Something Worth Doing

by Jane Kirkpatrick

  “The magnet’s right where I put it,” Ben said. “I haven’t misplaced it.”

  She patted his arm. “I know, Ben. It’s fine. Let’s head back to the house. Earl’s coming later.”

  “Earl? Where did he go?”

  “He’s working some of his own cattle now, Ben. And he’s teamed up with another rancher. We’ve had to sell our cows, remember?” Ben didn’t. What people were calling “the panic” had hit them too. She’d wanted to sell the ranch when the market was still good, but the property wasn’t even in her name! How Ben had managed that and how there was still $4000 owing stung her. The boys must have known but had not invited her into the decision when they’d expanded the boundaries, buying new property just as the economy was toppling.

  “I remember now,” Ben said. “He’s a good cowboy. Did you see the way he lobbed that rope around the calf? Wouldn’t be without him for the branding.”

  We won’t be branding here again.

  She turned him toward the ranch house. Geraniums bloomed in large pots on either side of the porch steps. The one plant she could keep from dying, it seemed. They were cheery, and their presence lifted her spirits, though not high enough. She sighed.

  “What’s the matter, Jenny? Are you sad?”

  “Weary. Nothing for you to worry over.”

  “I don’t have a worry in the world, Jen.” Ben took her hand, kissed the palm. “Everything always turns out all right.”

  As they watched the sun set, she repeated her hoped-for words of a wonderful outcome. She hadn’t gotten everything she wanted—most importantly the woman’s vote. But oh, didn’t she have an amazing story to leave behind? Daughter, wife, mother, grandmother, teacher, milliner, businesswoman, writer, poet, newspaper owner, public speaker, activist—a new word people were using for those who sought change for worthy causes. And now rancher. And all along, friend. Ben had been right. Things had turned out all right. They had weathered great disappointments and great loss. The world was changing and women were changing with it. She’d be so grateful for that. As she thought of her ever-hopeful and adventurous life, a shiver ran up her spine.

  The letter asking her to speak to the Columbian Exposition in Chicago brought a welcome change. Here was a prime opportunity to once again be on the national stage. And they would pay her and cover her expenses. It was to celebrate the quadricentennial of Columbus’s discovery of the Americas, and she would use that idea of discovery to frame her entire speech. She wrote on the porch table at the lodge, Ben rocking in the chair beside her.

  “Ben, I’ve come up with a doozy of a speech.” The dog thumped his tail on the boards at the sound of her voice. Ben said nothing so she spoke to Champ. “I’m going to invite them to think what exploration would have looked like if Columbus had landed on the West Coast instead of the East. We’d have an entirely different country. We’d all have pioneering spirits pushing us east, creating not only geographic explorations but economic, social, moral, and intellectual discoveries with a different cast. I’ll show them that men and women would have been seen as equal, discovering ‘with’ each other. Don’t you think that sounds like a good approach?”

  Champ lifted his head, his tongue hanging out, responding to the enthusiasm in her voice.

  “The dog gets it.” She spoke to Ben’s silence.

  Her speech was innovative, and she could encourage the idea that there were new opportunities in the West. Women could homestead and become property owners. There were new possibilities in this rugged mountain landscape, just as there’d been for her. The energy of her having thought of such an inventive approach kept her mind spinning with new metaphors and imagery that she thought the largely eastern audience would find compelling. This was the fervor she’d been missing. Even when she’d written The Coming Century—Journal of Progress and Reform and gotten it published through ’91 and ’92, she hadn’t felt the zest and zeal of knowing she’d be speaking to a large crowd with an inventive presentation. Spoken words had power too. They could help people look at things in different ways, and that was worthy work, even if how people chose to act because of those words weren’t her ways.

  She took Ben back to Portland and headed east for the speech. It was a marvel of a time for her, despite her need of the cane and her female parts causing pain.

  “Such a wonderful speech, Mrs. Duniway.” “Thank you for coming so far and at such a physical cost to you.”

  Abigail soaked in the praise, even though she knew accolades shouldn’t fall on her but for the cause. Still, she wrote to Shirley and her sisters about the excitement of the exposition. “Maybe Oregon will do something like it for the 100th anniversary of the exploration of Lewis and Clark in 1905.” Of course, Harvey had been selected to chair that event. Maybe by then they’d be successful with the vote and he’d have to recognize the reality of women’s suffrage whether he liked it or not. There was a new campaign set for 1900. She would be involved. She’d already designed the banner.

  She had lost the Ben she’d known and loved years before. The boys said the same thing, that the Pa they’d adored and tended wasn’t the man they said their final goodbyes to in October of ’96.

  Ben had witnessed the three weddings of ’94 when Clyde, Willis, and Wilke all found their life mates and married. And while he likely didn’t realize it, Idaho passed women’s suffrage in a statewide election with every county except Custer—the one they lived in—voting yes. It was good Ben didn’t know about that. Abigail was sure it was over that water argument they’d waged with neighbors.

  They’d sold the ranch, not getting nearly enough for it, but back in Portland, she and Ben had found a quiet life. She wrote her novels. More than nineteen, the last one in two parts, completed before Ben’s death. She noted that she’d been most productive during the years she had the newspaper, as though having a dozen brands in the flames gave her impetus and order. She wasn’t writing articles much, except copies of her speeches. The buyer of the New Northwest had gone under less than two years after the purchase. She learned later that it was a friend of Harvey’s who had bought it, and she wondered if perhaps he deliberately ran it into the ground. But her sons assured her that without major investors like the Oregonian attracted, a newspaper’s success depended on a commitment like hers that carried the charge ever forward as she had. The boys had withdrawn their shares of the business and moved on to new lives, first the ranch in Idaho and then later, when it was sold, on to legal work, university presidencies, and becoming the state’s printer. It was as it should have been.

  But she missed Ben. Missed his calm and wisdom and shared understandings, especially about Mr. Bunter, who continued until his own death the following year, still a bachelor, complaining about strong-minded women.

  Most importantly, Ben was now in a place where he truly didn’t have a worry in the world. Her worries were pecuniary ones. She badgered the boys into setting up a trust they paid into, giving her a small monthly income. Not enough to hobnob with the women’s club members in Portland, though she had founded that club, but someone had paid her dues. She thought it might have been her daughters-in-law. She liked the work they were doing for Portland’s beautification, but she yearned for the fight for the vote. For all the confidence she exuded when on the stage or in the fight, it was Ben’s assurance she was doing something worthwhile that had sustained her. She had resented him at times during the marriage—the notes he’d signed, leaving her off the ranch title, his need for care when they had so little funds and she needed care herself—but when he told her not to worry and to do what she knew well, she’d carried on. It was what women did.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Abigail Scott Duniway Day

  1905

  _______

  Shirley came to the Clay Street house to retrieve Abigail. A spring rain served as prelude to a warming sun, both bringing out the smells of pine trees and lifting Abigail’s spirits. Kate settled the pins in Abigail’s hat, held the mirror for her to as
sess the look. It was the week of the big 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition, and the National American Woman Suffrage Association convention had been meeting for several days now in Portland, their activities wrapped into the exhibits. Her brother Harvey, chairing the exposition, had surprised her by inviting the association to meet as part of the events in Portland. She’d been wary but hoped perhaps he had come to his senses and would support the suffrage amendment on the ballot for 1906. Abigail had read an opening speech, “Centennial Ode,” her voice a bit shaky as she still struggled with her rheumatism and the aftereffects of having two toes amputated when the infections wouldn’t heal.

  “I hope I’m up to the day’s events,” Abigail said. “I’ve wanted my eastern colleagues to enjoy Oregon hospitality, but I haven’t been up to much of it myself.”

  “Your minions have taken care of things.” Kate tied the hat bow beneath Abigail’s chin. A banner reading “Votes for Women” flapped from the porch railing.

  “Don’t get the strings caught in my double chins.” I’ve put on so much weight just sitting around. “I need to leave those morning donuts alone.”

  “If Maria was still here, she’d have rustled up precious knitted gifts or made sure everyone went out to see Multnomah Falls,” Kate said.

  Abigail lamented not being able to organize everything as she had in the old days.

  “Your youngest sister, Maria, right?” Shirley clarified.

  Abigail nodded. “Died in ’01. The year after we failed yet another vote. I think it broke her heart. At least she wasn’t alive to see the ’03 defeat too. That was another tough loss. Miss that girl. Miss dear Ben too.”

  Abigail held the mirror. Gone were the long curls. Her hair was smoothed beneath her hat, a bun snuggled in at the back of her neck.

  Shirley nodded approval. “California still doesn’t have suffrage either, so don’t be too hard on yourselves.”

  “That’s two of our dear sisters who made the Oregon Trail journey, gone to be with Momma and Papa.” Kate sighed.

  “Not sure what good I’ll do you or the cause today,” Abigail said. “I haven’t yet, it seems.” They walked out toward the landau Harvey had sent Shirley in to retrieve Abigail. Another surprising generosity of her brother. After all these yearsm does he feel guilty?

  “I wouldn’t be here today without you, Abigail,” Shirley said.

  “Me? What did I have to do with it?”

  “You’ve been a kaleidoscope of goodness in my life—and that of hundreds of women. Specifically, don’t you remember what you said when Clara died? That it was the nearby, not the faraway, that mattered in life, that you wished you’d have moved right next door to her when her husband took her to the wilds of Washougal.”

  “I did wish I’d done that.”

  “I did do that when our Mary and Walter bought their land in Idaho.”

  “I don’t think I realized that was why you and Eloi left San Francisco.”

  “Well, it was. And you were a part of that.”

  “Not my ranch. Ben’s gone and so is that land with a river named Pahsimeroi running through it. Pa-simmer-eye. I love the sound of that Shoshone word.”

  “You’ve always loved words,” Shirley said. “It was what drew me to you on the trail, when you read from the journal you kept. You were a map for me.”

  “Isn’t that strange. I remember dreaming of maps after Momma died. Life doesn’t give us one, does it?”

  “We do what we see to do and trust there’ll be a light to guide our way in the dark times.” Abigail hoisted herself into the carriage, and Kate slipped in beside her. Shirley did the same from the other side.

  She could hear the clop-clop of the horses’ hooves on the cobblestones. “Now whatever good I can do, I’ll do right here in Oregon,” Abigail said. “But I’m afraid some of the NAWSA members would say I’ve done more harm than good, Harvey and I have. He wrote the most scathing editorial opposed to us before the 1900 and 1903 vote, and I suspect he’ll do the same in ’06. Look at this noggin.” She patted the hat on her head. “Bumps everywhere from this suffrage work. What do you suppose Harvey’s up to, being so nice to the association? Such work we have to do.”

  “But pleasure too, Sister,” Kate said.

  Shirley laughed, then turned to face her friend, hands over Abigail’s gloved ones resting in her lap. “You never really knew your influence, Jenny. It wasn’t in the big campaigning or even the novels and newspapers. It was in the everyday living that you did, writing your own map for how to proceed from tragedy and trials, disappointment and defeat. You cared for and about others and learned lessons in your still hunt.”

  “Some took me awhile. Like holding my tongue.”

  “Oh, you’re still working on that one,” Kate said.

  “You did all that without even knowing it, I suspect, how you brought hope to our lives.” Shirley had tears in her eyes.

  Kate said, “A fierce love for justice and liberty for all of us. That’s your legacy.”

  “A passion, I’d say, for anything you put your heart toward. Even when things didn’t pan out,” Shirley said. “When no gold sank to the bottom, you never begrudged the effort of looking for it and helping others swirl the waters in their seeking.” Shirley put her arm through Abigail’s.

  “If you only knew,” Abigail said. She thought of Ben, Clara, her other children too. There were regrets. But Ben would be the first to tell her not to worry over the past. “I didn’t know I needed to hear such good words. Thank you, Shirley, Kate.

  “I am so excited about this day,” Shirley said. “Your children are already at the pavilion, along with Eloi and Fanny and all the nieces and nephews.”

  “My children? Aren’t we just having a little tea to encourage campaigners?”

  “We are doing that, too, with you, dear Abigail, as the sweetener,” Shirley said.

  Abigail guffawed and the horse’s ears twitched to the sound. “Sweet has never been a moniker given to me.”

  “It only takes a pinch to stir up a little joy,” Kate said.

  The driver chirped at the team and the horses pulled forward a little faster. The breeze cooled her face.

  “Today,” Kate said, “we’re also celebrating the Abigail Scott Duniway Day.”

  “We are?”

  “Your brother Harvey arranged for it. The entire day is about you, Abigail.” Shirley blinked back tears.

  “Harvey organized it?”

  “He’ll be there for the photograph taking, with you and Susan B. in the front row.”

  “I’m . . . speechless.”

  Both Shirley and Kate laughed. “That’s something for the woman who gave more than, what, fifteen hundred speeches? I can hardly wait to hear what you don’t say today,” Kate said. “The woman who spoke up for liberty. That’s you. The woman who stays the course, even when there are boulders in the road.”

  Epilogue

  1912

  _______

  Abigail

  Well, it finally happened. Oregon women finally earned the right to vote. I lived to see it! My brother Harvey did not. He was far away in Maryland when he passed three years ago, unexpectedly, but then is death ever expected? Even with an illness it comes as a shock. He needed emergency surgery, and it ended badly. He left his family well-off, his wife a millionaire, but she earned it having to live with him all those years. Oh, I should let it go now. I’ve had my life as rich as his, and we found a truce before the end, despite his editorials at each campaign urging defeat. And he had his own defeat when he ran for the Senate.

  Oregon went through six suffrage campaigns before the vote arrived. Washington women got their say—again—in 1910. California beat us too, voting it in last fall. I suspect Harvey’s opposition had something to do with Oregon’s delay, and perhaps my own fractious ways contributed as well. Kate notes that. I can take criticism from her.

  I have time now to write my autobiography. I’ve already begun, and the title will be Path Breaking:
An Autobiographical History of the Equal Suffrage Movement in Oregon. I’ll write of the struggles but also the triumphs. We had them both, but that is what passion is about, is it not? The ups and downs, being in the thick of things and then wasting away at times in the thin of them. Women were appointed to public posts even before they could vote. Oregon had a female public health officer, and Lola Baldwin became the first woman detective in the entire nation. She served right here in Portland. Even a female market inspector happened before we had the vote, and why not? Who better than a woman to know about pork and health and, yes, enforcing the laws that we had no say in making but can recognize justice when it’s needed?

  I’ll write too of my greatest achievement and greatest assets—my children. I love them so, and they are coming here for this big occasion. I wish Sarah Maria and Maggie had lived to see this day and Little Toot. And Ben. And Clara Belle, who sang at those suffrage meetings and gave me permission to continue on even while she breathed her last. Both she and Ben had those glorious voices. Ben thought I didn’t notice and perhaps I might not have said so as often as I should have, but I heard them and take comfort in those little things remembered, the things nearby.