Aside from Mr. Bledsoe’s forays into the kitchen to put more water on the stove or dump out what we’d used, the men—even my father—had been banned from the house all this time, forced to take their baths in the nearby creek. Now, though, the downstairs filled with masculine rumbles of conversation and laughter, and I felt the safety I’d felt down in the kitchen triple.
In a fun change of fortune, Chester himself brought up supper to Phoebe and me, and I took great joy in watching him carry the tray to the bed and set it down just so.
“And my napkin?” I asked, settling myself against the pillows.
“Mademoiselle.” He bowed low, brandishing a square of gingham cloth.
“And for Phoebe?” I added, since she didn’t appear to want to join in the game.
“But of course,” Chester said, adopting a comical French accent as he fussed about us, picking up our glasses to take sips of water as if to ensure that Mrs. Bledsoe didn’t intend to poison us in revenge for blackening her best washtub.
I continued to play the role of pouting princess and Phoebe kept her self-conscious silence until Chester left the room. Then, faced with the finest meal we’d seen since the steamboat’s dining room, we tore into our suppers with a most unladylike abandon. Savory pork sausage links and potatoes that had been parboiled, then fried with onions and seasoned with salt and black pepper. A hunk of rich, dark bread spread with butter, and a small dish of blackberry preserves.
By the time I got to the end of the meal, I wondered if perhaps Chester hadn’t been wise to check the water after all, because I was overcome with such fatigue I nearly fell asleep with a spoonful of preserves lodged in my cheek. Phoebe was tired too, and we grunted through a debate about whether to take our trays down to the kitchen, but settled on the side of laziness and placed them on the floor at the foot of the bed.
I have no idea who eventually took them away.
When I awoke later, I fully expected dawn to be around the corner, but one look out the window showed it to be the thick, still hours of the night. The open window made the room chilly, so I swung my feet over the side of the bed—wincing a bit at the pain in my back and shoulders—and walked over to close it. Lifting my arms proved an impossibility, however, and when I turned around, I saw that Phoebe had cocooned herself in the bed’s only blanket. Mrs. Bledsoe had mentioned having extra bedding in a trunk in Mother and Daddy’s room. My sense of entitlement had grown since arriving here, so I thought nothing of crossing the hall and fumbling around in the dark to find it.
I did extend the courtesy of being as quiet as possible, turning the knob of my parents’ door slowly, carefully, silently. When the door was opened just a crack, I leaned forward to listen for my father’s snoring, but heard nothing. Then again, I did hear something—their voices in conversation downstairs. I meant to just go inside, find a blanket, and creep back to my room, but the tone of their voices drew me. I’d lived my life listening to my parents. I’d heard them fight, my mother’s shrill voice running circles against Daddy’s short bursts of angry retorts. I’d heard them laugh at his comic renditions of their friends. I’d listened to low, passionate whispers—sometimes in broad daylight on the other side of the parlor door.
But what I was hearing now was different.
I remember once, standing out in our front yard with my father, the air perfectly still. No breeze whatsoever, like the entire world was clapped under a gray glass dome. “There’s going to be a storm,” Daddy had said. “God’s just building up for it.”
That was the essence of their conversation now. One steady volume interrupted by bouts of silence. An unnatural calm. I turned away from their room and made my way quietly down the hall, then silently down the stairs until I was on the third step. I couldn’t see my parents, but I could tell the room was full of low lamplight, and I was able to hear every soft, monotonous word.
“You’re quite sure. Everything?” Mother said.
“Ellen, I’m so sorry.”
“And the house?”
“Selling was the only option. We would have lost it soon anyway.”
“All of our things?”
“We couldn’t have brought them with us.”
There was a beat of silence during which everything I’d heard settled in my head. Gone. Everything gone. Not destroyed by any fire or storm. Simply … gone.
“I don’t understand how this happened,” Mother spoke, again in that eerily even tone.
“It’s complicated, dear. Demand was up, but we couldn’t—”
“I’m not a fool, Robert.” The calmness in her voice remained, but it was rimmed with a sharp, steel edge. “I understand the workings of a business. I was with you, remember? I was there beside you through every bit and piece of it. What I don’t understand is how you could have lied to me.”
“That was wrong, I know.”
“Or maybe I am a fool, and I just don’t understand how I could be so foolish as to let all of this fall apart around me.”
She sobbed a little then, and I could picture her, head bent low over the table, my father looking helplessly on—images I’d never been able to conjure before this afternoon in the stagecoach.
“And what,” Mother said, sniffing a bit, “do you think Silas will do with the business? Does he have some sort of magic touch that will bring it all back?”
“I’m not sure—”
“You didn’t ask?”
“He was willing to buy. It was a way out.”
“Oh, what my sister must think of me.”
“She didn’t know. Silas and I agreed—”
“She knows now!” Mother raised her voice, and I heard the little thump of her fist slamming on the table. When she spoke again, it was softer. “She knows everything, and what a laugh she must be having—living in the spoils of our failure while I’m stuck with that insipid brat of hers.”
I heard a sharp, small sound behind me and turned to see Phoebe sitting two steps above me. She was wrapped in the blanket from our bed. She came down to sit beside me, holding out the blanket to encompass both of us. I turned to Phoebe, my face full of an appeasing smile as if to apologize for my mother’s thoughtless comments, but she simply stared forward, her stone-still face the merest shadow in the stolen light of the kitchen.
“I wanted to protect you,” Daddy was saying. Mother’s only reply was a derisive laugh. “I knew how much our life meant to you. Our society. I couldn’t face losing all that. Seeing you lose everything you cared about.”
“You are what I care about, Robert,” Mother said, although her voice conveyed little passion behind the words. “You and the children. I am your wife. I’m to be your helpmeet.”
“There’s nothing you could have done.”
“How do you know that? You didn’t try. We might have been able to do something together. I could have prayed for you. Prayed with you.”
“Don’t you think I’ve prayed about this?” I heard the chair scrape on the floor and my father came into my view. He faced away from us, and Phoebe and I drew back further in the shadows lest he turn around. He looked smaller than I ever remembered seeing him, his shoulders stooped in unfamiliar defeat. “I don’t remember the last decent night’s sleep I’ve had. I’m up, middle of the night—sometimes all night—on my knees begging God for an answer. For direction.”
“And this is the answer He gave you?”
“I thought so, yes.”
“And you think it was His will for you to lie to your wife, to deceive your children?”
That seemed to deflate him completely. He turned around, but his eyes passed right over me; if he’d been looking, he would have seen me. He stepped out of my view again and went back to my mother. I leaned forward and ventured the tiniest peek around the corner of the stairwell and saw them—my mother seated regally in her chair, the lamplight filling the wall with her shadow, and my father on his knees before her, grasping her hand, his head nestled in her lap. If I didn’t know it was such a s
in, I could have hated her at that moment.
“I didn’t know what to do.” Daddy’s voice was muffled by my mother’s skirts. “I thought that if you saw this as an adventure rather than a defeat … if you could just think of it as an opportunity for a new beginning …”
His voice dissolved, and I hoped Mother was offering some measure of comfort, stroking his hair, perhaps. Bending deep to shush him with kisses. After a moment she asked, very quietly, “Just what do we have left?”
“Just what we’re traveling with. The cash in my wallet.”
“And it isn’t much, is it?”
“No, but think of it this way, Ellen.” Daddy’s voice sported renewed strength. “We have more than most people ever dream of having. Back home it wouldn’t buy us a month of living how we used to, but in Oregon, it’ll buy us a farm. It’ll be enough to start a smaller business, if you want to do that. There are people who haven’t got five dollars to their name crossing this country the same as we are.”
“Well, not quite the same,” Mother said, and I was relieved to hear a hint of humor in her voice. Something had broken.
“True,” Daddy said, his tone cautiously light. “Darling, I wanted this to be as painless as possible for you. I sank every dime I could into the steamboat and the coach ride. I couldn’t very well see you squatting next to a wagon cooking johnnycakes.”
“No, I don’t suppose so.” Mother’s voice was almost warm.
“So you’ll forgive me, Ellen?”
“You are my husband, Robert. God has charged me to submit to you.”
“And He has charged me to love you. And all of this is because I love you. Can you understand that?”
“I do,” Mother said softly.
“But submission and understanding—they aren’t the same as forgiveness, are they?”
“No, Robert. Not tonight.”
9
The next morning our family gathered together for breakfast in the Bledsoes’ kitchen. Mr. Bledsoe was outside helping the driver hitch up the teams, and Mrs. Bledsoe was busy overseeing the loading of our baggage onto the boot of the stagecoach.
“Don’t you rush, don’t you rush at all,” she’d said as she backed out of her kitchen with a small case in each hand. “You just take your time and eat your fill. I’ll see to it that no one disturbs you until you’re ready.”
She must have heard everything too.
Our plates were filled with bright yellow scrambled eggs and biscuits that steamed when they were sliced open to take on Mrs. Bledsoe’s white, pepper-flaked gravy. The stagecoach horses obviously shared their barn with a cow, because Phoebe and I had glasses of warm, fresh milk, while Mother, Daddy, and Chester stirred some into their cups of coffee. What a shame to have such bounty languish on our plates. My body ached with the effort of lifting my fork; Mother made no attempt to even pick hers up. Daddy and Phoebe both ate with methodical deliberation, forcing small bites through thin lips and taking great pains not to clink their forks against the plates. Only Chester attacked this meal with the vigor it deserved, creating his trademark stew of eggs, biscuits, and gravy in the center of his plate and using his spoon to bring heaps of it up to his mouth. He took a swig of coffee after every third bite, helped himself to a drink of my milk after every fourth, and seemed completely oblivious to the silent turbulence around him.
Mother dislodged one of her hands from her lap, reached for her coffee, took a sip, and nestled the cup back in its saucer. “Robert,” she said, once her hand was safely back in place, “don’t you have something to tell the children?”
“Should I leave?” Phoebe asked, her eyes narrowed to mere slits, making no effort to hide her disdain. “Is this a family matter?”
“Don’t be silly,” Mother said. “You are family, after all.”
Daddy took one last sip of his coffee, pulled the napkin from where he’d tucked it into his shirt collar, and unnecessarily dabbed at his beard. “Well, everybody,” he spoke to his largely untouched breakfast, “there are some things you all should know …”
He stirred the story around the table, a soft monologue of unforeseen disaster, filling in all the details I’d missed the night before. Competition from larger factories. Impending war in the South. Bad investments. Miscalculations. A slow, bleeding loss that brought us to this point. Mother looked down and fiddled with her napkin, allowing us to believe we were the only ones to have been deceived, but as Daddy talked about the expense and luxury of the steamship, a slight smile tugged at the corner of her mouth, as if she were about to hum a dinnertime waltz.
“Which brings us to where we are today.” Daddy propped his elbows on the table and rested his chin on his clasped hands. “I thought I was protecting all of you and that our journey would be a lark. I thought with a new home and a new life, you wouldn’t see what was … missing.”
I followed his gaze across the table toward Mother, who lifted her head to meet his eyes. “I’ve asked God to forgive me,” Daddy continued, “for being so shortsighted. For not trusting Him the same way I didn’t trust you. And I’ve asked your mother to forgive me for lying to her. Now—” His voice disappeared for a moment. “Now I come to you, Belinda and Chester, asking you—”
“Of course we do,” I said. It was a terrible thing, seeing my father’s spirit and strength eviscerated before me, splayed out on the table in front of us. “If anything, you should forgive us for making you feel like you couldn’t come to us with the truth.”
“Belinda, that’s enough,” Mother said. “You’ve quite forgotten your place.”
“Just don’t forget your place, Mother. By your husband’s side. Whatever he decides.”
Nobody at the table could have been more shocked at my boldness than I was, but still I didn’t shrink back. I held my aching shoulders straight and looked my mother square in the eye, daring her to contradict me.
“Apologize to your mother.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, for Daddy’s sake rather than hers, “but it wouldn’t be fair to—”
“What wouldn’t be fair would be to blindly continue on as we have been. Now, the cards are on the table.” Daddy offered an indulgent smile to Chester, who had been following this exchange with an air of calculated boredom. “And we’re at a crossroads. The money that I’m carrying is all we have. It’s plenty to start up new in Oregon. Farming, maybe a little store. Or we could go back home. Buy a smaller house. Invest in the foundry—”
“Never,” Mother said, and we all jumped a little at the level of disgust in her voice, except for Phoebe, who shrank back in her chair.
“No, none of that,” Daddy said. “If we go on, it has to be for the right reason. Not just because we’re afraid to go back.”
“It’s a gamble.” Somehow Chester’s plate had been emptied, and he reached across to stab a forkful of eggs from mine.
“Oh, spare us,” Mother said. “We certainly don’t need to hear your—”
“Let him speak,” Daddy said. “He’s a man now. Go ahead, Son.”
Chester cleared his throat. “When you’ve got a hand of cards, you’d be a fool to throw your money on the table because you’re afraid of what you’ve lost already.” Mother gave an audible little snort, but Chester ignored her and went on. “You put your money down because you believe—you have to believe—that what you’re holding are the winning cards. You can’t waste time thinking about the hands you lost. You’ve got to do what’s best with the ones you’re holding.”
Daddy looked at Chester with an expression akin to gratitude. Mother seemed less convinced, though, and even Chester seemed a little surprised at the apparent wisdom coming out of his mouth.
“That’s what faith is,” I chimed in, eager to bolster my father’s case. “And we have to trust God to be with us—just like we always have.”
“Well, we can’t expect God to just ignore our mistakes.” Mother looked at my father.
“Not ignore them, Mother,” I said, “but He does forgive the
m. And then He tosses them away. As far as God is concerned, we’ve been given a fresh start. A whole new journey. We can’t assume that He would abandon us simply because of Daddy’s misjudgment.”
Mother shifted her gaze to me. “I am not going to have this conversation with a child.”
“She’s not a child.” Daddy reached across to cover my hand with his. “She’s a young woman who seems to have more faith in God than any of the rest of us do. And the Bible says our sins are tossed as far as the east is from the west. Well, right now we’re about as far from the west as we are from the east. We can go either way, but I say we press on—”
“How does that verse go?” I asked. “Forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forth—”
“Philippians,” Mother said, sounding defeated, “chapter three. ‘Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.’ ”
“Amen,” Daddy said, making Mother’s recitation a prayer for our family.
Our family embarked on the next leg of our journey with renewed vigor. Perhaps it was the knowledge of having essentially nothing to return to that made us embrace the unknown, but within a few days, even Mother’s face would beam a little when we talked about the new life waiting to be claimed.
While the conditions of our travel did not improve, we seemed to encounter more of God’s little blessings along the way. The stagecoach was as harrowing and uncomfortable as ever, but we laughed more as we careened into one another. Our lodgings continued to range from crude to uninhabitable, but at least we were afforded more frequent overnight stops. We came together in prayer every evening and met each morning with a new sense of purpose.
Some of the stations were actually forts built to house soldiers posted to protect emigrants from Indian attacks. I found this amusing, as it seemed there were always a few Indians living within the forts’ walls or just outside—quiet, peaceful people wholly unlike the painted savages that made Mother hold her breath. We occasionally saw those savages too, or at least the evidence of them as we passed the charred buildings left in the wake of their raids. Daddy tried to reassure us that we were quite safe—Indians rarely attacked a stagecoach, as we had nothing of value to them and posed no threat. But still, sometimes in the night we would hear the sounds of battle cries and in the day see them proud upon their mounts on the horizon, and I would ask God to keep a wide path between us and them.
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