Esther's Pillow

by Marlin Fitzwater

  Esther’s Pillow

  The Tar and Feathering of

  Margaret Chambers

  A Novel by

  Marlin Fitzwater

  CCB Publishing

  British Columbia, Canada

  Esther’s Pillow: The Tar and Feathering of Margaret Chambers

  Copyright © 2011 by Marlin Fitzwater

  ISBN-13 978-1-926918-82-2

  Second Edition

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Fitzwater, Marlin, 1942-

  Esther’s pillow [electronic resource] : the tar and feathering of Margaret

  Chambers : a novel / by Marlin Fitzwater. – 2nd ed.

  Electronic monograph in PDF format.

  ISBN 978-1-926918-82-2

  Also available in print format.

  I. Title.

  PS3606.I89E88 2011a 813'.6 C2011-905827-8

  Cover Art by Judy Ward

  Esther’s Pillow was first published in 2001 by PublicAffairs Books, a division of Perseus Books Group, LLC.

  Disclaimer: This is a work of historical fiction. It is based on actual events but many of the characters, events, motives and relationships in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the express written permission of the publisher.

  Publisher: CCB Publishing

  British Columbia, Canada

  www.ccbpublishing.com

  Dedication

  For My Brother

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One: 1911

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Note from the Author

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  1911

  Margaret Chambers burst out the front door and practically flew down the stone steps of the College of Emporia. She was clutched by a sudden, childish desire to twirl in circles, flinging her arms out from her sides and whooping loudly, but she caught herself, slowed her pace, and judiciously moved away from the College building. She had done it. She had taken her last test to become a teacher. She was through.

  Margaret turned and walked past the small white wooden houses that framed the college grounds. About halfway down the block she came to the Wickham Lumber Yard bench, which had been placed along the curb as a rest stop for students, and which gave all visitors to the College a solid hint about where to buy their lumber and hardware needs. The bench was an advertisement. Many young people came to Emporia to attend the College, and their parents comprised an expanding market of customers who could take home a load of lumber or at least a barrel of nails for the year ahead. The Wickham Lumber Yard got good business from these visitors, selling them harnesses and yokes for teams of horses and buggies. The new automobiles gave this venture an uncertain future, but it still took horses to till the fields and bring in the crops, and many people thought automobiles were simply a gadget for the rich anyway. Several of Wickham’s new customers had automobiles and horses, and remarked how much they appreciated the new benches near the College of Emporia.

  Margaret slipped onto the Wickham bench and took a deep breath of the spring evening. It was her first chance to relax and think of her future, of starting a new school year in Nickerly County, of returning to live with her family, especially her older sister Ileen who had never left home, but who wrote her religiously for the two years it took to get the teaching degree. It was a satisfying feeling, warm and secure, to know that she had pioneered a new family achievement, a college education. Emporia wasn’t a four-year college, but two years were more than enough to teach, and not many women had accomplished that. Indeed, there were only three women among the fifty-seven students at the College. And of the three or four county teachers she had met in Nickerly, none had been to college. Most teachers had never even graduated from high school, but had been picked by local township supervisors for the job and given a certificate. Margaret closed her eyes and relaxed, glad that she had worn her black jacket because it picked up the remaining sun and warmed her shoulders.

  There were the normal sounds of evening activity, a carriage down the street rambling over the cobblestones and kicking up dust, two students chattering as they walked away from her toward the College. She thought she recognized them but didn’t care enough to really look. Birds seemed to be all around her, darting into the branches, bouncing under the spirea bushes. That rustle in the shrubs must have been a squirrel. They were reassuring sounds, the noise of a secure world that suited Margaret like a handmade quilt in which every familiar patch had been hand stitched, known by its source, loved for its memories.

  When someone’s hand appeared over her left shoulder, it barely registered on her mind, and it didn’t frighten her. She had heard footsteps behind her, but that was normal on the main path between town and College. She gave a slight start when the hand gently covered her mouth, so gently she thought it was Martin, from math class, who was always kidding her, tapping her on one shoulder and darting around the other, but why didn’t he say anything? She turned her head, innocently expecting the hand to be withdrawn with a greeting from Martin. But the fingers clasped more tightly, pulling her head back against a waistcoat. When she tried to twist her head away, a brass button dug into her cheek, hurting her. Even then, she was angry but not afraid. Some friend had gone too far.

  There was no experience in Margaret’s life for rough treatment, intentional or not. She had never known hostility, except perhaps when the grades were posted and she made superiors in every course. Then a few of the boys chided her about being “the brain,” and she could see that they were jealous. Women were not attacked, certainly not molested. Rape was so unthinkable as to be unthinkable. Margaret had never been with a man, but she had kissed Ed Garvey Jr. the night before she left for college, and sometimes three or four girls would gather in her room to laugh and talk about school and boys and what it must be like to be married. From those meandering sessions she had learned about sex, or at least had listened to her friends’ stories, many of which sounded like scenes from romantic novels rather than actual life experiences. From these social discussions Margaret had pieced together the basic physical aspects of love. But for her, love was still a synthetic vision of a couple walking in gardens of fragrant roses and honeysuckle. She dreamed of holding hands and expressing undying devotion, pledging to help each other and to share lives. She never really understood the word “lust,” but she knew that sometimes her own body would feel different, like the night she kissed Ed Garvey and she felt light-headed, hot as if she might perspire, but not sure why. Her friends assured her that boys felt the same way, but they never mentioned that boys could be mean about it.

  Margaret knew something was wrong because the person behind her never said a word, and there was a faint smell of something on his hand, maybe kerosene or ink. She could feel the rough weave of his coat scrape against her face. She tried to scream. Then another hand rushed to her throat, discovered the top button of her jacket loosened as she had left it, and moved down to force the second button through the eye o
f her blouse. The hand forced its way under her blouse, moving down. Then the fingers were on her breast, slipping beneath her brassiere, and then pulling out, one hand hitting her throat as the other left her mouth. She gasped for air. There was a terrible moment of confusion when she simply didn’t realize what had happened. Everything was a blur. Her head was spinning, and she felt weak in her arms and legs. Coughing, she grabbed her skirt as she fell off the bench. She knew she had to run, but her legs just buckled as she tumbled forward. She struggled to her feet and stumbled forward onto the porch of the closest house. The door opened, and a porch light came on. Dusk must have arrived while she was dreaming. It was a woman’s voice speaking, and Margaret could not see her, did not know her, but fell into her arms crying, “Help me, help me.”

  Mrs. Olsen had seen almost every girl attending the College of Emporia as they walked by her house each day. She said hello, and occasionally some girls would stop to talk. Usually lonely, they told her about where they were from and how much they missed their parents. She had seen Margaret before, so pretty with her sandy red curls that seemed to flow out of the ribbons, and her strong hands with long fingers. Mrs. Olsen had noticed her often because she was tall, at least in this community, and at five feet seven inches, usually could be seen bobbing above the other girls. She wore the standard black or gray skirt that almost touched the ground, flared over several petticoats, black lace shoes that covered her ankles, and a white blouse with starched collar that gave her a priestly look. There was little unusual about this costume, except for the fit. Her outer jacket was pulled tight and buttoned from throat to waist, a small waist no doubt accentuated by a corset and exaggerated by the size of her bust. With so many layers of clothes, almost all contours of the body were minimized, but the dimensions of Margaret’s chest and waist were so in conflict that not even the most pious of men could resist a calculating glance, a moment of wonder that such a waist could hold so much above.

  Margaret’s nose was a little too straight and too long for most people to call her cute, a favorite term of the time, but Mrs. Olsen thought her a handsome girl anyway. She helped Margaret onto the couch.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Margaret Chambers,” she stammered.

  “What happened?” Mrs. Olsen asked. “Did somebody hurt you?”

  She asked the question in the most general way, not accusatory, and not reflecting any particular fear that might be lingering in the street. There was none. There was no fear of other human beings, of being robbed or beaten or raped, because those things simply did not happen. Rather, fear was derivative of natural phenomena, a horse that veered and kicked a pedestrian, a windstorm that shattered windows or felled a tree, one of those new cars that people seemed to have trouble controlling, or a rabid animal that might have wandered in from the nearby fields.

  But Margaret was not thinking of any of those things. Her mind was jumbled, fearful but not understanding, knowing she had been violated but not sure how. The idea of a rough arm scratching her cheek, a hand over her mouth, a hand grabbing her, almost like in a fight, was so vulgar, so crude. She began to shudder at the thought, a stranger’s hand had touched her breast, had so quickly invaded the sanctity of her clothing. She remembered laying them out this morning, when she was so happy—her beautiful lace petticoat that her mother had made, the finely starched blouse that she had pressed herself by heating the iron in the fireplace. She liked ironing because the fire was warm, and the result of her work left such a straight edge, such a fine orderly garment for presenting herself to the world. It seemed impossible that such a proper form could be so soiled.

  She instinctively knew that she could not talk about it, indeed must never mention it to anyone. It was so shameful that anyone would pick her for violation. Her friends talked of boys stealing a glance at her ankles, and her best friends sometimes whispered that she had a wonderful figure. She could never answer the inevitable question—why her?—and did not want to. Certainly not to Mrs. Olsen. This kindly lady clearly had no idea what happened and would probably find Margaret’s explanation hard to believe. Margaret suddenly realized that no one would ever see this boy, or at least she assumed he was a boy, surely no adult would do such a horrible thing. She knew instinctively this event could only reflect poorly on her, indicating some weakness that must have made her a victim, or even incite gossip that she had enticed the man, or that she had a secret lover. She almost gagged at the thought, clutching her throat, and tightening her stomach to steel herself against the possibility of sickness.

  “Thank you,” Margaret said without answering Mrs. Olsen’s question. “I must go. I just saw something and it scared me. Thank you for helping me.”

  “My husband will be home soon,” Mrs. Olsen said. “I’ll have him walk you back to school.”

  “No,” Margaret said. “Please. I’ll be all right.”

  Margaret stood to test her legs, holding first to the arm of her chair, then to Mrs. Olsen’s arm, realizing by the feel of her heavy coat that Mrs. Olsen must have been leaving the house as the attack occurred.

  “It was just shadows,” Margaret said, composing herself, and testing Mrs. Olsen again.

  As if reading her mind, Mrs. Olsen said, “I didn’t see anything dear, but in these times it could have been anything. Sometimes just the spirea and barberry bushes can be frightening. Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Yes. Thank you,” Margaret said as she pulled the door open, pushed the screen, and moved out to the porch. The Wickham Lumber Yard bench was just below the steps, empty and unthreatening, just a few pieces of wood on this now-empty street. She wondered if anyone else had seen what happened. She walked down the steps and started back to her room, carrying a stain on her breast that she could still feel, and the nudging of a guilt that she was somehow responsible. She hurried down the sidewalk, desperate for the security and privacy of her room.

  Margaret Chambers had always wanted to be a schoolteacher. She thought often of that day, at age eleven, when she first saw the new Sunnyside School, a one-room building erected on a foundation of rough-cut timbers, that had been dragged to its site near Nickerly by a team of twelve horses. The school had been built on the Chambers farm, where Margaret’s father had organized the neighbors and parents from the surrounding area to build their own school. Land for the school had been donated by the Murphys and accepted even though it was located in a neighboring township. The location was central to the four or five families that could be expected to send children to the school and within two or three miles, a reasonable walking distance, of every family. Often four or five schools would be located within three or four miles of each other, if that’s how the family farms were situated.

  Most of the adults and all of the children in Nickerly turned out to see the new school pulled to its permanent site. People began arriving at the Chambers farm on foot and on horseback in the early afternoon, ready to help move the school, or just to see the team of horses hitched to the building. As the Chambers team of six horses began their strain against the harness, their haunches settling down to give their hind legs traction, the small building began to move on its foundation, a pair of sleigh-like runners. The timbers running down either side of the structure began to rise in the front, near the source of the pull, and drop in the back as the weight of the building shifted. Creaking sounds emanated from the freshly cut, green-wood joints, which slowly grasped each other in a wooden handshake that would never come apart. Then the new school started its forward motion, with Margaret’s father leading the team in a slow but steady pace. The entire community walked alongside, watching the dirt and sand on the road eat away at the runners, until they had lost their round shape, and then they were flat on the bottom, smooth as glass, and wearing themselves thinner by the mile. Children began to speculate on whether they would last for the three-mile trip to the school site.

  The building reached its permanent home in Murphy’s pasture, a one-acre par
cel donated by Sean Murphy, no doubt because he had six children about to reach school age, and because his pasture bordered the main county road from Nickerly to Lincoln. The school would be accessible to residents of Nickerly, as well as the dozens of small farms in the county. But there would be only seventeen students in the school, with at least one in every grade but sixth, which Margaret’s mother attributed to the drought twelve years earlier when everyone was too depressed or too sick to have babies.

  With the building secured by stakes driven through the ends of the foundation runners and into the ground, the men collected stones and rocks from the pasture and placed them under either end of the building, forming a loose foundation to catch the building if it settled and closing the underside of the school to possums, coons, and small children. Lastly, Ed Garvey’s wagon arrived with the benches. Garvey operated the flour mill on the Saline River and was therefore the principal source of cash for Nickerly County crops. The mill was a congregation point for farmers, who pulled their wagons up to the bins, unloaded the wheat that had been gathered from the threshing machines, and received their pay in a small office behind the counting room. For many farmers, the mill was their major source of sustenance: flour. Every couple of weeks, most farmers would bring a load of corn or wheat from their storage bins and trade it at the mill for two 48-pound sacks of flour, which would supply bread, cakes, pies, and pancakes for several days. Ed Garvey held forth in the counting room of the mill every day, greeting the farmers as they came in, writing down their delivery, then walking outside for a visual inspection of the wagons, primarily to make sure the wheat wasn’t wet or diseased by fungus. Most of the time, Ed sat at a square table in the middle of the counting room. Twelve-foot benches known as Garvey Benches stretched along two walls. Fully loaded, the benches might hold six or eight farmers lingering after their payments long enough for a discussion of the weather or a neighbor’s decision to try growing oats, a seemingly foolish move when wheat had done just fine for the last thirty years. Whatever the discussion, everyone recognized the quality of Garvey’s benches, wider than most because they were half a tree trunk, flat on the sitting side with the bark still on the underside. When Ed Garvey pulled into the schoolyard with his donation to the school, four new benches for the students, a cheer went up from the crowd of mothers who recognized the organization and rectitude that benches brought to a school. The challenge, of course, would be to make the students sit on them.