by Rosalyn Eves
I nod, not trusting myself to speak. I suck at the roof of my mouth, trying to keep tears at bay. Mumbling something I hope sounds like thanks, I escape as soon as I can.
I walk at random for a while, trying to decide what to do. I’ve forgotten to ask if Dr. Avery knows of anyone with rooms to let, but the humiliation is still too raw for me to force myself to return to the doctor’s house.
Perhaps I should just give up, go back to the train station, and beg enough money to get to Rebekka. To get home. Helping Mama, watching my siblings, those are tasks I know, tasks I’m good at. This—watching the eclipse, studying the stars—I might not be any good at. I might fail.
But everything in me resists the idea.
If I go home now, for the rest of my life, I’d wonder what would have happened if I stayed. I’ll sleep on the streets if I have to. Summer evenings in July can’t be that cold.
A splatter of rain lands on my nose.
All right, I will have to find a place out of the rain, but I can make do. I can even draw the corona for Dr. Colbert, if nothing else presents itself—though after the prospect of working with Miss Mitchell, it feels rather like snatching at crumbs from a table, after everyone else has been fed.
Still, crumbs are better than nothing.
Eventually, I wind up at the library again, where I flip through a few recent newspapers, searching for reports of other astronomers in town for the eclipse. I know from conversations at Dr. Avery’s that Dr. Charles Young, from Princeton, has a camp somewhere south of town, but I cannot find any specifics of where.
Finally, I give up and walk to the headquarters of the Denver Tribune, where I pester passing journalists until one of them, at last, gives me the directions I need.
Professor Young’s camp lies a couple of miles south of downtown, in a cottonwood grove alongside Cherry Creek. The camp is bustling when I arrive, mostly sunburned young men wandering between the tents and some wooden shacks. The scent of a savory stew floats over the trees.
A tall, dark-haired young man is the first to spot me. “Well, hello there. Are you lost, miss?”
I take a deep breath and square my shoulders. I can do this. “I’m looking for Professor Young. Is he available?”
The boy squints at me. “Twinkle? What do you want him for? You a reporter?”
I shake my head, trying not to feel daunted. “I’m an astronomer. That is, I’d like to be. I can do anything you need—help with instruments, fetch things, time the eclipse. I even know how to draw the corona.”
The young man stares at me for a long moment before giving a crack of laughter. “You? An astronomer? And will you bring your knitting and your darning to the eclipse? Go home, girl. You don’t belong here.”
I don’t move, though my cheeks burn. Maybe this was a mistake. “I’d like to speak to Professor Young.”
By this point, our exchange has drawn a few more boys. The first tells them, “This girl is looking to join us.”
“For what?” a blond boy with a scraggly mustache asks. “Do we look like we’re hosting a dance out here?”
“Says she wants to be an astronomer.”
“And become one of those sexless prudes in Mitchell’s group?” a third boy asks. He turns to me. “Lady, you don’t want to do that. Trust me. You’re better off finding yourself a nice boy.”
The blond boy elbows in. “Only not him. He’s a bit of a masher.”
I don’t know what that word means, but it hardly matters. It’s clear these boys don’t take me seriously. I know Princeton is supposed to be a fancy school, but I don’t think much of it if this is how they encourage their students to behave.
“Is Professor Young here?” I persist.
An older man with dark, silver-threaded hair makes his way from one of the tents. “What’s all this about?”
With great delight, the boys tell him about my ridiculous request. Professor Young—at least I assume it’s him from the way the tall boy calls him “Twinkle”—turns to me with pursed lips.
“Your interest in science is commendable, young lady, if perhaps a bit misguided. I’m afraid we’re an all-boys setup here. Hardly a suitable place for a girl, even if we had work for you. But my students have everything covered.”
He smiles kindly at me, but the dismissal is clear. I thank him, then ask, “And Professor William Pickering? Do you know if he needs assistance?”
The dark-haired boy wrinkles his nose. “Pickering? That MIT crowd is even rougher than we are, miss. You’d do better to stay in town and watch the eclipse with the other locals.”
“Wait,” the blond boy says, with the exaggerated air of one coming to a brilliant conclusion. “I’ve got it! We just had a wire from Pikes Peak that one of their astronomers is down with altitude sickness. No doubt you could be of great use to them.” He sniggers.
“If you can make it that far,” another adds, and then they all dissolve into laughter.
I can still hear them cackling as I round a bend in the road, making my way back to Denver.
chapter twenty-three
Friday, July 26, 1878
Denver, Colorado
Three days until eclipse
It’s late afternoon before I reach the Trans-Oceana to make good on my promise to retrieve my trunk. I’ll sleep in the train station for the night and figure out a new plan in the morning.
It amuses me—as much as I can be amused, just now—to think how far I’ve come from that scared country girl on the first night of my journey east, afraid to spend the night outside the station in Salt Lake City. I don’t look forward to a night on my trunk, but I’m not scared of it anymore.
There’s a different clerk waiting behind the front desk now, and I rush forward, words of explanation about my trunk dying on my tongue as I see someone rise from one of the wingback chairs in the lobby.
Alice.
I shouldn’t be surprised to see her in her grandpa’s hotel, but shock still pricks through me. I assumed we’d tacitly agreed to avoid each other.
“This came for you,” Alice says, holding out the familiar rectangular shape of a telegram. Her voice is cool, but a tiny divot between her eyebrows betrays some feeling—worry? She didn’t have to wait for me. She could have left the message with the desk clerk.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“I know,” Alice says. “I read your note. I’m sorry too. I shouldn’t have said the things I did.”
“You were right to say them. I deserved that, and more.” I take the telegram from her but don’t open it at once. It feels hot in my fingers, as though the contents might burn. “How’s Will?”
Alice turns her elegant profile toward the window. “Will is…struggling. Papa has told him he can’t leave the house except when he comes to the hotel to help Grandpa, and Will prowls the house like a wild thing. Papa wants him to learn responsibility, threatened to disown him if he doesn’t stop acting like a young fool, but he hasn’t given Will any directions on how to do that, and I’m afraid Will might do something rash in the meantime.”
I widen my eyes. “More rash than walking across a train trestle?”
Alice laughs, then sobers. “Maybe more permanently rash. He needs a distraction, but I don’t know what to offer him.” She turns back to me and nods at the paper in my hand. “You should read that.”
My hands shake as I read the few words printed. Mama is poorly again wants you home. Emily. Rebekka must have sent them my address.
I read it again, trying to figure out what my sister left out in the gaps between her words. Mama is poorly, how? Is it her usual troubles, or something different? “Again” suggests her usual dark moods, but I can’t be sure.
“Are you all right?” Alice asks. “Here, you should sit down.”
I take the chair she was sitting in earlier and stare up at her.
The tips of my fingers tingle, but I cannot figure out what I feel. I should be shocked, or alarmed, or sad, but all I feel is a heavy weight, as though everything from the past day has gathered up into a great lump in my chest.
Alice calls to the desk clerk, telling him to fetch us some tea from the kitchen, then sits in a seat facing me. “Trouble at home?”
“My mama’s sick.”
“I saw,” Alice says, a trifle apologetically. “Hard not to see, with a telegram. It came to the house earlier and I’ve been looking for you all over. Mrs. Segura said you don’t work here anymore. What happened?”
“Someone saw me coming out of Samuel’s room. It wasn’t anything, but it looked bad. I just came back to fetch my trunk.”
“You’re heading home, then?”
Until the last five minutes, I’d have said no. I meant to stay for the eclipse. But Mama—Mama is a responsibility I can’t easily ignore. “I don’t know. My family needs me.”
“And the eclipse?”
I run the toe of my boot across the carpet. “I’ve always done what my mama needed, up until this journey. And now everything has gone to pieces. So maybe I was wrong to pursue what I wanted.” Rebekka told me I should come to Denver, to the eclipse, to see if that’s what God wanted for me. Maybe this is my sign that it isn’t.
“Or maybe it’s not what you wanted, but how you pursued it,” Alice says. “You can’t lie about who you are and expect everything to turn out right.”
“I know,” I say, my voice small. “I told Miss Mitchell the truth. She was very nice about it, but I’m not welcome back to their site. No one else in town seems to want my help either. Perhaps this is for the best.”
Alice taps her fingertips together. “You gave me your sister’s words when I needed them. Let me tell you something my mama taught me. You know she isn’t like most society mamas. She works at the hotel almost as hard as Grandpa. She’s had to give up some things to do that—time with us, charity work. But she makes sure all those things get done. She donates to charity, hires people to take care of the house and meet our needs.
“Mama says it’s like a scale.” She raises one hand. “On one side are the needs of our community—our family, friends, even people we don’t know. On the other are our own needs. If the scale gets out of balance, if we give too much to our community and neglect ourselves, we get sick or unhappy, and then it’s hard to meet those needs.” She lifts the other hand. “If we only fill our own scale, then the community suffers, and our lives are poorer.”
A maid brings two cups and saucers to us. Alice takes them and sets them on the dainty round table between our two chairs. “It’s not wrong to want something for yourself. It doesn’t make you selfish to honor your needs, to believe your dreams matter. It only becomes selfish if the balance tips too far.”
Picking up my cup, I hold my hands around the fragile curve of the warmed porcelain. I think of my parents, how Far collects papers and spends time with Aunt Olena, how he smokes behind the barn when he thinks Mama doesn’t know. When Mama isn’t sick, she walks into town to gossip with the sisters. She sleeps when she’s tired. When she doesn’t get those things, she’s short and unhappy.
“How do you know,” I ask, “whose needs are more important in the moment?”
“If I knew that, I could be the richest woman in America, selling that answer to folks.” Alice laughs a little. “Mama always tries to approach it practically. Can anyone else do this thing for me? Or is this a small desire I can put aside until time allows?”
In all the days since I’ve come to Denver, I haven’t prayed about my path. It’s as if I’ve been so focused on becoming an astronomer, I’ve forgotten how to be Mormon too. While Alice sips her tea, I offer a silent prayer: Father, Mother, what should I do?
For a moment, there’s nothing but stillness. Then—
A powerful warm wave shudders through me.
Stay.
I look back at Alice to find her watching me, a smile in her eyes.
Experiencing the eclipse, deciding if I should be an astronomer—this isn’t something anyone else can do for me.
“I’m going to stay,” I say. “I’ll go home as soon after as I can, but I need to do this for myself.”
Alice grins at me. “Good.”
A glimmer of an idea takes shape. “But I won’t stay here in Denver. I want to see the eclipse from Pikes Peak.”
The boy in Dr. Young’s camp never intended me to take his words seriously, but if the scientists at Pikes Peak need an extra hand, it’s worth the chance. Even if they don’t need me, the extra altitude of the peak might make a difference to my experience. Miss Mitchell explained to us that the thinner air of Colorado might be the very thing astronomers need to see the planet Vulcan. And if the air in Denver is good, then wouldn’t the air of Pikes Peak, some eight or nine thousand feet higher, be even better? I might have to sell everything left to my name—my spare clothes, my carpetbag, even my long, curling hair—but I’ll find a way to get there.
“Why Pikes Peak?” Alice asks.
I explain my reasoning, then study Alice. “You should come with me. Just think what you could paint of the view from Pikes Peak during the eclipse. I know you said you were focusing on domestic pieces, but this eclipse is going to change the West—it’ll put Colorado on the map of scientific achievement. Why not make art of that?”
After a moment’s hesitation during which I wonder if I’ve offended Alice again, her smile blooms. “Why not? I think it’s a splendid idea.”
Outside, rain spatters against the windows in the growing dark, but everything inside seems suddenly flooded with light.
When Alice sets down her teacup and stands, I rise and throw my arms around her. “Thank you,” I whisper, choking. “Thank you for helping me find myself.”
There’s a long pause while Alice stands stiff with surprise. Then she returns my hug. Her voice isn’t entirely steady when she says, “We helped each other.”
She steps back and surveys me, a considering light in her eyes. Before she even speaks, I suspect what she’s going to say.
“We should bring Will.”
* * *
* * *
I spend that night in my old room at the Stevenses’ house—a vast improvement over a trunk in the station. The morning finds us back at the train station, Alice having worked everything out to her satisfaction. She’s loaned me some supplies and funds, which I mean to pay back, and expertly managed to talk her parents around to this last-minute scheme.
“Be sure to bring warm clothes for the mountain,” Mrs. Stevens said, just before we left. “It can be cold on the peak, even in July.”
“Take care of your sister,” Mr. Stevens told Will. “I expect you to bring everyone home safe and sound.”
“Pikes Peak or bust,” Will said, drawing a cross over his heart.
A tiny smile tugged at Mr. Stevens’s mouth. “No busting, if you please. Just come back.” I think secretly Mr. Stevens was relieved to have a reason to let Will out of the house.
While we wait for the train, I dash to the telegraph office to send a note home saying I’ll be back after the eclipse and sending my love. I have faith in you, I write to Emily. I want to send a note to Samuel too, but what would I say? I’m sorry we fought, but I haven’t changed my mind. And anyway, he’ll be another week or more on the road. I’ll catch him nearly as soon as a telegram would.
By late morning, Alice, Will, and I are rattling south on the narrow-gauge lines of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, slicing through hilly country toward the mountains around Colorado Springs. Will looks tired, with dark circles under his eyes, but he’s in good spirits, teasing Alice about her art supplies.
“What kind of young lady packs more paints and brushes than dresses and boots?” he asks.
“The kind that isn’t
above painting her brother’s face in the middle of the night if he doesn’t knock it off,” Alice says calmly.
Will laughs and leans across Alice to point out some landmark in the distance.
I let the siblings’ easy chatter wash across me and hope I’ve made the right decision—about not going home, about going to Pikes Peak. It’s so easy to get decisions wrong. Like switches on a train track: a little choice, a small shift, and you can wind up hundreds of miles from where you thought to go. For all I resisted the choices Mama tried to make for me, there was comfort in not having to choose.
It’s early afternoon when we reach Colorado Springs. We walk the few blocks from the depot into the heart of town. The air is close and chilly for July. I cannot see any sign of Pikes Peak: any mountains ringing the growing town are hidden behind low-hanging clouds. I hope the clouds lift by Monday, or our view of the eclipse will be a valley full of clouds.
We stop by a wooden building whose sign reads livery, feed, and stable, asking for a guide up the mountain, but are told all available guides have been hired already for the eclipse.
Back on the street, Will studies the base of the mountain. “I’ll bet I can get us up there.”
“Mmm,” Alice agrees noncommittally. “And they’ll be digging our bodies out of a snowbank in another month. I’d be easier with someone who has been up the mountain before.”
Will wrinkles his nose at her but doesn’t argue. “Who do we know in Colorado Springs? Someone must know of a guide still in town.”
While he and Alice run down a few unlikely options, I remember the writer Alice and I met. “There’s Mrs. Jackson—that writer we met at Dr. Avery’s. She seems pretty keen on traveling and the outdoors, so she likely knows someone.”
Alice brightens. “Good idea!”
A quick inquiry at a nearby hotel turns up directions to Mrs. Jackson’s. She must be something of a celebrity, because the clerk doesn’t have to ask us who we mean.