by Rebecca Tope
‘I come from a family of dog lovers,’ said Fanny. ‘Though I made as if I thought them a trial. My sister Lizzie has a bitch – at least, I suppose she has her yet. There were pups, sired by the great Melchior. We all watched over them, and took delight in their games.’ The nostalgia for those last months on the trail took her by surprise. She could not recall saying a word of approval for Lizzie’s dogs at the time. But now she remembered them with a painful fondness. ‘I would dearly love to have a dog of my own,’ she murmured.
‘Impossible,’ snapped Carola. ‘We have no space, and a monster such as this would require a deal of feeding.’
‘I understand that,’ said Fanny reluctantly. ‘Besides, he no doubt has an owner somewhere already. His condition is good.’
The dog flopped down at her side, lolling his huge head on her legs, tongue hanging out. He raised a paw as if for her inspection. ‘Oh, my! See this!’ Fanny cried. ‘His claw is torn almost off.’ She bent to look closer. ‘And his pads are bleeding. This dog has been walking for miles when he wasn’t used to it. He must be very far from home.’
Carola merely hummed in vague concern and maintained a careful distance. Then she looked at the sky and announced they should get back because there were clouds approaching.
Fanny was not surprised in the least when the dog followed them. She admitted to herself that she had hoped he would do just that. Already she was conscious of a relationship, an exchange of trust and goodwill that would inevitably form a bond that neither would easily break. Carola repeatedly turned and shouted at him to go away. He would pause and hang back for a minute, only to limp on when he deemed it safe. Fanny was distraught at his suffering feet, determined to bathe and dress them at the first opportunity.
The idea dawned swiftly, from one moment to the next. ‘He will keep us safe!’ she proclaimed. ‘We can teach him to attack any man who threatens us harm.’
Carola had reacted as if her friend were insane from her first overtures to the animal. ‘Teach him?’ she echoed, as if Fanny had suggested the dog be used as their cook and medical attendant.
‘He seems to have a full complement of wits. Unlike Melchior,’ Fanny added with a laugh. Her spirits had lifted immensely in the past hour. ‘Let me try it,’ she insisted. ‘What can we lose by it?’
For the first time since the appearance of the dog, Fanny took a look at her friend’s face. It was red and tight. ‘Carrie? What is it?’
‘I will not have a dog in the house. I cannot abide them. Send it away.’
Fanny stood still. ‘Cannot abide dogs? For what reason?’
‘They smell. They slaver and drool. They need so much.’
Fanny smiled. ‘Poor reasons. I expected you to tell me of some savage bite when you were six.’
Carola shook her head. ‘My mother had a lap dog. Some Chinese thing, with long hair and no nose. She loved it more than she loved her own children. It made me sick. Every time I went near, the stink of it turned my guts. My Mammy hated it as well. We would hatch plots to get rid of it, but it never happened. The thing lived to be sixteen years old.’
‘This dog is different. Look at him! He has no wish to sit in a lap – not yours or mine.’
‘That changes nothing. He is already half in love with you. See!’
The dog was gazing at Fanny with naked adoration, lying on his stomach, damaged paws stretched in front, his head resting on his forelegs. His tail did the slow wag that was already becoming a familiar trademark.
‘And I with him,’ sighed Fanny. ‘You speak of need. What I see is a creature satisfied with so very little it wrings my heart.’
‘He has a home already. He can find it readily enough if you reject him now.’
‘I think not.’ Fanny examined the paws again. ‘When we travelled the Trail, our dogs walked alongside us, those thousands of miles. Their feet were never sore. This one has been kept confined, probably tied up, as a guard perhaps. Now he has escaped, for some reason we can never know, and walked a very long way. It could be that he hopes to return east, where he remembers people who loved him. A girl, I suspect, like me. It could even be that for a second, back there by the river, he believed me to be his lost mistress. Oh, Carrie, can you not accept him? He wants only the most simple attentions to be happy.’
‘Sentiment!’ scoffed Carola, but her voice was low and shaky.
‘Genuine feeling,’ Fanny corrected. ‘And I assure you, he will prove worthy of our kindness. I have no doubt he can be savage when he likes. He will be our protector – something you said we needed. It is almost as if he was sent to us by God, who saw our need. It strikes me that we are the ones to benefit from adopting him.’
‘I fear God has scant time for two such sinners as us.’
‘God loves sinners above all others,’ said Fanny softly, remembering her Catholic girlhood. ‘He has not done with us yet.’
‘Well, if His idea of a blessing is to deliver a great beast like this into our hands, then I hate to think what a curse might be.’
Fanny laughed, rather longer and louder than was sincere. Carola’s passion had alarmed her, the danger of real conflict suddenly apparent for the first time. While still unresolved, she had a sense that her own wishes might well prevail if she trod cautiously. ‘We will keep him in the back yard, by the privy,’ she said. ‘He must have a kennel there.’
‘A kennel the size of a small house, then. I never saw such a huge dog in my life.’
Fanny blinked. She had won already! Victory had come more swiftly than she had dared hope. ‘So you will permit it?’ she asked. ‘Really?’
‘I see no way of persuading you out of it. Or him,’ she added ruefully.
Fanny flung her arms around the other girl. ‘Oh, Carrie. I bless the day I found you. I do truly. Without you…’ she choked at the thought.
Carola patted her back, then pushed her away. ‘We need to go marketing, before all the meat is gone,’ was all she said.
Chapter Four
They named him Hugo, on account of his hugeness. His devotion to Fanny increased by the hour, as did his size – or so it seemed. ‘He is a youngster,’ Fanny realised. ‘Perhaps not yet full grown.’
‘Lord preserve us!’ groaned Carola. ‘It’s like a bad dream, where a creature swells and swells until it occupies every morsel of free space.’
The dog’s feet were washed and salved, and soon recovered. Fanny made a point of taking him out for exercise every afternoon, watching him run free, never in any doubt that he would return to her call. The townspeople came to know him, reacting in a variety of ways to his size and manner. He would bare his teeth at men in a rictus that seemed instinctive, sometimes uttering a low growl. ‘Curb that animal!’ they would shout at Fanny.
‘He means no harm,’ she reposted. ‘He merely intends to protect me.’
The men mostly shrugged and kept their distance.
It was different in the boudoir. Hugo had to be taught with great firmness that the men who flowed through the door were there by invitation, offering no threat. The men themselves quickly understood that the dog was more than capable of defending its ladies from harm. Hugo lay at the foot of the stairs, ears cocked, while business was being conducted above. Nobody doubted that a single scream of pain or fear, especially from Fanny, would see the great animal hurling himself through the bedroom door to ensure that all was well.
Five weeks went by, in which Fanny serviced sixty-nine men and Carola seventy. They kept a tally for no better reason than that it amused them, and assisted in financial calculations. None of these many men had been as unpleasant as John on the first evening. Most were quick, relieved in more ways than one, and essentially decent. Some were shy and embarrassed. Some were boastful, convinced of their prowess. Fanny’s first sponge fell apart after four days and was replaced innumerable times. Its purpose as preventer of pregnancy was augmented by a role as successful concealer of the monthly courses in the third week of business. The acquisition of a he
althy supply of this essential tool gained a high priority with both girls.
The weather turned chill and a fire was maintained in the downstairs room. The hours of daylight shrank, so that evening began earlier. Fanny deposited a hundred dollars in the bank, and still had funds to spare for clothes, food and firewood. Calculations as to her financial situation by the end of the coming year made her gasp. Easily a thousand bucks would have accumulated, unless things went very badly wrong.
The little town had a well-established Methodist Mission, including a school and several paddocks containing beef animals. Loud hymn-singing billowed out through the open windows on Sundays, and various sober-suited men and women came and went, but there was little sense of a religious atmosphere. Fanny had observed a middle-aged couple who she learned were the minister and his wife. They had more of an appearance of ordinary business people than propagators of the Gospel. The Mission had been in existence for a dozen years or more, striving to convince the Flatheads and other Indian tribes that Jesus had died for them, and there was a place for them in heaven if they lived Godly lives. ‘What you see there now is a pale copy of how it was once,’ one of Fanny’s clients told her. He had been a rare individual, in that he had made his home in Chemeketa five years before, and was intent on remaining for the rest of his life. A young wife had died a week after their arrival, leaving him with little hope of finding another. ‘I shall be forty in a year or so, and in no way a handsome catch for a girl,’ he said. ‘I thank Providence for your spirit of enterprise, my dear.’
Such amicable and informative discussions regularly took place in the bedchamber, on a quiet evening. The girls slowly learned much about the history of the settlement, as well as the characters who lived there. This particular man had made a place for himself as the town recorder, alongside his expertise in drainage. Named Noah Shepherd, he was a well-known and much-liked character. Carola remarked that his unashamed patronage of their services would assist considerably in ensuring their acceptance as part of the life of the town. Fanny had been selected as his favourite, and she quickly discovered his extensive hoard of knowledge concerning the short history of Chemeketa. ‘There was a couple named Lee, who set up the Mission,’ he told her. ‘The wife arrived after almost a year voyaging around the Cape from Boston. She married him in ’37 and died a year later. It all began to fail after that. Lee moved north and took a second wife. He made a name for himself, but few speak well of him.’
‘Did the Indians become good Christians?’
‘Scarcely a one.’ He laughed. ‘All those braves required from the white men then was liquor and muskets, and good horses. For their spiritual needs, they felt quite satisfied with their totems and dances. Back in the thirties, the understanding between the races was limited to fur trading and scouting. The missionaries believed themselves to be making progress when they inveigled the Indian children into their school and gave them intensive religious instruction. The little ones then returned to their wigwams and informed their elders of the New Jerusalem and the fires of hell.’ Noah laughed. ‘I often wonder how those conversations might have gone, and what the braves and squaws made of these strange new stories. There were the Indian wives, too, of course, who came in useful as translators between their kin and their white husbands.’
Fanny was reminded of the mixed marriages she had seen at several forts along the migration trail, as well as the obvious lack of Christianity in any form amongst any of the natives she had observed since leaving Rhode Island.
‘Is it different now for the missionaries?’ she asked.
‘Somewhat. They concentrate rather more on the migrants, now they are arriving here in such numbers. The Indians have become wary and elusive. They can see the future, and it frightens them. Month by month, we take more and more from them – land, beasts, their very freedom.’
‘Gold too?’ asked Fanny, having heard talk in recent days of wondrous discoveries away to the south.
‘If gold exists, the white man will be sure to seize every ounce of it.’
‘The Mission,’ she prompted him, returning to the topic that had caught her interest. ‘That woman who died. Is she buried here?’
‘Indeed she is. At the Mission Cemetery. Her biography is writ on the stone above the grave. Sailed from Boston July ’36, arrived here June ’37, it says. Makes you wonder about that sea voyage, don’t it.’
Fanny quailed at the thought of so long a time aboard a ship, tossed on the limitless waters of the ocean, prone to sickness and thirst and constant terror. By comparison, her own months on the overland trail appeared like an easy stroll. ‘Poor woman!’ she sighed.
Then Noah’s eye fell on Carola’s much-read book by Maria Monk. ‘You allow this garbage under your roof?’ he demanded, his face growing red. ‘This filthy pack of lies!’ He took it up and shook it, as if killing a rat.
Fanny said nothing, too shocked to protest. The man began to rage against the poison contained in the pages, the power of the printed word to corrupt and deceive, until she began to see his fury as close to comical. ‘Sir, I beg you,’ she finally managed. ‘Why take such umbrage against it? What harm does it do?’
‘Are you wilfully blind?’ He almost snarled at her. ‘This is a deliberate piece of libellous mischief against the Roman Catholics.’
‘Are you one such, then?’
‘I am not. But I defend their right to equal respect. Such calumny against their priests is insupportable.’
‘I must inform you, then, that both Carlotta and I were born into the Catholic faith. We have no doubt that the book describes true events. You, as a man and a Protestant, will never have looked into the eyes of a priest and seen the darker depths that we have seen. They are required to be celibate, while being given admittance to a nunnery filled with young girls. The result, while shameful, is hardly to be wondered at. The real shame, I believe, is in a system that requires them to behave against nature. They are given absolute power over the innocent and ignorant maidens. Can you be surprised at what takes place?’
‘It is, nonetheless, untrue,’ he insisted, throwing the book aside as a loathsome thing. ‘I am amazed that you, as a Catholic yourself, could abide it for a moment.’
Fanny smiled. ‘We find it useful,’ she said. ‘In ways I cannot expect you to comprehend. Now come, sir, let us have a change of subject.’
Noah Shepherd was busy as autumn rains approached, advising on the best positioning of ditches and drains, warning newcomers that the quantity of rainfall would come as a considerable shock, and they had need of careful planning to avoid inundation and damage to their precious carpets and furnishings. He paid another visit to Fanny, ten or twelve days after the first, and since then she had seen no more of him.
They made another new acquaintance in the days following the arrival of Hugo. Eli Canelli was the barber, their closest neighbour. One afternoon, as the light was fading, he knocked on their door. ‘Too soon,’ called Carola. ‘Come back in an hour.’ The pattern of their days had become inflexible by this time – a slow lazy morning, followed by a hearty noontide meal and a walk to aid digestion – often to the store for meat and other provisions. The hours between that and their first visitation of the night were strictly for housework, mending and washing. The stove must be cleaned out and the ashes disposed of. Their garments must be neat and sweet-smelling. There must be no dust or spider web visible.
‘I am not come for your services,’ a man’s voice called through the door. ‘It is a social call I wish to pay.’
Curious, Fanny lifted the latch and pulled the door open. A large smiling man stood there, holding a paper sack in the crook of his arm. ‘Mr Canelli!’ Fanny greeted him.
‘Miss…Francesca? Or Carlotta? Italian names, both. I myself came from Napoli as a youngster. First to Chicago and then I brought myself here to Oregon County.’
Fanny laughed. ‘I am Francesca. But I confess we are neither of us of Italian blood. We simply felt the names to be more romant
ic.’ She winced inwardly at this hint that Italy might be the home of easy virtue and sinful indulgence. Another wry twinge occurred at the word ‘romantic’, which was far from an accurate description of the way she and Carola felt towards their work. Would the man be offended?
But the visitor showed no sign of it. ‘I have brought you something.’ He pulled open the top of the bag and proffered it.
Fanny took it, and inspected the contents. ‘Candles,’ she discovered, in some puzzlement. Such mundane items were hardly usual as a gift.
‘Sniff,’ he urged.
She did so, and her nostrils met a heady mixture of lavender, lemon and something so sensuously musky, she felt her blood stirring. ‘Carola, come and smell these,’ she invited her friend. ‘Scented candles.’
Carola leaned her face into the bag and inhaled deeply. ‘A marvel!’ she approved, several seconds later. ‘What a kind thought.’
The barber moved a little way into the room and scanned its contents. ‘I did hear you had made a little piece of paradise,’ he said. ‘And now I see it is true.’
Fanny became conscious of an oversight. Perhaps a number of oversights. ‘We ought to have asked you to see it, before now,’ she said. ‘Will you take tea, or perhaps a glass of whiskey?’
‘I ought not stay, when I imagine you must be busy,’ he demurred. ‘But I have a business proposal to make to you.’ He remained standing, balancing on his solid legs. ‘You understand that I have a regular supply of gentleman through my doors. I cut their hair and trim their beards. They are very often strangers in town, passing through on their mysterious affairs. They are men with few ties, as a general rule. After all, if they had wives, they would have little need for my services. Already I have been asked as to the exact nature of this establishment, and have been unable to supply them with a first-hand account. Until now,’ he smiled.