preparatory school. Most of them would only finish grammar school, or maybe eighth year, before leaving to begin a daylight-to-dark working life on the farm or to find other employment to help support their families. Only the kids from the most well-to-do families were able to stay through preparatory school.
Since Ben had never had any schooling, the teacher started him off in first year that morning, but by afternoon he had been promoted to third year. She told Ben that as soon as he could become as proficient in arithmetic as he was in reading and spelling, that she would put him in fourth year.
He couldn’t help but smile in appreciation of his new academic status as he walked home from school, but then he remembered the list of chores waiting on him, and that sort of took the joy out of his step. He resolved to spend an hour on the woodpile and an hour on the garden every afternoon until he was finished in the garden plot, then he could devote more time to building up a substantial supply of firewood. It seemed to him that his stepmother burned twice as much wood as Abbie—particularly once cooler weather began to set in. So he had trouble staying very far ahead of her appetite for firewood.
He worked on his arithmetic after supper; but when he asked for assistance with a multiplication problem, his pa couldn’t help, and he didn’t think his stepmother had ever been to school. If only he was at Abbie’s house, he was sure she could explain it to him.
After Daniel stared helplessly at Ben’s arithmetic primer for several minutes, his wife declared that if he wanted a haircut, he’d better quit acting a fool. Snatching a lock of Daniel’s curly hair, she told Ruth to fetch her sewing box. Inside the wooden box, lay what may have been her most valued possession—a pair of scissors—carefully wrapped in muslin. She then retrieved her comb and a looking glass that normally hung on a nail on the wall.
His stepmother had a talent after all! Abbie had given Ben haircuts with a bowl and a pair of scissors for as long as he could remember, but this was a whole different way of cutting hair than he had seen before. First she wet his pa’s hair, then set about trying to comb out the curls and tangles. Once that was accomplished, she combed tufts of hair, grabbed the hair with two fingers, and clipped off the ends of the tuft with the scissors. She moved slowly around his head, combing and clipping. In less than a half hour, his pa looked like a completely different person. Then she basically did the same thing with his beard and mustache—combing and clipping until it was short and even across his face. When she was finished, there was enough hair on the floor to reconstitute a small dog.
There were a few men in town with well-trimmed hair, but none looked as slick as his pa. He realized he had just seen something worth keeping in his memory. He would like to have had his own hair cut like that
but just couldn’t bring himself to ask his stepmother for a favor. He also wasn’t sure she would have agreed to do it, even if he had requested it. Ben would just continue to ask Abbie for a haircut every couple of months, but he also made a point of watching closely when his pa received a haircut from then on. He also paid close attention to where she stored her instruments.
After school the next day, Ben lost no time in getting to Abbie’s. He told her about school and described the unkempt status of his pa’s farm. She helped him with his multiplication until he understood how to do it and told him to come anytime he had problems that he couldn’t answer. He noticed there was only about a half hour of light left, and he wanted to check on his hiding place while he could still see.
As Ben walked into the woods behind the chicken house, Mr. Finnerty was standing at the window. “Now why in the world is that boy walkin’ through the woods at this time of an evenin’ instead of takin’ the road?”
“It’s shorter to go that way rather than back toward town to get to the Plank Road, and he’s done it so many times he could probably do it with his eyes closed,” Abbie replied.
Sean Finnerty said nothing.
Ben’s stepsisters, Martha and Ruth, were eleven and thirteen years old, respectively. Both of them had hair the color of carrots. Despite the bonnets their mother made them wear every time they walked outdoors, in the summertime both girls were covered with freckles. Ben decided it was highly unlikely a fly could land on their faces without treading on a freckle. One thing he was sure of, there was no possibility that the freckles were related in any way to the sisters actually performing physical labor out in the sun. Both did a few menial household chores, but manual labor for them or their mother seemed to be out of the question. Ben figured they each needed about a month with Abbie to change their perspective about what “women’s work” really meant.
Both girls were rail thin, despite their efforts to eat everything they could get their hands on. Ben couldn’t help but compare them to a girl about their age who was in fifth year at school. Alice Mabry was one of the nicest girls in grammar school, and he could not help but notice that she had already begun to take on the shape of older girls. But as far as Ben could tell, neither of his stepsisters had shown any sign of those same physical changes.
One thing that particularly bothered him was their feet. Each of the girls had very narrow, exceptionally long feet. Their toes were long and bony too. And because they were barefoot for much of the year, this particular feature was hard to ignore. Perhaps it was an inherited trait, as he had noticed the same characteristic in his stepmother on those rare occasions when she didn’t wear shoes. In fact, hers were all the worse due to the red, shiny bunions on the side of each foot. To see those six feet all splayed out in front of the fire at the end of the day was enough to take away Ben’s appetite.
Neither girl made an effort to be nice to Ben, or Arthur either for that matter. Ruth, in particular, delighted in finding ways to torment them both. The girls called him Bennie Frank at every opportunity. He had tried asking them to call him Ben—or even Benjamin—but that seemed to make it worse. He decided the best policy would be to ignore them, and maybe they would tire of it. However, he didn’t put a lot of store in that approach.
They took special enjoyment in humiliating Arthur. From time to time, they brought a kid home with them to show off “Wild Arthur” in his cage, and there was no attempt to hide their snickers and remarks, as though Arthur couldn’t hear what they were saying.
Once the sisters had used a knife to carve “BEN” in letters four inches high into one of the cabin’s logs near the hearth. When Ben was confronted by his stepmother, of course, he denied it. But she slapped him so hard—“for lying”—that he had a mark on his face all day. When he met his pa in the yard that evening and told him what had happened, he went inside for a few minutes. When he came out, he told Ben both Martha and Ruth said they didn’t know anything about it—and why would they want to carve his name into the side of the cabin anyway?
“This cabin don’t belong to you, and you got no right carvin’ yer name into anythin’ here. Mebbe you need to spend the night in the barn if ye cain’t act civilized in the house.” In addition to spending a cold December night in the barn, Ben missed supper, but it hurt worse to know that his pa wouldn’t believe him.
In the following weeks, he made it a habit to sneak a biscuit from the breakfast skillet, keeping it in his pocket all day in case he was sent to the barn with no supper. Many times this strategy paid off, as he seemed to spend more nights in the barn than in the house.
The girls knew how much Ben liked to pick up his pa’s musket and walk into the woods to hunt—particularly during the fall when the passenger pigeons were migrating south. It was a dramatic sight to view thousands upon thousands of the birds darkening the sky from September into November, and it was common to see the trees behind his pa’s cabin literally filled with the roosting birds almost every morning. So most days during the early fall, he had been able to bring at least a couple of pigeons home to the pot.
He prided himself on being extremely careful, and on those days when he found nothing to shoot for dinner, he emptied the gun into the base of a sycamore tree while still in the woods. The old flintlock could not be unloaded in any way except to fire the weapon. Shooting into the tree also gave him an opportunity every few weeks to dig the lead out of the tree so that it could be melted down, poured into a bullet mold, and used again.
On this particular morning, Ben found no squirrel or rabbit and came back empty-handed. He fired the musket into the sycamore, went into the house, hung the gun over the door, and left for school.
When he finished his chores that evening, he came into the house to find his pa as angry as he had ever seen him. He grabbed Ben by the shoulders and shook him so hard his teeth rattled. “What do you mean leavin’ my gun barrel plugged with mud? If it’s still got a ball in it, whoever pulls that trigger on a plugged gun would prob’ly be kilt or blinded, because the barrel would blow up on ’em. I can see right now that you ain’t old enough to be trusted with my musket. ’Til I say different, yore huntin’ days are over.”
Ben was dumbfounded. He knew he had fired the gun into the sycamore not five minutes before he entered the house that morning, so there was certainly no mud in the barrel then. And he was positive that he had not accidentally allowed the gun to hit the ground after that. In fact, it was his habit to carry the gun over his shoulder rather than at his side. He tried to tell his pa all this, but he was angrily waved off. He was accustomed to being believed whenever he said something—certainly that was his experience at Abbie’s house. But to have his own pa not trust his word was a hard thing.
He saw Ruth looking at him with her arms folded and just the trace of a smile on her face. Could she have had something to do with this? He looked at Arthur to see if he would give any indication of what had happened, but unfortunately, this happened to be a time when Arthur was in a far off place where only he could go.
The thought began to form in Ben’s mind that his pa was two different people. When it was just the two of them, they seemed to have what Ben thought was a good relationship. But with his stepmother in the picture, his pa was not the same. It was almost like he was doing everything he could to please her, even if it meant striking out at his own son.
He remembered something Abbie had said to him—that meanness doesn’t just happen overnight. And he couldn’t help but wonder if his stepmother were slowly turning his pa into a mean person. The realization of this was new information for Ben, and he didn’t really know what to do with it.
Five
I’m Purty Hot To Go
Jeffersonville, Indiana 1849
In January, Ben turned eight years old, and that same frigid day a steamship arrived from Pittsburg carrying over a hundred passengers who were bound for California. Ben saw a worn newspaper carried by one of the adventurers that quoted President James K. Polk�
��s December State of the Union message. The President’s speech included the verified communication from the Military Governor of California, Colonel Richard Barnes Mason, that there was a huge gold strike along the American River in California, and that “extensive and valuable” mines had been discovered. Elsewhere in the paper was a report of “lumps of gold the size of a man’s hand.” If the President said it was so, didn’t it have to be so?
All sorts of men from Jeffersonville immediately started their own preparations to head west. That evening, Ben’s pa spoke excitedly about the President’s speech. “Half the men in town are headed to California. I have to say, Sary, I’m purty hot to go.” He paused to judge the look on her face then quickly continued. “I figger I’ll mine gold for a year, make my fortune, and come back here so’s we can all live like royalty. Shoot, we could probably buy one o’ those big houses over to Louisville!”
Ben could almost see the twin demons waging a battle behind his stepmother’s eyes. She wanted to cry out and curse her husband for even considering leaving a defenseless woman, three young’uns, and her poor idjit brother to go off on a wild adventure. But on the other hand, the idea of living like a queen was an argument that had to be considered. After all, she had always wanted to be a queen!
Daniel had spent the whole day talking to would-be prospectors, and learned that there were only three ways to get from the eastern United States to California. All of the options began by water. The first involved an ocean transport to the Isthmus of Panama, followed by a dangerous and arduous journey by foot or on horseback through a tropical jungle to the Pacific Ocean, and then another ocean voyage up the western coastline of Central America and Mexico to the port of Yerba Buena (some now called it San Francisco) in California. However, there was no regularly scheduled steamship travel along the Pacific coast, so the traveler sometimes waited on the west coast of Panama for several weeks, before being picked up by a California-bound vessel.