by Harold Bakst
Jennifer arched an eyebrow.
Wilkes straightened. “Anyway, good luck to you.” He tipped his hat and walked over to his horse. Jennifer watched him ride away toward the trail.
Then Walter, his ruddy face even redder than usual, appeared in in the opening. “I hope you’re pleased with yourself,” he growled. “Now Wilkes is going to have a grand time telling everyone how you acted like a spoiled little girl and refused to come out of the wagon.”
“I don’t care,” said Jennifer quietly.
“You will next time you have to show your face in town.”
“I don’t plan to.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
“Oh, you’ll have to. Now, why don’t you stop making a fool of yourself and get out of the wagon.”
“No thank you, I’m comfortable right where I am.”
“Damn you!” snapped Walter, stalking off a few feet, then returning to the wagon. “I won’t put up with this much longer!”
“Where are the children?”
“They’re fine! Now are you coming out of there, or aren’t you?”
Jennifer turned her head away, looking over the plow handle at a jumble of chairs. Again Walter stalked off, and Jennifer wondered whether her stubborness was pushing her husband too far. He returned.
“You know, I really ought to start breaking ground,” he complained. “It’s late in the season.”
“You go right ahead.”
“Yeah, but first I’ve got to get you out of there. Hand me the shovel.”
Jennifer furrowed her brow, but she didn’t ask why Walter wanted the shovel. She reached behind her, took it, and offered it to him. He grabbed it and stalked off.
Soon, she heard him digging. She was curious, but she dared not look, even though it was getting hot in the wagon.
But then, several minutes after the digging started, Jennifer was jolted from her chair by the shouting of her children. “Poppa! Look out!” cried Peter.
Jennifer put her pot down and stuck her body out the back of the wagon. She saw, some yards off, Walter swinging frantically with his shovel at some squat, furry beast in the grass. “Walter!” she screamed. She scrambled from the wagon and hurried to him, hoisting her skirt to keep herself from tripping.
“Stay back, everyone!” roared Walter, taking a swipe at the grizzle-coated animal, which snarled back and returned the swipe with its own long claws, ripping Walter’s pant leg.
Jennifer dashed to her children and yanked them behind her. “My God, Walter, where’s your gun?”
His blue eyes bulging, Walter kept swinging his shovel as if he were using a scythe, but the beast kept dodging it, lunging spryly this way and that, slashing back.
“Walter!” cried Jennifer, making a tentative step toward her husband.
“Poppa!” cried the children from behind their mother.
“Keep them back!” shouted Walter as he landed a good whack on the animal’s broad back, then another on its side.
The beast, its striped face locked in a snarl, began to back up. Walter didn’t follow. When there was some distance between the two combatants, the animal turned and, still growling, waddled off into the grass. Jennifer and her children now hurried to Walter, who let the shovel drop to the ground.
“Are you all right, Poppa?” shouted Peter.
“Walter,” cried Jennifer, hurrying to her husband’s arms.
“Well, look who’s out of the wagon,” said Walter, his chest heaving, his face sweaty and red.
Jennifer pushed him away at arm’s length but kept her hands on his broad shoulders. “Are you hurt? Your pants are ripped.”
Walter looked down at his shredded pant leg. “Well, that old badger got the worst of it.” Jennifer started to bend to check her husband’s leg, but he stepped away and walked over to a small rise in the land, which was taller than he. It was in the side of this rise that he had been digging. He checked along the base and stopped. “Ha!” he shouted, “It looks like I was breaking into a badger den. See the entrance?” He pushed back some grass.
The two children ran over to see.
“Peter! Emma! Be careful!” shouted Jennifer. Keeping her own distance, she craned he neck and looked. “My God, Walter, why were you digging there, anyway?”
“I was preparing our home,” he answered. He noted the den. “And now it seems I’ve been given a head start. I’ll just expand this burrow until it’s big enough for the four of us and our furniture.”
Jennifer felt woozy. “Walter,” she began slowly, “surely you’re not suggesting that we are going to live inside this hill.”
“I surely am, little lady. There are no trees around here for a proper cabin, and this is the quickest way to get us some shelter. Don’t worry, you won’t be the only one living this way. Remember that stand of wheat we saw with no house around? There was probably a dugout nearby.”
Jennifer closed her eyes and stepped back. “Walter, I will not live in a badger hole.”
Walter approached his wife. “Listen, Jenny, it won’t be a badger hole when I’m through with it. You’ll have a door and windows…”
“I will not have the children living in there.”
“Hell, they’ll probably think it’s fun—right, children?”
Peter’s and Emma’s eyes widened with joyous expectation.
“Yay!” shouted Peter.
“Yay!” echoed his little sister.
Walter turned back to his wife. “See?”
“No, Walter,” insisted Jennifer, “I’m sorry. I want to go home.”
At this, Walter could only clench his teeth and glare at his obstinate wife. He picked up the shovel. “You are home.”
Chapter Two
Digging In
Over the course of the next week, Walter kept enlarging the badger den. He made the entrance big enough to allow his own broad physique, and continued hollowing out the inside, eventually poking a square hole on either side of the entrance for windows. At the end of each day, he declared that he was done because the dugout seemed spacious enough—until, that is, he moved in a piece of furniture. Then he realized how small the room still was. So, the following morning, he resumed his digging.
Meanwhile, Jennifer, now that she was out of the wagon, stayed out, if only to tend to her children. Walter had scythed away the grass from a small area where she could cook without setting the prairie on fire. Nearby she set up some chairs, a table, and a packing crate, which served as a kitchen counter. She even set out her rocker so that she could watch Walter digging as she rocked back and forth in grass that came up to her armrests and tickled her forearms. The wagon itself provided her with a semblance of a wall in what was otherwise an endless expanse that reached in every direction to the single encircling horizon. On bright days, Jennifer noted how the wind might continuously comb the grassy sea, and sheets of light would glide across the bent stems like fleets of magic carpets, beckoning her east.
But Jennifer stayed only in her rocker, feeling very small in the midst of all that open wilderness—and positively insignificant beneath its enormous capping blue dome. The prairie sky, she noted, was everywhere you looked. It was above you, it was in front of you. It was in back of you. It was everywhere except beneath you.
But as bad as it was during the day, the prairie during the night was still worse. Once the sun lowered to eye level, smearing the western sky with color and reddening the prairie and broadside of the covered wagon, Jennifer grew frightened. The sky darkened in the east, where the stars first appeared, spreading westward until they were overhead and all around, encrusting the entirety of what was now a black dome. With no moon out, the great grassy expanse disappeared in darkness. Jennifer could no longer see, only listen to what was out there beyond the glow of her campfire. Mostly there was the chirping of insects and the gently blowing wind. Sometimes, there was the chilling, yet poignant, howl chorus of distant wolves. On those occasions, Jennifer didn’t sleep. She kept h
er children close to her inside the wagon, and she didn’t relax until the sun returned, appearing at eye level on the opposite horizon, reddening the great grass expanse from that direction.
It was none too soon for Jennifer when Walter finally did dig out enough room in the hill to fit all the furniture and all the family—if just barely. He finished the job by putting in pole rafters—brought from Ohio—to keep the prairie sod above from sagging in. He then installed the cookstove, shoving the stove pipe right through the dirt ceiling and out among the prairie grass above. Finally, with Ohio lumber, he built a proper wooden door and two window frames with shutters. Unfortunately, there were no glass panes to put in those frames.
“Where do you want these chairs?” he asked Jennifer as he began hauling furniture through the doorway. “Where do you want this chest?”
Jennifer didn’t answer. She didn’t think it much mattered where they were placed in that hole.
“Where should I put this clock, Poppa?” asked Peter, carrying in a mantel clock.
“Where should I put these books?” asked Emma, hurrying with one volume under each arm.
Jennifer stayed back and watched as all her lovely furniture, scratched and dull from the long journey, was now shoved into this cave, in a squat Kansas hillside. Only when her husband and children were done moving in, and the wagon— her only home for hundreds of miles—was stripped of its canvass top, did Jennifer at last go in to inspect her new home, bringing with her the pot of geraniums.
Her heart sank. Though it was pleasantly cool inside, the room was murky, with only a feeble light entering through the two windows and door. And her beloved furniture, placed cheek-by-jowl, appeared merely as poignant momentos of her bygone life in the civilized East. She located her rocker, which Walter had placed near the cookstove, and she brushed from its needlepoint seat some soil that had fallen from the ceiling. Then, while Peter and Emma played outside, and while Walter hitched the oxen to the plow, Jennifer rocked back and forth, the geraniums on her lap once more. The smell of the earthen walls was in her nose, and the room’s grave-like silence pressed upon her ears.
Over the next few days, Jennifer went grimly about her wifely duties. One thing she learned quickly: it was going to be impossible to keep her home clean. The loam sprinkled down continuously from the root-laced ceiling. The table, the cookstove, the pots and pans, the silvery daguerrotype of her father, the high-backed chairs, the few books, as well as the hard dirt floor itself, all had to be swept daily.
Then there were the intruders. Ever so often, Jennifer had to pluck an earthworm from the low ceiling, or a mole would push its way through her walls, blindly sniffing the sudden, open area before retreating.
Walter, meanwhile, devoted his attention to matters outside the home. He broke the sod, which peeled back in long strips from his curved, steal plowblade. He cut through the tough mesh of grass roots—the fabric of the prairie—to the rapidfire muffled clicks and snaps, as if an unending string of tiny, buried firecrackers were being set off. After a few days, he built a shelter of poles and hay for the oxen. And, that afternoon, he went to town to refill one of the barrels with water from Frank Turner’s well.
But instead of fresh water, Walter returned to the dugout with a dark-haired, bearded man. He told Jennifer the man’s name was Mr. Riley, and that he was a water witch.
“We’ll soon have our own well,” he told his wife while Mr. Riley, all eyes upon him, walked hunched over around the dugout, holding before him the forked ends of a willow branch. His face was in deep concentration as he walked in ever larger circles, moving steadily farther from the dugout across the plowed field. Finally, about a dozen yards from the door, back in the middle of the wild bluestems, his branch began to dip. He walked a bit farther, and the branch pointed straight down. “Here!” he announced, stomping the ground with his foot. “Dig here.”
Walter hurried over with his shovel. “You sure?” he asked.
“Sure, I’m sure.”
Walter began to dig. Mr. Riley stood back, stroking his beard.
The water, however, was not very near the surface. Walter dug over six feet down and found no water. “You sure there’s water here?” he again asked Mr. Riley, who watched the whole time.
“Oh, you’ve got to dig deeper’n that,” answered Mr. Riley. He fetched his horse while Walter dug. “I’ll be in and out of town for a few days,” he said from atop his horse. “You can pay me when you strike water.”
Walter, his head down as he dug, grumbled some acknowledgement, and Mr. Riley rode off.
By the end of the day, Walter had gone down nearly twice his own height, and still there was no water. He began to curse Mr. Riley under his breath, calling him a charlatan taking advantage of desperate homesteaders. “He won’t get a penny.”
Jennifer looked smug, which didn’t escape Walter’s notice when he came up to rest. “You’d better pray we find water,” he said, “I mean, it’s not as if we’re leaving.”
This sobered Jennifer, and she began looking anxiously down the hole.
The next morning, Walter had a little trouble finding the hole in the tall grass. When he did find it, he tied a piece of red cloth to the nearby grass, then lowered himself down and resumed his digging. By morning’s end, he had gone down nearly the length of his height again. Jennifer by now had to help by hauling up dirt in a bucket. Still, there was no water. Walter dragged himself out as he cursed Mr. Riley and threatened to toss him down the hole and cover him over.
Jennifer almost felt sorry for her husband. After all, he was trying so very hard. Still, he had brought this upon himself.
The next morning, however, when Walter returned to the hole, he found the bottom was muddy. With great excitement, he resumed his labor. Each time Jennifer hauled up the bucket, she found the mud was looser and looser. Soon, it was muddy water. Then the muddy water became clearer. Finally, Walter called up, “Tastes terrific!” When he came to the surface, his pants were wet up to his thighs.
That night, Walter wished to celebrate. And he knew how he wanted to do it. It was two weeks since he and Jennifer moved into their new home, and longer than that since they had been intimate. There had been no privacy on the westward journey, and, as far as Jennifer was concerned, there still wasn’t. She and Walter shared just the one room with their children.
But Walter would not be put off any longer. The dugout, after all, was pitch black at night, and the children slept on the opposite side of the room. So, as soon as the children’s gentle breathing showed that they were asleep, and with a warm breeze blowing in through the two windows, Walter pressed close to his wife, his hand sliding under her nightgown, across her belly, his lips nuzzling the curve of her neck. Jennifer resisted at first, but, really, she wanted to be close, too. When Walter finally slid on top of her, slowly hoisting her nightclothes above her thighs, she whispered in his ear only, “Don’t make noise.”
After that night, life in their new home was little less tense. It was with some amazement that Jennifer one day realized that she had been living on that Kansas prairie for one month. She had never imagined herself surviving so long in such a God-forsaken place. The heat at times could be brutal. And she couldn’t escape it on that treeless land except by retreating into her dugout. And while she hadn’t noticed many mosquitoes when she first arrived, there were soon plenty of them to add to her misery.
Then there was the wind. It didn’t seem to ever stop blowing. Unhampered by anything vertical within view, the wind sometimes whispered, sometimes groaned, sometimes screamed. But always it was there, and it threatened to drive Jennifer mad.
And, yet, it didn’t. Jennifer simply went about her duties: hauling water from the well, bathing her children, washing clothes before her door on the scrubboard, sewing buttons, plucking earthworms from the ceiling, sweeping the dugout, and stoking her cookstove with, of all things, buffalo chips.
But whatever the inconveniences and hardships she had to endure, she dis
covered that there was one burden that proved to be the very worst—one, indeed, that only weighed more heavily on her with each passing day—the loneliness.
In all that time and, despite all the immensity of land contained within her view, she saw—aside from her own family—not another human being. In the evening there was no light from any distant window. During the day, there was no smoke from another stovepipe. No wagons passed on the trail.
Jennifer fondly remembered how she used to be able to sit on her front porch back in Ohio and, raising her voice only slightly, speak to the neighbors on their porches; or how, on summer evenings, she would greet neighbors, dressed in their best clothes, as they strolled by her house down the lane colonnaded with massive tulip trees. “Good evening,“Good evening, Jennifer,” they would respond, Charles always tipping his hat. “Nice evening.” Their four children would hurry ahead. “Isn’t it, though?” Jennifer would add, “A little muggy perhaps…”
But no neighbors strolled past Jennifer’s dugout now. Indeed, it seemed at times that her family was the only one left on the planet.
And so it was with some relief that, one morning, Jennifer finally espied a group of people walking up the trail toward her homestead. One stooped figure was on horseback. Walter was away, which made her nervous, but she saw, even at a distance, that there were at least one woman and two children in the approaching party, and so she didn’t worry. Indeed, she ground some coffee, primped in the mirror hanging outside the dugout, and waited outside her door, occupying herself with some darning. She would not be as cold to her neighbors this time as she had been in Franz Hoff-mann’s store.
It took a long while before the party came close enough for her to make them out better but, when she did, Jennifer’s enthusiasm turned to terror, and she looked about to see where her children were. “Peter! Emma! Get inside!”
“What’s the matter, Momma?” asked Peter, walking up to her, a tin soldier in his hand.