Dora frowns at me over the letter. “Good gracious, Catrina, how unladylike.”
I glance down at the drawstring trousers and long tunic I made. I got the idea from a picture of Chinese women’s clothes I saw a long time ago in Mr. Lenox’s book about the Far East. I embroidered ivy buds along the hems. Everything is stained and dirty now.
“Maybe you should go read the letter out loud from the kitchen so you won’t have to see me. You might have to raise your voice, though.” I blow a smoke ring in her direction. “But I doubt it.”
“Oh, Cat, now you’re just being silly.” She waves my words away with the pages. “Now hush, so we can find out what Henry wrote!” She smooths the papers straight and clears her throat. “November 14, 1861, Fort Rolla, Missouri—”
“Fort Rolla?” I interrupt. “I didn’t know he was so close. I thought he was sent to Springfield.” I set my pipe down on the table next to my fiddle.
“Well, goodness, now, let’s just wait and listen to what he says.” She straightens the papers and reads Henry’s letter:
My Dear Wife,
I hope this finds you well. Since I finally have a quiet moment while the boys are smoking and supper is over, I thought I would write to you about my time away these last several weeks, which have been quite eventful. Of course, I will not mention anything too unpleasant so as not to disturb you.
“I knew it.” I roll my eyes and keep smoking.
“Shh.” Dora keeps going:
Under Maj. Gen. John C. Frémont, our boys set out to Springfield to clear Maj. Gen. Sterling Price’s Confederates from the state of Missouri. On October 25, we engaged them with this shout to our troops: “Let the watchword be ‘Frémont and the Union!’” We beat them back and claimed the victory. Afterward, our troop evacuated Springfield under Maj. Gen. David Hunter, and withdrew to Fort Rolla, where I am stationed now.
Upon our arrival in Rolla, I was informed of the savage goings-on of the group of resisters led by the Creek Indian drifter whom my father once harbored. I am grateful to God for keeping my sister safe. Please express my sympathies to the Lenox family for the hardships they were subjected to in my absence and assure them that I pledge to bring this individual to justice if his path ever crosses mine again. I was pleased to be informed that our fine Reverend Preston has taken it upon himself to join the county militia in this very spirit of justice to search him out. I do have deep concerns for my father and especially my sister being left without the preacher’s care, but I trust that you, my wife, will do your best to help in his stead as we all do what we must in these trying circumstances.
But as to the subject of the reverend’s mission, I have some confidential information for your eyes only. Please be so kind as to not share this with my dear sister, as I fear it will have an ill effect on—
Dora stops reading and blinks at me over the top of the page, wide-eyed. “Oh!” She fumbles to fold the letter. “Well broom me out! I best read the rest of this at ho—”
I leap out of my seat and snatch the letter from her hands.
“Catrina Dickinson, you give that back!” She tries to grab me as I dart away, but I don’t have any long skirts for her to catch hold of. “That letter is for my eyes only. You heard what your brother said!”
I stand on the chair so she can’t reach the letter as I read it out loud.
Please be so kind as to not share this with my dear sister, as I fear it will have an ill effect on her fragile state. You may be interested to learn that while in Springfield, we received word of a—
Dora fetches a step stool, but I kick it over before she can step onto it.
“Witchy!” Dora’s crying now. Her face turns red. “Catrina, please!”
… we received word of a large group of Creek Indians who have left Oklahoma Territory and are traveling northeast toward Fort Row in Kansas to flee the Confederates and seek asylum on the word of President Lincoln. The group consists of almost a thousand men, women, and children being led by a man named Opothle Yahola, and were said to be about two hundred miles southwest of Springfield. We had orders not to interfere with them. I tell you this because Stonefield and the bushwhackers were last seen headed toward the very path in which these Creeks are advancing. Stonefield may very well take up with them if they are to meet. This means he may return north with them in our direction, instead of traveling farther south with the outlaws. This is a great concern to me. If word is received from Reverend Preston—
I stop reading out loud and continue to myself without speaking, so Dora can’t hear.
If word is received from Reverend Preston, I ask that you copy the information I have given you here and include it in a letter to him if he provides an address where he can be reached. Samuel will know what to do.
Lord. My heart’s pounding so fast.
“Catrina,” Dora whines, “if you’re going to steal my very own letter, the least you can do is keep reading it to me!”
“I lost my place.” I run my finger over the part where Henry asks Dora to write the preacher about Stonefield, skipping ahead to the end. “Oh, here it is.”
I know things have been difficult since the conscription, with our horses taken from you and few friends left in Roubidoux to help. I have been concerned for you and Father being able to find workers for the harvest after I left. Please do write to keep me informed.
Dora makes a slight whimpering sound. Everyone’s crops are rotting in the fields; there’s no one to help bring them in. Papa’s down to his nest egg savings and making coffee with ground-up acorns. I swallow hard and keep reading:
I have had a good deal of sickness this past month, but our late victory has given new life to our boys. I rejoice in the hope that the war will be brought to a speedy termination. It is enough to make anyone rejoice who has a heart for his country. Give my well wishes to Father and Catrina, and keep me and these brave boys in your prayers.
Your faithful husband,
Henry Wells Dickinson
Dora starts crying again. “He’s been sick for a whole month and I never knew!” She paces in front of the window, staring out toward the woods as she dabs her nose with a hanky.
My stomach growls and I rest my hand over the slight but firm thickness forming around my middle in front. My body’s trying to knit together a baby with what little food I give it.
Without me noticing, Dora’s turned around. She grabs the pages from my hand and stuffs them down the front of her bodice before I can snatch them back. “This letter is my own personal property!” She sniffs. “And I know you skipped parts when you were reading!” She blows her nose. “Just wait until I write and tell Henry what you’ve done.”
“Go ahead and tell him.” I pick up my fiddle. “How do you think he’ll feel to know that the one simple thing he asked of his dear wife—to keep something confidential—was the very thing she failed to do.” I run the bow across the fiddle, making the strings screech as loud and shrill as I can.
Dora clenches her hands over her ears. “Stop that!”
“I bet he’ll wish he’d told Effie instead.” I rub the bow again to make another screech.
“Oh, please stop that!” Dora cries. “You should be ashamed of yourself, Catrina Dickinson!” She turns away, her face wet. I know she won’t tell Henry now.
I stare out the window. The trees are bare. Brown dead leaves pile up as high as a person’s knees in some parts of the woods. A frost hangs in the air. Soon it will snow. I picture Stonefield camping out in this bitter cold with those Creek Indian families. I wonder how many months it will take such a large group of people to walk all the way from Oklahoma Territory to Kansas. Will their journey take them anywhere near Roubidoux? Will I be able to sense it when Stonefield passes by? If I call in my silent voice every day for him to come back to me, maybe one day he will answer.
The chance that he might be just a day’s journey from where I’m standing, instead of way down in Indian Territory where the preacher’s looking for him, makes my heart thu
mp too hard. My chest hurts from how swollen and bruised my heart feels.
The door slams. Dora’s left. From the window, I watch her run away as I play a nervous wild tune on my fiddle to match the rhythm of her racing feet and my anxious pulse.
32
In December, my stomach begins to swell and my breasts turn tender. When I run my hands over the hills and hollows of my new body, I imagine Stonefield’s fingers touching me.
When it snows, I take my fiddle to the secret house in the woods and I play for the stone guardians. They still stand, but parts of the stone house are crumbling. Dried weeds line the perimeter of the house and shoot through the blanket of snow where the roses and mint once carpeted the ground.
After I’m warmed up from playing music, I make wild work by collecting icicles, breaking them into pieces, and reconnecting the melting parts bit by bit into small arcs. I press the arcs against trees, curving the loops of ice round and round the trunks until the woods are filled with shining silver spirals.
At twilight, I lie down in the middle of the stone circle house. My body makes the shape of a girl in the snow. I imagine that the most important part of me pulls loose from her and flies across the hills and valleys, the gray fields and green cedar woods, to the place where Stonefield lies on his own spot of snowy ground.
Come to me, Stonefield.
I lie down inside his body and we become warm. We melt just a little as we press together and become connected.
When the dimness in the sky grows greater than the light, I return to my own cold body in the secret house. Then I race to the parsonage, outrunning the falling dark that always threatens to swallow me.
* * *
I don’t hear from the preacher until the new year, when the creek has frozen over and the crows arrive in the hollow. They caw and caw from the direction of Stone Field. The letter, addressed to me, arrives on the coldest day in January, slipped under Mr. Lenox’s front door.
Effie and Lu deliver it to me at the parsonage along with a supper of bean-and-ham-hock stew. They hope I will open the letter and read it to them, but I fold it up and push it deep into the pocket of my trousers. All through supper, the cawing voices of the crows fly around inside my head. Their black wings flap against my heart.
Inside my pocket, the preacher’s letter has turned into a heavy hand, pressing on my thigh. When they leave, I take a deep breath, pull it out, and open it.
Christmas night, 1861
Shoal Creek, Oklahoma Territory
Near Missouri’s southwestern border
Dear Catrina,
Though we did not part in peace, I do beseech you to harken unto the words of this letter, for they are written in the spirit of deepest sincerity. I am not proud of my behavior toward you and my Lord, but, through His grace and mercy, He has forgiven me and once again, He speaks to my heart! He has revealed to me that it was my own selfish passions which drew me to you and away from Him. Though it was His plan that we should marry, He desired I come to the union seeking His kingdom first. If I had only placed the yearning for spiritual union above my selfish longing for an earthly one, I would never have received such punishment from God. I have been called to care for my bride as Christ loved the church. Because of my impurities, God requires that I be cleansed first, so I might then purify you.
Despite my transgression, the Lord has forgiven me. Not only has He transformed my savage and unclean heart into something pure and white as snow, He has blessed my travels and led me and the men of the militia to the murderous band of bushwhackers we have been devotedly pursuing all this time. We overtook them just days ago, deep in Oklahoma Territory. The heathen, Stonefield, was not among them, but in return for clemency, his fellows quickly betrayed his plans. The rest of the militia has headed back toward Rolla to take the outlaws home for trial, but I remain. The Lord has given me a new mission.
He told me to seek the heathen on my own and serve God’s justice upon him. The outlaws confessed that the Indian broke off from them near Round Mountain in early December when they encountered a large band of Creek Indians headed north toward Kansas, near the Missouri border, fleeing Confederate troops. The chief welcomed him into their group, as they expected to be engaged in battle soon and needed all the assistance they could get.
I have picked up the unfortunate Indians’ bloodstained trail from just such a battle and have gone ahead of them to this place, Shoal Creek, where they plan to make camp, though Confederate troops continue to pursue them. Tonight, the night of our Lord’s birth, I wait with both my pistol and rifle loaded for the Lord’s direction and will see how His divine will shall play out when they arrive with the Stonefield Indian among them.
I hope, dearest Catrina, that my words will bolster you in the knowledge that your husband is faithful in his devotion to the Lord and to justice, and will carry that devotion into the marriage that God intended for you and me. I trust He has spoken to your heart, too, since I have been so fervently praying that He will give you understanding and repentance, as well.
It is getting late on this icy Christmas night, and there is much to anticipate in the morning, so I shall close with my love and blessings in the Lord.
Your faithful husband,
Samuel Preston
My hand trembles as I set the letter on the table and pick up the preacher’s table knife, which Effie used to slice the cornbread at supper. I stab the pages over and over again. “God can keep your love and blessings!” I cut them until the pages are ripped to shreds. “I don’t want them!”
I’ve never been so mad at God. Why does He always take to meddling with folks’ hearts so?
The baby inside me moves for the first time. The quickening feels like a butterfly tickling my insides with its fluttering wings. Come back to me, Stonefield, I call to him as I dip the ripped letter into the fire and watch it burn down to my fingers before I let it go.
Come back.
33
Mother never had the chance to tell me what a heavy burden it is to carry a child inside the belly for months and months. And I never had the chance to tell her what a heavy burden it is to carry a secret love inside the heart, swelling and kicking under the ribs for release.
I sometimes wonder if Stonefield ever thinks of me. But even if he thinks of me only half as much as I do him, that’d be at least ten times a day, and it’s now been almost two hundred days since I last laid eyes on him. The burden of all the moments I’ve passed without him weighs heavier on my heart than his child pressing against it.
I hope he’s suffering as much without me as I am without him. I hope he can’t sleep for the ache. Lord, I want to kill him like he’s killing me. I wish I could sink to the bottom of Roubidoux Creek, but Effie won’t let me. You’d think she was the one who had vowed to love me through sickness and health rather than the reverend. With me too ill from throat sickness these last couple months to even visit Papa, she’s trapped me here in the parsonage. She keeps me away from the woods and mostly in bed, trying to make up for the fact that she failed to notice I was pregnant in the first place. She can’t bear to make another mistake in her doctoring and has determined that before she leaves for the Congo, she’ll be my salvation.
But Lord, maybe I don’t want to be saved.
“Stick out your tongue,” Effie says as she pushes me back onto the bed. She leans over my stomach, which rises above my breasts, round and high like the baldnob hill above the church and parsonage. With a flat stick she presses my tongue and peers down my throat. “It’s getting worse.”
I hate my throat sicknesses. They didn’t use to be this bad when I was little. I want to ask Effie if she knows why, but it hurts too much to use my voice.
“I’m afraid it’s turned into rheumatic fever.” She exchanges the cooling rag on my forehead for a fresh one. “Is breathing difficult?”
I shake my head no, though I have felt out of breath lately. But it’s just from the baby’s weight pressing on my lungs. I know Effie’s w
orried about me and the baby from the way her eyes linger on my stomach as she sets her stethoscope over my heart. She’s listened to Papa’s heart like this many times over the last eight months and every time, her jaw sets a little tighter. She says his heart doesn’t beat as strong as it should—probably weakened from the rheumatic fever he, too, had when he was young.
Lu comes in with a cup of broth. It’s about the only thing I can swallow. I almost drop it when she hands it over, and broth slops onto the blanket.
“Goodness, you’re so clumsy, Catrina. I’ve never seen a person with such a knack for messing things as you.”
Lord, I don’t even have the energy to glare at her. But her voice has lost the creamy sweetness that used to cover up her sourness toward me. Now when she talks to me, it sounds like she’s skimmed the icing off and doesn’t use any spoiled words, just plain honest ones.
Before we get the mess cleaned up, the front door flies open and in bursts Dora, her face red and splotchy. She’s so far along, she looks like she’s hiding a watermelon under her dress.
Effie jumps up and runs to her. “What are you doing here, Dora? You shouldn’t be exerting yourself like this.”
Dora’s gasping for breath, her hair falling out of her pins.
Effie leads her to a chair. “What’s wrong?”
Oh God, please don’t let it be Papa.
“Broom me out.” Dora gulps in air like a catfish sucking up pond water. “That Devil man.” She fans herself with her hand. “That treasonous bushwhacker savage.”
I hold my breath.
Dora almost spits out the words. “Stonefield’s back!”
Stonefield.
I struggle to a sitting position and catch Effie’s eyes. She knows what I’m thinking. Lord, Lord. To see him after all this time! But does he want to see me? Is he still angry?
I slide my legs over the side of the bed.
Dora keeps talking between her huffing and puffing. “He’s the one stealing from our pantry and eating the eggs and milk! Mr. Dickinson says he told him he can take whatever he needs, but I think the Devil man has a hold on him, just like he bewitched Cat when he first showed up in the field. And what if he tries to see Cat? Mr. Dickinson told him she’s settled and she and Samuel are expecting a child, but who knows what he’ll do.”
Stone Field Page 21