by Judy Alter
Em was the polite gentleman for a long time in our relationship, progressing slowly to kind of brotherly kisses when he left me, affectionate little pecks that I, in my innocence—and it was an appalling ignorance!—accepted as appropriate and normal. But one night he came up behind me as I worked, muttering, on some mending that I could not avoid.
“Must be why I love you, Mattie. You’re so domestic! Such fine stitches!” His tone was sarcastic, but laughingly so.
“You know how I feel about mending,” I fumed. “I’m intimidated by Mama and her fine work.” I stood up, throwing the shirt down in disgust, and turned, only to find Em right in front of me. He held out his arms and simply enfolded me in them, kissing my forehead gently and murmuring that it was all right.
I stood trembling, expecting something to happen, and when Em’s mouth found mine forcefully, a new world exploded for me. As a doctor, I had of course studied all those things—the birds and bees, if you will—but there’s nothing like experience, and Em wakened feelings in me I had never dreamed could exist.
After that evening, Em was a gentle and patient teacher, though it must have been difficult for him. I learned to explore and to let him explore with those wonderful strong hands, but there was a harsh Puritan streak in me which held to the sanctity of the marriage bed. I would not compromise what I considered my honor, and still being naive, I had no idea how unfair I was being to Em. But he never pushed me. I guess, however, our physical relationship, in its halfway state, was one of the things that made me decide to marry him.
Strange that after all these years, I can’t bring him to life in my mind. When I write about him, I feel that he is vague, shapeless, lacking all the dash and charm that captivated me. Maybe it’s because all that dash and charm were part of an act, or maybe it’s because so much unhappiness came between those years of courtship and my memories that I can’t erase it. My memory is fully of happy days—I know they were happy for him and for me —and of silly fun, our last chance to be young again. But Em Jones no longer comes alive in my mind, not the man I knew at first. It embarrasses me to think about that past.
I did ask Em once why his parents never wrote.
“They prefer not to write too often. Black sheep, you know.” He said it lightly, and I thought at the time he must be hiding a great sadness.
“Don’t you ever visit them?” I wanted to reach out and comfort him, yet I was puzzled by this distance between parent and child. I had been unable to do anything about my separation from Mama, but it seemed to me Em and his parents could be doing things differently. As I have said, I was naive in more ways than one.
“I haven’t visited them in four years. It didn’t work out too well the last time I was there. They don’t seem to understand me or what I want to do with my life.”
Now there’s a statement that should make any girl wary. This world is so full of misunderstood men! But I simply asked, in all seriousness, “What do you want to do with your life, Em?”
“Why, marry you, of course!” He said it with a laugh, and came around the table to confirm it with a kiss. But he saw that I still was troubled.
“Why are you so concerned about my parents? You should know that relationships between parents and children aren’t always the way they’re pictured in Harper’s Weekly. How old were you when you parted company with your mother?”
“That’s different. It was a case of necessity.”
“So’s mine. It’s necessary for me to be away from them to survive as an individual. I’ll tell you what, though; after we’re married, I’ll take you in grand style to visit the family in St. Louis.”
“Really? I think I’d like that. Have you any brothers or sisters?”
“One of each. Both younger. You’ll meet them.”
“Would any of them come here for the wedding?”
“Nope. I won’t invite them. But does that mean you’ve set the date?”
“No, not yet.” I smoothed my skirt nervously and got up to walk away.
When we finally did marry, it was under unusual circumstances. It all began one day late in September. I was in the soddie, working on my account books and records, and Em was doing I don’t know what, inspecting my cattle or planning the next year’s garden or whatever.
Matt Quimby, the hired hand from Old Man Gressler’s farm, came riding hell-bent into the yard, yelling my name as loud as he could.
“Calm down, Matt. What’s the matter?”
“It’s Mr. Gressler. He’s been shot!”
“Shot?” I turned automatically to get my bag, and Em went for the horses.
“No buggy,” I called after him. “We’ll ride. It’s faster.”
We left Matt behind as we fairly flew out of the yard, for his horse was tired from the trip over. But before we left, he had time to shout, somewhere in the confusion, “Alvin Jones shot him.”
Em and I rode too hard for conversation, but we both knew that Alvin was another hand on the Gressler place, not a bad sort of fellow but not a dedicated worker either. I couldn’t imagine why any bad feeling between the men should come to shooting.
When we whirled into the Gressler place, Em took the horses without a word, and I ran into the house. Mrs. Gressler, a long, lean woman who had worked years on the plains, stood on the stoop, almost in a trance. She was dry-eyed and seemed to look right at me, but she never said a word. I murmured something soothing and brushed by her.
Luke Gressler sat slumped over his desk, account books before him, a neat hole in his temple. I didn’t know much about firearms, but I knew Alvin had been close when he shot him, and I knew that Luke Gressler was dead. I checked the pulse to make sure, but the man had died instantly. I would have been too late if I’d been in the next room.
Mrs. Gressler knew. When I said, “He’s dead,” she just nodded, still staring into space.
“Where’s Alvin?”
“Gone.” It was her first word.
“Did he just shoot him and run away?”
“Yes.”
Conversation with Mrs. Gressler wasn’t going to tell me much, but I doubted I could leave her alone. Em had been standing in the yard, still holding the lathered horses.
“Em, go back to town and bring Alice Short, will you? I don’t think Mrs. Gressler should be alone.”
Em nodded and left, riding more slowly this time, and I turned to the work at hand. After urging Mrs. Gressler inside, I settled her in the bedroom, where she couldn’t see her husband’s body, and began to brew a pot of strong tea. Then I settled to the task of caring for Gressler’s body. Without professional undertakers, it was often my chore to prepare the body for burial, a chore that I despised but did nonetheless. Gressler would be buried in the clothes in which he was killed, and Matt Quimby would seek the help of neighbors to build the coffin and dig the grave.
I looked at the account book Gressler had open in front of him, but it told me nothing except that he was figuring pay for his hands, Matt and Alvin. But it gave me a strange feeling to think that one minute he had been sitting here working on his daily business and the next he was dead. I’ve seen very few murders in my life . . . only two others that I can recall . . . and I feel fortunate. Gressler’s wasn’t messy, neat and clean, in fact, better than if he died from peritonitis or gangrene or some of the other horrible things that happened on the prairie, but the idea that it was the work of another man chilled me. Still does to this day.
By the time Matt Quimby rode in, I was sitting in the bedroom, tea in hand, trying to comfort Mrs. Gressler. She still wasn’t talking, and I knew it would be some time before she came out of her shock.
Matt tiptoed into the house and then coughed loudly. I went out to talk to him.
“You didn’t save him, did you?”
“There was no way I could. I suspect he died instantly. What happened?”
“All I know is I was outside by the barn, mending some harness, when I heard their voices raised real loud, then a shot, and Alvin co
mes flying out the door, grabs a horse out of the barn and takes off. Never said a word to me.”
It seemed hours before Em came back, and it probably was, but he brought Alice, a widow woman who lived in the tiniest house in town and who spent most of her time caring for those who needed her. In return, most folks saw to it that she had plenty of food on her table and was generally taken care of. Alice had often been a help to me with patients who needed care and couldn’t or wouldn’t be taken to my infirmary.
Em also brought news. Alvin Jones had gone almost straight to the sheriff and told him what he’d done. His version of the story was that Gressler had fired him for no reason and refused him wages due. It was the culmination of bad feelings between them that had been brewing for some time, and Alvin’s temper got the better of his judgment. He was not a bad man, however, and was immediately sorry for what he’d done.
“Nobody’ll ever hear Gressler’s story about why he fired him and whether or not he held back wages,” Em said. “I suppose maybe his wife can tell some of it, but . . . wouldn’t you know, it would be somebody named Jones that did the shooting. Now everyone will think I’m related to a murderer!”
He said it with a laugh, knowing no one would connect him with Alvin, and I thought how like Em it was to turn even such a somber occasion into a joke.
Alvin was transferred to the jail at Fort Sidney to wait for the judge to come through and try his case. It turned out to be spring before it came to trial. Judges, like the rest of us, didn’t get around the countryside much in a Nebraska winter.
So it was April when I was notified that I must be in Fort Sidney to testify. Em and I decided to make a wedding journey of it, and once I had committed myself, I shut off the doubts and hesitations and went blindly ahead.
“Why in Fort Sidney?” Em asked. “Why not here, among our friends?”
“I just want to do it this way. We’ll take Will Henry and Jim with us, and Lucy Gelson if she can come, and the judge can marry us after my testimony.”
Em thought it was crazy, but he wouldn’t cross me, and that’s exactly what we did. We made a party of our trip to the trial, all going in one wagon and having a wonderful time even on the long ride across the prairie. It seemed a shame, in a way, to make a party out of so serious an occasion as a man’s trial for his life, but that’s another thought I banished from my mind.
Em and I were married on April 22, 1895, in the courtroom at Fort Sidney. Spectators and the accused had been cleared out, and only Will Henry and Lucy stood up with us. The judge pronounced us man and wife, and Em kissed me, and it was done, far more smoothly and easily than I suspected.
“Why, Em,” I said, teasingly, “if I’d known it would be this easy, I wouldn’t have waited so long.”
“I tried to tell you,” he said, feigning resignation.
We settled down into domesticity fairly rapidly and happily. Em kept his job at Whittaker’s, but only for a while, because he either had a long ride twice a day or he had to stay in town in the same old room he’d had when he was a bachelor.
“Besides, you’ve got fifteen cows and four spring calves this year,” he pointed out, “and you need someone to pay attention to this place and drive you on your calls.”
It was wonderful to have him drive me, mostly for his company but also so I didn’t have to drive myself, so I agreed to his plan. We covered the western end of Nebraska in those years, or so it seemed. People since have told me strange stories that I hardly even remember, like the time a farmer about fifteen miles north went out in the morning and found our buggy between his barn and house. Em and I were inside asleep. Seems the horse had been there before, when I treated the family, and it just turned in and stopped. Others have told of seeing me grope my way out of the buggy, fighting to consciousness after a deep sleep on the ride, and I know I did that often. People who got sick, and particularly babies, never cared about my sleep, and I as like went at night as during the day.
Em didn’t like having patients in the infirmary. “It’s our home, and I like my privacy,” he complained. So I tried to keep that to a minimum, although at least once I reminded him that if I hadn’t had the infirmary, he and I would never have become acquainted.
“I know, I know. I just don’t want anyone else becoming acquainted.”
“Mattie, come see how your corn is growing,” he called one day as he came into the soddie.
“Isn’t it our corn?” I asked, raising my head from the medical journal I was reading.
“Well, sure, but I still sometimes feel like I’m living in your house. We’ll have to think about moving; time we got out of a soddie anyway. Then I’d feel like it was our house.”
“Em, I never knew you felt that way.”
“Neither did I till we started to talk about it. Come on, let’s look at the corn.”
It was early summer by then, and the corn was well along, almost knee-high, as it should have been. We didn’t grow much, only enough for us to have some and to feed the cattle.
“Em, could we ever make a paying proposition of this claim?”
“Sure we could, Mattie. We could raise sorghum, wheat, potatoes, lots of things. But we got to have grazing land for the cattle, and this claim just isn’t big enough to do all those things.”
“Wait a minute,” I laughed. “We need a bigger and better house, more land. Where is the money for all this coming from?”
He grinned at me. “Didn’t you know? I married a woman with a good income, a doctor.”
I didn’t even hear the warning bell that went off in my head.
We stayed in the soddie two years after our marriage, with Em talking all the time about moving to town. “Mattie, Mattie, don’t you see? Benteen’s where everything’s going to be. It will be important to your practice to be in the midst of things. You can take care of people better.”
Em knew how to convince me, because I truly did want to take care of people, and it was indeed hard to do when I had to ride all over the countryside. The thought of having a central base of operations and not having to travel so much was tempting beyond belief.
But I loved the land around my claim. I remember walking out alone that day, after we talked, and standing and letting the prairie wind blow over me, the fresh grass smell coming up. The wild prairie roses were blooming, and down by the buffalo wallow, the plum thickets looked like there would be plenty of plums for canning. I’d have to take a bushel in to Alice Short, who always put up preserves from my wild grapes and plums. I never tried to fiddle with it myself.
But move to town? Give up the soddie now that it was home, with four-o’clocks blooming outside the door and bright chintz curtains in the windows? Give up the freedom and the privacy, such as it was with people coming for help at any and all hours of the day? Why, I wondered, was Em always convincing me to do something that I was reluctant to do? It had taken him three years to convince me to marry him, not that he hadn’t been right about that. Marriage to Em was so wonderful that I used to wake in the night and put out a hand to touch him and make sure he was still there, that I wasn’t dreaming. So much, I thought, for Will Henry and Lucy Gelson and their prognostications of doom.
But that old warning bell was telling me to consider carefully before I agreed to the move. Was it because I didn’t want to leave the prairie, or was it something else?
Em finally wore me down.
“Will we sell the claim?”
“Of course not. I have to have work to do, too, you know, with you busy with patients all the time and never having much time for me.” He paused just a moment to let that sink in. “The claim, the cattle and your vegetables will be my business. I’m thinking seriously of putting in a potato crop, and maybe sorghum, too. They’re both selling well. Course, I’ll have to hire a hand, and we’ll watch for more land close by.”
“But, Em, the reason you quit Whittaker’s was so you wouldn’t have to ride back and forth. Now you’ll have to make the same ride, just going the ot
her direction.”
Those dark eyes that could dance with laughter now looked thunderclouds at me, and Em paced around the room, silently, picking up a small vase and fingering it, then staring at the picture of my mother as though he’d never seen any of those things before. Sitting in the big chair by the stove, I waited nervously for him to speak. I was, to be truthful, afraid of Em, never knowing when a casual word or phrase would anger him. And now, I wondered if I’d done it again.
When he did speak, it was slowly, as though he’d thought out each word and phrase carefully. “Mattie, why are you questioning my judgment about this move? I am the head of the household, you know, and I thought you truly had faith in my decisions. I didn’t mean to marry a woman who would wear the pants in the family.”
It was a low blow, and he knew it. I bit my lip and said nothing, because I could feel that I was about to cry. I was darned if I wanted to do that just then.
We built a fairly large house in town, and for some months Em was busy supervising construction of it. I was back to going on calls alone, and I hated it. Riding alone, I convinced myself that Em was indeed right; moving to town was going to be the best thing.
We planned the house together, sort of. “Where do you want your office, Mattie?”
“Office? Can’t I just see people in the parlor?”
“No, I want you to have a separate room for seeing them; keep our living quarters entirely apart from your work.”
“This surely is getting to be a big house.”
He grinned, busily working over the drawing in his hands. “We need a big house. We’ll have to have a nursery, too.”
Both Em and I agreed we wanted children, and I thought after two years of marriage, it was time for them to come along. Maybe after I was settled from the move and not subject to quite so busy a life, I thought, though I already suspected my life would not be any less busy, just different.